Consider Lanky, which is all anybody ever called him, as he sits in the swing up on the veranda. He would likely tell you twenty-five or fifty disconnected thoughts that you ought to take up immediately, even if they are contradictory. That is for Heaven to sort out he would say. And who would know Heaven better than this destroying angel himself burned dark by the beneficent Sun? You can't tell whether his eyes have dimmed or whether he has simply stopped paying attention to nonsense. It's so life's ambition is to embody the authority that the good god rooted down in each of us like a green shoot when we were created. When the green herb comes up in the spring that's when it's time to think of burning your old mattresses from winter. And if you don't let an old dog bark at you then you're depriving a living being of all the pleasure he has left in the world. Lanky wouldn't care whether you told him that you didn't understand what he was all about, since that was your destiny to learn. Even worse is when somebody would call him wise because he would take that as the kind of insult that they would use while trying to wheedle something out of him. Maybe a skinny pre-teenage girl could get away with it but hardly anyone else would he countenance. You know that there were people who would provide for his needs, bringing him food and clothes, a warm coat when the weather turned. It was like he was the local holy man. Sometimes the local cops suspected him of being up to no good helping the crime in the neighborhood. Because everybody seem to know Lanky and Lanky seemed to know just about everybody they assumed that he was the nerve center, the kingpin, the capo in charge of all the misdeeds keeping it all to himself. It was true that that little shack he lived in didn't seem to add up to any kind of thing that a crime boss would aspire to but they didn't need to have everything fit in place to make a theory.

As one might imagine, he didn't have too much time for cops. It was worse for the ones who came from the neighborhood, the boys and girls he knew when they were little sprats, who according to him wanted to find a way to feel important beyond what they had been granted. It wasn't as though he were actively hostile to them but then a person was never sure when Lanky was in a friend role either. So when he was gruff and severe to them it really stung.

Talking to him out on the veranda you'd see your face mirrored in his shades. You felt like you were being summed up, evaluated by one like the Egyptian custodians of the afterlife. They could have cast him as one of those gods, easy. But oh how the ladies loved him, the old widows especially. They could appreciate a fellow who didn't pretend to be young or claim to be good looking now. Lanky didn't smoke and as far as anybody could remember didn't seem to drink, except for steaming hot cups of black coffee. Was that why the tips of his fingers, his hands, were always in slight motion? People came to tell their secrets to him and it's clear with those conspiratorial whispers that would die out when someone else came within earshot. You always got the sense that it was going to be under lock and key whatever you told him and if he remembered what you said or didn't you were never quite sure. Lanky would just mutter his little enigmas after that. If they called back to your situation maybe only the two of you would ever know.

Lank"y, a.

Somewhat lank.

Thackeray.

The lanky Dinka, nearly seven feet in height. The Century.

 

© Webster 1913.

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