RICHARD HOLINGER

Vagabond

Weather.com predicted 85 degrees, hot for a wedding. As often the case this spring, it was wrong. By 3:30, the day had evolved into one of those 71-degree days Midwesterners write off by insisting, “We don’t get any spring; goes from winter to summer overnight.” Leaving the blissfully brief Lutheran wedding ceremony, Tia and I stepped beneath a brilliant sun, expansive blue sky, and canopy of newly sprouted green leaves. With an hour to kill before the reception a short drive away, we jaywalked across Third Street in Geneva, Illinois, a quaint destination town for shopping and dining that could have been moored next to Mystic or Kennebunkport.

Graham’s 318 offered outdoor patio seating on pillowed wicker furniture as well as Parisian metal tables and chairs for a mini–Champs Elysée experience. Inside, a line had formed in front of plastic-shielded pastries and a refrigerated case where one last boxed chicken pot pie and a vanilla yogurt topped with blackberries and raspberries waited, last to be picked.

Dressed in wedding garb—my gray slacks, yellow button-down, blue blazer and Brooks’ tie, and Tia’s long, flowing ankle-length blue print dress—we took our place in line behind a man who upon seeing us turned and said, “Now I feel overdressed.”

He had close-cropped gray hair tufted above his forehead, a full moon face, half-zipped blue flannel sweatshirt over a collarless white shirt, and clean, wrinkle-free khaki pants. His tone and smile conveyed an instant friendliness, as if waiting for a couple just our age and demeanor to walk through the door. A Jay Gatsby greeting nonpareil. His words, although unexpected (even in this cozy little town, seldom do strangers chat it up in line), drew me in, their droll, self-deprecating inflection an invitation not to be ignored or denied.

Ordinarily, I do not talk to strangers or, if possible, anyone outside my immediate family or best friends. Weddings, to use a word my mother used—however incorrectly—were, to my mind, ghastly. People who know each other only peripherally are thrown together for an interminable amount of time to drink symbolic champagne, forgettable wine, and tasteless food, all the while screaming at your table mates to be understood over a DJ’s choice of 1970s’ rock or a live band’s butchering James Taylor and John Denver. However, we weren’t incarcerated yet, hadn’t been shuttled to Table 15 to eat brown rolls and foil-wrapped butter; we were in a quiet, coffee-bean aromatic coffee house where palaver comes easy as the half and half poured from an insulated pitcher.

So I responded to his opening gambit by mumbling something about having come from a wedding ceremony across the street and in an hour my wife and I faced a reception to which I invited him to go in my place if he wanted to borrow my tie and coat. He asked what denomination.

“Lutheran,” I answered. “The pastor was a woman, and her sermon couldn’t have been more than ten minutes and focused on the bride and groom, not bible readings. It was great.”

When his turn, the man ordered a double espresso that never once, in the thirty or forty minutes we bantered with him, did he bring to his lips to drink from, even though his right hand circled the paper cup most of the time he sat near us, a king holding his sacred scepter—or and actor his prop.

Tia and I took a few minutes ordering, so I was surprised when I saw the man again when I went to fill a plastic cup with ice water from a glass jar next to the counter where he poured sugar and/or dairy into his espresso. Why did I feel compelled to elongate our relationship? Maybe because he initiated the first contact, and I felt impelled by my Neolithic ancestral DNA to extend that bond of community, to get along instead of snub.

“I’m planning on leaving the reception as soon as I can,” I said, “using our blind, deaf, 18-year-old dog as an excuse.”

I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it must have been appropriately empathic and charming, because I decided I couldn’t match it, and he wandered off toward the doors leading onto the patio and the world beyond the coffee house, never to be seen again.

Not waiting for Tia, hoping she’d figure out I’d gone outside in such comely weather, I opened the door, took the couple steps down, and found an empty table in the shade on which I set my water then pulled one of the chairs in place while peripherally I was conscious of someone noisily, metallically rearranging chairs a few feet away.

The man.

