On a cold January morning at 2:30 a.m., I walked into a small gas station in the bad part of Billings, Montana. I needed coffee. Or, more specifically, caffeine. I found the dispensers and groggily contemplated the selection. Highlander Grogg? Morning Mist? Fireball Blend? The decision seemed overwhelming, and I stood as though in a fog. I reached for a cup. I set it down again. 

A distant echo, a rising drumroll of unease shouldered its way into my consciousness. Things were not right in the room. I turned slowly, my back to the coffee. 

There were four people in the tiny store: myself, a man on the other side of the single display unit whom I could not see, a tall Native American in a long, black parka, and the cashier, a short, heavy older woman with cropped purple hair. 

The woman stood blocking the single doorway with what seemed to be a collapsed hiking stick with a bright yellow handle. The Native American, probably with Crow blood from the reservation to the south, stood facing her. “No one is moving until you take it out! I will tase you, I will call the cops! No one is moving until you take it all out I will tase you right here!” Her voice filled the room and held us. She gripped her stick with both her small hands and her eyes bored up into his face.

The Crow’s face was dead as a stone and he would not look at her. “Tase me then,” he mumbled, but he shifted back, away from the yellow weapon. It hurt to see a man reduced to this: unable to make eye contact, a sullen hull sapped by a life of poverty, addictions, incarcerations. He knew all too well the searing jolt of a taser and the bite of the cuffs. Grandma Purple advanced again, eyes blazing and gripping her taser. The Crow backed up some more, and again: “Tase me then.” But he was not about to be tased. He stayed well back.

Outside my family waited in our van. I had left the hose in the tank when I went after my coffee, and Amy, with a woman’s intuitions, knew something was off. She could see people in the tiny store but the usual rotations of purchasers past the counter had ceased. No one moved. No one came and went. She watched the door and formed a plan. At the first hint of violence she would lunge into the driver’s seat, kick the van into Drive and rip the hose from the pump. Perhaps already she’d have taken a bullet and would slump across the wheel, the heel of her hand pinned onto the horn and dragging the van in a tight circle in the little parking lot. The bouncing pump nozzle might strike a spark and ignite, becoming a roaring flamethrower slinging fire in a wide arc. This spectacle outside the door of the store could serve to disorient and intimidate an attacker. She sat ready, watching the door.

Inside the store I moved closer to Grandma Purple in a show of solidarity. How would this go down if the Crow pulled a gun and shot his way to the door, only to find it locked? Or got Grandma’s keys, and, bolting from the store with law enforcement’s blue strobes in his face, saw our van at the ready, threw Amy out and disappeared with our sleeping children? He had the long arms of a street fighter. He could grab a wine bottle and crush Grandma’s head before she could fumble out her phone. I moved to the center of the aisle, not too close to needlessly escalate, not too far to be useless should he assault her. “No one’s going anywhere. No one is moving until you empty that coat don’t make me tase you! I have it all on video cops will be here in less than three minutes. No one is moving that door is staying locked!”

The Crow writhed in the aisle. “I don’t have nothin’, I got nothin’.” The store fell silent, the industrial clock on the wall ticking ominously, the rush of distant traffic on I-90 whispering outside. We waited, the four of us, as this drama played out. Was Grandma bluffing or for real? Did she have video? Had she actually seen him fill his pockets, or was she only trying to flush him out? The Crow moved around listlessly, silent. Grandma Purple never took her eyes off him, never blinked. Her legs were braced, her jaw set. I didn’t know if this was a good road for Grandma to take. If there was a warrant out on the Crow, or there was more under his parka than some pilfered jerky, holding him up might not end well. But this was her wheelhouse, not mine. I could only hope she knew her stuff. We waited. Time hung suspended.

The Crow opened his parka and slowly took out a pack of crumpled M&Ms and laid them on the closest shelf. Grandma unlocked the door and took up her spot behind the counter. The Crow passed into the cold darkness outside.

I took my coffee to the counter. “Daylight’s coming,” I said, not taking my eyes off my family waiting at the edge of the light. 

She waved at my coffee. “It’s on me.” I nodded my thanks and walked to my family in our warm van.

I think of the Crow and Grandma Purple sometimes, of the movements and decisions that brought us together for ten minutes on a January morning. How different our lives, our destinies, our origins. How humans on this earth flow, mix, meet: the accoutrements of those interactions, the tasers and M&Ms, and how the meanings are lost on us. 

Those M&Ms haunt me; they looked too rumpled, too much like they had spent days in a coat pocket. Had Grandma Purple been running on a hunch and called it wrong? Had the Crow, seeing her determination and knowing there was no other way, searched his parka and found the M&Ms and laid them on the altar? Had I seen a little bit of Jesus, a willingness to take a wrong on himself for peace on earth, in a grungy gas station in Billings?