Some Might Call Him a Hero

Joseph Hinkley had lived a quiet life, built upon the twin foundations of routine and low expectations. Excitement was something that happened to others, and Joseph Hinkley was not only okay with that, he preferred it. He enjoyed waking up every Tuesday knowing that it would be the same as Monday up until 7 pm when prime time programming began. He liked the fact that his Ford F250 started with exactly the same sound every morning, and that even when this F250 died, there’d be another F250 to replace it, just like this one had replaced the one before. So, being in a hospital room on a Wednesday afternoon when he should have been at work like any other Wednesday afternoon really put a hitch in Joseph Hinkley’s giddyup, so to speak.

The beeps and clicks and whirs of the hospital room made Joseph Hinkley uncomfortable; the nurses tried their best to ignore his twitching and flinching at every new sound. Instead, the nurses focused on their patient, Joseph Hinkley, Jr., and effectively ignored his father, who, unsurprisingly, preferred to be ignored. Joseph Hinkley sat in the chair next to his unconscious son’s bed and tried to breathe out more than he was breathing in (the hospital smells were also not to his liking) while staring out the window with one eye and watching his son’s face with the other. Joseph Hinkley had talents most people didn’t understand.

“Mr. Hinkley?” said a doctor standing in the doorway, looking down at a chart instead of up at Joseph Hinkley, gold-rimmed glasses perched upon her nose and hair piled upon her head in an arrangement that did not look very arranged.

“Yes.” He said it in a softer voice than one would expect from a mouth that might very well be described as grizzled. He did not move his head.

“Mr. Hinkley, your son is lucky to be alive. He’s lost massive amounts of blood, and he may never recover his full range of mobility. He’s young, though, so that’s in his favor. He may be here for several weeks, regardless.”

Joseph Hinkley continued staring out the window with one eye, his jaw twitching a little every time the ventilator clicked. He gave no indication of having heard the doctor. After half a minute or so without a response, the doctor replaced Joseph Jr.’s chart and stepped silently out of the room.

An hour passed. Nurses bustled in and out at regular intervals, never disturbing Joseph Hinkley and never being disturbed by him. Eventually, a new shadow fell upon the floor.

“Ahem,” came a deep voice.

Joseph Hinkley looked up this time to see a squat, mustachioed man in an olive drab uniform bearing a badge that said “Daisy, Arkansas Sheriff’s Department.” The man fumbled with his hat and kept his eyes focused just above Junior’s feet.

“Bill.” Joseph Hinkley moved both eyes to the new visitor.
“Hi, Joe. How’s he doing?”
“He’s been cut to ribbons and beat to a pulp, Bill. How do you think he’s doing?”

The other man flinched visibly, and almost dropped his hat. He recovered enough to move his gaze from Junior’s feet to the seated Joseph Hinkley’s knees. “Well, I’m just here to tell you that we’ve caught them, the ones who done it, the whole gang of them.”

“Was it -”
“Yup. Just like we thought. Jimmy Vance - you know Jimmy, short stop for the high school baseball team - he actually caught most of the incident on his cell phone video camera.” Bill pulled a cell phone from his front pocket and thumbed a few buttons. “Craziest darn things… I just can’t keep up. A whole video camera, squeezed right in there.” He tossed the phone to Joseph Hinkley, who hadn’t moved yet, and said, “Just hit that silvery button on the left to play it. It’s small, and the quality ain’t great, but I figured you’d want to see it.”

Joseph Hinkley put the phone up to his face, about eight inches away, and pressed the button to make it play. What he saw was a blur of images that eventually coalesced into the parking lot of his son’s high school. There were many voices in the background, and he couldn’t make out what any of them were saying. The camera zoomed suddenly, and now Joseph Hinkley realized that he was watching his son, crouched on the roof of his ‘89 Chevy Cavalier. The Cavalier was surrounded by what looked like

“Goddamn ninjas,” Joseph Hinkley said, his voice quiet again, but filling the hospital room with barely suppressed rage.

The ninjas had formed a circle, slowly tightening around the car like a noose. Junior looked in all directions, his face more hopeless with each quarter turn. Other students ran in all directions in the background, screaming, diving for cover, piling into cars or back into the school. Junior, having experienced the view from all sides, rose from his cowering position. With a look hovering between defiance and hopeless abandon, he faced the ninja who had just leapt onto the hood of the Cavalier.

“Stupid boy,” Joseph Hinkley said.

Junior actually blocked one kick from the ninja facing him, but was instantly slashed from behind by one carrying a katana. At first blood, the rest of the ninjas swarmed, kicking and cutting at Junior from all sides. Joseph Hinkley was about to put down the phone, thinking he could hardly bare to watch anymore, when suddenly a white blur cut through the black-pyjamaed ninjas. The blur moved so fast, Joseph Hinkley couldn’t be sure it was a man. One by one, the limp bodies of ninjas were thrown from the roof of the car. As the last one sailed into the windshield of a nearby Honda Civic, the camera phone shook out of focus. Joseph Hinkley could just barely make out the shape of a man who had thrown Junior over his shoulder and leapt, effortlessly, from the roof of the car to the door of the school, a distance of no less than twenty-five feet. The video ended abruptly.

Joseph Hinkley put down the phone. He looked at his son again for close to a full minute, dropped his gaze back to the phone, then looked up at Bill. “Who was that man?” he asked, even more quietly than before.

“Well, Joe, that’s the thing,” said Bill, turning the hat in his hands once again. “Nobody knows. Deputy Harris, you know, Davey boy, he’s part Cherokee, you know, and he reckons that this guy is a spirit that they call ‘The Ghost Who Walks.’”

“Wait. You mean like The Phantom? Like the comic strip?”
“Well, yeah. It’s, I guess, modern Cherokee folklore. Or whatever.”
“Or Davey Harris is screwing with you Bill.”
“Well, maybe that too.” Bill turned a shade of red and lowered his eyes more. “Anyway, the sheriff, he thinks maybe this has something to do with it, too.” From his breast pocket, Bill pulled out a piece of paper folded in quarters. He took a step across the room and tossed it gently into Joseph Hinkley’s lap.

Joseph Hinkley opened what turned out to be an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper, upon which was printed a digital photo. The photo showed a close up of the upper half of a ninja’s head. On the forehead, carved with precision, were the letters “FJ.”

“Wonder what that means,” he said. “We got some kind of Zorro knock-off playing hero in Daisy?”
Bill shrugged.
The ventilator clicked.

* * *

Seventeen miles west of Daisy, Fred Gulden pulled his eighteen wheeler to the side of the empty, dusty, sun-beat road and kicked the passenger side door open. “Where ya headed?” he grunted, good-naturedly, to the hitchhiker already climbing into the cab.

“West,” said the stranger, running a hand through his snowy white hair while the other hauled up a duffel bag with something wrapped between the handles.

“What is that, some kind of samurai sword?” asked Fred, with the smallest hint of alarm in his voice.

“Aw, that? That’s just for show. Not even sharp,” said the stranger with a wink.