All stories › Fantasy › Feet on the White › Episode 1
The Stop Sign
Episode 1 of 3 of Feet on the White by Calvin Truax · free to read
The stop sign had a new handle, and I was still learning the grip. I had wrapped it in friction tape on Sunday, tight, the way I used to wrap a lathe lever at the shop.
Monday morning the school beacon was blinking yellow over the street, same as always, and I stepped into the crosswalk and held the sign high.
The kids came off the curb behind me in their usual clump.
“Feet on the white, eyes on me,” I said.
A silver sedan came over the rise too fast. The driver was looking down at the phone in her lap, and she did not slow down.
I didn’t think. I shoved the sign higher, as if reaching would help.
Then everything quit.
The sedan stopped a car length from the white line. It didn’t brake. It just stopped, with exhaust hanging behind it like gray cotton. A pigeon hung over the bank sign with its wings half open. Steam stood still above the coffee cart on the corner.
The only things moving were me and the kids in the crosswalk. Most of them didn’t notice.
One of them noticed.
“Mr. Dorman,” Dewey Culpepper said. “Why is the bird stuck?”
Dewey was in fifth grade and wore his backpack on both shoulders.
“Not now, Dewey. Keep walking,” I said. “Everybody to the far curb. Go.”
“But the car isn’t moving.”
“Then it’s a good time to cross.”
They went. I checked my watch out of shop habit. The sweep hand was still moving. The last sneaker hit the far curb at twenty-six seconds. I stepped up onto the curb myself at twenty-nine.
At thirty, the sedan finished its trip. It went through the empty crosswalk and on down the hill. The pigeon landed on the bank sign like nothing had happened.
Bonnie Ackerly had run the coffee cart on that corner since before I took the job. She handed me my cup at the end of the morning shift, black with two sugars, same as always.
“That car,” she said. “I thought you were done for.”
“Did it look strange to you?”
“It looked fast. You got them all across, though. I don’t know how.”
“Nobody blows past that beacon,” I said. “Not with me standing under it.”
“She did. Drink your coffee, Lyman.”
I drank my coffee.
That afternoon a woman in a city windbreaker was kneeling in the gutter, screwing a black rubber tube to the asphalt.
“Coral Brandvold,” she said, and stood and shook my hand. “Traffic engineering. You’re the guard?”
“Lyman Dorman. Mornings and afternoons, school days only.”
“This corner is on my list. I’m running a three week study. Counts, speeds, near-misses. I put a camera on that pole last week.” She pointed. “If the numbers are bad, I recommend a full signal to the council.”
“How many does a corner usually get?”
“In three weeks? None, if it’s a good corner. One, if it’s unlucky.” She looked me over, the vest and the gray hair. “No offense, but you’re out here in traffic at what, seventy?”
“Sixty-eight. Retired machinist.”
“And you want to spend your mornings dodging cars.”
“I want the kids to get across. What happens to me?”
She had the decency to look at the tube instead of at me. “A signal doesn’t need a guard, Mr. Dorman.”
“There was a car this morning,” Bonnie said from the cart.
“I know. I pulled the footage at lunch. That’s one.” Coral frowned at her tablet. “The odd thing is my camera skipped. Thirty seconds of nothing, then the car is already through.”
Wednesday morning I woke up and could not find Tuesday.
It was not hazy. It was gone. I remembered Monday, then going to bed, then my alarm on Wednesday.
My pocket notebook had Tuesday’s counts in my own block capitals, and a note that said BONNIE OUT OF CINNAMON. I had no memory of writing any of it.
At the cart, Bonnie poured my coffee and squinted at me.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “Quieter than yesterday.”
“What did I do yesterday?”
“You told me the same joke about the drill press twice. I figured you were tired.”
Dewey was waiting at the curb with his hands in his pockets. When the others were across, he stayed beside me.
“It was thirty seconds,” he said. “I watched the bank clock. Only the people in the crosswalk could move. And only after you shoved the sign at that car.”
“I hold that sign up every crossing. It never did that before.”
“So it needs a car coming at us. Do you feel okay?”
“I lost yesterday,” I said. “The whole day. Like it got taken for payment.”
He thought about that hard. “So it’s one stop, one day. The day after.”
“That’s my guess.”
“That’s a bad trade, Mr. Dorman.”
“It’s a good trade for you,” I said.
“Are you going to do it again?”
“If somebody blows past that beacon with you in the street, I am.”
That afternoon the kids came out loud. I had them halfway across, and Coral was back at the curb with her tablet.
Then a gray pickup came over the rise.