#We were young souls full#

For a month, she’d warned me every morning to be careful, told me to stay away from crowds, to take my lunch to work so that I didn’t have to eat in a restaurant. They brought it back from Europe with them, and now everybody was afraid of getting it. I had read the newspaper stories, pointing out the irony that this was 1918, the war was almost over, but soldiers who had survived it were dying of the influenza. What if I brought the influenza home to Helen and Dorothy? I held out my hand, but then I pulled it back. That was why nobody would come to his aid. “Won’t somebody help him?” I asked and started to kneel. Blood seeped out of his eyes and mouth, and he twisted in agony. His brown cap lay nearby, as if it had come off when he fell. His brown jacket was buttoned up to his neck, and his boots were polished so that they gleamed in the faint light. The streetlamp came on then, and I could see the man on the ground a little more clearly. I glanced at him, taking in the expensive gray suit, the kind we advertised at Neusteter’s, the specialty store where I worked, as having “snap and style.” I couldn’t help but notice such things. Then he removed it quickly, as if he shouldn’t have touched me, and stepped back. I stepped forward for a better look, but a man beside me held out his arm to keep me away. “What happened?” I asked, pushing between two bystanders. We’d said that sooner or later, he’d do just that. Perhaps the kid down the block who raced his auto at twenty miles an hour had finally hit someone. Or maybe the man had been hurt in an automobile accident.

#We were young souls full#

Bootleggers were in full swing in North Denver and in the old mining towns in the mountains. Although there was no national law on Prohibition, Colorado had passed one in 1916, two years ago. Then I saw him-the man lying on the ground-and I stopped. The three of us could eat in front of the fire.

After the overheated car, with all of us pressed together, I was suddenly chill. The streetcar clanged in the distance, its metal wheels screeching on the metal tracks, so I did not hear the murmuring. That was why I didn’t pay attention to the handful of men gathered on the lawn at mid-block. It had been a long day, and I’d wanted to tell my sister about the parade. Dried leaves fell from the trees, rattling across the yards and into the gutter as the wind swept them up. It was cold, and there was the clammy feel of moisture in the air, as if rain were hovering over us. The blue-black dusk had come on by the time I got off the streetcar and started down the sidewalk.