A huge ball of flame, crescendoing up with its sound, and strong enough to push things back, like a punch; the man is in his head and while he flashes back to his recent trauma, his boss Randy is being assaulted by a man with a bat. It isn’t until the man hears Randy call out his name that he shakes the past away and sees the man with the bat looking at him.
“This man got the balls to fuck my wife behind my back, so he should be able to handle this beatin. This ain’t your business, go on, give us a minute.” The man with the bat turns back to Randy.
The man knows that Randy brought this situation on himself and if he intervenes, he will be validating his actions in some way. But it is against the man’s nature to leave someone in distress. He had taken to covering his face when he was young in NC, but when he wandered the woods behind his house or the streets of his town, he would help people in need because he knew that it would make his mother proud. The man decided at a young age that there is a simple path to the righteousness of heaven, he need only honor his mother and he would undoubtedly be honoring and pleasing God to a point that would see him selected for the Kingdom and the glory. But his mother had strict rules about him using his preternatural ability publically, so he would find some way to be helpful without being noticed. He saved countless cats in trees, even a dog once, and he managed to help people out of a burning house when he imagined a fireproof lift that appeared out of nowhere to carry them to safety.
Really, he can’t help what happens next, despite the memory of his last disastrous intervention, and in the blink of an eye, the room is filled with a SWAT team that seems to rush in through the garage door. They apprehend the man with the bat and the man knows that this will end with questions that he can’t answer. Quick fix, the man thinks, and one member of the SWAT team hits the man with the bat hard enough to knock him unconscious, and they drag him out to the back of the shop.
Randy is badly wounded on the floor and the man rushes to help him. Before long they are in a car and headed to a hospital; the SWAT team disappears in full view of a homeless person who assumes that he had purchased very good drugs and is hallucinating. The man with the bat is unconscious, on his face.
As the man drives, he lectures Randy; “I can’t believe you put me in this position. I can’t believe you…” Randy doesn’t respond and soon they arrive at the local hospital. The man helps Randy inside and they don’t wait long before a doctor sees him. The man sits in the main waiting room, fuming that he allowed himself to be sucked into drama again.
The man waits about an hour before a nurse tells him that Randy would like to see him, and the man makes his way to the room where Randy’s midsection is bandaged and the cuts from glass on his face are not bleeding, but noticeable. The man feels a pang of pity and manages a smile at the old man who had shown him kindness at a time when he needed it the most.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean none of this to happen. I’m sure glad you was there.” Randy managed weakly. “And all them police, I still don’t know where they came from.”
The man shook his head, “I guess we just got lucky. I’m gonna head back to the shop.” The inside of the hospital room is reminiscent of his time in TN, and he knows that Randy is in good hands.
“Yea, I guess that’s a good idea. You don’t have to rush off though, I appreciate the company.”
Randy looked pitiful. The man knows that Randy’s family is too far away to visit him, but the man is itching to leave the hospital.
“I’m gonna go, call me if anything.”
The man is back in his car and headed to the garage with the radio on. He listens to a news story, the same story that has been getting a lot of attention lately; the unarmed black boy that was killed in MO by a police officer. Even though he’s heard the story many times since the incident happened, the man is still fuzzy on the details, but he assumes that the incident was the result of an overzealous police officer who was intimated by a black boy. The man thinks about his encounters with police and the only one he has ever had was with Detective Young after the explosion. Sure, the man was involved, but there was no way for the detective to know that, aside from the height of the man on the store surveillance footage, but it could have just as easily been a tall white guy with his face covered; the skin tone of the man in the footage was impossible to see and none of the witnesses reported it being a black man with a gun at the gas station. The man thinks about being handcuffed to his hospital bed and he thinks that it was definitely an excessive measure considering that the detective admitted more than once that he was sure the man wasn’t the cause of the accident. As much as the man had lived his life free of the racism commonly associated with the south, it did not mean that racism didn’t exist. And even though he didn’t carry himself the way a racist person would expect a black man to carry himself, and he had no truly mean-spirited, racist tendencies of his own, he realized that racism was ingrained into the American psyche and the new people he encountered on his journey were bound to see him and make assumptions about his intentions based on their encounters with black men that looked like him. It annoys the man that he is no longer innocent and he wonders if he is worthy of his indignation, but surely his attempts at redemption (or withdrawal from superfluous interactions with others so as to limit his ability to negatively impact innocence) count for something.
The man feels compelled to leave his life in Amarillo behind him and when he is back at the shop he starts to pack. The man has to be selective of the company he keeps lest he be associated with the negativity some people were already trying to burden him with based on his dark skin and serious visage.
But I don’t think Randy is a bad guy, the man thinks as he packs his two bags. When they are full, the room looks exactly as it had the first day he arrived in town; bare white walls, a cott-esque bed and closet-sized bathroom.
Down in the shop, there is a customer waiting and the man drops his bags long enough to help the woman who peeks in at the window of the garage, lightly tapping it and saying, “Hello?”
The man lifts the door and the woman stands there in her blue jeans and tank top smiling at him.
She offers a hand, “I’m Jessica.” She is around the man’s age, not particularly tall or short, but lithe, with straight, blonde hair past her shoulders. She has a nose like a Disney princess with a smooth point on the end.
“Its jerkin all crazy. I know I put gas in it, so it ain’t that.” There are thin wisps of smoke rising from underneath the hood.
The man is bound by honor to help Jessica and for once, he thinks, something good might come from his compulsion to be helpful.
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