The man at the bus stop was drunk, and apparently not waiting for the bus.

He was the spitting image of her boss back in the Midwest: wiry, silver-haired with a goatee, visibly a child of the sixties. Anyway, her mom had just left to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for tomorrow's dinner. While she waited, she snuck a cigarette. The man asked if he could bum one, assuring her that, under the normal run of things, he carries his own cigarettes. I have my own light, he further assured. All things considered, he still had his pride, and didn't want this girl he just met to think he was some bum off the street.

He was a math professor at a small college nearby. The facts came out in an unmediated stream. His father, for example, designed the fuel cell for the Apollo. Of the two large, defining events in his childhood, one was his father promising to put a man on the moon on his son's birthday. It was 1969. Eventually July 17th came around and still no one had set foot on the moon. No phone call, no nothing. Feeling bad, his father later apologized to his son for breaking his promise: Sorry, son. I was two days late. The other event: box seats at Game 7 of the 1967 World Series, Cardinals against the Red Sox at Fenway. I could name every player, every stat.

He asked her if knew what a grunt was. She thought she did, thought it was the guy who has to do what no one else will. No. It's a soldier on the front line. Do you know why they were called grunts? No. Because that's the sound they make when they die. He mimicked the sound, the guttural, purgative sound. He even made a sort of stagey getting-shot gesture. I had to walk over grunts.