Misdirection

I was walking down South King one weekend hungry as hell so I went into the Maunakea Market to look for something to eat, something light, to tide me over until a dinner party in the early evening. So I walked past the pig heads, past the basins of frozen, glassy-eyed trout and cat fish, and picked out an apple. Then I stepped outside and waited for the bus. Outside, an old man in a wheelchair approached me. "You get dollah?" he asked. I did, I reached into my pockets and extracted two quarters, and four dimes and two nickels. He furrowed his brow – they looked like the dry ripples along a sand dune in the desert. He had the flaking skin of a molting reptile and the teeth of large herbivorous mammal. "No mo dollah bills?" he asked, squinting. "Nope," I said. "Sorry." He stared at me incredulously and asked "What. You ten years old?" and then he wheeled away. Just then, a tall man in crutches popped up as if his crutches were a mile high and he had just taken a single bound all the way from Dillingham Blvd. Whoosh. He came out of nowhere, and fast. He fumbled about and pulled out his wallet. The man in the wheelchair rolled up to him, his fine hair - thin and wispy –streamed in the wind like a plume of white smoke leaking from a crack in his cranium. "You get dollah?" he asked. The man in the crutches took out a crisp dollar bill and dropped it onto the ground. "Whoops," he said. He struggled to bend over. He leaned a crutch against a mailbox and reached with his fingers. "This is my longer arm," he joked. His head was a foot away from the man in the wheelchair, and I could see that he was surreptitiously surveying the man's legs. "Hey. You know, you got some pretty thick calves. They look pretty young and healthy," the tall man said. The man in the wheelchair slunk back. "I no can believe you said dat to me," he snarled and folded his arms. "Seriously, old man, you got healthy sprinter's legs," said the tall man. "You wouldn't be faking your condition, would you?" The man in the wheelchair rolled his eyes, "You know what?" he snapped, and in a split second kicked the man in the crutches. Hard. It sent the tall, spindly guy sailing through the air, his crutches spinning like batons. The man in the wheelchair got up, picked up his ride and threw it along the sidewalk. The tall man – on his own two legs now – nimbly got onto his own feet it and they both went sprinting off toward River street. I stood there dumbfounded. I was pretty sure I had missed my bus. I was about to take the first bite of my apple but then I realized it was gone. My palm was open and facing upward, but the apple had vanished. I took that open palm and slapped it hard against my own sweaty forehead. I had just fallen for the oldest trick in the book.