Gideon's Confession

6

My uncle’s checks came and went as did the days. One day flying into another and so many of those days spent drinking at the bar. And waiting. The door to the bar would fly open, and I’d turn my head to see who it was, who was coming in. If it was the face of one of the regulars, I turned my head back to my beer. If it was a new face, I stared at it, trying to figure it out. Who did it belong to, and why were they stopping in here? Sometimes someone walking through the bar might notice me and step up and say hello. They’d stay a moment or a few hours, and then they too would be gone to pursue their life, and I would never hear from them again. So many people were so busy. It was perplexing to me how one came to have so many plans, how one came to be so busy, always off doing something or another. For me, I have always felt a tremendous inertia. Whenever I felt motivated to do something, which was rarer and rarer the older I got, the more pointless it seemed. Why bother? I would say to myself. What’s the point? And so I sat and I sat an awful long time not doing a damned thing. And so it went for a long time, and then, one day, something happened that changed everything. I w a s ti r e d f r o m a night of poor sleep. I was in my car driving, flipping through stations on the radio wondering whatever would become of me. It was one of those bright, clear days. I was going about my business, going 118 G i d e o n ’ s C o n f e s s i o n through the motions, running my errands and not paying enough attention to the world around me when someone driving a silver minivan through the intersection missed his red light. We were both moving fast, and in a careening instant we both skidded to avoid a high-impact collision. I realized quite calmly that I was on the cusp of being killed—a split second from death. Thankfully, the other driver must have had the same revelation. I could see it in his eyes in the slowed-down moment before the crash. (They were blue eyes, slightly haggard. Perhaps he too had had a poor night of sleep.) We both turned to get out of the way, and by the grace of god or good fortune we avoided each other, a narrow miss. Without so much as stopping we went on our ways, unscathed. But as I drove along, the shock of what I’d just narrowly missed was so overwhelming that I had to pull over to the side of the road and catch my breath. My hands were trembling, and I could feel my heart pounding. Suppose I died, I thought to myself, sitting in my car. Who would care that I died? There was a moment there where I wasn’t even sure I would care if I died. It might be easier to let all this go . . . But then something in me wanted there to be others who cared if I died. At the very least I wanted a small list of people who possibly might mourn my passing, a group of people who therefore cared that I had been part of their lives. I could count on Victor, I thought, if I had to. He was my friend, my confidant, my mentor. He would definitely care if I suddenly died. He might even feel partly to blame for my death. I could probably count on Walt too. He might mourn my passing. He might even bury me in J o s e p h G . P e t e r s o n 119 Oak Woods Cemetery even though I vowed never to let Boettcher get his hands on me. He’d help the mourners out at the water bubbler. He’d help with the little orange flags on the cars. He’d dig the hole, lower me down, and fill the hole with a backhoe after the funeralgoers had departed . He might even be good enough to tend my grave through the seasons: dust the snow off my tombstone...