The heat rises up from off the concrete and asphalt like flamenco dancers moaning, moving and smoking. As his shaved head comes up over the black line of the horizon, the city behind him, it bobs with the gait of a disguise. He is every other person walking down every heated street, but it is his mission that is hidden from view. At the top of Baxter, Travis marches right through the rigid wall of translucent waves, undetermined. His guitar is draped over his shoulder with its neck pointing at the ground like an arrow, he, a troubadour. One step and he is anxious and frustrated—the next, he is smiling and laughing at private jokes and things his friends say, little melodies and chords in the noise of the world—the next moment, the theme from the Incredible Hulk plays, as David Banner, alone and lost, walks down a road. Travis is smiling in the gruesome heat, his black boots wrapped hot around his feet, the inside of his jeans damp from sweat. Wandering, wandering.

Apathy keeps him from walking toward any particular destination. He doesn’t want to stop wandering this prairie dream on the edge of reality, but he spies a playground across the street, and something inside him suddenly feels the need to sit for a while. Looking up and down Baxter, Travis checks to see if any cars are coming. There aren’t and it’s an odd sight. The peculiarly empty vista enforces the heat and he stares out across the eastern stretch of Athens. He pretends that he is the only person left in the world. Some apocalypse has come and taken everyone but Travis Fleeting. He steps out into the road and walks to the middle to stop, bringing his guitar down off his shoulder and letting it rest on his steel covered toe. Looking at the formica gleaming in the asphalt, he takes in a deep breath and sighs.

His left shoe has a massive hole in it between the sole and toe and he studies it carefully in the middle of the road. It is worn away by four years of walking, climbing, moving. Travis cocks his head and wonders. Four years he had had these boots. Had four years gone by? It was too easy to be twenty and forget that four years was a fifth of your entire life. And you sleep a third of that. Had he slept for 5 years? He was probably on the low side of that average. The guitar resting on his right foot testifies to living, growing, getting better, and Travis squats down to finger the hole in his boot. How big had that hole been when he’d met Nick or Ian or John? How much had it grown when he knew Meryl, lost Meryl? It is a shame, he thinks, that holes in shoes don’t have rings like trees to count. He looks at each stitch and thinks this is the first time I made love or this is the first time I smoked a cigarette. He tugs the leather up, revealing his sock. Here’s the time I got so drunk, Ian carried me up Broad Street to his car. Or this one—this is the time Nick asked me if he could go out with Daphne. This is the one where John and I drove to Atlanta to buy a six pack just so we could watch the sun come up together. The unraveling stitches come apart as his life goes by in front of him. Would it all pass when the sole completely fell off? Would he die, then? He looks back down the road again, thinking that he will die some day, squinting, with the sun angry on his back, in the middle of the road.

July has a way of making people vanish, wanting to be inside and cool during the day, close to their metal air conditioners. July had sent all the students home for the summer in Athens—which cut the population to a fourth. Travis just keeps looking in awe at a familiar world empty of familiar people. For ten minutes, ten full minutes in a world devoid of anyone, Travis stands on the double yellow lines in the midst of four lanes on Baxter Street and feels a strange lifetime devoid of seasons or change—as though his whole life had been a hot instantaneous moment. A wind teases him, cooling the sweat on the back of his neck. The lonlieness is a song.

I told you not to come back here, Fleeting, says the gritty voice of Gene Hackman.

Travis looks down the empty road and speaks softly, self-consciously, as though there might be someone listening that he cannot see. “I just want my horse back is all. I don’t mean any harm.”

You’ve done all the harm this town can handle, mister.

Then, there comes a starlight twist of light on glass from far down Baxter Street, in the direction of his apartment. A car crests the hill near Rockspring, and the mere glint is enough to shatter the solitude. He can hear the sound of the engine, hotter than the air or concrete, racing toward him, exploding, blasting pistons. Looking to the playground, Travis beings moving again. He relishes that moment of complete solitude, dreads the arrival of a car, so sets to the swings. He will be safe from the noise and motion then. The song of solitude can continue.

He hefts his guitar to the sound of a harmonica in his head and walks across the other half of the road more aware of the hole in his boot now. When he steps to the sidewalk and on to the grass he passes out of his existence. The view of the park is nostalgic and so a little sad. But the sadness quickly passes as the monkey bars and the teeter-totters ring a rusty but familiar hello. He makes his way to the swings, those seats of arcs of freedom, rushing and laughter, and sits down in one, setting his guitar in his lap. Pushing off the ground a bit with his feet, he sets himself in motion and begins to fiddle with the guitar’s strings, not making a melody, just some noise—light in pitch and light in his heart—something to counteract the oncoming rush of noise from the car. The doppler effect of the engine rattles the metal bars, even rattles the guitar, but Travis leans his head down pensively to eliminate everything but the gorgeous notes. The car passes and Travis does not notice. Then, after a few more moments and a few delicate arcs of flight, a melody travels down through Travis’s sinewy conduit to play itself out in the middle of the park, trickling out his fingers, traveling out over the grass and out through the humidity. He listens to the way the strings of the guitar are affected by the evaporated water in the air. He listens to his mood and memories. For a moment, as the song plays out and swirls in the hollow wooden body of the guitar, the music defines Travis. For a moment, he is found in the calm melody and vague memories of horses.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Athens, shoes, summer, Travis Fleeting