By Scott Holleran
Image Courtesy of Perplexity AI image
Watching from a window, theirs was the same routine every day. Man and boy walked from a one-room apartment on a path through a small courtyard, down a few steps to the sidewalk and a few hundred feet to the corner curbside facing west. The boy looked down, sometimes kicking leaves from lawn to the curb. The man stood behind the boy.
A bus pulled up to the corner, doors opened and the child boarded without looking up, stepping up into the bright yellow bus with thick black capital letters on its side. The boy took a window seat near the driver, away from other children. Placing his hand on the window, he spread his fingers wide as the man reached up and placed his hand on the other side of the window.
The man softly, quietly cried looking into the boy’s eyes, standing still as he grew stern while the bus driver waited on traffic at the corner, pulling a handle to close the doors and accelerating the bus—breaking the pair’s mutual window gesture—during a break in the traffic flow. The bus pulled into the middle of the road, turning left toward the edge of town. Waving to the boy on the bus, the man stood tall, erect, remaining unmoved on the curb. Tears—in thick, single drops or as a few—streamed down his cheeks. The boy, turning back and raising his arm high, slowly waved from inside the bus, looking backward as it pulled away. This happened every day.
The routine repeated week after week, month after month until school let out. The ritual returned in the winter after each new year, pausing again in the spring, returning a week later, ending for summertime, resuming in fall. Boy and man parted this way for nine years. What came next came after the boy went through puberty.
Nine years of departure did not go unnoticed, of course. This observer did not bear witness every day, not even every week, though during most of those years, your storyteller saw the scene play out the same way again and again. At first, it was touching. Then, unnerving. Later, ‘twas puzzling, curious and strange. At that point, an easel went up and sticks of charcoal came out. Finally, the exchange became moving again. After that, it was never anything but.
Not to everyone. Many people saw the same thing. Only one eyewitness engaged the two males. The rest were contemptuous, unfazed or feigned ignorance or indifference. Most—largely women, some men and especially spinsters—demonstrably sneered. Many stood frozen and stared, even after several years. The routine was always the same, barely with variation, every weekday of each semester. The man stood still and cried. The boy waved high while looking back during the turn. Only once when the bus broke down did the routine change—the man crouched and talked with the boy as other kids stayed on the bus, cheering, yelling, laughing and bouncing up and down while they waited for another bus. When the new bus showed up, the scene happened again. Those who watched typically frowned. After a while, it was clear that they watched because they wanted to frown. Or that they wanted or wished others would see that they frowned.
“A grown man crying in front of his son,” Rahullah Vellemalent snapped when a trio of teenage boys walked by her spot on the sidewalk near the courtyard apartments. Rahullah Vellemalent, who’d lived with her daughter—whom she let everyone know had gone away to the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university—in the house next door, watered her garden every morning when the school bus came. She’d previously been in the habit of gardening in the afternoon but that was before she spotted the man and the boy at the bus stop one day. After noticing the man’s display of emotional expression, she rarely missed the chance to watch and express her disapproval. “What a disgrace!” She called to the teenaged boys as they loped away, as if admonishing them for not admonishing the man for crying.
“Hi ‘Hullah!” Dabney Baum called to her as he waved while riding by on his bike. Dabney, who was loud and cheerful to everyone, lived across the street and had been a witness to the daily crying as well. Rahullah Vellemalent grimaced before smiling and waving back at him. Dabney rarely uttered a word about his thoughts on the bus stop ritual, though there was no guessing his position after dark when he drank liquor with his wife and others who imbibed on their backyard veranda. “What’s that all about?” He’d ask when the topic came up while flipping burgers on the grill as his wife served cocktails on a tray. Katy May Baum had an answer every time: “Well, they don’t make dads like they used to! Have you seen them?” She asked the Baums’ guests, who were there for the free cocktails. “It’s something,” she answered herself. “You really ought to see it sometime.” Hearing herself in the quiet of the veranda as the guests sipped their drinks, she slowly added, as if it suddenly occurred to her that God himself might have heard her: “I just feel sorry for the son.”