He put down his cup, sat on a chair facing our table, and began talking as if the coffee station’s extrication had been nothing but a disingenuous formality. Either he did not allow for the possibility my wife and I might want to sit alone, quietly checking texts, reading online news or books, answering emails, whatever, or he wanted to ride roughshod over such possibility. He assumed conviviality the way he would assume I’d reach for a helping hand out of quicksand.

Incredibly, I did want his offered chitchat, his interference. I’d packed a novel when leaving the house, but we’d come here straight from church, not stopping at the car. By the time Tia arrived with her tea, John was prattling on about his self-confessed life as a “vagabond.” He’d lived on the West Coast, near Oakland, for a long time, six or seven years. “I loved it, but it wasn’t home.”

Apparently nowhere was home, unless it was his childhood home in Ohio he left when young after earning his credentials as a waiter. “With that, I had a ticket for a job just about anywhere. When I got too old to do that anymore, I did other things—temp jobs, hospitality, security.”

Suddenly he stood up and offered his table to a young couple while moving his seat, uninvited, to our table. With that smooth move, he simultaneously showed his concern for others—giving up his table—while confidently sweeping physically closer into on our lives with the finesse of a Paul Hornung. A lovely, deft, invasive move.

Without pause (after assuring the couple they were welcome to his table), he continued his story. An itinerant lifestyle took him all over the States, some more hospitable than others. When it came to this neck of the woods, he professed that people were real nice; in Maine, not so much. They’re real suspicious. They won’t hardly talk to you.

Was he saying that to gain our trust? To get us to like him because he liked the folks who lived here, apparently including us? Or was he being sincere, complimenting our community’s welcoming warmth, and to question him would be to second guess ourselves?

“How’d you wind up here?” I asked.

When living in Texas, he had a friend who told him about Geneva. Because Austin was expensive, he researched the town and found the area had “four coffee shops, four independent bookstores, and lots of good restaurants.” He rented a room from his friend and for a year had been working at a large senior care facility as concierge.

“I’ve done a lot of things,” he went on. Once he worked a phone bank contacting medical doctors all over the U.S. He could intuit where he was calling from the way people reacted to his calls. One receptionist answered brusquely, telling him, “The doctor’s not here. What’s the message?” After hanging up, he saw the call had been to Massachusetts. On the next call, when asking to speak to the doctor, the receptionist said, “Oh, baby, he gone!” That one was to Louisiana.

“New Orleans is the most welcoming city in the world. People there are marvelous. So giving. On the East Coast, not so much. You won’t be asked for dinner by anyone you meet in Vermont.”

There it was. The thrown gauntlet. The crucible to reveal our true Midwestern nature.

Because the vagabond had just invited himself to dinner. At our house.

If we didn’t want to be like those assholes in Vermont, we would have him over for a veritable feast, impressing him with our cordiality and our faith in our fellow human beings.

If we didn’t extend an invitation, we’d be the assholes from Geneva, Illinois.

Growing up in Chicago, I’ve been careful, even suspect, of people’s motives all my life. I’m not sure paranoia describes my cautious nature, but at that moment, my gut tightened with suspicion. Was the vagabond playing us? Was he a slick rhetorician, a conman, a grifter, sending sweet, seductive tunes to draw us into the lethal shoals of his intentions, to open our emotions, car doors, and front door to him?

Or was he who he seemed to be, a fascinating, uncalculating man who never let anything or anyone pin him down, living the unconventional, nonconformist life on the road like an Alexander Supertramp or Dean Moriarty?

If we hadn’t been going to a sit-down dinner wedding reception, at the very least, I could have seen asking if he wanted to go to a local pub for a hamburger and a craft beer to try to either slice through his costumed facade or come to appreciate his radical, majestic Odyssean wanderings.

My phone, turned off for the church service, vibrated in my pocket. My daughter. Saved by the shiver. I answered and began telling her—on speaker, although Tia was engrossed in talking to the vagabond and was hardly aware of the phone call or whom I was talking to—about the ceremony and hoping Tia would use the phone call to escape the banter.

Because,. in the few minutes between the man telling us about the selfish Vermonters, inferring we would be degenerates if not extending an invitation to dinner, and the phone ringing, I’d become distrustful, even frightened, of the vagabond.

