Good People

They picked him up just past the intersection of Highway 10 and the Ninth Sideroad, coming home in a near blizzard from Avery’s doctor’s appointment in the city. He was trudging along the same side of the road as them, hauling an orange Jerry can the size of a bar fridge.

Dan slowed the car. “Should we?”  He was a much kinder person than  Avery, which annoyed the hell out of her, because he didn’t get rewarded for it. But then, he wasn’t looking for that.

Avery hesitated. There were newspaper and social media stories warning against picking up strangers on the road. But as they continued down the highway, she felt a pang of compassion. This time was different—the weather, the heavy load he was struggling with, and trying to be a better person like the social media ads said.

It didn’t take long to convince Dan, so they turned around and went back, coasting to a stop just in front of the man on foot. He opened the back door of the SUV, lifted the Jerry can in first and set it on the floor, then slid into the back seat behind Avery.

“Will the gas slosh all over?” she whispered to Dan, but he was too busy getting to know the stranger they’d picked up. By the time they pulled back on to the highway, Dan knew his name, occupation, and how he’d run out of gas. Avery, on the other hand, had a queasy feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t quite comprehend.

“Yep, BJ,” the stranger said. “I’m a simple kind of guy. Just go by my initials, makes things easy. As Avery half-turned to him in the back seat, a shiver ran down her spine. His teeth. Where had she seen them before—the incisors fighting the two front teeth for room, and the incisors winning. He grinned at her. “Good day, ma’am.”

‘Ma’am?’ Why would she be a ‘ma’am?’

“Cold day for running out of gas,” Dan observed. “We’'ll get your car going again for you. Need a hot coffee to warm you up, too?”

Avery’s head swivelled to Dan, slowly and deliberately, something like the head-turn Linda Blair made in The Exorcist. Why would Dan offer to buy coffee for a total stranger they had picked up on the roadside? But then, Dan was one of those ‘good people’ and she was more cautious--an ‘over anxious personality’ her therapist had called it. She could feel BJ’s hot breath on her neck, so close that he couldn’t have had his seatbelt done up. She felt the pressure of his hand on the back of her headrest. Her mind searched desperately for the reason for the ‘mCa’am.’ She’d only ever heard it used in prison or war movies.

Prison. That was it. She’d been on a jury a few years ago regarding an armed robbery with two defendants. One had been as cool as a cucumber, the other was his youngest brother who seemed to have been roped into the caper. BJ. It wasn’t their first rodeo—they’d held up convenience stores before. The jury convicted both of them. Five years in prison, the judge ordered. Then what the hell was BJ doing out in society already?

“That your dog?” BJ said, pointing through the front seats to the vinyl decal  attached to the dash.

Dan grinned. The dog had been his idea. Avery would have preferred a cat who wasn’t so demanding. “‘Honey' we call her. Avery picked the name,” Dan said, nodding towards her.

BJ cleared his throat. He sounded hoarse and dry. “Got two like that. They’re good guard dogs, them collies.” Avery shuddered and considered taking the decal off the dash but she didn’t want to draw any special attention to Honey. Just in case.

She gulped air that almost choked her. BJ’s breath smelled like salami and mustard. Not her two favourite foods.  She found a pen in the console and started writing a note to Dan on a piece of paper towel she found in her coat pocket: He’s the convict in my trial. Get rid... The pen tore the paper towel.

“Hard to write on that flimsy thing,” BJ said from the back seat. “Need something firmer like the back of a cigarette package.” She heard a tearing noise and then he handed her a slip of cardboard. She took it from him, reluctantly.

“Well, that’s handy of you,” said Dan, flashing a smile into the back seat of the car. She looked daggers at him, then put the cardboard and pen in her coat pocket and stared straight ahead.

The wind wailed around them. Blasts of snow hit the windshield. Traffic slogged along. The heater in the car roared in sync with the easy music Dan always selected on the radio.

***

It took thirty minutes to get BJ back to his car, which wasn’t on the side of the road at all. His car was sitting at the end of a long driveway to a trailer park that was closed for the winter, so the sign said. The hood was up. Avery’s stomach churned again as she took in the setting. Half-fallen trees crowded together, their trunks twisted and scarred, branches knitting a dense canopy. Snow whirled through the forest, vines spilled everywhere, curling around tree limbs, dangling like living ropes.

A beaten-up trailer sat between the trees, grungy white with faded red stripes around its circumference. There was cardboard over one of the windows with a large black “X” scrawled over it. The stairs leading up to the trailer looked rickety and old. Half of the railing had come away from the stairs and was swaying in the wind.

Two dogs came running from behind the trailer, barking ferociously. Avery suddenly noticed that she had planted both feet against the car floor as if she were applying the brakes—lightly first, then harder, the closer they got to the trailer. A sense of danger surrounded her. What if she and Dan were found murdered in their car here in the middle of nowhere and two dogs scratching at the vehicle’s doors, knowing there were bodies in there. Or, BJ took off in their SUV, perhaps having loaded their bodies into his little coupe, murdered and left to the elements. She shook, and told herself to stop this. He hadn’t been found guilty of murder, after all. Though it wasn’t much of an assurance.

