Man With a Shopping Cart by Tom Bentley-Fisher

William stands on the upper level of a parkade leaning on a shopping cart some employee had forgotten to rack up with the others. He’s waiting for a friend to pick up a jug of organic milk. He knows his friend will be forever and come up the elevator loaded with ‘two-for-one’s’ and any specials he can find on pasta, ice cream and pineapple juice, not to mention a stack of car magazines. William doesn’t mind waiting. It’s two in the morning and a beautiful night in San Francisco, the concrete rooftop a checker board of symmetrical parking spaces, the only vehicle on the horizon his friend’s sky blue Dodge Caravan, clean and American in its loneliness.

The metal rails of the shopping cart catch the reflection of the nighttime sky. William likes shopping carts. He likes the clarity of their intention, the sleekness of design.

Occasionally he goes into a Supermarket just so he can push them, but always leaves wanting something more. Parading up and down the aisles traveling a single direction in space seems an entrapment of spirit, a kind of censorship. Tonight he has the cart in the firm grip of his hands without an aisle in sight. He is satisfied, alone in the process of reinventing himself.

William has been in San Francisco for four months. When he arrived he had a car, but one night decided to leave it on Twin Peaks. He’d been looking down at the city and it made him want to walk. So he left the keys in the ignition and started to walk. The car needed an oil change anyway, and it reminded him too much of his wife.

William’s wife died in a boating accident on a Northern Oregon Lake. He didn’t stay for the funeral. He got in the car and drove south. His friend let him sleep in his living room. Even when he ran out of money, his friend told him not to worry. “Take the time to grieve,” he said.

William wasn’t interested in grieving. He wanted to walk.

Late one night he found a shopping cart in an empty lot outside a Catholic church. When he leaned on the cart to lift his foot and wriggle the hole in his sock away from his toes, he saw a squat happy woman in a Hawaiian shirt coming towards him. She was pushing a shopping cart dangling with worry beads, her clothing pinned with fluorescent three-dimensional images of Jesus and Mary. William wondered if she’d escaped some Christian strobe-light disco from the seventies and had the distinct impression she was going to ask him to dance.

Before he could walk away, she stood, motionless, smiling beside him as if waiting for him to make the first move. So he did. He pushed the cart, expecting it to jerk clumsily ahead. Instead, it pulled him into an elegant wide arc and circled back to the Catholic Hawaiian who was mirroring his every movement. As he banked toward the left, she sashayed to the right, their carts reeling in unison to the rhythm of a pavement minuet. A hula-hula fox-trot, a waltz under the stars. They danced into the dawn, chaperoned by the hundred twinkling eyes of Mary and her son.

Without warning, the woman spun her cart out of the promenade, scooted over the church, and sat on the steps, sparkling for early mass.

William had discovered the pleasure of the shopping cart, the musicality of its rhythm, the surrender of intention. He wanted to take it with him, but didn’t have the nerve.

One evening, when he was walking down Lincoln, he was stopped by a great ship sailing across his path. It was foggy, but William saw him clearly, a gnarled old Viking pushing a shopping cart through the drizzle, steering his longboat into the shadows of Golden Gate Park. His matted beard clung to his chest like decaying seaweed, antlers rising from the top of his football helmet, protective plates curving over his mouth like armour. His cart was full weapons … hubcaps, barbed wire, a broken window, a baseball bat … and pierced between its front rungs rose a long pole, angled aggressively into the park. Attached to the end of the pole was a canvas tarp, a magnificent flag soaring over the Viking’s head, trailing like a net on the wet pavement behind him, dragging with the weight of the rain like a great robe of history demanding to be pulled into the present. He was a warrior, undaunted by the mysteries of his future. William was moved to tears.

Usually William walked at night. He came across shopping carts abandoned in hidden corners of the city, remnants of lives caught within the metal bars, secrets waiting to be buried. William searched through belongings looking for clues. The meaning of the wheel, the catcher’s mitt, the microwave … he’d look up narrow paths and dark roads waiting for the street people to return to their mysteries. Sometimes he wanted to take a shopping cart with him. But he didn’t. When the sun came up, he’d find his way home.

William’s friend still hasn’t come up the elevator. He looks across the parkade at the ramp  descending onto the city. The light glows a faint yellow from the street below … misty … evocative. He begins pushing his cart to the centre of the roof top, drawn by the possibilities of what lay below.

He enjoys the feeling of surrender, the shopping cart easing him forward. An old couple out for a stroll, gliding with the hidden desires of their youth, the rattle of bones rising from the pavement. As he reaches the centre a cold wind blows a heavy sigh across his face. He begins to think about his wife. The bird in his ribcage awakens.

