Five Dollars

I got out of the car and walked into the store. I like to shop late Sunday night when the rest of the town is asleep. No crashing into carts. No long lines at the check-out counters. I walked through the warm spring air into the all-night supermarket.

I collected the few things I needed and pushed my cart up to where a young man stood ahead of me. Beyond the cash register, two other men were clowning around. These two men were talking about five dollars. I paid no attention to the details. It was a pleasant spring night. People felt like clowning around.

One of the men was about forty. He looked stocky, not too heavy, but well built and strong. The other man was twenty at best. Slender, average height, quick and agile, a good-looking kid. He carried a bag of groceries in his left hand. A pretty young woman stood there waiting for him.

Then the younger of the two men suddenly threw out his right fist, putting all his weight into a blow that Sugar Ray Robinson would have laughed at. But the older man didn’t laugh. The amateur roundhouse caught him in the mouth and blood soon spotted his T-shirt. I pulled out my cell phone as a manager shouted, “None of that in here. That stops right now.”

The young man and his companion turned and ran out the door. The other man, despite the fact that blood continued to fall on his shirt, was still talking about the five dollars. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said repeatedly. “I have my own money.”

A policewoman arrived within sixty seconds. She hadn’t used her siren. “Let me look at that mouth,” she said to the injured man. “We’ll worry about the five dollars later.” The microphone attached to her lapel picked up every word for the dispatcher. “One ambulance,” the policewoman said as the man continued to talk about the five dollars.

One of the women who worked for the store gave the man a clean towel to put on his mouth as he continued to say, “I have my own money. I didn’t take any five dollars from anyone.”

The man in front of me paid for his groceries. Commerce stops for nothing. He stood there tentatively, probably wondering what to do next. I paid for my groceries, and we finally walked out together.

“I didn’t see any reason for that young fellow to hit that man,” I said. “I don’t know what the trouble was, but he didn’t need to hit him.”

“Oh, you know how these kids are these days,” he said. “He lives in the same apartment building I do. I talked to him earlier today, and he was just fine. The police will know who he was.”

He started to walk toward the apartment building beyond the store as I unlocked the door of my white Toyota. “Be careful,” I said.

“I’ll be okay,” he said.

I got into the car and locked the door. In the distance, the sound of an ambulance siren was coming my way.

I looked at the clock on the dash. It was almost 12:30 AM. The next morning, I would drive down to southern Iowa. I would put flowers on the graves of my parents and grandparents. I’d remember how hard their lives had been. At 12:30 AM, it was already Memorial Day, 2006.

I started the car and drove slowly home.