At Dusk
They don’t pave the road that runs in front of my house. A big truck comes by once a month, and it drops fresh gravel on the road. The gravel gives the road some grip, but not as much grip as a paved road.
So I could blame it on the traction.
The sunsets here are powerful. They’re so bright sometimes that they can blind your eyes with their brilliance – especially if you’re driving along at dusk. They say that most accidents occur at dusk.
So I could blame it on the dusk.
The hills on my road are very steep. The houses on my road are spread out, and the road is about four miles long. I live exactly half way along the road, which is about a half mile past the Johnson’s and a quarter mile before the Fletcher’s. The Johnson’s live about two miles in, and their house is at the bottom of a very steep hill. You have to slow down to nearly a crawl as you approach the bottom of their hill, because it is so steep that you can’t really see the bottom until you just about reach it.
So I could blame it on the hill.
I could blame it on a lot of things, but the bottom line is that I didn’t even see it happen, I only felt it. And as soon as I felt it, I stopped the car like any person would, and got out to see what I’d hit. I figured it was at best a rabbit, and at worst, someone’s dog. A sensation of guilt began to gnaw at me. The guilt came from my brain, but I felt it in my chest.
I’d stopped the car, but a thick cloud of dust from the gravel surrounded me as I pushed the door open to get out. The dust hit my nostrils and I coughed the way I used to cough when my father would smoke his cigarettes in the front room after dinner.
My heart constricted in my chest when I first saw the tricycle.
I stepped back. I looked behind me; I saw nothing. I looked ahead of me, and I also saw nothing. I was at the bottom of the hill, and the only way to see me would have been to come down the hill from either direction.
The tricycle had a red seat and yellow handlebars. The front wheel was black and made out of plastic and it was also bent and now facing the wrong way in front of my car. Next to the tricycle lay the boy. I recognized the boy, but I couldn’t remember his name.
I called out, “You okay?”
The boy didn’t answer. He didn’t move either. He looked real small.
I was wearing gloves. They were an old pair of gloves that I’d had for many winters, and I was wearing them because it was the end of winter.
I reached out, with my hands still in my gloves, and I touched the boy’s neck. Even with my gloves on, I could tell that his neck was still warm. The boy didn’t stir.
I repeated myself: “You okay?”
No answer.
I again looked around me, in all directions, but it was the same as before. We were alone.
I felt the boy’s neck again, this time I did it like how I see them do it on TV and in the movies, using two fingers feeling for a pulse. I felt no pulse.
This meant that the boy was not okay. The boy was dead.
I stood up. My head and shoulders were shaking and I felt tiny bubbles pushing at the skin around my eyes. I was shaking, but it was cold, so I could have been shaking from the cold.
I turned around to face the grill of my truck. There was some blood, and a thick mat of the boy’s blonde hair stuck to the bottom of the grill. I turned back around to look at the boy.
The boy was lying face down, next to his tricycle, I turned his body over, very carefully, and the only evidence was a thick wound on his scalp, on the side that had been facing the gravel. Just a nick, with some hair missing, that was all.
I stood up, and I looked around again. No one.
I’m sixty-four years old. I am retiring at the end of this year. I have no family. I eat Progresso soup for dinner most nights. I never go out; most of my nights are spent watching the television and day dreaming about a life I never lived and a future that doesn’t actually exist.
Nowhere, in any of my dreams or my nightmares, do I end up being known as and hated for being the man who killed a boy with his car. It would not be fair.
I looked down at the gravel. I could barely make out three sets of my own foot prints in the shape of my boots. I walked over to these sets of boot prints and kicked the gravel around until the prints had been smeared away.
I walked in a full circle around my truck, eyeing my surroundings closely. Since I hadn’t slammed on my brakes, there were not any irregular tire marks from my truck.
I walked back over to the body of the dead boy. I’d only touched him twice, and both times, I’d touched him with my gloves. But just to be sure, I picked up a blade of grass from the side of the road, and I used it to wipe the spot of skin on the boy’s neck where I’d felt for a pulse.
Stepping carefully, as though there were grapes underneath my feet and I didn’t want to crush them, I walked back to my truck, and I got inside the cab.