William clenches the cart harder and presses it away from himself. It veers him into a slow circle. Round and round, a spherical ghost circumscribing his fear, haunting him with its longing for escape.

Again he looks toward the ramp descending into the street. He feels the cool metal locking the palms of his hands to the handle and yanks on the bar. The cart rears its skeletal frame like a horse ready for flight. Then he lowers the wheels and aims it toward the exit. He looks down into the cart and feels reassured by its emptiness. He begins … slowly at first,  cautious.

William hears a faint rattle of metal in the distance behind. He looks over his shoulder and sees thin outlines of shopping carts creeping from the shadows of his peripheral vision, emerging from the blackness. Old women, young boys, Vikings and rogues … the bizarre and the brilliant, the wounded and bewildered. From out of dark corners, they run with their carts to join in the parade. Black kings and princesses … seekers and seers … the willow branch stick-people and creaky old whores. Pirates, peasants, the wicked, the blind. Remote … forgotten … tattered and torn … they storm the empty rooftop, an outcry of insurrection roaring its thunder at the sky.

William sees a man in khaki pushing a dead soldier. He sees a preacher pushing a stone. A girl with a sparrow on her head, her cart packed with alarm clocks … ringing, ringing … tick-tock, tick-tock.

He sees gaunt young men with their baskets full of pharmaceuticals, a showman and a chandelier. A ballerina pushing a giant tutu and a trunk crammed with point shoes. An ancient burlesque queen, her shopping cart gorged with garter belts, lace underwear, nylon stockings and a bag of withering oranges. He sees a child wheeling his grandfather and a nun pushing a box of Black Magic Chocolates. A clown and a porcelain doll … a Rabbi with a cart full of ashes … a widow with a flag.

The carts are overflowing with sunflowers, kittens, teapots, and curtains. Wigs and crinolines, tuxedos and shoes. He sees a set of encyclopedias, cameras, a violin. Letters bound with ribbon. Teddy bears, baseball cards, newspapers, lottery tickets, an armchair, grocery bills, Baptismal shawls, a wedding gown, an aquarium, and a seeing-eye dog.

William soars across the roof, the pavement flinging itself down like a magnet, pulling his cart faster and faster. He sees a yellow line running across the top of the ramp, marking the beginning of its descent. His chest opens like an angel … he is closer … he is there.

William hits a barrier with such violence the cart hurls away from him, flinging itself over its front wheels, crashing onto the pavement. He scrambles to his feet, looking in all directions. The parkade is still empty, except for the blue Caravan and a teenager in a Safeway’s uniform, leaning beside the elevator and smoking a cigarette, a ray of light from the lamp above illuminating the ‘wise guy’ smirk spreading over his face. The boy is motionless, cruel and confident in his youthful arrogance.

William looks at the yellow line at the top of the ramp and understands what has happened. When he hit the line, it triggered a lock on the cart. He studies the round casement enclosing the top perimeter of the front wheels, a piece of steel protruding from its interior, gripping the rubber like claws of an eagle clenching its prey. William can’t understand why they go to so much trouble. Surely it would be easier just to shoot the homeless bastards. He glares at the Safeway boy as if it was all his fault. The punk still doesn’t move. He puffs away on his cigarette, smoke rings billowing out of his smug adolescent mouth like a series of smouldering little challenges. “I dare you,” they seem to be saying. “I dare you.”

William pulls the cart upright. Again a cold wind blows across his face. He stands above the ramp frozen with fear. He closes his eyes, listening for the comfort of metal rumbling in the distance, but all he can hear is the sound of a northern lake, swelling back and forth against the rocks. He yanks the cart onto its hind wheels and tried to press it forward, but it wouldn’t budge, his arms aching with the weight of the cart. When he lowers it to the ground, he looks into its basket. The shopping cart is filling with water, green algae floating on its surface, rising slowly to the top of the rim.

William looks again at the boy under the light. He wants to say goodbye. To forgive him. The boy flicks his cigarette over the parkade and descends the stairs beside the elevator. Then William bends his knees and clamps his body around the sides of the cart’s basket.

He lifts it into the air. Cold lake water pours through its rungs and down his legs, cascading the gentle slope of the ramp onto the street. He twists his spine under the carriage, wrestling the cart onto his back. He feels the burden of its heavy load pressing him further and further into the ground, and crooks his neck to look at what is above.

Falling between the bars of the shopping cart is his dead wife, her naked wet body imprinted with lines like the uniform of a prisoner. William crab-walks his way down the slippery slope and heads for the park.

Tom Bentley Fisher

Image: An abandoned shopping cart by the railings with water in the background. From pixabay.com