Gentlemens’ Agreement by Steven French

As one of the new faculty members at a small Midwestern college, I used to get the short straw when it came to various off-campus activities, such as ‘community outreach’. Basically, that involved a long drive out to some godforsaken rural township in the middle of nowhere to give a talk on local history to a bunch of bored Shriners. Who never asked questions, never showed any more interest than ‘that’s another event ticked off the calendar’ and who wouldn’t even stump up for dinner afterwards. Which meant hunting down a diner somewhere for a slice of pie as a reward to myself, partnered with a stay-awake coffee and refill.

But truth be known, I didn’t actually mind doing it. Driving through the cornfields along empty county roads in the pitch dark with the headlights picking out the occasional tree or farm building, well, that was an escape, a release from the long hours teaching farm-boys fresh in from those same fields, from the mind-numbing admin and small-town, small-minded college bureaucracy, and also, I have to admit, from my family. As much as I loved Jill and enjoyed our regular date nights and was happy to take the boys to Little League and the State Fair, I needed some ‘me’ time. Time to let all those responsibilities just slough away and just be myself, if only for an hour or two.

So, not only did I become the first to volunteer every time one of these opportunities arose, I even started driving out into the boonies at night when there was nothing lined up on the college calendar. I didn’t like lying to Jill but I justified it by telling myself that every marriage needed to have at least some secrets and anyway, it wasn’t like I was having an affair, not like Artie over in Politics. Plus it meant that when I got home I was even more attentive, more loving, more … present. For Jill and the boys.

And so, it was on one of those clandestine drives, with the sky overcast and the night shrouding everything, that I saw him, standing by the side of the road, his thumb out, looking hopeful, if a bit hesitant. He seemed quite young, dressed in jeans and a tee, with his jacket over one shoulder, because the evening was warm with summer coming on, and a backpack over the other. Now I knew it was not a good idea to pick some stranger up from the roadside miles from anywhere, I knew that … but he seemed clean-cut and trustworthy and I was full of pie and happy, sated you might say. I’d just come from a little diner I hadn’t been to before, where they’d served some excellent home-made peach cobbler and I’d struck up a friendly conversation with one of the other late-night customers who was willing to engage with a complete stranger. And I’d even managed to find a secluded little spot where I could pull over to do what needed to be done, not so far out of town that I’d start to feel anxious but far enough so that I wouldn’t be disturbed.

All of which is to say that I was in a pretty good frame of mind when I saw this guy, so I stopped the car and leaned across to open the passenger side door. He told me he was a student up in St. Louis who’d been down visiting family but had gone out for drinks with a bunch of old-school friends and then had lost them somehow and he didn’t have enough money to get back and … and I didn’t call ‘bullshit’, just said to myself “Yeah, whatever!” and told him to get in. He seemed nice, chatty but not too chatty, friendly but not too friendly, if you know what I mean. Thinking back, maybe he did check me out, surreptitiously, but that could be a false memory, coloured by subsequent events. All I can say for sure is that I dropped him off on Main, then handed him a twenty and told him if he hurried, he could still get the last bus back to St. Louis. He thanked me and gave me a wave as I drove away, but glancing in the rear-view mirror I saw him head down a side street, away from the bus station.

Of course, later, I realised why. He’d gotten cocky, as some do, especially the less experienced ones, and hadn’t pulled the zipcuff tight enough so his last target had managed to break loose and get away. And that was that, as far as his particular murderous career went. After the trial, it all came out on the local news, how he’d gone on a ‘spree’ covering the tri-county area and how the student found butchered just off Main was indeed one of his many victims. Thankfully they weren’t one of mine ….

But that wasn’t the reason that I wrote to him on death row, of course. I wanted him to explain to me why I had been spared. Was it my age? My gender? I couldn’t imagine that it was because I’d been kind enough to pick him up, that surely wouldn’t carry much weight for someone like him. There was nothing in his ‘profile’ or from what I could glean in the news reports that gave any insight.

So I wrote to him, with no real expectation of a reply, and asked him, bluntly, “Why did you spare me?”

Three weeks later, I received a letter on Federal prison writing paper that contained one line: “Why did you?”

Steven French

Image by Jonathan Sautter from Pixabay – cornfield at sunset with rows of corn and the sun on the horizon