I looked in the rear view mirror, and I didn’t see anything.
The sun was setting, but I didn’t appreciate its brilliance.
It isn’t my destiny to go to prison. Not now, not ever. I eat canned soup for dinner each night and I never married. I worked hard all my life and I never hurt anyone on purpose.
I started the truck’s engine, and I put it in reverse, and I very slowly moved the vehicle backwards. I then put the truck into drive, and drove around the spot where the boy and the tricycle were lying in the road, and being sure to move at a speed that wouldn’t create any tire tracks; I crawled on up the hill towards my home.
My heart was now pounding and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, but no one was there. I passed the Johnson’s house at the top of the hill, and no one was outside. Just in case somebody was watching, I tried to pretend that I was happy. I pretended that I was whistling along to a song on the radio, even though I never listen to the radio and I don’t even know how to whistle.
I got home about two minutes later, and I went directly into the bathroom. I ran some water in the sink, and I took a giant wad of toilet paper and put it under the water. I walked back out of the house and over to the grill of my truck.
I took the wet toilet paper, and I applied it to the spot on the grill that had the blood and the hair. I cleaned the grill real good. I frowned; the grill was now a little too shiny. So I picked up some gravel, and I threw the gravel at the grill. The dust settled on the wet parts of the grill, and then it looked normal again. Normal for this part of the country.
The sun had now set, it was no longer dusk. I went inside to fix a can of soup, I watched some television, and then I tried to fall asleep.
***
I didn’t sleep so well that night. I kept thinking about the state prison and the various men I’d known who had ended up there. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve a lot of the bullshit I’d already dealt with for most of my life, and so I decided, that night, that for once in my life, I was going to stand up for myself.
It was on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning. I first saw it at work because someone had left the newspaper in the break room. By lunchtime, nearly everyone at work was talking about it.
Margie, the one with the fat thighs and the stupid pictures of her nieces and nephews, she just wouldn’t shut up about it.
It was so sad and so tragic and she just couldn’t believe that someone would leave a child to die.
Fuck her. Fuck her and her fat thighs. I watched her crying about the whole thing and eating a large slice of cake with a spoon. Every time that she would sob, her fat body would ripple and ooze about, and then she would cut into the white cream at the top of the cake, with more attention than she gave to her job, and she’d spoon a hefty chunk of the cake into her mouth. I found myself wishing that she would choke on the cake.
By quitting time I’d had enough. Everyone at work, even the customers, everyone was talking about the Johnson boy. At one point, Ed walked over to me and asked. “don’t you live on the same road as the Johnson’s?” I nodded and did my best to look morose.
There was only one way to drive home, and there was no avoiding it—in order to get home each day, I had to pass right by the spot, and then I had to drive on up the hill, past the Johnson’s house.
But I got used to it. Besides, I don’t really have any friends, and I never go out, so I only had to pass their house twice a day, five days a week, and then maybe two or four more times, on the weekend, if I had to get out to run an errand or two.
***
Four days had passed the first time I nearly lost my nerve. It was just a little after work, and I’d already passed the damn house, which by now was barely visible beyond the yard full of wreathes and flowers and candles and the such. The whole town was making such a big deal out of the thing.
I was settling into my routine when I heard a knock on the door.
No one ever visits me. The last time I had a visitor it was some electric guy checking on the utilities. That was about two years ago. Only relative I got that is still alive is a brother who is ten years my junior, and he moved out west with some gal nearly twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen him since.
I heard a second knock, but I just stood there, right in my own kitchen. I could feel my heart going all crazy again. It wasn’t “pounding” so much as it was threatening to stop beating. It was going about all weird in my chest, and I wasn’t sure if this was it, if they were here to take me in, but I decided then and there that if this was it, I wasn’t going to do much about it, I was just going to stay quiet and see how things turned out.
I waited there in my kitchen, like a prisoner in my own home, and I listened to the world. It was so quiet that I could hear birds chirping outside and I could hear some feet scuffling in the gravel pathway that leads right up to my front door.
