“I’m not here to start anything,” Trent said quickly, holding his good hand up in a gesture of peace. “I just… I needed to talk to you.”
Arthur took a slow sip from his thermos. “You’re trespassing on city property, son. The bus terminal doesn’t open for another hour.”
“I know. I’ll leave in a second,” Trent said, swallowing hard. He had rehearsed a dozen different speeches in his head, but all of them felt hollow and pathetic now. “I just… I wanted to ask you a question.”
Arthur didn’t say yes, but he didn’t walk away.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” Trent asked, the frustration and confusion leaking into his voice. “On the bus, when I was running my mouth, when I threatened you… why didn’t you just tell me who you were? Tell me you were a SEAL? Tell me you could snap my neck? I would have backed down.
Why did you let me walk into a wood chipper?”
Arthur looked at Trent for a long, agonizing moment. The silence between them was heavy, broken only by the hum of the diesel engines warming up in the garage.
“A man who has to tell you what he is usually isn’t it,” Arthur said quietly. His voice carried the rough texture of crushed gravel. “You thought you were a tough guy because you know how to tap people out on a padded floor. You thought violence was a currency you could use to buy respect.”
Arthur took a step closer. Trent instinctively flinched, but Arthur simply leaned against the chain-link fence, staring out at the gray morning.
“True violence isn’t a sport, Trent. It’s a tragedy,” Arthur continued, his eyes taking on that distant haunted look Trent had seen right before he blacked out.
“It’s ugly, it’s fast, and it ruins everyone it touches. I spent twenty years doing things in the dark so people in this country could walk in the light. I lost brothers.
I took fathers away from their children. I have nightmares that wake me up screaming in cold sweats.
