‘I get off at three today,’ I said, and pointed at the bench. ‘Meet me there, if the rain holds off. If it doesn’t, we’ll go upstairs or down to the Country Way Diner, if you’re hungry. I expect your father would want you to know.’
Was that true? I actually had no idea. Yet my impulse to tell him seemed strong enough to qualify as an intuition, maybe even a direct order from beyond. I’m not a religious man, but I sort of believe in such things. And I thought about the oldtimers saying kill or cure, saying give that curious cat a dose of satisfaction.
Does knowing really satisfy? Rarely, in my experience. But I didn’t want Ned leaving for Pitt in September the way he was in July, with his usual sunny nature flickering on and off like a lightbulb that isn’t screwed all the way in. I thought he had a right to some answers.
Sometimes there are none, I know that, but I felt like trying. Felt I had to try, in spite of the risks.
Earthquake country, Curtis Wilcox said in my ear. That’s earthquake country in there, so be careful.
‘Goose walk over your grave again, Sandy?’ the boy asked me.
‘I guess it wasn’t a goose, after all,’ I said. ‘But it was something.’
The rain held off. When I went out to join Ned on the bench which faces Shed B across the parking lot, Arky Arkanian was there, smoking a cigarette and talking Pirate baseball with the kid. Arky made as if to leave when I showed up, but I told him to stay put. ‘I’m going to tell Ned about the Buick we keep over there,’ I told Arky, nodding toward the ramshackle shed across the way. ‘If he decides to call for the men in the white coats because the Troop D
Sergeant Commanding has lost his shit, you can back me up. After all, you were here.’
Arky’s smile faded. His iron-gray hair fluffed around his head in the limp, hot breeze that had sprung up. ‘You sure dat a good idear, Sarge?’
‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ I said, ‘but — ‘
‘ — satisfaction brought him back,’ Shirley finished from behind me. ‘A great big dose of it, is what Trooper Curtis Wilcox used to say. Can I join you? Or is this the Boys’ Club today?’
‘No sex discrimination on the smokers’ bench,’ I said. ‘Join us, please.’
Like me, Shirley had just finished her shift and Steff Colucci had taken her place at dispatch.
She sat next to Ned, gave him a smile, and brought a pack of Parliaments out of her purse.
It was two-double-oh-two, we all knew better, had for years, and we went right on killing ourselves. Amazing. Or maybe, considering we live in a world where drunks can crush State Troopers against the sides of eighteen-wheelers and where make-believe Buicks show up from time to time at real gas stations, not so amazing. Anyway, it was nothing to me right then.
Right then I had a story to tell.
THEN
In 1979, the Jenny station at the intersection of SR 32 and the Humboldt Road was still open, but it was staggering badly; OPEC took all the little ‘uns out in the end. The mechanic and owner was Herbert ‘Hugh’ Bossey, and on that particular day he was over in Lassburg, getting his teeth looked after — a bear for his Snickers bars and RC Colas was Hugh Bossey. NO
MECH ON DUTY BECAUSE OF TOOTH-AKE, said the sign taped in the window of the garage bay.
The pump-jockey was a high school dropout named Bradley Roach, barely out of his teens.
This fellow, twenty-two years and untold thousands of beers later, would come along and kill the father of a boy who was not then born, crushing him against the side of a Freuhof box, turning him like a spindle, unrolling him like a noisemaker, spinning him almost skinless into the weeds and leaving his bloody clothes inside-out on the highway like a magic trick. But all that is in the yet-to-be. We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then.
At around ten o’clock on a morning in July, Brad Roach was sitting in the office of the Jenny station with his feet up, reading Inside View. On the front was a picture of a flying saucer hovering ominously over the White House.
The bell in the garage dinged as the tires of a vehicle rolled over the airhose on the tarmac.
Brad looked up to see a car — the very one which would spend so many years in the darkness of Shed B — pull up to the second of the station’s two pumps. That was the one labeled HI TEST. It was a beautiful midnight-blue Buick, old (it had the big chrome grille and the portholes running up the sides) but in mint condition. The paint sparkled, the windshield sparkled, the chrome bar sweeping along the side of the body sparkled, and even betore the driver opened the door and got out, Bradley Roach knew there was something wrong with it.
He just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
He dropped his newspaper on the desk (he never would have been allowed to take it out of the desk drawer in the first place, if the boss hadn’t been overtown paying for his sweet tooth) and got up just as the Roadmaster’s driver opened his door on the far side of the pumps and got out.
It had rained heavily the night before and the roads were still wet (hell, still underwater in
some of the low places on the west side of Statler Township) but the sun had come out around eight o’clock and by ten the day was both bright and warm. Nevertheless, the man who got out of the car was dressed in a black trenchcoat and large black hat. ‘Looked like a spy in some old movie,’ Brad said to Ennis Rafferty an hour or so later, indulging in what was, for him, a flight of poetic fancy. The trenchcoat, in fact, was so long it nearly dragged on the puddly cement tarmac, and it billowed behind the Buick’s driver as he strode toward the side of the station and the sound of Redfern Stream, which ran behind it. The sound of the stream was very loud that morning; it had swelled wonderfully in the previous night’s showers.
Brad, assuming that the man in the black coat and floppy black hat was headed for the seat of convenience, called: ‘Door’s open, mister . . . how much of this jetfuel you want?’
‘Fill ‘er up,’ the customer said. He spoke in a voice Brad Roach didn’t much like. What he told the responding officers later was that the guy sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of jelly. Brad was in a poetical mood for sure. Maybe Hugh being gone for the day had something to do with it.
‘Check the earl?’ Brad asked. By this time his customer had reached the corner of the little white station. Judging by how fast he was moving, Brad figured he had to offload some freight in a hurry.
The guy paused, though, and turned toward Brad a little. Just enough for Brad to see a pallid, almost waxy crescent of cheek, a dark, almond-shaped eye with no discernible white in it, and a curl of lank black hair falling beside one oddly made ear. Brad remembered the ear best, remembered it with great clarity. Something about it disturbed him deeply, perhaps even horrified him, but he couldn’t explain just what it was. At this point, poesy failed him.
Melted, kinda, like he’d been in a fire seemed to be the best he could do.
‘Oil’s fine!’ the man in the black coat and hat said in his choked voice, and was gone around the corner in a final batlike swirl of dark cloth. In addition to the quality of the voice — that unpleasant, mucusy sound — the man had an accent that made Brad Roach think of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Boris Badinoff telling Natasha Ve must stop moose und squeerul!
Brad went to the Buick, ambled down the side closest to the pumps (the driver had parked carelessly, leaving plenty of room between the car and the island), trailing one hand along the chrome swoop and the smooth paintjob as he went. That stroke was more admiring than impudent, although it might have had a bit of harmless impudence in it; Bradley was then a young man, with a young man’s high spirits. At the back, bending over the fuel hatch, he paused. The fuel hatch was there, but the rear license plate wasn’t. There wasn’t even a plate holder, or screw-holes where a plate would normally go.
This made Bradley realize what had struck him as wrong as soon as he heard the ding-ding of the bell and looked up at the car for the first time. There was no inspection sticker. Well,