“Oh, that!” Large Helena Madre, who lived near the Baums, scoffed whenever the topic came up, though jolly Helena scoffed whenever any topic came up. “Who knows why things happen. It does upset people, though I never judge,” she was fond of saying, before rendering judgment. “I suppose they might be indigent, troubled and sad,” she opined. “Men are weaker than women, y’know. I always try to help. Y’know, I have a Christmas feast for the indigent every year.” Once, when a neighbor child—a girl who lived across the railroad tracks—asked Helena Madre if she’d invited the boy and man to her Christmas dinner, she laughed out loud: “If only I could. I hardly have a place for those who come every year.” Then, she glared at the little girl.
Other nearby neighbors—Hal Jones and Martha Mazursky, Bill and Gloria Christian, the Harris family, whose adult children had their own TV shows, which the parents co-produced, Candy and Franklin Marks—scoffed at the boy and man, too, if amongst themselves in their own homes from a distance. The Marks couple, who had three sons and two dogs, prided themselves on being disenfranchised by their blood. They looked down upon the man as being an exemplar of self-pity. The Christian couple, whose son was a missionary on charity service in the Vietnamese jungle, never showed interest in, spoke to or approached the man and boy. They prayed for them every night. Patriotic neighbors Hal Jones and Martha Mazursky, who had installed a flagpole in the front yard with a gigantic national flag, declared their disapproval of Crying Man—as they called him—to anyone who asked. “Well, you know,” Martha would whisper to people who brought it up, “I heard he might be queer.” “Wouldn’t surprise me none,” Hal, who had never asked Martha to marry but lived off her inheritance, would pile on, “no family values there.” Hal would pause, before opening up another can of beer. “Ain’t never seen a woman in the picture.” The Harris family never had anything to say about the bus stop routine. They were busy exploiting their children’s celebrity and never took an interest in their neighbors.
Others passing by the bus stop would scowl, too. Bachelors, lady joggers, delivery drivers, old foreigners, obese kids, postal carriers, people walking dogs—to one and almost all, the man who cried and the sullen boy who waved to the man were a source of collective shame, a bother or a daily display they’d rather not see. “I would not mind,” one single lady said into her earpiece as she jogged by in her jogging pants, matching jacket and color-coordinated cap drawn down over her eyes, “but it’s negative energy.” She went on, when pressed, about how the universe soaks that up and poisons everything and everyone as she proclaimed with gusto that she would not let it poison her. “I suppose I’m just positive,” she said, “I have zero tolerance for the negative.”
Once, at a neighborhood block party (which man and boy did not attend), they all congregated and bandied the topic. Commentaries varied; “What’s become of today’s fathers?” “A man should act like a man.” “Real men don’t cry.” “The boy’s gonna grow up to be a sissy.” “There’s a church social I’d like to take them to—” “—they obviously need government assistance…” “They should be reported to the school…” “What they need is a woman in the home.”
“Get a life!” Someone yelled at the tearful man one day from a passing pickup truck before she put the window back up. The man did not seem to notice. The bus turned, the boy turned back to look at the man, raise his arm and wave back and the man still cried with a suspended wave. No one knew the boy. No one one knew the man. No one had seen their apartment. No one had bothered to greet them. Everyone—this includes this observer—watched, judged and moved along. Then, one fall day after nine years had gone by, the bus pulled up. The driver paused, pulled into traffic and turned. The boy and the man were gone. No one ever saw them again.
A rumor went around that a moving truck had come in the night and they’d slipped away. Someone from Martha and Hal’s church said they were part of a cult that migrated to South America. One of the Baums’ drinkers said she’d heard that they were arrested for drug trafficking. Helena Madre speculated that the indigent sometimes skip out on the rent.
No one knew the truth. None of them wanted to know. They never did learn. That I did was a byproduct of my virtue and, I now realize, theirs. It was not a stroke of luck or karma or the universe whispering or someone giving back. It was a fact of reality. I had been watching something on a picture stream while on break from directing my newest film. The assistant director was setting up the shot for an exterior scene and—well, anyway, I caught notice of a speech by a young man in a black robe with a graduate’s cap and yellow tassel. The speech moved me. The lesson of his words was profound. But I noticed that his manner matched his message’s power, strength and emotion. When the speaker paused after delivering the essence of his commencement address, he openly, softly cried and, as he did, he looked up—he did not look down—peering into the audience of graduates with sincerity, valor and an air of wisdom. All of this as tears ran down his face. Something about all of this looked faintly familiar. But my mouth was agape, my hand was waving off the film crew and my eyes were fixed on the screen.
