The Kind Man

Elsdon Watson was kind of a small man, a quiet man. He was the one who always got bullied in school. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t capable of standing up for himself. Lord knows his father, an ex US Marine, taught him all the skills he needed to deal with bullies. For whatever reason, throughout his life he seemed content with embracing the embarrassment of the label coward.

Elsdon was not an actual coward, he just strongly believed in crap like turning the other cheek and being kind towards your fellow man would be paid back in spades. Any fool could have told him that way of thinking was both wrong and dangerous in current times, but Elsdon was a kind man and needed no such advice, especially from a fool.

Elsdon’s best friend in college was a like-minded guy named Timmy Jodene. Timmy had a slightly shorter fuse than Elsdon, but primarily lived by the same “kind man” philosophy. Timmy could see the good in most people, but his BS meter was a bit more fine tuned than Elsdon’s. Elsdon was hiding something. Timmy could feel it. He had felt it for a long time. He would pay closer attention to his friend, covertly follow him for a while hoping to expose the truer version of the kind man, Elsdon.

After college, Elsdon met a girl. Her name was Kathie. She was not a good girl. She was not the girl for Elsdon. For months, Kathie had been on the receiving end of an abusive relationship. Having vowed she would suffer no more at the hands of her abusive lover, she clubbed him over the head one evening with a six-pack of beer and ran for her life. She felt empowered and liked it. She told Elsdon her story and, being a kind man, he took her in.

Timmy did not like Kathie and told Elsdon so. Timmy saw Kathie’s truth. She was a bottom feeder, scum, uncouth, and gross. It was clear she sought relationships of chaos and violence. Elsdon was not the man for her. But Elsdon was a kind man. He had fallen in love with her, and thought he could turn her life around. One night her ex showed up, kicked in Elsdon’s front door, punched him square in the nose, sending him flying backwards onto the floor and then dragged Kathie out of the house by her hair to a waiting pickup truck. Elsdon picked himself up and made it to the door just in time to her and her ex kissing wildly on the front lawn before getting into his truck and driving off. Elsdon never saw Kathie again. The incident affected him.

Soon after that incident, Elsdon and Timmy parted ways. Timmy could no longer deal with Elsdon’s “kind man” crap and simply walked away, vowing never to speak to him again until he pulled his head out. Elsdon pretended he didn’t care, but he did, and the realization of losing his best friend caused, for lack of a better term, a mental hiccup.

He sat in the dark room alone. Every few seconds, the light from a flashing fluorescent building sign across the street shined through the window, revealing only his eyes. He sat in the dark room alone, naked, curled up in a corner in the fetal position. Elsdon was not in a good place. It was near twenty years since Timmy Jodene walked out of his life. Twenty years of anguish and despair as he yearned for the answer to why he longed to be a kind man. The vision of it was always the same.

⁂

The guy with the gun to his head was unbelievably calm, considering what was about to happen to him. He had somehow found his way onto a hit list and the assassin assigned to take him out was locked in a stare-down that could only have one outcome. Why was he so calm? Did he know something the assassin did not? He said he was tired of running and wanted to get it over with. And then the vision would fade away.

⁂

Juan Pablo Atilio met Timmy Jodene in a bar near the southern tip of Las Cruces, New Mexico where I-25 intersects with I-10. They met frequently and drank tequila, smoked cigars, and felt up whores as they playfully sashayed by. Timmy hadn’t thought much about his friend Elsdon over the years. A few months after walking away, Timmy popped the cork on a bottle and followed a drunken rabbit down a hole that he couldn’t seem to pull himself up out of it. He told Juan he had no idea how he ended up in Las Cruces as he fell off the barstool and onto the floor.

“Dude,” Juan laughed as he stepped over him. “You were born and raised here, man. I gotta go, man, you so stupid,” he quipped in a thick Spanish accent.

Timmy grabbed a holt to the first set of whore legs that passed by and used her to pull himself up off the floor. He knew that no one in the joint would help otherwise. As soon as he made it back to the bar stool, his phone rang. He answered, but only heard breathing on the other line. He threw the phone on the counter and ordered another shot of tequila. It was almost time to go to work, and he wanted to make sure he was sober, “ah, what, yea, sober,” he thought.

⁂

He glanced at her inquisitively as he read the dossier. It read like something out of a horror film. He accepted the contract and told the woman he would eliminate the target within a couple of days. She slid him a separate piece of paper with a number on it and told him to call that number when the job was done. She told him not to speak, just call the number, wait for an answer, and then hang up. He would begin his search for the target the following day. It wouldn’t take long, as he knew exactly where that target would be.

The guy with the gun to his head was unbelievably calm, considering what was about to happen to him. He had somehow found his way onto a hit list and the assassin assigned to take him out was locked in a stare-down that could only have one outcome. Why was he so calm? Did he know something the assassin did not?

Timmy had been running for most of his life. He often wondered why Elsdon never confronted him during those years they were friends. Elsdon knew who Timmy was, the things he had done, but he pretended to be a kind man and convinced himself that Timmy could be saved. He could not. Timmy wanted his life to end. It was the only way he could be stopped. Timmy looked at his friend Elsdon one last time as he said, “I’m just tired of running, man. Let’s get it over with.”

“Fair enough,” Elsdon thought as he pulled the trigger and watched Timmy’s body go limp and fall to the ground. It turned out Elsdon was not a kind man. He never had been.

K.R. Eaton - The Kind Man

Short Stories by K.R Eaton