The Unlikely Hero

Approaching the corner, I bristled as the stiff wind ruffled the envelopes I grasped in white fingers carelessly ungloved. I was nearing the end of ten minutes of monotony, a routine walk home from a friend’s made treacherous by the cold, the threat of ice stooping me forward and fixing my eyes upon the glistening pavement. Having crunched and skittered and sloshed through snow marred by mud and salt and ground to slick sheen by hundreds of passing feet, I finally turned my gaze skyward. My eyes complied, bringing into focus a metal rod, made crystalline and cloudy by ice, opposite me to the west. A red hand, blinking, halting, taunting, with numbers counting down beside it: 8, 7, 6.

Of course.

A sigh huffed out of my lungs almost involuntarily, the white vapor rising hot yet feebly dissipating into black. I could probably make it, if I hurried. A quick glance across the intersection stilled the rising tempo of my footsteps. A white SUV with a clear, plastic rod fixed to its roof. Inside, red and blue lights which, so the stories went, eagerly stopped pedestrians who dared cross an empty road out of turn.

Better not.

But maybe the cop was busy? Outside the driver’s door, a man stood, his hands desperately seeking respite in the pockets of his zip-up hoodie. With bent knee and forward lean he lowered himself to the eye level of the driver. Who chats with cops these days? I looked down the cross-street, the nearing headlights and slushy goopy roads staying my anxious, tiring feet. Across the way, the neon white figure confidently striding forward, showing the way north, inexorably gave way to the same blinking red hand. 20, 19, 18. Fine. Not long.

Back to the man, who still spoke to the cop, it appeared, with increasing urgency. He turned, pointing north. Directions? Lost? My mind idled, dulled by the wind and the pavement and the cold. 13, 12, 11. I followed the angle of the man’s arm as it stretched out, his bare hand curling in the wind as my own plunged deeper inside my pocket. He beckoned an unseen entity, asking for it to follow him. 8, 7, 6.

Darkness melted away to reveal a woman standing on the curb, her torso bundled and head draped to hide her from unforgiving night. A large blanket over her arms, concealing the weight she bore as she hurried to clamber through the door, now ajar, to the cruiser’s backseat. She looked down at the blanket, adjusting one edge hurriedly but carefully, pulling it close to shut out the frigid air. Important. A treasure. 3, 2, 1.

Her baby.

The door slammed, damming the heat that had flooded freely from the car in near-transparent streams. Red and green — green? — flashes illuminated the now-reflective tarmac in the intersection. The cruiser lurched forward, circling wide right, then back around left, reversing course. It sped toward the glass-fronted medical center piercing the horizon, whose brilliant azure facade in the daylight now twisted into cloudless black, a phantasm in a pool of midnight. As I shielded my eyes from the blinding red and green pulses, the dim sepia glow of the streetlamps barely let me make out the name carefully decaled on the side of the cruiser as it wheeled away, the smoke from its tailpipe battered and dissolving. The campus parking authority. The unlikely hero. Huh.

The red hand barring my progress yielded to an intrepid white figure that graciously beckoned me across the street. I followed, lifting my hand from my pocket in silent acknowledgement to a car as it let me pass before it slid, fishtailing, southward. Now, only seconds away from angling for the key in my pants pocket and turning it against the lock that grew more stubborn by the day, I could already feel the hazy, gold warmth of home reach out to me.

I hope it reaches them, too.