My heart was really moving about now, and I don’t know if I was more nervous about the trouble I was in, or my heart exploding. But then I heard the sound of a child’s voice.
“I know he’s there, Ma. His car is parked right here in the yard, and he never goes out but once a day to get to work and back.”
Whoever it was, it wasn’t the police, and I was suddenly able to relax.
My heart settled back into rhythm and I used the back of my hand to wipe away the small beads of sweat that had percolated on my forehead.
After hearing a third knock I walked to the door and opened it.
Standing outside my front door was Evelyn Woodbury and her son—I forget his name. I nodded. Evelyn nodded back and smiled a polite smile. I’d known Evelyn since she was a little girl and I was a young man. She’d married some man from out of town and I remember that she had been showing a bit before the wedding.
“How do you do, Roger?” Evelyn seemed a bit frightened, and I didn’t mind.
I nodded again, and then I looked down at her boy, and back up at her. She was wearing a sundress, and it was a little too tight on her. It also looked worn, and I thought she looked a little worn down herself.
“…Well, Roger, we’re sorry to bother you at the dinner hour, but—” Evelyn stopped talking but she forgot to close her mouth.
The boy cut in, saying, “—Sir, we’re holding a fundraiser for little Willie Johnson. I’m sure you heard by now about the tragedy that occurred last Thursday evening, around five thirty. Sir, it was real sad. We’re all real sad. Willie was hit and killed by a car, sir, and we’re collecting money, through the school, for the Johnson family, so that they can do up a real nice funeral for the boy, is all.”
So they wanted my money. Everyone in this god damn world seems to want your hard earned money. First the government asks for it from your pay check. Then they ask again every April, and then you have to pay them even more of it with the sales tax every time you want to buy something in a store. It goes on and on and on, so I stay at home, and I do what I can to keep to myself.
I reached into my back pocket and felt for my wallet. Inside of my wallet were some bills, and I knew exactly how many there were, and of which denomination as well. I reached for the third one over and I took it out. It was a five dollar bill. I handed it to the boy and I forced a smile.
Evelyn relaxed a bit, and she tugged at the sides of her dress, as if that could make the thing fit, or make her look better; maybe both. I don’t know; I don’t understand women very well, I never have.
They thanked me for my generous donation, and I nodded once more. I stood there, with my left hand holding the door open, and watched them as they walked back down the gravel path, and then turned left onto the main road. There were another two miles of houses going on in that direction, and I wondered if they were really going to walk to each and every home along the way, doing the same thing they had just done to me. I watched them walk on until they were just out of sight, and then I closed my door.
***
The more the papers wrote about it, and the more the townsfolk talked about it, the more I got angry about it, and what little guilt and worry I may have felt, well, it just slowly went away, like how the snow melts in the early part of spring.
They even talked about it on the local news, which I don’t regularly watch, but now I had started watching nearly every night. There was something weird about watching a mystery unfold, and being the only one who knew the answers to the questions that everyone else wanted to know.
Plus, I wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to catch me. So far, they didn’t have any suspects, but the police were making an investigation, and the case was still open. For the most part, I wasn’t afraid anymore; I was just tired of it all, and I wanted it to end.
***
The most scared I ever got was the one day that Officer Thompson came by. It was the same time of night that Evelyn and her boy had come by; at dusk. Only this time I wasn’t making soup from a can, I was cooking a microwave dinner. I know this because it was a Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day I always cook my microwave dinner.
Officer Thompson knocked real hard, harder than Evelyn and the boy did. It was a tough knock. Not an unfriendly knock, but just the right kind of knock to let you know that it deserves an answer.
I walked over to the door and opened it. Officer Thompson nodded his head, and removed his hat. I nodded in return, and stepped to the side, so he could enter if he wanted to.
He did not enter.
“Afternoon, Roger.”
“Fred.” I said.
“We’re…” Fred sighed, and then took a long while to resume speaking.
While I waited for Fred to continue, I could hear the microwave doing its thing, but now that I was worried and now that my stomach was all tight, I realized that I had lost my appetite.
Fred finally continued. “Well, we’re just combing the whole road is what we’re doing. The Johnson boy, as you know, well, we don’t have much on who hit him, but we figure that whoever killed the boy, well, he probably lives on this road, since it’s a dead end.”
