A child’s voice squeaked, “Mr. Minton, you okay?”
“Who’s that man?” another child screamed.
I fell to the floor, noticing as I hit that my killer wore leather sandals on bare feet. As I lost consciousness I thought that if a man was going to kill me, he should at least wear grown-up men’s shoes.
2
“MR. MINTON? Mr. Minton, are you okay?”
It was a man’s voice. A familiar voice. There was concern, not mayhem, in the words. I opened my eyes and saw Theodore Wally, the clerk from Antonio and Sons Superette next door. He was a young man, but his face was ready for old age. It was medium brown and soft with fleshy weight around the eyes.
“Mr. Minton?” he asked again. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t answer because I was preoccupied with the miracle of my survival. The killer, I figured, was still human enough not to want to murder children. When he saw them he decided to spare me. I lifted my head, and a pain as sharp as Fearless Jones’s bayonet traveled the length of my spine.
“Help me up,” I said, fearing that I was paralyzed.
The little shopkeeper pulled as hard as he could and I sat up. When I got to my feet the pain was even worse, but I could take steps without falling.
“Damn! Ow!”
“You okay, Mr. Minton?”
“Why don’t you call me Paris, Theodore?” I said, angry at the world.
“I don’t know. It’s the way I was raised, I guess.”
“You call Freddy at the hot dog stand Freddy.” A wave of pain crashed in my head. I almost lost my footing, but Theodore held me up.
“You okay? You want a doctor?”
“No. But thank you. Thank you. How come you came in here?”
“Those kids, Elbert and them. They come in the store an’ said you was dead, that a big, ugly man killed you.”
“Where the kids?”
“Outside.”
I tripped over the downed burlap curtain going through the doorway from my back room. When I got outside the sunlight made my eyes feel as if they were going to explode.
“You okay, Mr. Minton?” a too-tall-for-his-age eight-year-old cried.
“Okay, Elbert. Okay. You see him?”
“That man that hit you?”
“Uh-huh.” The pain from the sun was so great that everything was tinged in red. I wondered if that meant I was bleeding inside my skull.
“He drove a blue car like my daddy’s, only it was a light blue and it had horns.”
“Horns?”
“Yeah.”
“What kinda horns?”
“Like the cows in the movies.”
“Longhorns?”
“Uh-huh.”
I fell to my knees and threw up, hard. The boys skittered away, but Theodore knelt down and held me by the shoulders, then helped me back to my back room.
“You should go to a doctor, Mr. Minton.”
“I just wanna sleep, Theodore.” They were the truest words ever spoken. “Do me a favor and pull the shades and lock the door. And put up my closed sign. Please, Theodore.” I added the last two words because I was a transplanted southern boy who learned manners before he knew how to talk.
