Street People

I heard the fox tonight. Coming home around one in the morning, the night had settled into the coldest temperature it was comfortable with—would not rise from that or dip any further. It was around twenty degrees outside, and the air was clear and dry. No clouds hid the bright moon, making the night seem colder. The sharpness of everything pricks at you, makes the edges of the world seem more brittle, less kind than in milder and cloudier times.

Some might call the fox’s cry a “bark.” I think it sounds more like a scream. Even if you’ve heard it many times, like I have, it is still disconcerting, unsettling. It’s simply that I don’t know what it means—that piercing cry out there in the brittle cold. If I were another fox I might pay it no heed, or perhaps answer in a way that would make the other fox just shut up. But I’m a human, and if I heard another human making that sound, I would know that person was not having a happy time. So the fox spoke to me, and I heard what I wanted to hear, as people often do. I went to the leftover beef stew, lingering in the fridge since before I left for Europe. I took the whole crock pot and a spatula out into that area of the yard just under the maple tree, scooped it out onto the frozen ground. The fox would know to look for it there, would leave no trace of it the next morning. It was maybe even looking at me silently from the not-too-distant stand of trees, from that place its scream had been coming from.

I thought about the encampments of street people in Paris, bedding down for the night in the out of doors. I would walk the streets late, see a small village huddled in the granite entrance of an office building, see the stuff of their bedding—cardboard, sleeping bags, blankets and so on. Up ahead on a bench would be a buffet set out by a neighborhood business—a restaurant that had closed for the night. Tray upon tray of untouched food waited there in aluminum foil dishes, as yet undiscovered by the city dwellers who called the streets their home. Chicken and rice and cous-cous, potatoes and vegetables that had just been offered in an expensive eatery, waited in the silent and deserted street, with the overhead lamps casting their light on this incongruous scene. I’d passed many of the street people so far, but now there were none—the food and the people inhabited two different worlds at the moment. I walked on, my travels taking me to the parts of the city removed from the grands magasins, where people who were not actually from the city rarely strayed. At this hour the big boulevard was dark and traveled by little traffic—unlike the constant to-and-fro of that area near the Place de la Madeleine or near the big opera house, where a good deal of activity could be expected no matter what the hour.

Back in my familiar neighborhood, with all the cafés suffused by a golden light, couples toasted each other, drank to the day, to each other’s health. They spoke of their work, of the kids, or of the kids they planned to have—one day if they ever moved away from Paris and someplace a little more reasonable. They pondered what little introduction to their meal they might indulge in, would it be some foie gras or coquilles Saint-Jacques—or perhaps something else entirely? This was their main preoccupation as they sat in front of the expanse of glass, that partition that separated them from the glistening city outside—the streets and sidewalks and fashion shops reflected in the mirror of the café’s window.

Just outside, within view of the comfortable and warm couples, a man was dragging an enormous piece of cardboard to his spot to bed down for the night. The cold November streets would be a little more welcoming with a mattress made from the discarded refrigerator box. Whatever he could pull up over his body would be a temporary shield against the drizzle or snow that might fall that night.

Back home, in the woods outside the comfortable homes of suburbia, a fox screamed.