The Interstate to Damascus

The heat rose to meet his face. The scorched sidewalk reflected and radiated it. The vehicles on the interstate, passing feet from his elbows, created no breeze, just waves that buffeted him.

Dauntless, Marty plodded on. Shoe after broken shoe, grit irritating the cracked skin between his toes. He couldn’t stop: he had shopping.

He called it shopping, but it came from the dumpsters behind the supermarket. A good haul. He’d taken all he could manage, maybe more than he could manage.

He walked hunched to keep the sun from burning his face. He mopped his brow. This heat, it was biblical.

God’s testing me. I’m not letting him down today.

He just wanted to get back. Back to the underpass, to the tarp that he refused to call home. Today at least he could call it shade.

A truck pounded past, kicking up a wave of dust. Marty blinked, spitting grit from his lips, then he heard the silence that rose up behind the vehicle as it disappeared around the curve. A break in the traffic.

He needed to cross. He peered up and down the highway, holding his breath to listen through his thatch of uncut mane. Nothing coming. He stepped off the kerb.

The front edge of his left shoe clipped it. He stumbled. His right leg jammed into the ground. He caught himself, but not quite the shopping bag, which swung out across the concrete.

Marty gasped. The best of today's one-day-past produce scattered across the highway.

He scrabbled to gather what he could. The tomatoes which weren’t burst were covered in dirt. He couldn’t spare any water to clean them. He'd find a way. The apples he could peel, maybe. A sudden gust blew dust into his throat and he hacked and spluttered to clear it, covering his eyes from the glare of the sun.

He didn’t see the car approaching.

The first thing he knew was the sound of the tyres, locked, shearing and skewing, bearing down on him like judgment.

He fell backwards, his right hand flattening a tomato into a red smear across the concrete. The car was almost on him.

He cried out for God, for mercy, for a miracle.

The car careened diagonally the last few yards and came to a stop, his ankle in the shade of the vehicle’s front bumper.

Marty gasped, rejoicing at whatever intervention had spared him.

Over the shimmering hood of the Toyota, he saw the faces of its occupants: the driver, a woman, ashen, her sunglasses hanging from one ear; a passenger, holding his hand to his forehead, staunching a black cascade; and in the back, a boy no more than ten, eyes wide, as the two of them exchanged a moment of recognition of the disaster they had both barely survived.

Marty’s jubilation turned into horror at what he had caused. Four lives on the brink, all for a bag of shopping.

The people in the vehicle were moving, checking and reassuring and untangling from one another.

Marty dusted himself off, flustered for a moment by the red liquid dripping from his right hand, until he realised it was tomato pulp. He almost wanted to laugh, to lick himself, not to waste that precious juice. He turned back to the Toyota...

And then his stomach dropped.

He saw over the roof, beyond the car, emerging at speed from around the curve in the road, an eighteen-wheeler, sun strobing off its chrome grille, twin exhausts sending hot ripples into the viscid air.

The leviathan showed no sign of stopping, and nor, as the road shrank between it and the stalled Toyota, any ability to do so.

Marty pitched himself onto the bonnet of the car, waving his arms. They seemed to think he was berating them, so they gestured back coarsely. He yelled, pointing sharply through the vehicle to the approaching calamity behind them. But the driver just yelled back, spewing further profanities at this crazed homeless man who had ambushed them.

But Marty saw that the boy in the back had seen. The boy was looking out the rear window, recognising his own death drawing near.

Marty lurched around the side of the car, hoping maybe to pull open the rear door, grab the kid, and leap them both to safety... But there was no time.

The boy looked at him through the window and once again they were united in a moment of mutual understanding.

In the seconds before the truck obliterated the car – as Marty would tell the investigating officers some hours later – he saw the boy raise his right hand and form his fingers into a deliberate gesture: his thumb pressed to his little finger, his middle three fingers raised.

“He blessed me,” Marty explained, his eyes wide like hubcaps, “I am redeemed. I am guiltless.”