Stupid comes in all colors.

One after another they burst into my store, spitting out guilty parties even before they ordered cigarettes.

The white guy said a black guy did it.

The black guy said it was probably a Korean guy but a black guy will be blamed.

The Korean guy said nothing. Well, he mumbled something but I can never understand him.

The grandmother said it was a drug addict.

The drug addict was too mellowed out to say anything but, “Where’s the candy?” He was standing right next to it.

Nate the Late’s death is the talk of the store with theories and blame freely drooling out of misguided mouths. Everyone wants to guess who did it. No one wants to talk about Nate.

He was a part of the Center City community, just as much a part as the commuters in suits and women in sneaks with their dress shoes in bags. He was more of an integral part, really. He lived here.

Nate was the Late because he chose not to live anymore. He just didn’t have the strength to kill himself. Someone made it official last night. They poured gasoline on him and set him on fire. I’m a peaceful man but after I heard the crushing news, I wanted to find the culprit and hang him from the mammoth tree and let him dangle over Nate’s bench. Better yet, pour gasoline on the bastard and set him on fire. If it was a him.

Nate basked in one color. Purple. His skin had a purple tint almost as if all the wine he drank flowed to his extremities and left an indelible mark as it tried to escape through his pores. His clothes were a shade of purple, too, fermented from years of never being washed. They existed in a tattered state on or below the bench near the thick brambles at the western end of Center City Park.

A giant pine tree served as his natural protection, hanging its branches in an embrace over Nate’s cove. His tiny niche was out of the way. The cops never chased him. If they were new on park detail, they would check him out, but they never found any bottles. Nate was neat in a chaotic, frenzied way. He tossed his empty bottles in the cement cylinder anchored at the turn in the trail. The main mess Nate made was of himself.

“Between you and me, that corner of the woods is fairly close to where the brothers hang out,” said Reggie, a former truck driver who comes in for serious smokes; he would suck on Camels if I still carried them in the store. “Brothers” is what he calls Blacks when he’s feeling human. “I think you can hear that hip-hop crap from Nate's bench. It had to be them.”

“Why?” I asked. “What possible reason could they have for doing such a horrible thing to such a harmless guy?”

“They don’t need a reason,” said Reggie.

“Of course, they do,” I said. “That act was personal. There was anger in that act. I can’t figure it out because Nate barely spoke to people.”

“Maybe he looked at them crossed-eyed,” said Reggie.

“Right Reg, that’s it,” I said. “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes. It’s solved then. The old crossed-eyed-look motivation. That sets off fights in high school. That doesn’t lead to murder.”

“OK, be a wise guy,” said Reggie. “But mark my words. You’ll see.”

Later, one of the “brothers” drops in with his take on the tragedy.

“Whoever did that is a mean sucker,” said Tatt, who can speak with authority on mean. He’s a former boxer who let me call him by his nickname only after I asked him about the Semper Fi tattoo on one of the granite pillars that he uses for arms. Though I hadn’t saluted or taken orders in many years, there is no such thing as a former Marine and when two Marines meet, wherever, whenever, there is an instant bond with no color or culture lines to cross.

“That was cold, man,” said Tatt. “Cold.”

I nodded. Tatt could be scary but he has compassion.

Addie couldn’t scare a cat. Her arms are twigs. She’s a spry, 82-year-old woman who lives next to the store and brings me enough cookies that I’ll have to keep jogging after death. Her suspects stuck needles in their arms.

“They go in there at night,” she said. “They must have thought Nate the Late had money. Those druggies don’t have any of the sense God gave them.”

Druggies? I got a kick out of Addie’s lingo. The druggies I saw around the park barely had enough strength to walk. Nate, for Christ’s sake, could beat most of them in a race. As for sense, God must blink sometimes. That would explain druggies and a bulk of other communal groups.

People who come into my store generally want instant gratification. They don’t really get it, but they keep coming back. I played along, without conviction, in the futile, purely semantic, amateur detective work. It was a bit glib for my taste. I wanted to think about Nate the Late. I wanted to talk about him but there was no one to lend me an ear.

Days like this I’d prefer Nate as the constant. In fact, any day I’d prefer Nate.

Too much hate oozes through this city. A lot of it lies slightly below the surface anxious for a trigger.

Some people thought Nate was homeless but I know for a fact he wasn’t. He had two homes, one with walls, and the other with a lot of open space and shrubbery. The bench served as a safe haven. The house conjured up too many memories. Actually, one memory emerged whenever he walked through the front door.

