An incident on Good Friday

Good Friday and the code wasn’t working...or maybe the code was working but the data was bad. I couldn’t tell which for sure, or, rather, I knew how to go about figuring it out but I also knew it would take at least an hour. I’d already been at work two hours longer than I had planned, and everybody else was gone except the 24-hour power traders (because even on Good Friday and Easter and Christmas and New Year’s Eve people expect the lights to come on when they flip the switch). I had had enough. So I packed up the laptop, swung by the kitchen for a cup of hot chocolate (I’m trying to reduce my dependence on coffee) and hit the road.

Swung onto Highway 6 and then the light ahead of me changed. I stopped and shifted into neutral and took my foot off the clutch, and the cars lined up behind me. Then a thunderclap of sound like a bomb behind me, and another. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the third car behind me explode forward with another crash, and then the second. No time to switch back into gear, nothing to do but hold on. I shifted my eyes to the face of the woman behind me as her eyes widened with horror staring in her own rearview mirror, and then her car jerked forward and her head snapped back and it was all in slow motion and I could see the death grip she had on her steering wheel and then her car ground to a halt. No impact. Her brakes had held perhaps six inches from my bumper. ...continue reading...

I pulled off the road into the small parking lot there on my right. Jumped out, ran back to the car behind me. The woman was frantically asking the old lady in the passenger seat if she was all right; the lady in the passenger seat was having trouble breathing. I could hear a child screaming and then I saw his father running from the cars with his five-year-old son screaming in his arms; there was grass on the other side of the parking lot and the child’s mother trailed several feet behind them. I looked back at the old lady and she took a deep breath and said she was fine.

I had my phone out and was dialing 9-1-1. They wanted to know if anybody was hurt. I was walking up and down the scene; everybody seemed to be out of their cars and nobody was trapped, but the back three cars were absolutely mauled. I told them about the kid and they said they would send an ambulance. I looked at the car that had started it, a van of some sort. Grill smashed all the way back to the tires and bright red brake fluid all over the ground from the demolished car he’d hit and dirty black oil from his own engine and white steam rolling out from under what had been his hood but the old fool was trying to get his car started and drive away. Another, younger man standing and screaming at him to turn off his engine. Then he gets out and wobbles toward us, a fatuously ingratiating smile on his face and even my worthless nose could smell the alcohol ten feet away. Two women next to me, one says, “I knew he was about to hit somebody; he never even slowed down.” Other woman asks the world in general, looking at me, “He’s going to have to pay for all our cars, isn’t he?” “His insurance company will,” I answer. None of us says out loud that the kind of man who is driving a car down the highway reeking drunk at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon is the kind of man who doesn’t carry liability insurance. I don’t know if she has thought of that on her own but I see no point in adding to her present worries if she hasn’t.

Nobody will talk to him, his stupid smile makes you want to punch him and we can all hear the little boy still screaming over on the grass.

I go back to the old woman and her daughter. The daughter is out of the car pacing back and forth while she tries to get someone to answer her on the cell phone. “What street is this?” she asks and I tell her and she tells the person on the other end of the conversation. I look at the old lady, who is still breathing irregularly. “Ma’am,” I ask gently, “can I get you something to drink?” It is a very hot day. She answers gratefully, in a whisper, “Water.” “I’ll be right back.” There is a small corner store but it is across six lanes of traffic – only five lanes now though. I pick my way across, buy a bottle of water and six bottles of Gatorade, pick my way back across to where I started. The police haven’t gotten here yet, I don’t even hear sirens. I give her the water and she says, “Thank you, son.” I don’t get called “son” much any more except by my parents and I’m briefly amused.

I go from one little group to the other passing out the Gatorade. The little boy isn’t screaming anymore. I walk past the drunk sitting on the grass and come up to where the boy is lying on the ground, his mother squatting next to him on her haunches, the father standing tall beside them and gazing quietly across the lawn at the long line of twisted metal. They have gotten an icepack from someplace – a big freezer bag filled with convenience store ice; somebody must have had an icechest in the car – and they have laid it across the boy’s chest. His eyes are wide and terrified and uncomprehending but he is not crying and his parents have the look of people who are in the aftermath of adrenaline but who think everything is going to be okay. I offer them Gatorade; the father answers, “We don’t think it’s a good idea for him to drink anything yet.” I gently correct him, “I mean for you and your wife.” He thanks me and declines. I have two Gatorades left.

There is nothing really for me to do. I wasn’t in the accident and God knows there are plenty of other witnesses. I decide I should get out of the way. I go up to the young man who initially made the drunk get out of his car; I leave the Gatorade with him; I walk back toward my car. I say goodbye to the old lady and her daughter and I drive away.

I can feel the reaction settling in on myself as my own adrenaline starts to drain away. Turn right, turn right again, fifteen minutes to home. I look down and see my hot chocolate. I pick it up and it is still hot. So little time for lives to be changed.

I sip my hot chocolate and I remember the wide eyes of the woman behind me as she saw inevitability in her rearview mirror. I remember the old lady’s shortness of breath. I can hear the boy’s screams. But then...

How do you remember things you didn’t notice when you were living them? But now I see with total clarity the circle of space we put around the drunk, the pariah. I can see him turning from one of us to the other and none of us would look at him and I can see his frightened smile trembling because he knows he’s screwed up irrevocably and that his life is about to get very much worse and he doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry or express the sick panic in the pit of his stomach. I can see him about to turn to me and I see again my field of vision shifting as I automatically turn away so that when he does turn to me my eyes won’t be there for him to catch. I can see him sitting alone on the grass staring across the grass at nothing in particular and I can see – I can see, I watched people step away from the child and his parents to go back to their cars and I watched them swing fifteen feet out of the straight line of their path in order to avoid coming inside the shunning circle, and it didn’t register then what I was watching but I can see it now as if they were leaving vivid glowing footsteps in their arcing path. I can see myself swinging out on that same path to go offer Gatorade to the boy’s parents, without even thinking about what I was doing. I can see him sitting alone under the hot sun and I have two spare Gatorades and I give them to a man who doesn’t even want them and I walk off without ever saying a word to the drunk on his lonely little patch of grass.

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

They also will answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”

He will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

The loneliest man in Houston sat a few feet away from me. Forty days of Lent and it never even occurred to me to offer him a smile and comfort and a simple drink of Gatorade under the hot sun. On Good Friday.

I can feel tears of shame on my face as I drive. I could go back. I should go back. But I’m halfway home.

I take a sip of hot chocolate.

I keep driving. I do not go back.

God, be merciful to me, a sinner...