To the untrained eye, Foster McMillan might seem completely doomed, having locked himself inside of his powder blue four-door car with a loaded 44-caliber pistol resting on his trembling lap, right at the bed of the lake where he first learned to swim.
Scowling at his own presence, in fact, nothing in the last week for Foster would paint him as anything but utterly menacing. That is, to the untrained, blinded eye.
But one with curious vision, and an innocent logic, would wonder what it was exactly that brought Foster to be so crestfallen, in such a state that would cause sweat to trickle ferociously from his face in the dead of winter. How could a grounded scholar unlearn twenty-five years of sound upbringing in a matter of minutes?
Certainly, this was a different Foster.
It wasn’t the Foster, who at only 11-years-old, while waiting in his mother’s white Volvo in the supermarket parking lot as she shopped for groceries, took notice of a crying baby in the neighboring car. It was a regular July midday in the south; a triple-digit, sweltering, fry meat on the curb sizzle.
Steam fizzled, crackling from the absorbing black asphalt that a barefoot dare not touch; a daring, but fading green leaf in a tiny red clay pot crumpled underneath the sun in the rear panel of a riddled hatchback.
And then there was the baby, almost a mirror of the fighting leaf. With the windows rolled up tight, the four-month-old newborn cried mercilessly, sitting helplessly exposed to the 103-degree scorcher, wiggling and whining in his car seat as the unforgiving rays beat against his tender red face.
Minutes passed and no one came to the car… Twenty minutes elapsed and the cries weakened as the humidity intensified, beaming dangerously through the clear-plated glass onto the child’s vulnerable skin. Water streamed from his forehead like a shower, masking onto his face and neck.
Foster had the AC blasting and was still bothered somewhat by the heat, so it was frightening to even fathom what the baby endured. He looked over with serious concern, once and a second time until his attention was finally given undividedly.
Cooking was the child’s flesh, the car now a frying pan and the sun the stove’s eye.
Foster grew restless, conceiving how long the boy had been in the car while pondering how much longer it would be before someone came. He glanced around. His optimism grew every time he saw a white lady nearing. But even as their pace seemed to temper whenever they’d approach, none would stop. Every few seconds, to Foster’s dismay, another possibility, another shade-seeker, all ducking, hiding and fleeing as from the dragon’s flames.
Unfortunately, as Foster weighed these crucial unknowns, the child’s eyes had closed and he didn’t seem to be breathing. Life stood still, very still, almost waiting for Foster to choose before it moved on with its final decision.
Unwilling to watch him suffer any longer, almost with innate reaction, grabbing the tire iron from the trunk, young Foster took three manly swings into the front window, cracking a hole big enough for him to reach in and unlock the door from the inside; grunting, yet never wavering, Foster grinded his elbow through the shattered glass slicing his skin.
And as the car alarm wailed, he leaned in the back – his knees being scraped by loose window remains on the seat cushion, and his ankle being burnt by a furnace-hot metal belt buckle – and he scooped up the child, his body burning and eyes welded tight. The baby’s clothes were soaking wet, sticking to his skin. Foster nestled him close to his chest away from the heat and hollered for help as customers scurried in and out of the grocery store. The once squirming infant was now motionless, sending all that surrounded him into panic.
The boy’s mother was located ten minutes later. Indeed, those ten felt ten times more over an eternity for Foster, almost a baby himself, who got lost behind the screaming red sirens, flashing blue lights, and scampering paramedics.
Justly, he received a Citizens Award from the sheriff, and more importantly, he saved little Jacob’s life. Doctors said he acted with possibly only minutes to spare. Had his picture taken for the newspaper, and was spotlighted on all the local TV stations.
The mother, who was found wandering aimlessly on the other end of the parking lot, drug-induced, saying she had forgotten where she left her daughter, had her picture snapped for a mug shot. Foster was certainly a hero that day. But such a gesture was faint in the crescent of his mind now.It was no longer yesterday. And yet he was as helpless as that baby boy.
Seemingly, what once made Foster special was what eventually led him down this dark, icy back road at two in the morning in six-degree weather, with nothing but a patch of fog hovering over the lake standing between him and death.
Alienated from society. Chained to the present. Separated from understanding. Married to grief.
He had fixated his eyes, reddened and glassy, on the patch, which was moving slowly over the still, frost-covered water. He stared intently as ice cycles crystallized on a small bush on the bank of the lake. And still he followed the patch. Silently. Steadily. Sweating profusely. But it was only a matter of time before that patch was out of sight, and Foster was out of hope.
Closing his eyes, reminiscing on the fate of the past week, the flashback finally became all too much to bear. Rubbing his forehead had become tiresome, and painful; there were no more patches to distract the hurt, no sweet aromas to suffocate the deathly smell of blood smeared across the face of his shirt, and no mystical regiments to erase his fatally etched memory.
It became certain that the nightmare wasn’t going to stop – at least not by itself.
He had to do it. It was frigid. It was black. It was unyielding; it was his soul, more threatening than the weather itself. He needed answers or at least some form of peace to calm this raging storm. The gun was getting warmer from the caress of his palm. He begged. He pleaded. But sadly, no answers followed, no peace appeared. Not for him. Not this night. A night that was so grim. A night that was so final.
Maybe he asked too much of one night; perhaps one night took too much from him. Regardless, with no tears to shed from his cursed eyes, and no more strength to fuel his anger, Foster was running out of reasons to live.
There was no hope for him to grasp, his fingers fidgety, wet and weak. The ground had slipped from underneath his feet and desperation had no answer for gravity. Even his cry was loud; he screamed himself hoarse. But who could hear his plea except for nature – out there tucked in between the long rolling hills, underneath the thick, deep wooded forests, hidden behind the wide, cluttered cow pastures and endless dirt roads, it was his burden to bear, his questions to answer.
His alone. And all at once, by himself, for himself, he replied… resoundingly, EMPHATICALLY.
…He squeezed the silver-plated handle tight, wrapped his shaking finger around the trigger, and finally, with a chilling calm, he pointed, aimed and in one swift motion, he pulled it – a simple nudge to the trigger. Little resistance, a centimeter’s worth of work, a split of a split second in time was all it demanded. It didn’t take a man to do this. But this was not about being a man.
Barely two miles from the parked car, the roaring gunshot pierced through the murky night air and penetrated the silence of his house; the echo rang relentlessly off the walls throughout the neighborhood, triggering car alarms, causing sleeping dogs to awake and bark, and sending a heard of cattle in a nearby grazing area stampeding.
It was a tumultuous explosion, the fire bursting out of the barrel like a blaze undaunted. It stunned. Shook the ground. Numbed the air with its fierceness. And like any passing storm, the booming thunder of the bullet had come and gone; a rift almost paralyzing, behind it left an eerie atmosphere, one diluted with silence and absent of certainty. It was a miserable, sad end, a spiritless end, the bullet now ruptured through, a pitifully morbid end, the silence now interrupted with vicissitude; but it was essentially and indeed, an end, however destitute, however tragic.
The nightmare, his nightmare, was now gone, traded for another.
How had Foster come down this road, and what, if anything, was left standing after the storm?
