The Rights of a Man who has Lost his Goodness

The Rights of a Man who has Lost his Goodness ~ Cassidy McGinty

            My name is Jack Shallow and I used to be a good person.

            I was the only good person from Wilardston, Pennsylvania for nineteen years. I never cheated, not even on tests. I didn’t steal, hell, I never took anything from my own mother without asking, not that she noticed. She was usually too busy cheating on my father while he was off getting stoned at the nearest tire shop. And God have there been a good number of times I’ve wanted to land a right punch on all my brothers. They wouldn’t be able to define courtesy or integrity if they tried. Probably wouldn’t be able to spell them or read them either. That’s how everyone is in Wilardston. I’ve never met anyone different. And that’s what led me to learning everything I could about how to get a car running so I could fix up my old man’s Volkswagen Beatle and get the hell out of that place.

My father did say I could have it if I could get her running. He wasn’t even drunk. That was the last time I ever spoke to him while he was sober, when I turned sixteen. He was never much to talk to anyway. I like to think my father was once a good man, or maybe he could have been. Maybe way back before he had met any of his poisons, the things that made him a rotten dirt bag with no more pride than a jar of dirt. I like to imagine he had been a lot like me: eager to get out of this hellhole without a black mark on his soul. Except my father didn’t have the self discipline I have. He didn’t have the knowhow or the motivation. That’s the only reason we’re different, and maybe if he hadn’t given up like he has, maybe I could’ve told him I loved him before I left.

But he did give up, so I left without a word to anybody. And just as it had for the past few days, that Volkswagen Beatle fired right up and we made a sprint for the border like no man had ever seen. I remember the exact moment we passed that beautiful sign, the one that read, “eavin W la dsto”, probably because my brothers had used it for target practice. I had never felt such freedom, like I had suddenly dropped a hundred pounds of groceries on the kitchen floor and someone else was going to put them away. It made me want to soar, so I did. I pressed the gas flat on the floor and watched the speedometer needle shake and rattle and slowly rise till it was pushing ninety. Then I slowed back to a steady forty when I saw a car enter through the horizon. No use getting in an accident now and besides, it is against the law to speed.

I didn’t know exactly where I was headed. I was just going west with five hundred dollars in my pocket I had saved since I was six and my old man’s suitcase full of everything I own. My father had given it to me when I was ten. It was the only birthday present I had received in the past five years and it was three weeks late. But there it was sitting on my bed with my slug of a father.

He said to me, “Here ya go son. This here’ll be of real use to ya if you ever get out of this goddamn hell.” He laughed like it was one of the funniest names he had ever given this place. I remember thinking how insanely accurate it was before he slapped a meaty hand on my shoulder. My father always reeked of stale cigarettes, marijuana, and booze. He creakily kneeled down so his gruff face was level with mine.

“Now don’t you go runnin’ off just yet. Yer gots a little bit of learnin’ to do, boy.” He looked at me for a while and I saw something I didn’t know my father possessed. It was pity but also a little bit of hope and sadness, like he felt like this was all his fault and he was doing his best to fix it in the only way he knew how. And then, like an old scab, that expression fell off replaced by rage. He stood and kicked the closest thing to him, which happened to be a DNA model I had made out of aluminum foil, chicken wire, and markers. It had taken me weeks, and in a matter of seconds I watched it crumble into a pile of garbage. “Who am I kiddin’,” he scowled. “You’ll never get out of here, ya bastard. Ya can’t!”

And there I was, defying him and every odd against me. The steering wheel smooth and solid under my steady grip, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony blasting from the tiny speakers on the sides of the doors, and the windows rolled down, blowing in a tunnel around my face. I didn’t know which state I was in. All I could see were fields and fields of corn, then wheat, then corn again. It was monotonous, but out there, with no bad people or any people in sight, it was heaven.

That was perhaps one of the reasons the car parked on the side of the road didn’t register until I was almost on top of it. My first instinct was to keep driving. I didn’t know the man, and, back where I was from, high jacking wasn’t uncommon. But we were in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a filling station for miles and he looked like he needed a hand. So, for once, I pushed down everything Wilardston had taught me, and decided to trust someone for once.

The first thing I noticed when I got out of my Beatle was how big he was. Not only was he a good five inches taller than me, but his shoulders were broad and meaty. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he told me he was a dock loader or something, but he didn’t say anything as I approached him. He just sat on the hood of his tiny, red Sedan, watching me with black eyes that were almost half hidden by thick bushy, eyebrows. Every instinct in my body screamed, “Get out of here! Leave! You should’ve never stopped!” but I knew what it was like to be judged by your cover and I was a new man, the type of man who would stop and go out of his way to help a stranger.

“Hello, sir,” I called when I was a body length away. “Is something wrong with your car?”

“Over heated,” he rumbled standing. I resisted the urge to swallow as he straightened. I knew how to defend myself. Growing up where I did, it was a requirement, but it wouldn’t have mattered up against someone of his size.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” I offered. My hands were cold and clammy, which I would’ve thought physically impossible under the blazing sun. “I have a few gallons of water in my trunk if you would like to—”

When he grabbed me I acted on impulse, ducking, trying to avoid his thick grip, but I had let my guard down, and now I was paying the price. He slammed me against the searing hot hood of the Sedan, smashing my face against the metal. I screamed, thrashing and trying to gain some type of leverage but he held me there. I cringed as I felt his thick, hard chest press against my back.

“Just doin’ what I have to, punk,” he growled in my ear. He let go of me, this man whose name I didn’t even know. I took the few seconds of freedom to whirl myself onto my back, just in time to see him raise a crow bar that came out of nowhere. It missed my skull by millimeters, and the realization he was trying to kill me for my damned Beatle that I just got running a few days ago began to sink in.

Admittedly, my next hit was cheap, but it was either that or get my faced bashed in. He sank to the dusty ground clutching his crotch and, despite the soreness that was already seeping into my arms and the throbbing burn on my cheek and ear; I sprinted to my car, each joint in my body shaking and my stomach ready to heave up the cheese sandwich I had eaten for lunch. I couldn’t hear anything around me. My only focus was to get the car going and get out of there, even as my hands fumbled with the door and the key.

I didn’t even see him. I should have. He was right in front of me. But I didn’t, and right after I had let the clutch out and slammed my foot on the gas, the most sickening sound I will ever hear in my life erupted from the burly man who had just attacked me with a crowbar. It was somewhere in between a scream, a grunt, and a crunch. The car had leapt forward before my brain even registered the sound, and when I got out he was laying face up, six feet from my bumper. I remember how far because it was about how deep the hole I dug was.

It was something that had been decided before I even checked for a pulse. There was a certain part of me that already knew he was dead. I had killed him. I killed that man. And his black eyes stared at me the whole time I dug along the side of that dusty road. Where I got the spade, his car, my car, it didn’t matter. All had to remember of it were the blisters on my palms that rubbed against the steering wheel for the next four days.

Before I rolled him in, a splash of light caught my eye. A gold chain, causing wrinkles on his bulbous neck, glared at me, and before I could stop myself it was in my hand. On it was a single charm, the cross. When I pulled it over my head and tucked it into my shirt, I could already feel the metal burning a white hot scar on my chest. With the last shovel of dirt in place, I threw the spade into the field, got into the Beatle and never looked back.

My name is Jack Shallow and I am not a good person. I killed a man.