The moon was nearly full and midway through its climb across the southeastern sky, glowing like a midnight sun among the filmy wisps of cloud.

Of the five of us, three off-loaded before the bus shelter, all bound for Middle River, a mile and a quarter to the east.

I get off the front, before the shelter, which houses four zombies.

The middle-aged blonde hooker eyes me with bad intent, Aqualung as a transvestite.

Her paramour of the moment is a high-caste Hispanic man, tall, furtive and greasy with a similar height and look to the two Honduran families I know that run area eateries, but entirely absent their good character.

A bald, forty-year-old white man in cargo shorts and wife beater holds a crack pipe for a 13-year-old mulatto girl in a bikini top and designer shorts. She is sucking ravenously on the aluminum foil pipe, which glows blue in the shallow rectangular cave, as his hairy hand caresses the back of her tiny waist.

The tiny, wiry Walmart clerk, a dark black girl of perhaps 17, looked at the bus shelter and snorts, “Fuckin’ fiend central, Yo,” into her very large smart phone, which glows like a rectangular star fallen into her hand as she slinks off across the street chanting a vicious rap about, doing violence to “fiends, niggas and hos,” walking belligerently in the westbound lane.

Her coworker, also in Walmart uniform, offloads from the rear door, looked into the shelter as if she peered into Hell itself, looked at me with wide, fearful eyes, as I shouldered my pack and hefted my pimp cane, and then marched off with her head swiveling like a commando out the way, me in her wake. She had her concerns about me, so I walk a quarter mile behind her, unfortunately way out of range to help if she needed it, but respectful of her fear of white deviltry. She is tall, perhaps six feet, well made and pretty in her chocolate coating and utterly terrified of the world she finds herself in. I have not seen her before. Perhaps this was her first night at work.

As I strolled in her willowy wake, two stocky, dwarfish figures stood idly before Gussies Liquors, bearded, smart phones in hand, perhaps 25 years, a marked degeneration of the Caucasian of Nordic type, at about 5’ 4” and 270 pounds each.

I glared at them and they nervously made way.

We said good evening reluctantly and the more terrified one, obviously drunk, sweating heavily in the warm breeze, asked, “Excuse me, sir does a bus stop here?”

While his friend frantically sought conformation from an Uber driver, I told him, “This is not a bus route. Back at Eastern and Stemmers, at that light I came from, is a major transfer point. You can catch four lines there, to Essex, Dundalk, Towson or downtown.

A car pulled over to let them in and as they scrambled like space marines getting the hell off of an alien-infested planet, he squeaked, “Thank you so much, sir. We got a ride,” then huskily whispered to his friend and the driver, “Where the fuck are we? Is this a joke?”

A block on a blue car with tinted windows shadowed me, then pulled over across the street. The car stayed put for a minute, then made a U-turn and headed west.

I continued to trail my point girl by a quarter mile, past a cop making a traffic stop on the main road at the 7-11, and through the park, curiously absent its crazy woman. At Middle River Bridge she must have known she was within running distance of her destination, as she began darting her head this way and that and running almost gracefully, a little overbalanced by her developing breasts, obviously a person who was a good runner as a girl, but was facing balance problems in her womanly form.

I got to work in time to find two hoodrats playing crash up derby on the sidewalk with two of the store’s handicapped carts, contentedly at my place of toil once again.