the most disgusting dollar

he threw a dollar down as if placing a contemptuous bet, his face a rigged game, gaunt & pale like a gray cloud cast out & climbing the west hills' fence. “do i know you” he asked, poking me from across the aisle where he sat slumping as if he didn't have a spine, but his eyes had a strange blue intensity that reminded me of when i was a kid, playing with electricity, teasing arcs of blue from their caves. “i don’t know where this dollar came from” he said to his female friend slumped beside him in a gray sweatshirt, pale & gaunt too, his dark cloud accomplice, together hugging the concrete like a fog the sun didn't bother to burn through. they may not have been as old as they looked. a wooden cane rested against his inner thigh as he loudly slurred numbers into his meekly cradled phone. hands like an old web trembling from catching too large a prize, each number popping balloons inside the bus as the rest of us grimly stare from within our cones of silence, cubed in ice. his friend said she found the dollar on the corner. wasn’t theirs he said & flung it in the aisle like nose blown tissue, crumpled & thrown away. “let’s see who grabs it” he says & the ice around us thickened. next to me a young guy, dressed in denim, strokes his electronic device. oblivious, his skinny legs splayed too wide beside me, his too warm thigh pressing against mine. halfway to work and i’m already trapped, freaking inside the can, plotting an escape, but then a wheelchair gets on at the next stop & there isn't another seat, so i flip through a magazine from my backpack, searching for something, anything that could transport me, but the river is the only poem today that can take me and on the bus it's just too brief. i strain my head to peek through a thicket of rain jacketed torsos as we pass above its indifferent reclining body. downtown, once we are finished with our bridge, they get off at the first stop. but then he almost forgets his fred meyer recycled bag stuffed beneath the seat and so returns, stumble slithering down the aisle, gripping his cane in one hand while crooking his phone against his ear. “hey, his friend asks, what about that dollar?” and he says leave it, it was never theirs, as an unheard sigh is released and the bus expands again like some sort of psychic accordion and the ice begins to thaw. next stop, a couple of blocks before i get off, a gaunt grizzled man tented in a huge winter green parka, pencil head buried in a green bay packers knit hat, plops down across from me, and then suddenly springs out of his box & pounces on the dollar near my feet, holding it up to my face and asking, “is this your dollar?” “no, i say with a deep sigh, that's not my dollar.”