At last they eased along beside the coupe with its hood up and Dan put the vehicle in park. A young woman emerged from the trailer and walked out to meet them at the car. She was wearing a long dress, hair plaited in one long braid down her back and running shoes on her feet. The bump in her stomach proclaimed a baby was on the way. She pulled an old sweater close around her and stood shivering in the driveway.

BJ opened the passenger door, and got out, then lifted the full Jerry can from the vehicle and sat it in the snowy driveway. He leaned inside the SUV and grinned.

“Stole her from the Mennonites,” he said. “Clara.” He stood up to face her and she beamed at him.

“Finally,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “I was worried about you. In this storm and all.”

Avery looked away, embarrassed at witnessing such a tender moment between them. She hadn’t thought BJ capable of demonstrating such vulnerability with anyone.

Dan lowered his car window and called out to them. “Hello, Clara! We rescued your man from the side of the road toting that heavy gas can.”

BJ poked his head in the window and looked straight at Avery. “I’m grateful for your help. Not many would stop for people on the side of the road anymore.”

He took Clara’s hand and they moved toward the trailer, BJ toting the gas can with the other hand. He set it down and they both turned to wave—his version was a forefinger in the air, hers, a polite: “Bye for now.” As if they might come back again and they’d be welcome.

Dan put the SUV in drive and moved forward slowly, then straightened it out and headed for the road.

“Stop!” Avery shouted when they were half-way down the driveway. It seemed that Dan hadn’t noticed how frightened she’d been, how his generosity might have been the means to a tragic end.

Dan put the car in park and leaned back. “You’re mad, right?”  The snow whirled around the car, the windshield wipers scraping frantically to clear it.

She took a deep breath. “When I was part of that jury a few years ago, BJ was one of the criminals being tried. We convicted him, for God’s sake, sent him to jail. I guess he got out on good behaviour.” She sighed, then added, “So yeah, what I’ve always said, ‘Don’t pick up strangers.’”

She sniffed and stared out the window, sinking deeper into her seat now that there was just the two of them in the car.

“Okay. I didn’t know. Jeez, what are the chances of that?” Dan’s fingers drummed against the steering wheel.

Avery traced a clot of snowflakes whirling down the window and settling in the groove of the window ledge. They held their shape, accumulating with others, like eiderdown from a sea duck. But then there were tiny ice balls inside, she heard them starting to ping on the car.

“Something else,” she whispered, as if in confession. “I didn’t agree with the rest of the jurors. At first anyway.”

She recounted how BJ was used as a look-out and to drive the get-away car but he didn’t steal anything, didn’t commit the actual act.

“I mean, he wasn’t as guilty as the other guy, you know. And so, for three days—remember those three days I was away—I didn’t agree with the rest of the jurors.”

She thought of those who had children waiting for them at home, husbands and jobs, and vacations booked and the trial and subsequent sequestering had been a total pain in the ass for them.

“Why did you finally agree?” Dan said.

She frowned and bit her bottom lip. Took her hands out of her gloves and splayed them across her lap, rubbing them up and down her jeans. It was a nervous habit she had developed since the trial.

“For three days they hounded me, just as I imagined BJ’s co-accused did to him. I bent, finally, like I thought BJ must have done when his brother roped him into his crimes. The others on the jury were stronger than me, and I was afraid, so I agreed, in the end, to a guilty verdict. But I didn’t think  BJ was that guilty. I mean he did it, but maybe he didn’t have a choice.”

“Well,” Dan said, patting her hand. “He’s out of jail now and getting on with his life. Maybe he got out early for good behaviour. He’s with a Mennonite girl, for God’s sake. You can’t ask for better rehabilitation than that. She’ll make a good person out of him, yet. And... then the baby.” He smiled weakly.

She nodded. Noticed the snow piling up around them, the wind still shrieking through the trees.

“We’d better get out of here,” Avery said. “While we still can.”

Dan nodded and put the  SUV in drive, creeping slowly ahead, plowing through the thick drifts. A tree creaked and groaned in the laneway beside her, its load burdened heavy with snow.

Avery sighed. It felt good to bare her soul to Dan. She had refused to talk about the trial just after it, and then Dan had avoided the subject. Suddenly, she was a little glad for BJ—an odd, tender feeling that she couldn’t have explained. Maybe, just maybe...

She opened her window to let the cold air in, craving its sharp and brittle sensation on her skin.

And there, in the passenger mirror, she saw him, standing in the driveway, the two dogs at his side, and a cigarette between his fingers. He brought it to his lips slowly, oh, so slowly, and then blew out—tiny circles escaping, swirling up and over the trees, and he grinned as if it was the day his baby was born—perfect and slick and shiny new.