Meeting Evil by Thomas Berger

boy asked derisively. “This is Beckworth.”
    “Just tell her how to get here.”
    “By car? I’m not old enough to have my license yet. I don’t know much about roads except just between here and the village.”
    “That’s okay,” John said, trying to keep the boy calm. “Fine. Just tell her how to get here from the village—that’s Beckworth?”
    “Naw, the village that’s closest is Bolton.”
    “Bolton?” John asked. “Okay, just tell her that, and then what road to take to get here.”
    “Does she know where Bolton is? Where’s she coming from, anyway?”
    “She can find Bolton on a map.” Desperation was gaining on him again. Joanie was an excellent driver, better than he in precision techniques such as parking parallel to a curb, but she was hopeless with a map and, uncharacteristically for her sex, had the aversion to asking directions from strangers for which males are traditionally noted. Her explanation was that men might get the wrong idea if so accosted by her.
    “Where’d you leave your car?” the boy asked through the slit between door and jamb, which he prudently had not widened. “Want me to call the Triple-A?”
    “I didn’t come by car.”
    “No car and yet you’ve got a twelve-gauge pump gun?”
    The non sequitur made John sigh. “Would you mind first making that call to my wife? I’ll explain while I’m waiting for her. The gun doesn’t belong to me. I don’t even know how to unload it.”
    The boy spoke in a sneering tone. “Then what are you doing with it?”
    “I really think I ought to talk to her,” John said, turning the weapon to offer it butt-first. “I’ll bet living out here you know how to use this. Take it and cover me, if you want, while I make the call. In fact, you keep the gun as a present from me. I’ll repay the guy I borrowed it from.”
    “Know what one of these costs?” the boy asked skeptically.“You don’t have that kind of money. You look like some kind of a bum.”
    It was amazing to John how much the comment hurt him, though it would seem to be the least of his complaints on this day. No doubt it was worse because a minor had made it. “I’m no bum,” he said reproachfully. “I’m a respectable man with a wife and children and job, a good position with a fine firm. I have an excellent reputation in my town, which has many well-to-do residents, including some television personages who paid a million or more for their homes: that red-headed woman on the morning news, I don’t know if you’ve seen her? And others. I’ve just had some bad breaks today, that’s all. I’m a good person.”
    “You don’t exactly look it.”
    John lost his temper. “God damn it, you let me use that telephone!”
    The boy slammed the door and loudly latched it.
    John tried unsuccessfully to open the screen door, but the hook was fastened. He pounded on its frame. There was no response. He had been stupid to boil over like that. The boy was probably home alone for some reason, maybe recuperating from an illness that kept him from school. So the sick child is threatened by an infamous-looking tramp with a stolen gun. There could now be a list of charges against John for a multitude of crimes he had not committed, some of which had never even occurred. The matter of the truckdriver, however,
was
serious: that could not be forgotten. But not only had he not run the man down, he had called an ambulance on the nearest phone he could reach. He was still utterly clean, if he could just find somebody who would listen to and believe him.
    On an impulse, he ran down from the porch and located where the telephone line came in from the roadside pole.Using the gunbarrel as a lever, he forced the wires to rip away from the porcelain connector. If he was not permitted to phone his wife, he would not suffer the boy to make an unwarranted call to the police. This unfairness simply had to stop. He did not deserve it.
    He returned to the porch and propped the weapon