Written for the Freewrite 5 minute challenge "unusual dressing," 17 September #freewrite #dailyprompt
If eyes are windows to the soul, I wonder why he keeps the blinds down.
That was my first thought upon seeing the ridiculously ostentatious sunglasses the man wore. "Is he trying to look like a secret agent?" Someone beside me asked.
"Not very 'secret' with that cowboy hat, is he?" Answered another.
"He is closer to Siberia than to home. If he's a CIA apparatchik, he's not a very good one." Nobody bothered whispering. There wasn't a chance he'd understand us. After all, we were all speaking Russian and if ever there had been an obvious Amyerikanskii, it was this man.
"A cowboy, in Kharkiv? What's he doing here?" commented an old woman with an armload of vegetables.
None of us were prepared when he opened his mouth to speak, and answered in fairly decent Russian (except for the accent), "Nyet. My father was a cowboy. I just have the hat."
The old woman with the vegetables said nothing, and hurried to get home and avoid an awkward conversation. As the man removed his sunglasses, I began to understand why he wore them. I don't think I'd ever seen a more haunted, weary, worn-out pair of eyes.
Everything about him seemed to be summed up in one word: struggle. The eyes were those of one who struggles with a lifetime of horrors; his physique, that of a man who was once toned and chiseled in his youth, now struggling valiantly (but not successfully) against the inevitable onset of what the younger folks called a "dad bod" as the dreaded age of forty approached. His clothes, which I now saw were entirely denim from top to bottom, with cowboy boots whose soles seemed to consist almost entirely of gorilla glue by this point, and a belt buckle that looked like it belonged in one of the John Wayne movies my father had always sneaked into the house during the days when Soviet censors wouldn't allow them, read like a story of one man's struggle against the march of time. Had he not carried an iPhone on his belt, one could have been forgiven for thinking he'd stepped right out of 19th century America and into our market, here on the border, 15 km from Russia.
Again the question came to my mind, what's he doing here?
Seemingly oblivious to our eyes upon him, the man picked up a basket, chose a few tomatoes, and dropped them in. Next were a few cloves of garlic, an onion, some chilis, and a bag of red beans. Without a word, he brought the basket to the counter and set them in front of me.
"Sixty-eight Hryvnias, fifty kopeks," I said, hoping my English was passable. Apparently it was, because the kovboi with the ridiculous sunglasses passed two notes, a fifty and a twenty across the counter. Without waiting for change, he reached his hand toward the front of his hat and dipped it a bit, reminding me again of the sheriff in one of my father's contraband movies, and walked back the way he came.
"Amyerikanskii, da?" asked the man in line behind him, an older gentleman in a drab gray coat. "What was he doing here?"
As I began ringing up the old man's groceries I answered, "apparently, buying vegetables."