He just stopped, right there. No question, just a statement. What this did was to put me on guard, it did. I wasn’t sure if it was a tactic of his, or if I was just being paranoid, but I felt sort of stuck, the way you do when your boss asks you if you’d mind staying a bit late that night, to help out. I didn’t know what to say.
Fred was my own age, and we’d gone to school together. He’d married Anne Walsh and they’d had themselves several kids. One even went on to the big state school with a scholarship in football.
I don’t watch football, but I was born and raised in this town, so I know most everything you can know about football.
Fred was looking right at me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I don’t much read my own mind, let alone the minds of other folks. Forty-six years of checking insurance policy figures has taught me very little about people and what they are thinking.
“Well, it’s sad.” I finally said.
Fred broke eye contact, and sighed again.
“Sure is.” He agreed.
He seemed relieved, but I wanted to be sure.
“I think an awful lot about it.” I said. “Some nights.” I added.
“We all do.” Fred agreed. He wrung his hat in his hands, making out like it were a bandana, rather than a state issued trooper hat. I thought he was going to permanently crease it, but he didn’t.
The next thing I did is what saved me, I’m sure of this, and I’m very glad I did it.
“The Fletcher boy. He speeds.”
Five words. That’s all I had to say. It was just like when my father had taught me how to make plants grow.
My father had been a farmer, and he had wanted me to take over the farm. But I was good at math, and my brains didn’t want me to farm, so I had taken a job with the firm instead of the farm.
But here I was, more than fifty years later, taking my dad’s profession to heart; planting a seed and then watching it grow.
***
Soon thereafter, I began to notice all sorts of things I never noticed before. Driving on the main highway, for example, I one day noticed how well aligned all the telephone poles were. They had built them all perfect and neat, spaced out just right, so that the lines didn’t sag, but also so that the lines were not too taut. And the center lines on the highway, they had been spaced evenly as well.
In town I started to notice other people existing in their own lives. One person in particular that I happened to notice was a new girl that had been hired at Betty’s Coffee Shop. I noticed that this new girl was pretty.
People at work still talked about the Johnson boy nearly every day, but now I could tune it out. The subject of the Johnson boy became about as interesting to me as the football scores and the new county highway they were building that could get you to the Wal-Mart quicker.
Only thing I really cared about was my workday ending so I could get back home where I could be alone.
***
It was about three Thursdays after the accident that I heard the big news at work.
It was Margie who I heard it from. She was in the break room, per usual, eating a doughnut and sitting on her fat ass. I wondered if she ever stopped eating and actually worked.
She was in the break room when I walked in to get a little coffee. Ever since the accident, I hadn’t been sleeping as well as I’d like, so I’d taken to drinking a cup of coffee here and there to keep me on my toes at work. The coffee at work was thin, and I didn’t mind the taste of it, but it did make me have to pee a lot.
“Oh Roger, did you hear?” Margie’s cheeks were flushed, and I couldn’t tell if it was from wearing too much makeup, or if it was from sitting and eating so damn much.
She took her thumb and her index finger and pinched a chunk of doughnut away from her partially eaten doughnut. She was careless, and some of the chocolate from the doughnut smeared itself on one of her long, pink painted nails.
She shoved her fingers right into her mouth, and I could hear her sucking the chunk of doughnut into her mouth. It made me feel sort of sick. I turned my back to her and poured myself a cup of coffee.
Margie continued, “They think it was the Fletcher boy. They think the Fletcher boy was the one that done did it. That he was the one who…who struck and killed the Johnson boy. Someone says they saw him driving home right about the time that poor Willie was killed!”
What really got me was the way she said struck. I’m not real particular about many things, but I didn’t like the way she said struck. For some reason, when she said struck, it made me very angry, so I didn’t answer her and I left the room.
It wasn’t until later, when I was getting ready to leave work that I was finally able to figure it out. I didn’t like it when Margie said “struck” the way she did because it was an accusation. It implied that the Johnson boy had been hurt on purpose, and that was unfair.