Tia, however, an extrovert, had found her equal in sharing easily dispensed information and well-worn stories with a person whose life story seemed practiced hundreds, maybe thousands, of times with other innocent prisoners. Talking to my daughter, I couldn’t focus on what they were saying, only the one high-pitched voice followed by a low-pitched voice, both equally engaged in sharing nonessentials in a highly spirited manner.

Finally, Tia tore herself away from what Henry James would call her interlocutor and asked about our daughter. As I handed the phone to her, the vagabond, seeing our attention waning, possibly even disappearing, stood up and scraped his chair across the gray stone hardscape next to a blue-neckerchiefed honey-golden lab lying next to a woman in a wicker chair.

“Is it all right if I pat him?” he asked the woman even though she faced away from him and was speaking to a friend lounging on a sofa beside her. By the time he finished his question, he’d already started patting the dog who stood up, slid under his hand, and lumbered over to me where he wedged between my knees, blond hair swirling off my hands onto my gray slacks.

I had to admire the way the vagabond, consciously or not—who knew?—used the lab as a MacGuffin to ingratiate himself with his next targets with whom he could spread his narrative, whose attention he could hold, and whose beneficence he could perhaps wrest dinner from.

“Hold on, hold on,” I told my daughter. We stood and pulled together cups, napkins, stir sticks, and mini straws to drop in the garbage bin on our way out. As we do, the vagabond conversationalist moved into a more strategic position, his attention entirely given to the two women, all the while stroking the dog’s head lovingly.

Given that scenario, I was surprised when walking between the vagabond and his new BFFs, he looked up at us and almost shouted, “My name is John!”

Turning back, I managed a “Nice talking to you,” just before dumping our garbage, but John had already returned to his new constituents.

Later, I thought I should have added, “We’re from Vermont.” But that would have been untrue—and unnecessary. I might be an asshole who doesn’t invite strangers who rely on the kindness of strangers for dinner, but I wasn’t rude. At least, not that rude.

Maybe in a decade or two I’ll end up in the senior care facility John now works as concierge—if, in fact, he does. Maybe he’ll find enough curious and compassionate people in town to keep him from escaping to the next state, the next town, the next coffee shop. I might run into him when his hair has gone all salt, his tan face is creased with sun wrinkles, his paunch, twice the size, is hanging over his belt. And I’ll know he’s told the truth.

If by not asking for John’s last name, phone number, and/or email address I failed his humanity test, and by so doing failed the existential ethical imperative to ask a stranger in when he or she knocks on your door, showing myself evil rather than good, John perhaps being God’s messenger to test whether I will treat an outsider as a leper or Jesus Christ, well, then, I’m screwed. I chose the safety of myself and my family over the impulse to do good.

At the wedding reception, I sat next to a man who’d been an engineer for thirty years at the Peoria Caterpillar plant. Describing my interaction with John, the man assured me that these people came into a town, told you all kinds of stories, and I had been right to be careful. “The Music Man,” he said, figuring I’d get the allusion, certain I’d side with him, positive he and I could both spot a charlatan a mile away and wouldn’t hesitate to shun and eschew him.

“What a bastard,” I thought of the engineer. “How callous.” And, I reflected, how similar to my revulsion of the vagabond; I had just defined my own nature, my own character.

What haunts me still about this unique meeting is why, as Tia and I were leaving, John shouted out his name. Usually when meeting someone, after the first few minutes of shared comradery, at least first names are exchanged. Why didn’t he offer his earlier? I may have hesitated because wary of his motives. But with him spilling his life with apparent abandon, why not offer a name and a handshake?

I’ll probably never know if John was his real name, just as I’ll probably never know if his declarations were true narratives or alternative facts. Maybe such mystery makes a recounting of the story better than a decisive, certain answer. Leave it ambiguous. Let the reader decide.

Let the ending be the beginning.

“My name is John.”

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Orca, and garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Books include “North of Crivitz” (poetry, Kelsay Books) and “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences” (essays, Dreaming Big Press). He holds a doctorate from UIC and lives northwest of Chicago.