Paper Route StoriesSuicideYesterday’s chapter on tragedy reminded me of another.
One cold morning in the first winter of delivering papers I was walking the route and noticed a car with the engine running. It was sitting in the driveway next to a house.
I didn’t think much about it other than it was really early in the morning, but people do leave their cars running to warm them up and make the windows easier to scrape.
Later that morning, on my way to school, I saw John Judge’s cop car sitting in front of that house. There was an ambulance there too and the doors to the car I had seen running were wide open. Back then there wasn’t much difference in the look of an ambulance and a hearse except the ambulance had lights on top.
That afternoon, or perhaps the day after, on my way home from school I saw John Judge sitting in his cop car by the school cross walk and I went to ask him what had happened. I told him I saw the car sitting there running and I wondered if it had caught fire or something.
He didn’t say why he was there or what had happened. He asked me what time it had been and if I delivered a paper there and I replied that it was sometime after 4:30 a.m. I didn’t deliver to that house; I was across the street when I saw it.
He also asked me if the lights were on in the house and I really couldn’t remember one way or another. I thought it was an odd question.
Later I was told a man had killed himself by putting a hose from the exhaust pipe to the car window so the fumes would fill up the car.
I didn’t know him and don’t think I had ever met him, but I couldn’t imagine why anyone would kill himself. |
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