Chapter 18

The Last Day

12:00:00 a.m.

When the fireworks began, Brian was almost invisible, near the front door, beside the game machine. No one liked to sit there because the waitresses had a hard time noticing that your cup was empty or that you needed something. Brian loved to sit there because it gave him another barrier to erect between himself and the world.

Never able truly to trust, Brian suffered a life of isolation and smoldering frustration as each day stretched interminably into the next. Nothing broke up his endless boredom. No one breached the defense mechanisms that worked perfectly to keep potential companions out of his hair and out of his life.

As a machinist at the foundry, Brian made good money. He never took vacations, had no close friends to visit, and was visited by no one. Because of his penury, his bank account was quite full but his life was empty.

On those rare occasions when he had tried to maintain a simple relationship with a woman, he had failed miserably. Brian was not skilled at the arts of compassion and empathy. He had learned to rub dirt into others' injuries and go back to work. Whenever he had taken that approach to one of his female acquaintances, it had ended the budding friendship before it had gotten started.

Once in a great while, Brian would strike up a brief conversation with a likewise lonely traveler and spend hours regaling them with stories about Benjamin. He was happy for a little while during those moments when he could share the memories of his one true friend. Often the recipient of his tale would shake his head in wonder at the passion Brian carried for his departed K-9 companion.

Brian was the only parishioner that had ever brought his collie to Saint James United Methodist Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Benjamin attended services with a faithfulness that would put the staunch old folks to shame. Wherever Brian went, except to the foundry, Benjamin was beside him, looking out for danger and protecting his best friend. Church people marveled at their bond, often wishing they could experience commitment like that in their marriages and with their children.

Many members still remembered another Christmas Eve, in a previous decade. Benjamin had accompanied Brian to the altar and waited, perfectly still, as Brian had prayed with Pastor Kelvin and accepted Christ as his Savior.

Most wept when retelling that story. It had touched hundreds of people, from five to ninety-five, in ways they had never fully understood. People who had watched the two still forms at the altar rail had held their breath as if afraid to break the spell it had cast over all in attendance.

Brian had shed his own tears that night, forgiving a childhood of neglect, deprivation, and hardship. The words of Pastor Kelvin and the magic of Christmas Eve had worked their magic on Brian, finally breaking down a lifetime of barriers erected through hungry nights, cold mornings, and threadbare clothes.

The child of an alcoholic bulldozer operator and a mother who was simply alcoholic, Brian had navigated life cringing. He still feared a hard slap to the head, a belt across his back, or endless profanities screamed at deafening levels at all times of the day and night.

The cold, hard life had changed Brian from a curious and gifted student into a closed off, angry young man, unable to bridge the gap between himself and his classmates and neighbors. Shunned by his teachers and feared by his peers, Brian had existed like a ghost trapped among living people.

He had gone to work at eight years old to escape the frightening confines of home. His ability to produce as much as any other employee had earned him more and more responsibility. At eighteen, he had joined the union and bid a permanent night shift in the toughest department of the foundry.

The men in his department had tried to warn him that no one lasted long at that job because of the backbreaking tasks performed in brutally hot temperatures. They had meant well, but their advice had fallen on deaf ears. For Brian, work was escape from the memories that seared his soul. In the noise and hectic pace, he could forget the past for eight hours every night, then fall into an exhausted sleep for another eight to ten hours, thus earning a temporary respite from the demons that tormented him.

He always stopped for a hungry man's meal at Last Chance before his shift. It wouldn't do to show up on an empty stomach. It took all the fuel he could pack into his one-hundred seventy-pound body to withstand the physical toll of his job.

Nothing had really changed in his life. Brian had had the life habits of a forty-year-old man before he turned twelve and every year his habits, likes, and dislikes became more deeply ingrained, until even those who knew him well swore he was in his fifties and just looked young.

There had been another remarkable Christmas Eve in the life of Brian. On December 24, 1978, at 11:59 a.m., stopped to help a neighbor push his car out of the pile of snow plowed up by the city, Brian had met Benjamin. He had had no idea how that chance meeting would change every part of his life. In his state of mind, he would certainly have walked away if he had foreseen the future. Nevertheless, as his neighbor pulled away from the curb, Brian had noticed a shivering dog crouched against the snow bank, trying futilely to find some warmth.