I’m not going to jail. I am too old, and I’ve worked all my life to avoid trouble. And it’s not like I tried to do what I did. It just sort of happened, the way that a storm wind can turn over your shed, or a valve in your car can suddenly break, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from happening.
The way I see things, things work until they sometimes break. And when they do break, you can try to fix them, but sometimes, no matter how much the thing needs fixing, and you want to fix it, you just can’t, and then, well, there’s nothing you can do.
The Johnson boy was broken, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix him up, so I carried on. But I didn’t like that Margie said he was struck. I didn’t like Margie.
***
I was fixing to get in my car after work that afternoon, when I noticed the new girl at Betty’s again. She was leaning over a table in the window at the front of the coffee shop, and she was wiping down the red and white checkered tablecloth with a grey rag.
It has been years since I went to Betty’s. In high school, it was where most of the fellows and gals would go to socialize after school, so I didn’t go there much. Years later, I would take my brother there before he could drive, because he could talk to people which meant that he could talk to girls and such, but me, I never much went there, except when my family would go for a breakfast before a big trip to visit Grandma up in the big city.
This was all a long time ago, before Grandma died, and before my folks passed on as well. I watched the new girl scoop the rag and its contents into her other hand, and turn around to find a waste basket. Her apron was tied in a neat bow behind her back, and she was wearing a pretty colored dress that hung just right. Her hair was tied up in the back, with a white ribbon, and she was wearing some sort of silver necklace that hung around her soft, white neck.
I thought about going into Betty’s. I figured I could sit myself down and order a cup of coffee. After all, now that I was drinking coffee, I could try theirs, to see if it was any good. But what would I do with myself once I had the coffee? Would I sit there, and stare out the window? I supposed I could buy myself a newspaper, but I didn’t much like to read the newspaper.
No, it was a stupid idea. I needed to be practical at all times, and going into Betty’s was impractical, that’s what it was.
I walked to my truck, placed my key into the lock on the door, twisted the lock all the way to the left, and pressed the silver button that was set into the handle, and opened the door. I sat on the leather cushion, and looked into my rear view mirror.
From my mirror I could still see the new girl leaning over on the counter, talking to the cook through the service window. I moved my head a little, to the right, to see the rest of the restaurant, and I noticed that there was only one customer, an old man, who was sitting alone in the booth at the back of the restaurant. He was staring straight ahead of himself, no paper, nothing; just staring.
I started the car, and pulled out onto the main street that gets me to the main highway that takes me to my road, the road where I struck the Johnson boy.
I thought about Margie and I got real angry again, but then I remembered what she had mentioned about the Fletcher boy. I turned right onto the highway and I thought about how I was going to watch the news that evening.
***
In regards to the Johnson boy, the Fletcher boy was innocent. I knew that much, but no one else did. But was he really innocent?
The town sure didn’t think so. After all, the Fletcher boy had run over the Bonderman’s dog the first year that he’d gotten himself a license to drive.
And this fact was the particular item that led the town into an uproar.
Surely it was the Fletcher boy.
That boy’s always had an odd sort of way about him.
He never really fit in, even when he was young.
Why myself, I’d caught the Fletcher boy killing his neighbor’s rabbits with his own bare hands about four summers ago. His parents had asked me to look over him for a few hours on a few different weekends that summer, so they could get away, and I had agreed.
Well, when I’d caught him killing the rabbits that one day, he’d given me the kind of look that would scare nearly any woman to her death. I just shook my head and told him it was wrong, and that he couldn’t do it, ever again. But I’ll never forget the look he gave me. He was sort of odd.
The Fletcher family was poor, and they couldn’t afford a lawyer. The boy had just turned eighteen, so he was going to face the charges as an adult; as a man.
He said he was innocent, which, like I said, I knew to be the truth. But the way I saw things; better him than me. He was young; he could be taught things and he could be rehabilitated and he would get out and then he would still have a life.
What the hell did the state want with me? I was nearly sixty five years old and about to retire. I was a man who’d kept to his own all his life. I had walked the straight line, I had worked hard at calculating insurance claims nearly every single day of my adult life, so what good would it do anyone for me to go to jail and then die there?
