A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

http://rattlesnakedreams.blogspot.com  A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

Samaritan in Los Angeles
     At the beginning of summer, 1970, I was hitchhiking through Los Angeles to drop in at Mike Taylor's wedding, then head for Mexico for a summer of reading John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, then hitchhiking to as many of the locations mentioned in the book as I could get to. I'd just finished my first year in graduate school, was startled to find I had a little money left over from my first year scholarship, and figured if I was really thrifty I could survive a summer in Mexico without working.
     It was rush hour and I was stranded on some little traffic island in the midst of what seemed like an intersection of all the freeways in California. I couldn't even see a way to cross a street without getting hit, and didn't know which street to cross if I could.
     A pickup swerved out of traffic and bumped onto the curb. "Git in..." the driver yelled. I did. "... 'fore we both git run over!" he said as he rammed the pickup back into traffic. He turned to me, grinning: "Are you as lost as I think you are?" I said I sure was. I told him where I was trying to go, and he drove me to a less frantic street and told me where to catch a ride.
     I thanked him for bailing me out of a difficult situation, and for going out of his way to do it. I climbed down and retrieved my knapsack from the floorboard. As I bent to pick it up, I noticed the muzzle of a .22 rifle just sticking out from under the seat on the passenger side. I looked up at him, trying to formulate a question about what there was to hunt in urban Los Angeles.
     "That's my nigger gitter," he said, his smile as friendly as before.
     I didn't know what to say. I'd just had my faith in humanity sent to both ends of the spectrum, in a couple of minutes, by the same man.
     "Git many?" I asked. I actually wanted to know if he used the .22 to shoot at black people, but now I think it came out like we were two country boys talking about hunting cottontails.
     He shook his head, still grinning. "Nah." He drove off.