Lee Goldberg: The Walk

Buck shoved him. “This guy says there’s a kid in that car up there, buckled in the seat, too fucking scared to move.”

“I don’t blame him,” Marty said, starting to walk away. Buck grabbed him.

“The guy needs our help to get the kid out.”

Marty shook his head. “Do I look like Charlton Heston to you?”

“What the fuck?”

“I’m not a hero.” Marty turned away, and again Buck grabbed him.

“Maybe I’m not making myself fucking clear here. There’s a kid alone in that car up there. He’s trapped.”

“So are a thousand other kids in this city. Am I supposed to save each one of them?”

Buck let go of Marty and looked him right in the eye. “You are going to save this one.”

“No,” Marty said. “I’m going home.”

He adjusted his gym bag on his shoulders, turned his back to Buck, and headed west. Molly was enough. More than anyone had a right to ask of him. He’d done his part, he didn’t have to do any more. His only obligation was to get home to his wife.

Marty heard the click. The Dirty Harry click. The sound was almost subliminal. He knew what it was from a lifetime of vicarious experience. Although nobody had ever pointed a gun at him and cocked the trigger before, he’d heard it on TV so many times, he knew the sound instinctively.

“Take one more step asshole and I’ll shoot you,” Buck said behind him.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Yep, Buck was aiming a gun at him for the second time today. Behind Buck, the Mexican guy was waving his hands, jabbering in a desperate torrent of unintelligible Spanish, clearly afraid he’d been terribly misunderstood.

Marty spoke clearly and slowly.

“I’ve been through this already, Buck. That’s why my backpack was on fire. That’s how close I came to dying. You want to be a hero? Go for it. I hope you survive, but I can’t risk it again. I have to make it home, for my wife. That is my moral obligation. Okay?”

But Marty didn’t get anything back from Buck and he’d be damned if he was going to argue about it. So Marty just started walking.

And Buck shot him.

Marty heard the unbelievably loud gunshot the same instant he felt the scorching punch in his shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him off his feet.

His shoulder was burning. He touched the bloody tear in his jacket and, his ears still ringing, stared back at Buck incredulously. “You shot me?”

“I grazed you,” Buck said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

Marty’s fury overwhelmed his pain. “You don’t have any one, it doesn’t matter if you get killed trying to save everybody. There’s no one waiting for you, no one depending on you.”

“That kid is,” Buck said. “Look around you, asshole. You’re alive. You have two good arms and two good legs. Your fucking obligation is to help everyone you see, whether you want to or not. So, you got a choice. You can die a hero trying to save that kid or you can die a coward right now. You decide.”

Marty glanced up at the car, creaking in the breeze, then at the bloody lump on the pavement. In a few minutes, if he gave in, that could be him. Only with a car and maybe the entire overpass on him. Even the homeless were smart enough to flee from the fractured overpass, leaving behind their flea-ridden mattresses, piles of soiled blankets, and plastic bags of garbage.

The crumbling overpass, the swaying car, they were death traps. Attempting this rescue, without the necessary equipment or any experience, was suicide.

It was like all those stories he’d read in the LA Times, the ones about people who drowned trying to save someone who fell through ice or got sucked under the sea by a riptide. Instead of one unfortunate person dying, three or four would-be rescuers inevitably sacrificed their lives as well.

Those stories, buried in the bottom corner of the back pages, always struck Marty as sad, tragic, and stupid. He liked to think that if he were in one of those situations he’d know to choose survival over unthinking heroism, no matter how wrenching that decision would be.

But he’d never been in one of those situations.

He also never had to make a decision at gunpoint before.

It changed things.

“Put the gun away.” Marty said.

Buck kept it on him.

“Put the fucking gun away,” Marty yelled. “I can’t think with that pointed at me.”

“There’s nothing to think about.”

“Do you know how to get the kid out without knocking the car over the edge? Do you, you fucking psychopath?” Marty stared at him, at the blank look on his face. “I didn’t think so.”

Buck holstered his gun. “You got some rope in your pack. We’ll lower you down.”

“First of all, that rope is for tying up a roll of electric cables, it’s not strong enough to hold a man,” Marty said. “Secondly, why am I the guy?”

“Because you’re the lightest of the three of us,” Buck said. “And even if you weren’t, you’ve been shot in the arm.”

“You said I was grazed.”

“Stop being a pussy,” Buck said.

Marty looked at the teetering car again, then down at the pavement, and the body splattered on it. His eyes drifted from the body to the pile of filthy blankets and he remembered something he saw on Cinemax late one night, one of those soft-core women-in-prison movies. The busty, sexually-adventurous convicts escaped using bed-sheets. It wasn’t a very secure prison, the guards weren’t too bright, but the girls were pretty resourceful and the principle was sound.

Marty clutched his bloody shoulder and got up. “I got an idea. You’re going to have to find a few more people to help.”

1:30 p.m. Tuesday

The smell from the urine-starched blankets tied around his chest and wrapped under his shoulders was overpowering. If the drop didn’t kill Marty, the odor would.

The bum’s blankets were tied together end-to-end and securely wound with Marty’s rope. The apparatus trailed behind him a few feet to Buck, Enrique, and half-a-dozen other survivors who held the other end as if preparing for a game of tug-of-war.

Marty stood on the edge of the precipice, beside the Toyota, gathering his courage. The ticks, fleas, and lice were probably smart enough to abandon the blankets now. No sense taking a fall with this fool, a guy who mistook Caged Party Bimbos for an instructional video on urban rescues.

“We’re ready,” Buck yelled.

“I’m not,” Marty muttered, pulling his leather work gloves tight over his hands.

The car was hanging by just one rear wheel, held in place by just a few pieces of twisted rebar. He couldn’t see the kid, the car was tipped too far forward, but he could hear him whining in terror.

Marty had no idea what he was going to do, except not look down. He turned to the men holding the rope, strangers he didn’t know an hour ago and still didn’t know right now. He was entrusting them, and a make-shift rope made of a dozen soiled blankets, with his life.

“You sure you can hold me?” Marty asked.

“Two more seconds and I’ll push you,” Buck said. “Stop stalling. That car isn’t going to hold much longer.”

Marty took a deep breath and moved right up to the edge. It was a long drop. Chances of survival if he fell were zero.

“Shit,” he whispered, sitting down.

He grabbed two pieces of rebar and slid slowly over the edge, bits of concrete shaking loose, falling into space and shattering on the street below.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Marty slid a bit further, his legs dangling over the side. Soon there would be nothing for him to hold on to at all.

“Do you have me?” he yelled.

“Hurry the fuck up,” Buck grunted.

Marty let go of the rebar and fell, screaming. The blanket dug into Marty’s armpits, jerking his shoulders up against his neck. But it held, stopping his fall, but jerking the cell phone out of his pocket. He dangled, spinning beside the car, making the mistake of looking down just as his cell phone shattered on the pavement.