Hell, I’d only missed six and a half days of work in the past fifty years, and four of them had been because I had to attend to a dying relative. Only two and a half had been for me; and they were for the time that I got real sick from eating some pears that I suppose I should not have eaten.
The Fletcher boy was going to be tried for manslaughter and for hit and run. All in all, the state was going to try and recommend that he be put away in a real prison, and for as long as possible.
Margie seemed satisfied with the news, and slowly but surely, she and everyone else at work began to talk about other things. It was now nearing the end of summer, and this meant that the annual town beauty pageant was coming up that Saturday. Margie thought that this year’s crop of young women was just about the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen.
I was thinking about why someone as fat and ugly as Margie would enjoy a beauty pageant, when I noticed a strange man conversing with Margie at her desk. Her demeanor had suddenly become quite professional, and after a brief exchange, she pointed directly at me, and the strange man proceeded to walk towards me.
I suddenly began to panic, real bad. This is it. I thought to myself. I could feel my heart beating in many odd spots of my body, even in my thighs. A hot, uncomfortable sticky sweat formed in my loins and my breathing became distorted and everything looked like I was looking through a screen door. Even sounds seemed distorted. They had somehow caught me. I was done for.
The man was wearing a dark suit, either navy blue or black; I wasn’t able to pay very good attention. His shirt was very white. I remember thinking that his shirt was very clean and white. Starched. Bleached. White.
“Roger McDermitt?” The man asked.
I tried to speak, but it was difficult. Everyone in the office was watching me. Most of them had stopped working, and some of them had even stood up from their desks to take in the scene. Even Flo, the boss’s pretty young secretary, who had never so much as even acknowledged my presence in the three years she’d worked there, even Flo had stopped filing her sharp red nails, and was looking right at me.
“Yes. Sir. I. Am.” The words came out the same way that the last drops of catsup come out of the bottle if you shake it hard enough; slow and messy, but they came out nonetheless.
“Mr. Roger McDermitt, Do you in fact live at the address of 2023 Dovetail Lane, in Millard County?”
It took me an eternity to get the word out, but I nodded and said “Yes.” In all my life, I’d never felt so dizzy and sick to my stomach. It felt even worse than the time I’d eaten those bad pears.
The strange man then smiled, and my panic attack began to recede. I realized that if I were going to be under arrest, they would have sent an officer to arrest me. I felt my bowels move, and I wished for a quick escape to the bathroom.
“Mr. McDermitt, I represent one Timothy Fletcher in the hit and run manslaughter trial of one William Johnson. I’m here to ask you, on behalf of the boy’s parents, if you would appear in court as what we call a “character witness?”
I was completely blown away. They wanted me to testify on behalf of the boy?
“Me?” I asked.
“Well, Mr. McDermitt, you see, the defendant is being tried by the state justice department for some pretty serious crimes, and his parents seem to think that you, well, since you once looked after the boy a few summers ago, well, perhaps you could explain to a jury of his peers that he’s, um, misunderstood.”
I smiled, and I accepted a piece of paper that he had brought for me to fill out and then sign. I was to show up to the county courthouse in three weeks time. I took my copy of the paper, it was yellow, and I folded it into a quarter of its original size, and then placed it in my pocket.
I looked at the office calendar that they kept up on the wall, the one where you’re supposed to write your name when you need to request a day off. It is the same cheap calendar that the agency gives out to all of its new customers. I walked right over to the calendar and for the seventh time in my life, I asked for a day off from my job.
I felt my heart race a little; not in the way it had when there had been a knock on my door, but in a different way, like the way it did when I saw the pretty girl at Betty’s wiping down a table or smoothing her hair when she thought that nobody was looking.
***
I only had one suit, it was the suit that my parents had bought for me when I’d graduated from high school, and I had decided to apply for a job at the insurance firm.
I had worn the suit for that interview, and then at the various funerals I had to attend in the forty some years since. Despite its age, it was still in a nice condition, and as I walked up to the stand, in order to take my oath, I felt well respected by my peers.