At first, I couldn’t figure what exactly rang true. I was held in the aftermath of his speech. The audience rose in a wave with a roar in the longest, most righteous and glorious ovation I’ve seen. What the young speaker said connected with everyone in the audience and they cheered. The camera cut back to the young man, a handsome and proud graduate who filled out his robe and turned his head slowly from right to left and back as he stepped back from the podium and let himself be rewarded with wonder, pride and appreciation. It’s at this point I felt a lump in my throat and my own eyes welled up. In the roaring of that moment, the young man’s hand went up as his arm rose straight up and he waved as a salutation to the graduates and everything in life they would encounter as a show of solidarity and in answer to their uniform praise. In this instant, I suddenly realized this was the face of the man I had been drawing in charcoal on my sketchpad for many years when I lived in that neighborhood and watched a boy and man at the bus stop near my mom’s house next to the courtyard apartments where they lived.
This was the boy who had since become a man. When it struck me, I fully turned my back on the crew, rewinded the speech to its beginning on my screen with my finger, and I listened to the speech slowly with intent, absorbed by every word. He spoke at the podium at a mid-range college campus with which I was familiar. It wasn’t as prestigious or renowned as the college I attended where my mother insisted I go, but it was what he said that earned my interest. He told the story of his life. That he was born as an accident in a government hospital somewhere in the Midwest. That his father was a soldier at war in a faraway place where war went on and on and on, and his father never came home. On the night he was born, the nurses and doctors surrounded his mother as machines sounded off in alarm and his mother—who had been told she could never bear children—expired in a room for labor and delivery. That he was taken from the ward to an orphanage where he waited for someone to come to claim him.
He said that a man came for him when he was the age of two. He said that the man was silent and stern and that the man wore the uniform of a United States Marine. That the man had no legs. That he struggled in his wheelchair to cradle the toddler, and that tears welled in his eyes—the speaker remembered this—and that the man’s tears fell on to the boy’s face and blanket, which he never forgot. They went home that day from the orphanage, he said, to a military veteran rehabilitation center. Caregivers looked the other way while the crippled father tended to his toddler son in a room in the back of the center where it would be easier to let a wounded war veteran take care of his son in violation of the rules. When his father was finally fitted with prosthetic legs, many months later, he did months and months of grueling physical therapy and was discharged with his child to live on their own.
They left, father and son, as stone-faced caregivers saluted and waved goodbye to a transport van for the crippled and dying as they were dropped off in the town where they eventually came to live for 11 years. Through modest assistance, the father was able to obtain a job working part time. With his disability and veteran subsidies, which barely covered expenses, he was able to rent a studio. He enrolled his son in school, walking him to the bus stop every morning. At night, they ate quietly—usually a bowl of soup and some rice—played catch in the living room and that his father read children’s books and, later, great works of literature, to his son every night at bedtime. That his father told him his mother had loved reading books and left a library of books she’d wanted one day to read. At that point in the speech, the son, now a man, looked up at the audience of fellow graduates, and he explained that his father never once asked for his assistance with his prosthetic legs. That he taught his son how to be vulnerable and cry which he did every day when he looked at his son through a school bus window and saw the face of the only woman he loved for whom he’d fought to be reunited in an endless war which crippled his life.
I look upon the charcoal drawing which is framed in my office on the studio lot. It’s my first picture. It’s the reason I became a movie director. It’s the face of a boy on a bus as he looks into his father’s eyes at the bus stop. I knew then that the boy would live a life that matters. I could see it in his eyes. I could see the loneliness. I could see the desire. I could see the vulnerability forming, settling, yearning to breathe free and strong—strong enough to look back and wave at the wounded man who was his father whom he loved—the crying man everyone vilified was the strongest man in the world and he’d raised a boy who became a man who would be even stronger—and probably better with deeper resolve to persevere. I never would’ve become the artist I am without them. I saw them for who they are. I cherish these men. That corner—those leaves—the curb—the window—their hands—his tears—the bus stop. This is where three lives were forged. This is where there’s wonder in the world.
Award-winning author, writer and journalist Scott Holleran lived in Chicago for 21 years and writes the non-fictional Industrial Revolutions column as well as short stories. Read and subscribe to his non-fiction newsletter, Autonomia, at scottholleran.substack.com. Listen and subscribe to his fiction podcast at ShortStoriesByScottHolleran.substack.com. Scott Holleran lives in Southern California.
