INTERSECTIONS: Orchard @ Division

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

by Luanne diBernardo

I’d never seen the car before, but the girl I’d seen for years; a girl from a couple blocks over who passed our house on her way to school, sometimes in winter the light from our kitchen the only light streaking the early snow where she passed.  Evenings too, like now before dusk, where the curious car slows to the pace of the girl, not in the lane where vehicles belong, but nearer the shoulder where a week’s worth of leaves rustle about the car’s bloated tires. 

She was heading towards school and away from her house, away from the Erie Street Bridge, a drawbridge that rarely drew anymore. Any longer, it was crossed by locals, people who returned here from work, but never the car just outside my window. Twenty-seven years I registered, transferred, and collected surrendered plates at our local DMV. I knew every prefix to every plate; I knew the auto dealers, the city officials, the corporate issues, and the vanities; and this car was a stranger.

Dull and blistered, it barely crawls to the walk of the girl. One of its taillights is busted and bandaged with bright red cellophane that crinkles around the empty duct. Inside, a man hunkers so low across the front seat that I can watch him watch the girl and, for whatever reason, his foot jabs the brakes while he calls something out, and politely she answers. 

Even from here where I watch, the man reads large and lumpy, his large skull misshapen by the swell of his hair, easier to see once his car has paused for whatever he wants of the neighborhood girl, a sincerity to her movements that touches me, the hunched-over man now smiling. It’s difficult to tell who is asking and who is answering anymore, though clearly the girl and the man are people not yet familiar with the other, evident by how she moves nearer, then stops, moves nearer, then stops, when just in time, he says what he says and she reaches the wide metal stretch of door, it’s old chrome handle dangled by a jimmy of twisted wire.  With one hand slung over his steering wheel, the bulky man’s heft leans further across the seat, his free hand releasing the latch of the busted handle, a movement perfected. The dull length of  door gapes open.  His body scootches back behind the wheel.  Without so much as a glance in her direction, he waits.

Her feet flinch towards the opened door, but her body lags; only seconds long and barely noticed, it quakes up my lawn, through my kitchen window, up my spine and across my scalp.  I’ll do it the moment I get to work, check the computers to learn where his plate was registered, his name, what business he’d have with a girl from our town, certain I was making something from nothing, the heavy car door as high as her shoulders, once seated. In a movement that should have been two, his fleshy hand reached over the girl and wrangled the gizmo that locked her safely inside.

The car jerks forward. My hands feel clammy despite the fact they are still immersed in dishwater. Queasiness crawls from my gut while I fight the urge to run from my house, to stop whatever it is that’s happening, a thing so deliberate and yet I can find no words as I imagine myself explaining what I’d seen to the officers who’d arrive to take my statement, or to the girl’s parents, or even to the man when I’d scream for him to stop, except that only I’d seen him pumping the brakes of his own registered car, and only I’d seen the girl enter freely, a whole lot of trouble because I happened to be at my kitchen window where I’d seen her a thousand times before, where, if I minded my own business, this all would have happened anyway, proof in how the mammoth car devours the street, its immense rusted body too long for the three-point turn that rubs streaks of black rubber against the curb. A battered rim escapes and wobbles, the story of a runaway pancake, I think without smiling. 

I crane my head forward, then sharply against my kitchen window in order to sight the round, red taillights.  Cindered smoke chokes from an oily tail pipe and stains the air between where the girl had been and where she was heading, her face turned back as if she’d left something behind her.