After several days of unseasonably warm and springlike weather, winter came back tonight, riding on the back of an avenging wind that wanted to drive the breath from your lungs and teach you a lesson for having dared to believe that you’d seen the last of him for another year.
The snow was just starting as I stepped off the evening train; I flipped up the collar of my pea coat against the wet, spattering flakes that were coming in almost horizontally from the north. The temperatures had been relatively mild when I’d boarded a half-hour and 25 miles ago, and I gasped at the abrupt change for the worse. Then the sky brightened and shimmered in a truly weird display, lightning in the belly of a snowstorm, and I knew it was going to be one hell of a night.
That was when the old man reached out for my shoulder with a trembling, knobby hand that looked to have been warped by a serious case of arthritis.
“Pardon me, sir, but are you driving somewhere from here?
I hesitated, unsure I wanted to get involved with this situation, whatever it was. “Yeah, I’m heading home.”
“I wonder if you might give me a ride someplace?”
The first thing that came to mind was all my mother’s paranoid admonitions against picking up hitch-hikers, because you just can’t tell who’s a nut, or who’s got a gun, or who might be on drugs. But this guy wasn’t Rutger Hauer looking for a twisted bit of fun. He was a skinny drink of water in the neighborhood of 70 years old, wearing only a sports jacket and a BYU cap in place of a proper coat and hat, freezing his aged cojones off on a train platform in Sandy, Utah.
“Where do you need to go?” I asked, a bit more suspiciously than I probably ought to have. I really didn’t want to play cabbie tonight. I’d had a long day and just wanted to get home and get something to eat.
“Down to the Olive Garden. My son works there, and I’m trying to get to him.”
The snow-lightning flashed again, and the old man shivered visibly.
“Sure, I’m going that way. I can drop you.”
We started walking towards the end of the platform and the sidewalk that leads out to the distant corner of the parking lot where my Mustang waited.
“Thank you, sir, I really appreciate this. I thought I was going to die out here waiting for someone to come along.”
“No problem. You know, I’m parked quite a ways out. If you want to wait here, I’ll go get my car and come back.”
“Oh, sure, that would be fine.”
So I left him in the relative shelter of a ticket-machine kiosk and made the familiar hike out to my ‘stang. The snow was really coming down by now, and I was feeling good about myself for coming to this guy’s rescue. It took me a few moments to get the car started and clear the windows; the old man was still waiting where I’d left him when I drove back. I thought briefly that I might have to help him get in — my dad has a bum knee and has a difficult time bending himself down low enough to get into my ground-hugging sports car — but this old guy seemed to be pretty spry as he opened the passenger door and plopped into the seat.
“Nice car,” he remarked.
“Thanks, I’m pretty proud of it.” I saw that he was still shivering, so I cranked the heater on full as I steered toward the parking lot’s exit. The Olive Garden was only a mile or so away, and as I drove I found myself remembering something that happened years ago, when I was in middle school.
My dad was laid off for a couple years around that time and had taken up truck driving to try and get by until his employer recalled him (this was back in the days when a laid-off worker had a reasonable expectation of someday getting called back — paradise lost, eh?). I occasionally rode along with him when I could get out of school, and he and I had had a few adventures together. On one particular trip, we picked up an elderly hitcher in the middle of the Nevada desert. The guy actually looked a bit like my passenger, as I recall, a scrawny old bantamweight who seemed to bob around inside his threadbare, too-big-for-him suit. I remember the guy eyeballing a box of stale donuts on the dashboard for a long time before my dad noticed and offered him one. Judging by the way the old man inhaled the first one, then politely asked if he could have a second which he savored with a funny little half-smile, he hadn’t eaten anything in a very long time. He ended up eating every last crumb in that box, washed down with a warm Coke from the paper bag at my feet. I don’t remember how far we took the man, and it seems like we dropped him in the desert again, on the outskirts of some town instead of inside actual civilization, but my dad’s kindness that day to a down-on-his-luck man most motorists would have happily ignored made a huge impression on me.
Back here in the future, my elderly hitch-hiker was quiet until I turned onto State Street, then he spoke again. “I wonder, um, how much farther you might be going?”
Instantly I was on my guard. “Not far… just to Riverton.”
“Oh. Okay. I live down in Saratoga Springs, you see…”
Saratoga Springs was in Utah County, the next valley south of mine, and a pretty good drive. Especially on a blustery night like this, especially in a car that doesn’t handle especially well in snow.
“I thought you were meeting your son…”
“Well, I am. I hope. He works there as a greeter, so I haven’t been able to get him on the phone. I hope he’s there tonight.”
“You don’t know if he’s working?” I hate to admit it, but this guy’s story was sounding fishy to me.
“Oh, I’m sure he is, it’s just that he doesn’t know I’m coming. My car broke down, you see.” He paused for a moment. “I have a daughter in Thanksgiving Point.” Another Utah County address, not as far as Saratoga, but still beyond my home territory. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to get myself conned into giving this guy a ride all the way home. I said something about being sure his son would be able to help him and we made inconsequential small talk the rest of the way to the Olive Garden. It was a busy night at the restaurant — when isn’t it a busy night at the Olive Garden? — and I pulled up as near to the door as I could. As he got out of the car, the old man said “Bless you, sir. You’ve done a good thing tonight.”
I told him he was welcome, and watched him walk into the restaurant. I realized he had a limp I hadn’t noticed before. Then my cellphone rang. My own father, asking me if I was going to be home soon and if I wanted to grab an In-and-Out burger with him.
I thought again about the old man in the desert, and donuts that my father and I hadn’t wanted. I wondered if the old man in the snowstorm had found his son, and if not, if the restaurant’s manager had let him use the phone to call his daughter. I thought to myself that Saratoga Springs really wasn’t that far out of my way. And I watched the lightning flicker in the belly of the storm as slushy pellets of snow smacked against my beloved Mustang.
