of the back of the car, hoisted up his jeans, turned and looked annoyed, as if he had been thoughtlessly interrupted. Gazing down at Felix—he was tall, seemed to be about eighteen or twenty, lanky but muscular—he gripped a fistful of CDs. He laid the discs on the roof of the car with a sigh, reached into the front right pocket of his tight, faded jeans, and extracted a black-handled knife. He flipped it open toward Felix, pointed the long, silver blade at him and asked, “Now what the hell it look like we doing?”
Felix froze but finally managed to find the words, “You can’t . . . you can’t just take my stuff. Guys, I need that.”
“Oh yeah? How come you think you need this shit more than us?” asked the thief as he poked the air menacingly with the knife.
The question gave Felix pause. “Maybe you have something there. I do believe that rights ought to be balanced with need. So you’re claiming that your present need is more important than my prior ownership?”
“Here’s my damn right, fool!” the thief responded, thrusting the knife up in the air in front of Felix as if he were going to shove it up his nose. “Now you just turn your sweet little girly ass back around and . . .”
With that a huge black Chrysler with dark tinted windows appeared out of nowhere, skidding up behind Felix’s car in a roar of gravel, a wave of dust and blinking blue lights. The fat man behind the counter had called the law.
Seeing the cops, the thief with the knife turned and shoved the clothes he was holding back into the car, but he did so in such panic that he accidentally stabbed his left arm, crying out in pain and dropping the knife in the dust. The other thief dropped the booty that he was holding and made a run for their truck, huffingly pursued by an overweight cop.
The thinner cop screamed to the wounded thief, “Hit the ground, sucker! Now!” He fell to his knees, weeping, holding his bleeding arm. Felix also fell to the ground.
“Not you! Him!” the cop said to Felix.
“I’ve done killed myself,” wept the thief. The cop looked down at him and pronounced, “Damn. Guess we’ll have to take you to ‘mergency room. And on a Satiday. You ain’t dead. That patrol car there is brand new. Put some of them old clothes on the backseat so you won’t bleed on county property. If you do, by God, you will pay for a new backseat!” The thief struggled to his feet, sniveling, whimpering, pressing the wound on his arm.
“Them seats is real leather,” said the cop proudly.
Felix watched in befuddlement as one of the cops led the second thief around the back of Felix’s car and toward the other side of the patrol car. This thief was weeping too, great wails of lament. Looking at Felix, he called over the top of the car, “I hope you are happy. Now you going to get us kicked out of Tech. I’m a dead man, thanks to you.”
“But . . . but I didn’t call the police,” Felix protested. “Officer, can’t this be settled in another way? I don’t want these guys charged. Please don’t take them to jail. I don’t want retribution.”
The cop slammed the back door on the laments of the bleeding, weeping thieves, wheeled around, and grabbed Felix by his sweat-drenched shirt. “Where you from?”
“Salisbury,” replied Felix weakly. “North Carolina.”
“Well then maybe that explains why you are stupid,” said the cop. “We got laws in this town. Don’t tell me how to do my damn job. You hea’ me?”
“But I don’t want these guys’ lives ruined just because they made a mistake,” Felix protested. “What is the long-term good of punishment?”
“Shut up!” the cop commanded. “I come out here and put my ass on the line. Give a hundred and fifty percent. Here we are trying to do our job and some stupid” (he spit out the words exaggeratedly for rhetorical effect) “smartass from Sawlsberry damn, North damn Carolina thinks he knows more than accredited first responders. Well, in Georgia, stealing, with a knife too, is a helluvalot more than a ‘mistake.’ The American Way is alive in Galilee. Now you just git back on your way and mind your own damn business and we’ll mind ours, got that?”
“I hope you’re happy for destroying a young man’s life!” wailed one of the weeping thieves from the backseat of the patrol car. “The NRA says we could have had a gun. All we had was a knife! Oh Gaaawdd!”
“Shut up!” the fat cop ordered.
“I so wish we had another way . . .” pled Felix.
“Don’t blaspheme the NRA!”
The fat one opened his door (exposing the young men’s chorus of sobbing from the backseat), stuffed his girth into the front of the patrol car. Then wheeling around in the lot, the Chrysler kicked up gravel as it sped toward town.
Felix returned to the plate of cold, congealing chili dogs. Pink clots of grease globbed on the top of the mound of chili, despite the heat. Wordlessly he turned and moved toward the door.
“You don’t have to thank me for callin’ the cops and savin’ your butt. You do gotta pay me three dollars and eighty-five cent,” insisted the man behind the counter. Felix turned, smiled, and carefully searched for a five-dollar bill.
“Sawt said,” declared the man to a now empty diner, “‘every man has the face he deserves at fifty.’ Or, hell, maybe it was Camoos. You got yours early.”
* * *
“That’s him,” croaked Alberta Swanson upon sighting the gray Toyota inching in front of her house. She put her afternoon’s second gin fizz on a coaster, straightened her hair and hoisted her slip strap up. Peering through parted sheers into the gray twilight with her turkey neck, she saw a gawky, lean-looking young man emerge from the car. He pulled out and put on a wrinkled white shirt, then smoothed down his hair while looking in his side mirror. Tucking the shirt in his pants, he strode with conviction through the gate and up her walk.
“He’s not much of a looker,” she mumbled as she opened her front door. Outsider was written all over him.
“Mr. Luckie, I presume?”
“Yes ma’am. Felix Goforth Luckie. Trinity Communications and lifelong learner. And you must be Ms. Swanson,” he said, eagerly extending his hand.
“Mrs.,” she said as she opened the door. “What with global warming, can I offer you a cool gin and tonic, son?”
“Thank you but I don’t drink,” he said. “Alcohol, that is.”
“You don’t?” His answer disoriented her. “Your letter led me to believe that you were a college man. N. C. State, as I recall? In my day, college prepared one for life. Where you sent a boy to become a man. Do you suffer from some ailment that prohibits you from acceptance of a well-intentioned social drink?”
“No ma’am, it’s just that I once did something bad while I was under the influence, and . . .”
“Well, kindly keep it to yourself. None of my business,” she smirked. “Does your condition exclude tonic water with a slice of lime, or do you not trust yourself with that either?”
“Thank you, ma’am. May I ask if tonic water has caffeine? If not, that would be wonderful,” he replied.
Swanson
