20-something latin american guy wearing an athletic jersey and a red backpack, with short hair and a string of faceted glass beads hanging over a tattoo of the name elvira on his breast bone approached me at the bus stop to ask for a cigarette. i had a shoulder bag and a duffel, and roll my own cigarettes from loose tobacco, which i carry in a pouch with papers in my pocket, so the one i was smoking at the moment i had rolled back in the apartment before pocketing the gear and carrying the bags out to the bus stop.
i didn't have any at hand to offer but the one i was smoking; i offered it. he looked at it a little skeptically, "no marijuana?"
"not marijuana," i told him and he took it.
he wanted to both walk away and stay and talk and tried to do both. "are you some sort of professor or something - you look like a professor?"
"no. i am an underemployed attorney."
the way he wanted to both stay talking and leave reminded me of some situation in which it has seemed that a person was trying to decide whether i was an easy target or not. i am ambiguous. he repeated "attorney" like it was a new word; i wondered whether to say "abogado" but just repeated "attorney" with him.
"you are not the pilot who deported my brother, are you?"
"no."
"you look like a traveler." then, with a sequence of expressions that i cannot duplicate i think he told me about his brother . . .
he seemed to say that his brother had been arrested - "got in a lot of trouble" - for discharging a firearm "over there" - he gestured to the area surrounding the front of my apartment building, "do you see that a/c unit?" he certainly seemed to gesture to the courtyard of my building, then suggested that his brother had shot at it (i pictured my own a/c unit, half-way out my bedroom window). then he hastened to comfort me - "not at any person, no -" he mimed shifting his aim from me up into the air, at about the right angle to send a bullet through my window and into my ceiling. but i was aware of no such bullets in my decade in the unit. there have been some gunshots in that time.
anyway, i said, "he got deported for that?"
"bad trouble! that's what he did," miming again, "blah! blah-blah! blah! big trouble!" then he suggested, i think, that he and his brother were involved in a crew, and that it was leading to big trouble: "i should stop hanging with that crew," he said, and finally wandered off . . . into the courtyard of my building - as though he were a tenant or visitor intent on entering - and out of my sight, for a while, during which i wondered whether he lived in the building, or visited regularly, or had any association of which i ought already to be aware. i also wondered briefly whether the brother he mentioned was that homeless man squatting in the stairwell whom the tenants association had had barred and then arrested, before he came back back down the courtyard steps and, apparently talking to those whom he passed, continued on down the street.