Midnight Mercy

December 23, 2019

Greetings from the unstrained mercy,

The dash was littered with take-out wrappers, wadded receipts, empty Styrofoam cups.  Chris pushed his hand into the place where he knew the Winstons were and pulled out the pack and tapped one free.  He lit the cigarette and took a puff, opened his flip phone and pressed the only number he had ever called and listened to the blips and beeps that followed.  He heard the trilling of her phone, one ring, and she answered. 

He told his wife he wasn’t going the usual way; he had an idea to do it different this time.

She was chewing something, but thinking.  And then: “Whatthehell?”

“You are gonna get some calls I think, and I dint wantya be worried.” he rasped, a little firmer than he meant to.  He knew she was reading his mind in that moment, of course she knew, and so he stopped talking, pulled on the cigarette, blew smoke out the window.  When she didn’t say anything he finally added:  “Some kids will be disappointed, but, ..you know, they got someone watching em.”  She asked him if he was smoking again and they both laughed at his lie. 

She told him she loved him and called him something that made his cheeks blush.  He closed the phone.  He turned the key on the dash, listened as the solenoid fought for attention, then clicked it again and heard the starter grind and the engine fired up. 

The clock on the dash stopped seconds short of midnight.  Given the condition of the ’69 Country Squire station wagon it would be reasonable to assume it was broken.  But he had stopped it there.  He looked into the windshield, wiped at the condensation, and drove into the night.

Chris pulled into the alley in south Boston and parked, engine running, and opened the door.  He pulled his bag from the back and walked into the damp darkness.  In the first doorway he found the man he was looking for, and knelt next to him, silent, not wanting him to wake.  He pulled out the sleeping bag and the jacket and draped it over the man, tucking the edges around him gently.  He was back in the car before the man took another breath.

The sound of the lifters pinging and rattling under the hood caught the attention of the three children.  They were huddled together outside the shack where their mother left them a week before.  None of them believed she was coming back.  They had never seen a ‘69 Ford station wagon, although the roads in Bangalore were teeming with cars and scooters at all hours.  They watched as the man came toward them, holding out a basket.  He rested it in front of them.  Bread, bowls of rice, a jug of water.  Nested between them, three stuffed animals.

The station wagon fishtailed in the muddy snow, fighting to get over the culvert hump, and then bounced up the rutted driveway.  The house was halfway between Oglala and Pine Ridge, and the land was flat, so they saw the car coming a long way off, the headlights changing the dark into little movies in front of it.  The people in the dark house watched, afraid.

The man pushed the door open and climbed out, a big man, wearing heavy clothes.  He went to the back of the wagon and reached in and pulled an enormous bag and threw it over his shoulder and then began walking toward the house.  The woman stepped back from the window, waved her children back into the kitchen.  It was not her man, he was gone. She heard the thump on the front porch and then the sound of the man walking back across the frozen mush of the yard to his car.

When the car was gone, they opened the door and pulled the bag inside.  It was filled with food, with clothes, with new towels, and some toys for the young ones.  There was a clasp for her hair.  She held her breath: in the bottom, there was the prayer stone her mother had given her when she was a child.

The station wagon roared from place to place, down lonely farm roads and into crowded barrios.  Crisscrossing the desolate steppes, easing between tenement houses in gutted cities, stopping at funeral homes, and nursing homes and homes with no doors where the meth addicts ached.  He left them what they needed, not what anyone thought they deserved.

Anywhere there was someone forgotten.  He went to the broken people, the sinners, to the last child, to the lonely grave.  He put food in hands, put a few dollars in a collection plate, fixed a window that let snow in, and while the exhausted mother slept, head on the counter, he did the dishes and left her a plate of her favorite banana bread.

He paid the bail for the kid with a list of mistakes that would get longer, but not in jail.  He wrote an apology note for an angry husband and left it where his wife would find it.  He left a pair of new socks for the widower who had never learned to sew anything.  He opened a sack lunch and put in slices of bologna where there was only bread and mustard.  He put a book of poetry under the pillow of the heartbroken boy who was sure he’d never love again.  He stood with the little girl in the migrant detention camp, who was too afraid to go to the latrine alone.  He helped her back to her tent and put a small doll on her pillow.

The phone rang and the woman answered and explained in quiet tones.  She was patient, told each person what they needed, promised that everything was all right. Each time she hung up the battered phone on the wall she chuckled a little at her husband.  What a world.

Chris took the last Winston and threw the wrinkled package on the dash.  He was tired but it was a good tired.  There was still places he hadn’t been but that would always be the case.  He laughed a little, feeling his wife laugh, thousands of miles away. 

He reached onto the dusty dash again and pulled out the list, the one he was supposed to follow.  Good ones, all of them, but they’d be good again next year.  He leaned up and tapped the plastic bezel over the clock and the second hand swept past midnight.  He put the cigarette to his lips and slipped the car into drive and pointed the wagon north.

Hope this finds you spreading cheer,

David

Copyright © 2019 David Smith