Nate said the same thing to me every morning as I passed the bench on my daily jogs. “You got it made in the shade.”

“No, you got it made,” I would answer and he did because he had the bench and the tree roof, if the sun was overhead.

That was our daily exchange for two solid years until I stumbled into a real conversation one morning. The close encounter was the only time I saw Nate more than 20 yards away from his bench. I had stubbed my left foot on a jutting tree root and took a nosedive. I was more embarrassed than hurt, more mad at myself for not paying attention. Thankfully, at that time of the morning, there were few witnesses.

I was still unraveling my 6-4 frame from its impromptu pretzel shape when I felt a hand on my elbow trying to help me up. I smelled him before I saw his purple haze.

“You OK?” asked Nate. I was surprised to hear him broach a subject other than shade. He was hung over but lucid. We went on and talked for half an hour.

He had been a semi-successful businessman. Never had children. One night, the love of his life, Abby, died of a heart attack as she slept beside him. Nate the Late was the name he made up for himself that night, his life dizzily spiraling into alcohol and restless days and nights.

I understood a small fabric of Nate’s turmoil. I had lost a wife, too, and had sunk into my own emotional abyss. I climbed back out just far enough so if I squinted occasionally I could see a glimmer of sunlight. But it fades quickly. I certainly didn’t have it made in the shade.

It provided a strange comfort to see him there every day after that encounter. From then on I would just utter, “Hey Nate,” when I passed him.

 

 

Three days after his murder, as they rolled Nate’s coffin through the back of the church I couldn’t stifle my anger. I was cursing to myself. It’s selfish on my part because Nate didn’t want to live, but there was a sick savage roaming the park. How could he live with himself?

Very easily, I found out months later, when the authorities found the idiot by accident. Actually, it was a couple of idiots. One of them, Billy, was still carrying Nate’s crusty wallet with an old license plastered in one of the compartments. I was shocked Nate had a wallet. Billy was even more shocked.

The cops got Billy and his older brother Sammy on a drug raid. They weren’t druggies. They were dealers. Billy was strictly a follower, a lame clown, who performed chores for his sibling. Sammy was a bastard without a conscience.

I went to the trial, which was a slam-dunk. Witnesses to Sammy’s bragging about the incident came forward. They were part of Sammy’s crew, but found fragments of their souls once Sammy was safely in jail. I searched Sammy’s rugged face for clues. There were several deep scars, but they were simply part of the desolation. His eyes were darker than a cloudy night in the country.

He had no soul. I don’t know if he had a rotten childhood. I don’t care.

Billy’s face was full of anger and venom. Sammy’s stare was without focus or substance. He seemed mildly annoyed at best.

Witnesses wove a despicable tale of Billy and Sammy jostling Nate for fun more than for money. Nate grew tired of being a human soccer ball. He fired back both verbally and physically with veteran invective and mustered up one forceful kick, which caught Sammy squarely on the shin. That was the ignition. Guess Nate was supposed to just lie there and let them pummel the last breath out of him with their boots.

After beating Nate into a stupor, the pair went home, got some gasoline, returned and set Nate on fire, like it was another item on their to-do list. Wake, sell some drugs, kick a decrepit man to death, burn the carcass, go home, watch some TV, eat a snack, and go to bed. The day after they did it, Sammy and Billy were back on the corner, dealing and bragging.

They both got life, which logically was senseless. Billy wailed. Sammy had no reaction. What was the point? Even the most ardent supporter of the prison system would have to concede there was no rehabilitation in the future of these two.

So, they live, joining others like them, and will probably just be moving their drug business to a new location. Maybe they’ll get cable TV in their cells. Meanwhile, Nate’s voice is silent.

I was back on my morning course through the park a couple days after the trial, and I thought for a moment I heard Nate yelling to me as I approached his bench. I shuddered at the imagined noise. I smiled when I passed his bench.

An hour later, the store still had the closed sign in the window. I went back to the bench and sat. It’s funny. The view from that vantage point was spectacular. High-rises could be seen in the background, but this was clearly off-limits to them. It was peaceful in this little sanctuary.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly before pulling a knife from my back pocket. I carved four, huge letters in a spot where I couldn’t miss them, looking over my shoulder after each one.

I stepped back to admire my handiwork.

I ran off with a bounce in my step, glanced back once, and then headed toward the store.

“NATE” was back on his bench in the shade.

It will have to do.