AT FIRST Matthew feels only astonishment, disbelief, something like the shock from a blow. As if he’d had the wind knocked out of him, for a moment he can’t seem to breathe. In another moment he’s sucking air into his lungs fiercely but can’t seem to get any oxygen from it. Then he droops, all his energy gone at once, and feels like a fool, that he’s been played for a fool and deserved it. They saw everything, these children, understood everything about him, his desires, his clumsiness, his fakery, his vulnerability, everything.
His anger begins to rise. It overwhelms his embarrassment, replaces it with fury. He cries out, and it’s a fine, furious cry, wordless, horribly eloquent. He turns, turns, turns again, searching for something. He doesn’t realize, honestly doesn’t realize, that he’s looking for a weapon. He stumbles over something, bends and grasps it, raises it, and sees in the wedge of light that falls across his arm and hand that it’s a piece of concrete paving. He hefts it. The cab, where’s the cab? He turns, turns, turns, hunting. The cab is moving away, to his left. Fucking shits. He hurls the piece of paving in the direction of the cab, but it’s too heavy, and the cab is already too far away. The chunk falls humiliatingly short. Shit. Shit. He looks around for something else to throw, picks up other, smaller chunks, and hefts them, until he finds one he likes. He straightens up to throw it, and he sees the cab’s brake lights come on. The cab is stopping. Fear chills him. He steps into the shadows, against the bridge abutment, and watches, holding his chunk. The cab makes a left turn, and in the light of its sweeping headlights, Matthew can see the reason: the road ahead is closed. Only when the lights sweep around and light up the opposite side of the bridge abutment does Matthew realize that the driver has had to turn completely around and will, in a moment, pass within a few feet of him. He feels the rush of a thrilling emotion. Recalling the instruction of one of his badgering gym coaches, he glances at the chunk, adjusts his grip, draws a breath, takes a stance, coolly, planting his feet. The cab pulls into view, moving slowly, dodging potholes. He winds up and throws. The chunk strikes the driver’s window squarely and smashes it instantaneously, the glass bursting into the bright pebbles Matthew sees in the gutters every morning after the nighttime radio harvest. The driver shouts, the cab swerves, a wheel drops into a pothole, the frame shrieks against the pavement, and the cab comes to a wrenching halt, tossing the kids around inside.
Holy shit! says BW. That was great! Amazing!
The driver is out of the cab at once, looking around, turning as Matthew turned when he was hunting for a weapon, in the same half squat. Matthew is terrified, sweating, shivering, unable to move, but thrilled, thrilled.
“Yo, shithead!” he shouts. “Fuck you!”
The driver reaches into the cab, grabs from the floor the jack handle he keeps under his seat, turns, and runs toward Matthew, brandishing it. Oh, shit. Matthew turns to run, falls. Down, he turns and turns about, trying to run and rise at the same time. Is he running? He can’t tell whether he’s running or crawling. He seems to hear the sound of the driver’s running feet, his breath. That can’t be. It must be me. He has no real sense of what his arms and legs are doing. Somewhere to hide. A place to hide.
Not to hide, to strike. A place to strike from.
Hide in the shadows.
Strike from the shadows.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 556, Mark Dorset considers City Life and Tools, Multi-Purpose: Jack Handle from this episode.
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🎧 556: At first . . .