The Wheelbarrow Man

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H e wasn't a disappointment. He was taller than the residents of Riverton had expected and thinner, which enhanced the loose-jointed effect of his movement. His body shambled along under a holey pair of jeans, a checkered shirt, and a tattered denim jacket. His face was razor-boned under a salt and pepper beard, and though his eyes were deeply set and difficult to read, in some of the towns through which he'd passed, people were still speaking of a movement they'd seen below the gray irises, like leaves tumbling under the muddy river. He stepped and stepped and stepped into the town of Riverton behind a blue wheelbarrow. pack of children and mutts -nameless and, some said, never before seen -had met the Wheelbarrow Man on the outskirts of town, and they followed him into its limits like pilot fish. With this escort, the man pushed his wheelbarrow down the main street sidewalk. His arrival had been announced in the Herald Enquirer with the headline A Man with a Purpose. And, now, here he was. Cars slowed and their drivers screwed their heads around to see what sort of lunatic attempts to push a blue wheelbarrow around the world. He set it down in front of Parker's Callus Grill. few of the curs, who'd followed him in from the bushy outskirts of town, crept in, the hair at their necks electrified (as the man's seemed to be all the time), and sniffed him as if they weren't sure they could trust him or were wondering at the scent of other places on him: smoke, catfish flesh, rolling muddy water, honeysuckle, wind-cured sweat, aeolian leaves, another scent, harder to identify, of things to come -the superabounding scent of motion. The children stood at their margin, whispering and watching. The man nodded to them, he hoped encouragingly. Later, he would write in