Free The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones

rescuer.
    Morris, hands plunged in his pockets, shrugged in an exaggerated way. He wasn’t quite Wyatt’s age—Wyatt had ten years on him, probably—but he wasn’t one of the young turks, either, and he’d been around long enough that they had one of those pleasant but limited acquaintanceships, the kind that had weathered nothing more serious than an argument about who should take the last Nip Chee bag from the vending machine. “That son of a bitch Sam gave my boy trouble the whole time they were in school together,” Morris said. “Him and a pack of his buddies came and set fire to a Halloween dummy we had in our yard, probably would’ve caught the whole house on fire if I hadn’t seen it in time. I knew it was him, but I couldn’t prove it. Nobody did a thing to him.”
    “That’s how it goes around here,” Wyatt said.
    Morris punched his card. “You got that right.” He paused before crossing into the factory. “No offense, but you’re asking for this kind of thing, going out with those guys. They’re not your friends. They’re not good people.”
    Wyatt remembered Glen Campbell on the loudspeakers and his own earnest, drunken crooning, the guys all laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes, wiping them away and patting their knees and saying, “Woo! Shit!” before erupting all over again. “ I am a lineman for the county . . .”
    “I know,” he said. “I made a mistake. I thought it would be better if I gave in and went along one time.” His hand was shaking so badly that it took him two tries to punch his own card.
    “It’s never better,” Morris said. They were in the factory now, at the point where Morris would split left toward die cast and Wyatt straight ahead to packaging, and Wyatt dreaded the day so badly that he felt almost paralyzed. Despair was what it was. The despair of living a life that you didn’t understand and hadn’t bargained for, hadn’t deserved, could only wish upon your worst enemy.
    “I’d lay low if you could,” Morris said, barely audible over the clank of machinery. “Don’t give them ammunition, don’t egg them on. Having them ride you is bad enough, but you don’t want this guy and his buddies jumping you in the parking lot.”
    “You think he’d do that?”
    “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
    Wyatt sighed. He couldn’t figure out how he’d made such a mess of things.
    They parted, Morris lifting his hand a bit in good-bye before striding over to his station. Wyatt continued on, unsurprised to see that Jusef was already in motion, pulling motors off one of Saturday’s pallets and loading them, lickety-split, into rows in the first crate. “You move slow today,” he said in that strange accent of his, the way he seemed to force each word off the thick mass of his tongue, his heavy fringe of eyebrows punctuating the syllables, making all of hispronouncements seem ill spirited whether he intended them that way or not. “You put me behind.”
    Wyatt went to the computer and jabbed the space bar with his thick, clumsy forefinger, interrupting the screen saver’s neon-on-black pattern of spinning spirals and pinwheels. The program loaded, yellow text on a black background, little boxes in which he was supposed to type addresses, product ID numbers, quantities. “Do you hear me?” Jusef was saying behind him, and Wyatt was trying, he really was, but his finger was quivering, and the screen seemed to be quivering, and it occurred to him that it was absurd, going through the regular motions of a day and plugging numbers into a machine when nothing else in his life was regular. Morris’s kindness had taken him by surprise. What he felt now, contemplating it, was not gratitude but despair.
    He was warm, sick to his stomach, and he leaned against the table to steady himself.
    “You put me behind,” Jusef repeated. “Do you hear me?”
    2.
    Roma was what the locals liked to call a damp town in a dry county: you could purchase alcohol