All in all, I was only up there for about ten minutes. First the defense asked me my relationship to the boy, and then they asked me if I thought that he was mentally troubled. I had thought a lot about what I was going to say, ahead of time. I had even practiced it in front of the only mirror I own at home. I have to say, my delivery that day in court was impeccable. I even, at one point, made one of the jurors gasp in shock.
“It is my opinion that the Fletcher boy has always been troubled. I thought a lot about what I was going to say today, since I was asked here to speak on the boy’s behalf. But the more I thought about it, the more I could not forget about an incident that occurred nearly four years ago, when the boy was about fourteen years old. It was at this time that I had been asked to watch the boy on a Sunday, while his parents were out. I was in the front yard of his house, when I heard footsteps and the sounds of branches breaking all coming from across the creek that divides the Fletcher home from their neighbors’ house. I got up from my seat on the porch and went to investigate. What I saw next, well, it still gives me chills.”
At this point, I paused, not because I actually had to think, but because I wanted to give the next part of my speech some more weight.
As I paused, I couldn’t help it, I had to look at the Fletcher boy. We locked eyes. What I saw in his eyes was not so much hatred, as it was a cold acceptance of reality. I began to think about what it would feel like to be this boy; and I realized that I knew exactly what it felt like to be this boy, for I too had lived in this town, a town that assumed everything about who I was. And I too had never been able to escape from the reputation the town had branded on me. Suddenly, I didn’t feel sorry for the boy at all.
I went on to describe the way the Fletcher boy had killed those rabbits with his bare hands, and I told them about the look he gave me when I caught him. As I said this last part, everyone in the court strained their heads to get a good look at the boy.
After I had finished, the Fletcher boy’s lawyer said he had no more questions, and the attorney for the prosecution said he didn’t need anything from me, and I was excused.
***
The trial lasted for nearly two weeks, and my testimony had been given right in the middle. It was two days after the boy was convicted, the day after his sentencing, it was on this day that I finally decided to go into Betty’s and try some of her coffee.
I left the firm right at five and walked across the street. In my pockets were two quarters, and I slipped them into a newspaper box in front of the coffee shop. I took a newspaper out of the box, and wrapped it under my left arm.
I hesitated for a minute before opening the door, wondering if I should have combed my hair or anything like that, but it was too late, I’d already walked up to the door, and now I had to go on with it.
I walked inside, wearing a carefully practiced smile. Betty herself was standing behind the café counter holding a pot of coffee. She smiled at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but wasn’t sure exactly who I was. I looked all around the shop and for the pretty young girl, but she wasn’t there. The place was deserted, except for Betty, the Cook, and now me.
I felt like closing my eyes, and dropping to the floor I was so disappointed. The pretty girl wasn’t there, and just like every other disappointment in my life, there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to make things better.
I felt like an idiot, and I didn’t know what to do. Betty smiled again and instructed me to sit anywhere I liked.
I walked to the far corner of the coffee shop to the same booth that I had seen the old man sit in the day I had watched the pretty girl clean the table after work.
I sat down and Betty brought me a mug and a menu. I told her I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted the coffee.
I really wanted to leave, but I sat there anyway, hoping that maybe the pretty girl was just on break. Finally, after about ten minutes of staring at the opposing wall, I looked down at the table and I saw the newspaper lying there.
I took a sip of black coffee from the time worn mug. The mug felt sort of soft in my hands, and I noticed that it was chipped in so many places that the chips almost seemed like they had been placed there on purpose, by the potter himself.
I had left the newspaper folded in half and face up on the table. It was the most important headline that day, so at any moment that I wanted to, I could look down, and read the headline.
It was written in a pretty large sized type, and the letters were bolder than many of the headlines I am used to seeing.
It was a simple headline; unremarkable in many ways, but not so if you were me. It read: “Young man gets twenty years for hit and run manslaughter.” I read it again, one more time, as though it were like the weather, and capable of abrupt change.
But regardless of how many times I read the headline, it did not change. And every time that I read the headline, I felt a powerful sort of rush. The rush was addictive, and very pleasant. It was the same kind of rush you sometimes get in my part of the country when you watch a brilliant sunset, at dusk.
