I heard them from two blocks away.
A man screaming. A woman crying.
She was so much smaller than he was, that at first I did not even see her.
He had her pushed up against a brick wall, pinned there with a bicycle as he bellowed in her face and she squirmed and cried.
I turned my truck around in the street and bumped up onto the sidewalk beside them. I rolled down the window and put on my schoolteacher voice.
“Take your hands off her and back away,” I told him. “The cops are on the way. Hands off. Back away. Now.”
The cop thing was a lie. I had forgotten my phone at home.
“Do it now,” I said.
He raised his hands and took half a step away from her. When he turned to face my truck, his intentions toward the woman became evident.
“This isn’t what you think it is,” he said.
My response was something that cannot be printed in a family newspaper.
He was still blocking her way, leaning back against the bicycle.
“Don’t make me get out of this truck,” I said.
I do see the humor in this. He was over six feet tall and hefty. I am not even 5-foot-5. My only weapon was intimidation. My only advantage was his fear and my lack of it.
But when I took my seatbelt off and opened the truck door, he backed off, hands in the air. The woman mouthed “Thank you” before running down the sidewalk.
I hollered at the man’s back, “You’d better hope the cops find you before I do.”
Then I took off to find a phone and actually call 911.
With the cops on the way, for real, this time, I drove around town until I found the woman.
She was walking alone, still crying. I offered her a ride to wherever she needed to go. I bought her a sandwich. We exchanged phone numbers before I dropped her off at her friend’s trailer.
Before she got out of the truck, she said, “I just gotta ask: why did you do that? Why did you stop and help me? You don’t even know me. He’s beaten me more times than I can count. There was nothing stopping him from beating on you.”
I had to puzzle out an answer.
Cops dread domestic violence calls. It takes,
on average, seven tries before an abused spouse escapes. The chances of my actually helping this woman were close to negligible.
“Probably because of my mom,” I told her. “She always said that the odds of really being able to help somebody might be low, but it doesn’t matter. You try to help.
“You do it, anyway.”
To be continued next week ...
Robbi Pounds is the staff writer for The Graham Star. She can be reached by phone, 479-3383 or email, rpounds@grahamstar.com.