August Odenkirk

August Odenkirk, usually called Augie, is an unemployed man who arrives at the City Center job fair hoping to be among the first applicants. His brief appearance turns from an episode of mutual aid into an act of self-sacrifice: after lending Janice Cray his sleeping bag to warm her and her baby, Patti, he covers them with his body as a gray Mercedes plows into the crowd. The attack kills him, making his attempt to shield two strangers the decisive end of his story.

Identity and Circumstances

Augie has a 1997 Datsun that still runs despite its high mileage, but expensive gas and his lack of work make the trip across town impractical. He takes the last bus of the night instead, arriving at the auditorium at 11:20 with a pack on his back and a rolled sleeping bag under one arm. The night is misty and cold; he expects the down-filled bag to be welcome by three in the morning.

The long drive leads to a crowd already at least two dozen strong. Yellow DO NOT CROSS tape makes the applicants double back through a confined, maze-like queue, an arrangement Augie recognizes from movie theaters and the bank where his account is overdrawn. He understands that the barriers are meant to fit as many people as possible into as little space as possible. His own need for work is set against the vulnerable crowd gathered in that constrained space.

Meeting Janice and Patti

Near the end of the line, Augie sees that the woman ahead of him has a sleeping baby in a Papoose carrier. The child’s cheeks are flushed in the cold, and her breathing has a faint rattle. The woman, young and tired-looking, greets him as a member of the Early Birds Club. Augie responds with a joke about catching a worm, then introduces himself as August Odenkirk, or Augie, and explains that he has been downsized—in plain terms, fired.

The woman identifies herself as Janice Cray and the baby as Patti. She too has lost her job: she had been a housekeeper for a family in Sugar Heights whose husband owns a car dealership. Augie’s brief wince registers the implication of her former employment without making it a point of confrontation. He tells her he is divorced when she asks whether he is married.

As the fog thickens, Janice says Patti is hungry and wet, and that she cannot change the baby in the conditions around them. Augie sees how exposed and desperate their situation is. He has placed his sleeping bag beside Patti’s diaper bag; he squats, unties and unrolls it, and tells Janice to get inside it with the baby to warm them both. He offers to hand in whatever supplies she needs. The gesture is practical rather than ceremonial: he gives up the one item he brought to protect himself from the cold.

The Attack and His Final Act

The gray Mercedes appears through the fog as the crowd is packed together by the queue barriers. A long horn blast comes from the car behind it; the Mercedes’ headlamps flare, and the sedan surges forward. The crowd has little room to escape. People near the rear can run, but those closest to the doors—the early arrivals—are trapped by the posts and tape. Applicants collide and rebound against one another, while older and smaller people fall and are trampled.

Augie is shoved aside, struck beneath his right eye by a flying elbow, and pushed forward. He is driven to his knees beside the sleeping bag and kicked as he struggles to rise. When Janice briefly pokes her head out of the bag, he scrambles forward on hands and knees, then lies across it, covering her and Patti with his body. The surrounding shouts are nearly drowned by the approaching engine. Someone hits the back of his head, but he barely registers it; his attention remains on the woman and child beneath him.

He has only fragments of time to think: that he had been going to buy Rose of Sharon breakfast, and that perhaps the driver will veer away. He begins to lift his head to see whether the car is turning. Instead, a huge black tire fills his vision. Janice grips his forearm, and Augie has time to hope that Patti is still asleep before the narrative cuts off: time runs out. The abrupt ending confirms his death without showing the immediate fate of Janice or the baby.

Narrative Role and Significance

Augie’s story is brief, but its sequence gives the opening attack a human scale. The queue is not an anonymous mass to him: he has met Janice, learned that she and Patti are cold and without adequate shelter, and offered them his sleeping bag. When danger comes, that ordinary act of assistance becomes a physical choice to place himself between them and the car. The scene’s force lies in the continuity between the two actions: he first gives away warmth, then uses his own body as cover.

The tight, taped passage that Augie recognizes as a way to compress a crowd becomes a trap when the Mercedes charges in. His death is bound to the conditions of the gathering—the cold night, the dense line, the barriers, and the lack of room to flee—rather than presented as an isolated encounter. The scene also makes his final attention strikingly specific: amid the chaos, he thinks of a breakfast he intended to buy for Rose of Sharon, hopes the car will veer away, and finally hopes the baby is still asleep. His brief arc ends not with a resolution of his unemployment or a glimpse of the aftermath, but with the protective act itself.