When I was a kid I went in the ditch once, in a blizzard. I put the car in the ditch, is what I mean. And not even all the way in, really. Slid off the side of the road, the front right tire went over the edge, the bumper caught on the crust, the car went off balance. Tires were spinning, couldn’t go anywhere, and it was still coming down hard. I turned off the engine and sat there thinking for a minute, and that’s when I saw the big shiny pickup truck coming over the hill. Oh good, I thought. Maybe this guy has a cellular phone. Cell phones were a new thing at the time, most people didn’t have one, but I thought there was a chance. Well, this guy didn’t have a cell phone, but what he did have was a big shiny chain, with some nice big hooks on the ends. Held ‘em up as he climbed out of his cab. I was about sixteen or seventeen, never experienced this kind of thing before. He was probably twenty-three. He had a neon snowmobiling jacket and a piss-colored rat-tail for a haircut. I bet my older brother knew him, not that they would have been friends necessarily. He eyed up the situation, asked if I wanted the help, I said yes. I asked if I could do anything, he said no. He hooked up the chain and had me outta that ditch less than five minutes after I’d seen him coming over the hill off the county highway.
Well, I was sitting there behind the wheel, window rolled down, and he was standing there in the road, in the snow, and I said, “Thanks a lot, mister.” And he said, “Well I bet you could reach down into that little wallet of yours and find a nice twenty for me.”
And I said, “What? You want my money?”
And he said, “I expect I ought to be compensated somehow for pulling you out of that there ditch.”
“Well jeez,” I said, “Haven’t you ever heard of just doing something nice for somebody?”
And you know what he said? He said, “Why I ought to just push your little car right back into that damn ditch. I could do that in about one second.”
And I said, “Go ahead. I’ll just walk home, it’s only ten minutes from here. I’ll just come back with the truck later, like I was going to do in the first place.”
He turned real cross and looked like he was trying to think of something to say, but I guess he lost his nerve because he just got back in his truck and drove away without a word.
I sat there another minute, processing what had just happened, wondering if I had made the wrong decision. I did have about ten bucks on me, I remember. I drove the mile and a half home in weird silence. Told my dad what had happened, and he said that he supposed I should have paid the man. Never could decide what to think about that. I knew something was wrong with this picture, that a person ought to be able to expect that her or his fellow human will help out in time of need, without expectation of reward. But I didn’t know where the problem lay, in the workings of our society. If this guy could afford such a nice big truck, what was a measly ten bucks, or twenty? And if this was the unspoken system of the backroad farm-country folk, that they were all handing each other cash in exchange for simple favors, what did that say about our economy, not to mention our morality?
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