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Punishment by Proxy

Charley Daveler

    First he got the ticket.
    “I thought it was a ticket,” he told his girlfriend.
    But it couldn’t be.
    “So then I thought it was some sort of ad, like the flyer for the Mexican restaurant down the street that constantly bombards us with its menu in their windshields. As I walked closer down the sidewalk, I kept thinking that I was being paranoid.”
    The pink slip sat under the wiper with a caustic, stone face as though it thought itself only the messenger.
    “They gave me a ticket, damn it! And even as I held it in my hand, looking at it, I thought, ‘This isn’t right.’”
    He read it. He reread it. Frustration crunched behind his cheekbones. His eyes grew tense. The pink paper still in hand, he looked for something he’d missed.
    “The curb wasn’t red.”
    He looked under the car.
    “There was no handicap paint.”
    He looked to his review mirror.
    “I had my parking permit.
    He reread the ticket. He looked around again.
    “My car was right in the middle of the student’s parking lot.”
    He searched for postings. He looked at the windows of the vehicles next to him. They didn’t have tickets or special permits.
    The gut wrench that comes with the understanding of unadulterated injustice crept right up into this throat and punched him in the back of the mouth. He felt swallowing grow less pleasurable. His face heated with rage.
    “Of course I went to complain.”
    Michael Fredrick was not a complainer. He wouldn’t even special order anything at fast food places and be a burden. He’d gotten parking tickets before. The street in front of his girlfriend’s house would slap him with a fine if he parked there after three a.m. He paid those. He paid those if he happened to do it on a day that he had believed to be a holiday. He even paid even after they told him that he could park on the other side of the street and be fine—which apparently wasn’t true.
    “I marched right down to campus safety and I showed them that ticket. And I was like, is this some sort of mistake?”
    The guy made him wait for a long time. Then he looked at it. Then he called in a friend.
    “So after I sat there for about an hour, the guy who gave it to me came in and looked at it and he’s like, ‘You parked in a coned off area.’”
    Michael Fredrick could not even think. He was suddenly frozen. He tried to remember. He did not recall any orange cones. He would have seen them even if he had just driven over them. He looked.
    “I was like, ‘No I didn’t.’ And he was like, ‘You did too.’”
    The security guard patiently yet agitatedly explained that they had marked it off for the some sort of important person that probably gave money to the university or whatever.
    “I was like, ‘It wasn’t coned off! There were no cones!’”
    He kept trying to remember.
    The security guard just handed it back to him.
    “He’s like, ‘Sorry, man. That’s just how it is.’”
    What he really meant is, I don’t believe you.
    “‘What if I don’t pay it? ‘ I asked. He told me he’d give me three weeks, and then they’d send it in to the county and make them deal with it.
    He didn’t know if that was true or not.
    “And I’m like, ‘Go ahead!’ And the man noticed how enraged I’m getting.”
    He took him to the side to admit and threaten him.
    “So then he says to me, ‘Students pull this stunt all the time. You can’t just remove the cones and expect not to get in trouble. We’re not stupid.’”
    He didn’t argue with him.
    “And so now I have to pay this stupid ticket for 30 bucks. I looked all over that place and I didn’t see any stupid cones. I’m so pissed, I can’t even see straight.”
    That was yesterday. He couldn’t sit through class for all his anger. Now Celeste sat with him, smiling politely, trying to be sympathetic about something she didn’t particularly care about.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    And she probably was.
    “I don’t know what to tell you,” she continued. “The enforcement here really is horrible.”
    “You’re telling me.”
    She was sweet about it. He smiled empathetically, then leaned back into the chair in defeat and groaned.
    Celeste waited for a few moments before she admitted that she had to go.
    They kissed goodbye and she walked away, click-clacking down the stairs and out the automatic door into the parking lot. He watched her from the top then went back to trying to do his homework.
    As the girl got out to her truck, she looked over to see Kris Jones standing in front of his running car throwing something into the bushes. She stared at him. He smiled and waved.
    He noticed her horror and stopped.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “Where those traffic cones that you just threw out?”
    “Yeah.”
    She flicked a glance to the side before saying as she moved to her door, “You should put those back when you’re done.”
    “Nah,” he waved her away. “They’re not going to remember.”
    She just smiled at him.
    “Okay,” she said.
    Then she got in the car and drove off, deciding not to say anything to Michael. He might kill him, and it could have just as easily been one of the other twenty kids doing the exact same thing that had caused him the trouble.

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