Free The 56th Man by J. Clayton Rogers Page B

this far south. Perhaps a few thousand in the
immediate area. Ari wondered if the outraged jogger would conclude
he was Punjabi. Or Sikh. Or a member of that relatively new race: a
Terrorist.
    Why not? We all look the same to them.
    "You don't do that here," the jogger
admonished, no longer screaming, but scolding. "There are public
toilets."
    Ari had tried to use the facilities at a
nature center further up the trail, only to find the building
locked. Peering through a plate glass window, he saw a marine
turtle moping in a fish tank and some fanciful children's drawings
of various animals on a bulletin board next to the entrance.
Otherwise, the interior was dark. Ari had encountered this
manifestation before. Americans were very good at stockpiling
material in great abundance, then locking it all up. Everything for
the record, none for use.
    The jogger was into the second phase of his
assessment, his eyes running up and down Ari's baggy jogging pants
and sweaty gray shirt. They compared poorly with his own natty
outfit. The logos on his shirt and striped shorts matched, while
his immaculate running shoes appeared to have an inch of cushion.
He was a brand name. He belonged. Whereas Ari (and his renegade
penis) was fraught with anonymity. Was he homeless? Or that worst
of all conjunctions: foreign and destitute--with nothing to lose?
In other words, was he dangerous?
    "There's a shelter for..."
    Ari raised his brow inquiringly.
    "They have toilets. You can even take a
shower." He chose to interpret Ari's silence as a query. "It's
three or four miles from here, across the river. Next to the city
jail...I hear."
    "I am not a peasant," Ari said with grim
civility. Feeling a twinge in his calf, he braced his hands on one
knee and stretched out his leg. When he straightened, the other
jogger was gone.
    It was his own fault, he thought. He had been
living in a state of semi-savagery, sleeping in his jogging suit,
eating junk food, neglecting his appearance. He had neither
showered nor shaved this morning, putting off his toilette until
he'd taken his morning run. Which only made sense, but which also
helped explain why the man treated him like some alien
cast-off.
    But it did nothing to alleviate Ari's
sense of outrage. He had done well in his country, so well that
there was an assumption among some that his good fortune was simply
that, plums that had fallen out of the sky into his lap. True, luck
had been involved. But few understood how hard he had worked, the
risks he had taken, the fragility of the thread from which he
dangled. And with the final toss of the dice, he had lost all. Not
that he had had much choice. Nor was he by any means the only one
to have found a desert where, only a day before, there had been
lush pastures. Which made the man's reaction to his uncovered
presence all the more galling. He had reprimanded Ari out of
ignorance. He had screamed out
of ignorance. And Ari wondered, as he jogged the several miles back
to Beach Court, if he should have broken the idiot's
jaw.
    No. You did well. Doing
something like that might draw attention .
    An unpleasant odor greeted him inside the
house. It seemed to be coming from upstairs. Going up, he found his
thin blanket balled up at the end of the mattress. A nudge of his
foot exposed feces and a large wet patch that could only be
urine.
    The cat must have predicted Ari's reaction,
because it was nowhere to be found. What a clever beast, to find a
hiding spot where none existed.
    Only we both know that's not true, don't
we?
    His wrath slowly receded, like a slow-moving
thunderstorm disappearing over the horizon. After all, he reasoned,
the cat was only guilty of a cultural misstep similar to the one
Ari had apparently made in James River Park. Locked inside the
house, it had used the nearest thing at hand that approximated
loose soil.
    His primitive bed was now unusable. The
mattress was thin and folded easily, along with the blanket, in the
large trash can (Waste