Animal Appetite

anything that might have to do with Hannah Duston, but didn’t find her in any of the indexes I checked. Out of curiosity, I looked for Mass. Mayhem. It wasn’t there.
    After a while, I went back outside, wandered around the Square, fought the wind along Mount Auburn Street, and eventually wound my way back to my car to feed the meter. Wishing that I’d called Leah to arrange to meet her for lunch, I again crossed Mass. Ave. and went alone to Bartley’s Burger Cottage, where I battled the miasma of steamy heat and sizzling hamburgers, and ordered and ate a tuna sandwich made the way tuna’s supposed to be: dripping with mayonnaise. Then I left Bartley’s and again checked the corner of Mass. Ave. and Bow Street.
    Right on the corner, just a few steps from the ice cream store and a few doors down from Bartley’s, was a big trash barrel. Bending into it was a man in a purple parka. He didn’t wear the small aqua daypack I’d somehow imagined, but an internal-frame backpack, its numerous compartments neatly fastened. Lashed to the bottom of the pack was a compact bedroll. With bare hands, the man was frantically and ferociously stuffing his mouth with soggy ice cream cones, discarded french fries, and hunks of half-eaten burgers. So rapidly did he shovel the remains of other people’s lunches from the trash barrel to his mouth that he couldn’t possibly have examined the debris before ingesting it.
    1 stepped toward Gareth. He continued to shove fistfuls of refuse into his mouth. From close up, I could see that he was cleaner than I’d expected. Except for some smears of grease and ketchup around the cuffs and on the front, the purple parka looked new and expensive. He wore neither earmuffs nor a hat. His wavy dark hair wasn’t matted or dull, and he’d had a recent haircut. If he’d been strolling down the street instead of raiding the trash with the appetite of a starving dog, he’d have been easy to mistake for a hiker at the end of a long trek. All that gave him away was the twisted quality of that ravenous greed. When parents refer to teenage sons as “human garbage disposals,” they are only kidding. Twice a day in my own kitchen, I witness raw animal appetite. I joke about it. Turned loose on that trash barrel, Rowdy and Kimi would have fought over the greasy rubbish. If Gareth had paused, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lift his leg on the barrel, or raise a foot and try to scratch an ear. I also had no doubt that if I reached in to snatch a french fry, he’d bite my wrist.
    Knowing no other way to approach Gareth, I returned to Bartley’s and ordered a cheeseburger with fries to go. As I waited for the food, the sight of ordinary people chewing food turned my stomach. Never again, I resolved, would I laugh at Rita for eating pizza with a knife and fork. From now on, I’d do the same myself.
    Back outside, I had to remind myself that in buying sustenance for a homeless man, I was doing nothing wrong. I tried to think that I was offering him the dignity of eating his very own food instead of jettisoned burgers and fries that bore other people’s tooth marks and saliva. What rattled me was the familiarity of my own behavior. I train my dogs with food. I had a horrible sense of treating Gareth as other than human.
    By now, he was standing upright. I got my first look at his face. For no good reason, I had envisioned him in the image of his father’s graduation picture. In fact, he looked vaguely like Claudia. His expression, though, was weirdly passive and puzzled. Gareth had the vacant look of a man who’s spent a long time waiting for an event that has never materialized—-not the coming of Godot, either, but the arrival of a nameless something. He now stood a few feet from the trash barrel with his arms hanging limply at his sides and his feet spread. He wore new high-top running shoes. His face was clean: He must have wiped his mouth on something—his sleeve, perhaps, or someone else’s discarded paper napkin. His cheeks showed only a few days’ growth of beard. There was, I thought, a sort of lost sweetness about Gareth.
    I thrust the paper bag of cheeseburger and fries toward him. “Gareth,” I said, “my name is Holly. I brought you some lunch.”
    For obvious reasons, I expected him to tear open the bag and shove the food down his throat. But as he stared at the bag in his hands, his expression was mystified. His fingers trembled.
    “It’s a cheeseburger,” I