Jersey Shore Magazine

j e r s e y s h o r e • F A L L / H O L I D A Y 2 0 2 2 79 My mind came back to my passen- ger. I thought it best to try to keep him talking, so I gave way to my curiosity. "…Can you give me an example of the kind of explosives you could improvise?" He described how to fill a light bulb with gasoline and put it in a ceiling socket. "….It would explode across ceiling, lighting up curtains and spread to furniture," he said as a matter of fact. Clearly, I was dealing with a man capable of taking out human life with household items if he chose to. The car was silent for minutes. I offered him a cigarette, and we both smoked through the tunnel of dark- ness. There were few cars or trucks. Looking for new territory, I asked, "What was your first impression when you came to the U.S.? "The churches!" he said with aston- ishment. "You have them everywhere!" It was his first display of emotion. "My family risk our lives to sneak across border for religious freedom. My sister got shot and lost her leg. You have churches and people are free to go to them, but they are empty." I pondered this as the miles blurred by. We rode in silence for a long time. "Why do you want to kill this man in North Carolina?" "I was stationed in Korea. I got transferred with no notice. She mar- ried another soldier after I leave. He bring her back from Korea; now he beats her. He's sick. She calls and tells me. I'm going to kill him." There was resolution in his voice. I stared at the road ahead. My mind wandered, trying to imagine what it must be like for the woman—an Asian stranger with language deficiencies in the rural South. Her options for dealing with this man's violence must seem limited to calling the passenger in my car. We passed into South Carolina and would reach my car soon. "You said this man was sick. Do you mean ill?" I asked, fluttering for a perch in our rolling cage. "Yeah, he got some kind of nerve disease." I asked him to tell me more. As he described the man's behaviors, I real- ized he was describing symptoms of Huntington's chorea, a disorder that disables muscles of the hands, face, and trunk and can lead to dementia. I only knew this because I was an investiga- tor. I recently had a case where police had picked up a man in his late 30s. He had been carrying a large Bowie knife and failed to give good account of himself. The man's two brothers had died of the genetic disease. It tends to strike when people reach their late 30s. Woody Guthrie was dying of it when Bob Dylan met him. "I'm not a doctor," I said, while trying to sound like one, "You know, if that's what the man has, it would be pointless to kill him: he's gonna be incapacitated soon, and he won't be able to harm anyone then. But you'd be in prison." "He's gonna die soon anyway and then the path to the woman would be clear." We rode in silence for twenty min- utes and climbed the Florence exit ramp. My Volvo was at the top at the deserted Texaco where I'd left it. We backed up to it, and I got the heavy towbar from my trunk. My passenger helped. We laid on the pavement, fastened the chains to the undercarriage, and secured the bolts. The freezing metal burned my fingers—Jesus it was cold! I kept blowing into my hands to keep blood flowing and had difficulty holding the shackles in place. Out of kindness to me, he insisted on finishing the last part of the hook- up. I did the easy part of pointing the flashlight under the suspension. We worked as a team and were done in five minutes. It was time to part: he would head to North Carolina, and I would return south. It was 2:00 a.m. I shook the hitchhiker's hand and wished him well. He walked away a few steps as I put wrenches back in the trunk and closed it. Out of my Volvo-in-tow, I grabbed the cookie tins I had left behind two days earli- er. I put my cookie container in easy reach in the front seat and the one for my parents in the back seat where HOME PORT THE CHRISTMAS KILLER, continued from page 82 I'd be less tempted to open it. They would be good company for the solo return journey. Rather than continue down the ramp for another ride like I expected, my former passenger stopped, stood about twenty feet away for a few sec- onds. Then he walked toward me. "Could I ride back with you?" he asked. After a moment of disbelief, I want- ed to jump for joy. "Yes! Yes! Of course!" I exclaimed. All the dread of the night vanished. Joyously we shook hands—we had crossed the threshold between who we were and who we became. "Let's get in. I'm freezing," I said. As the car's heater thawed us out on the drive back, the miles seemed to melt beneath our wheels. We opened my tin of cookies and shared them. Conversation flowed like a dam had broken. Crumbs spilled everywhere; we laughed. And we talked! It turned into a party! He told me his name was Gabor and how he hadn't seen his family in nearly two years. They were getting older and depended upon what he made in the military. We smoked cigarettes with smiles and the tone was one of merriment. I dropped him off at the gates of Fort Gordon back in Georgia as the new day sky began to lighten. Then I had a thought. I reached in the back seat and grabbed the tin of homemade cookies Toni had made for my parents. I handed it to Gabor with a "Merry Christmas." It seemed a fitting present. We gave each other a hearty hand- shake and parted. As I pulled away, the thought oc- curred, it really was a killer Christmas. u Gordon Hesse is the author of "Island Beach – A Sonnet In The Sands," "All Summer Long – Tales & Lore of Lifeguarding on the Atlantic," "Cuban Blues – A Memoir," and "Children Of The Sky – The Odyssey Of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca." Mr. Hesse grew up in Lavallette. For more information about his books, please refer to pages 7 - 8.

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