I stood in my toll booth at Breezewood with the telephone against my ear and the Pennsylvania sun just coming up over the red mountains, and when Detective Russo asked which direction the black Escalade had gone, I did not need to think. I am Denise Kowalczyk, fifty seven years old, and in nineteen years at the plaza I have never forgotten which way a vehicle turned. “East,” I said. “It took the ramp for the Turnpike toward Harrisburg. It was moving at the speed limit. The hand was on the back window.” The detective said something to someone away from the receiver.
The state police acted faster than I thought possible, and for twelve minutes I stood at my window listening to the hum of the tires and the clatter of my own pulse. Within twelve minutes, the troop barracks at Bedford had put out the plate, and troopers at three interchanges east of me were watching the road. My supervisor, Mr. Hendricks, came out of the office with his tie crooked and stood beside the booth, wringing his cap. “Denise,” he said, “you handled this just right.” I told him I was shaking like a leaf. “That is also just right,” he said. A truck in the next lane honked, and a driver leaned out and asked what the holdup was.
At 7:21, the radio in the office crackled. A trooper had spotted the Escalade at the Fort Littleton exit, and had followed it for two miles, and had boxed it in at the toll gate of the next interchange, where it had slowed for the booth. Two cars, lights on, no sirens. The driver had tried to wave his way through, and then tried to run the gate. He did not get far. The old man in the passenger seat sat with his white head bowed and his hands folded, as still as a church statue.
A toll ticket folded into the hand of a toll collector gave one toll collector the morning to bring a father and son home from Breezewood.
The old man gave his terms in the parking lot of the plaza an hour later, when the troopers brought him back to Breezewood, because he asked to speak to the collector who had read his ticket. His name was Morris Feld. He was eighty six years old, in a worn cardigan, and he held both of my hands. “Mrs. Kowalczyk,” he said, “I will sign over nothing. The company stays with my partner, Leo, and with the men who built it. As for my son, I will not press charges, if he enters treatment, and if he works for his wage. I owe him that, as his father.”
In the back seat, the troopers had found the partner, Leo Brandt, alive, unharmed and furious, wrapped in a blanket, with a wedding ring on the hand he had pressed against the glass. He had been held for four days in a motel in New Jersey. His wife stood sobbing at the side of the road, held up by two troopers. Leo walked to Morris and the two old men embraced like brothers in the middle of the lot, among the diesel trucks. I turned away, and found that I was weeping into my sleeve.
The son, Alan, forty four years old, in his gold chain and sunglasses, had been in the front seat of a state police car with the door open. Seeing his father embrace his partner, and the troopers distracted by the reunion, he suddenly bolted, clambering out of the car and sprinting across the lot toward the highway ramp and the line of idling trucks. He was a fast runner. He might have made it, but I was standing at my open gate, and with one pull of the lever, I lowered the arm of the toll gate across the lane.
Alan ran into it at full tilt and folded over the striped arm like a man hitting a clothesline. Before he could pull himself up, a dozen truckers swung down from their cabs, big men in caps and boots, and formed a half circle around him. “Easy there, fella,” said one, in a drawl. “The lady at the booth says you owe your daddy an apology.” Alan stopped struggling. A trooper came up and put a hand on his arm, and Alan sagged and turned his face away.
The money consequences were arranged in the following weeks. The company, which made kitchen cabinets in Pittsburgh and was worth five million dollars, stayed in the hands of Morris and Leo, who put it in a structure that no single person, including Alan, could sell. The debt in Atlantic City, which Alan had run up over six years, was reported by Detective Russo to the gaming authorities, and the men who held it were charged. Alan was sentenced to a program and supervised work.
In the name of his wife Rae, who passed in 2020, Morris Feld started the Rae Feld Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for protection and legal help for older adults who are being pressured over their property, and for gambling counseling for families, in Bedford, Fulton and Somerset counties. In the first year we helped thirty eight families and placed twenty six people in counseling. One was a retired trucker from McConnellsburg who had been driving his savings to a casino every Friday.
On a morning in October, with the mountains red on both sides, a black Escalade pulled up to my booth, and I leaned out to take the ticket. The window came down. Morris Feld, in his cardigan, sat in the passenger seat, and beside him, hands steady on the wheel, sat Alan, fourteen months into his program. Morris handed me a pound cake in a tin and a second ticket, folded small. I opened it. On the back, in shaky ballpoint, it read, thank you, in capital letters. I waved them through, and watched the black Escalade roll east into the red light of the morning, and I did not look at the line of cars behind me for a good long while. Then a trucker leaned on his horn, and I laughed, and took the next ticket.
