"Service Station"

Buzzing fluorescent bulbs light the service station’s waiting room. Three battered folding chairs, a recycled church pew, a garish red table, and an empty gumball machine fill the stale air of the room. Sitting uncomfortably in the corner on one of the crooked metal chairs is a sad-eyed twenty year old, folding and unfolding her arms and crossing and uncrossing her legs. We’ll call her Mary. Mary needs to get back on the goddamned road.

The screen-less screen door opens with a tired jingle. Mary resists
the urge to gather her handbag closer to her as two figures take a seat on the old pew across from her. Dreading the inevitable conversation, she avoids eye contact. Dear God, I wish he’d hurry up with car. Desperate wishes for a magazine or a Xanax or a magic carpet flit through her head. Just as she’s leaning her head back on the drab cinderblock wall, the woman draws a phlegmy breath as if a prelude to speech. “Hey. You got a butt?”

Mary takes a few puzzled, blinking seconds to figure out what the hell this creepy old woman even means.

“No. I do not smoke.”

“Ah. You’re a smart girl. Wicked habit, wicked habit. Here’s what I want to know. How in the hell did a smart girl ever end up in the boondocks? Me and my boy here…” She jerks an arthritic thumb toward the silent, staring man beside her. “…we’re waiting for the bus. That fella in town said this is the only spot around to catch the Greyhound, and I’d bet my immortal soul it’s gonna be all damned night before it comes.” She seems to bookend all her speeches with a cackle.

Since the woman seems to expect conversation, the girl hesitantly explains that while on a road trip (she caught herself before she uttered the decidedly saccharine phrase “spiritual journey”) her car broke down here (in a place which is surely the exact latitude and longitude of the Middle of Fucking Nowhere). Now she’s just waiting for the mechanic, who barely looks old enough to drive much less replace a transmission, to work his magic.

Suddenly embarrassed, Mary dismisses the matter by feigning interest in a religious tract left by a concerned citizen on the red table beside her.

Galatians 5:16 Walk in the Spirit, and you shall Not fulfill the Lust of the Flesh!
John 3:16 HaveYou accepted Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior!?
Revelations 1:5 Sins of the flesh! Repent! Be Bathed in the Blood of the Lamb!

“Don’t you sit there reading that. I want somebody to talk to. I can’t very well talk to him. He’s touched.” She taps the man’s forehead as she says, “He’s a bit off.” He doesn’t even blink. She cackles. Mary tosses the pamphlet on the table with an impatient sigh and looks at the speaker for more or less the first time. The woman is tiny; her feet swing comically two feet above the concrete floor. Her face is leathery and ambiguous; age is hard to determine--perhaps this side of forty; perhaps closer to sixty. Her hair is dyed an unnatural (and uneven) raven black, and she’d been quite creative in redefining her lip-line with a plummy lipstick. The hygiene of her company as a top priority is the doubtful. The sickeningly sweet smell of cheap wine and body odor closes the distance across the cramped service station waiting room, and Mary resists the urge to fan the air in front of face.

“Of course you would be delighted to talk to me.”

“Of course I would,” Mary echoes, slightly amused and somewhat intrigued despite herself.

“I’m damned glad of it. I don’t often get to talk to people.” Her voice was low and rumbly, like thunder or hunger. “Especially to women. I suppose I could blame it on him…or fate. Hahahaha. Goddamned fickle fate.”

The girl turns reluctantly to look at the third person in the room, startled to find the man staring openly at her and even more startled to find she is returning his unblinking gaze. She stared openly at his red satiny tuxedo jacket, torn jeans, and bare dusty feet. The girl resists the urge to lean forward and touch the sleeve of his jacket to see if he was real. Mary shivers involuntarily and forces her eyes away from him. “Oh, don’t worry about him. I’m the one you have to worry about.” She breaks off with a cackle and from her dingy canvas tote bag produces a half empty (half full?) bottle of what Mary realizes with a concealed smile is probably Thunderbird and takes a healthy swig, mid-cackle. Turning to the man, the woman says, “We got ourselves a smart one. Hell, she goes to college. And well-off to boot. She’s got herself a nice car in there too. So you best behave. Don’t just sit there staring, boy. I ain’t playin’.” The girl resists the urge to laugh maniacally. Fucking surreal. Nothing visible has changed in the man’s gaze. Indeed, Mary still hadn’t even noticed him blink; but the girl suddenly flushes under his gaze as if he had made an obscene gesture. She wonders at the incongruence of his tightly cropped copper curls, his café con leche skin, and his strikingly green-gold eyes. What before seemed a vacant expression on his mulatto face now seems lurid, knowing. The girl inwardly chides herself. Just nervous from the wait in such an eerie place with the long car ride still ahead of her, not to mention an unresolved argument with the man who may or may not still be her boyfriend. She doesn’t know if leaving in the middle of their argument and driving across the state alone had been the wisest course of action, but dammit at least it was proactive.

She had to get out of there. She couldn’t stand the way the déjà vu of their argument was smarting in her eyes and rising in her throat. She remembered finding her mother, already drunk at four in the afternoon, crying on the lanai that Daddy #3 was a cheating, lying bastard and take notice, sweetheart, he’s just like all the men, always chasing the elusive tail, only this time the tail belonged to a nimble twenty-one year old intern at the office. She knew that her mother refused to sleep with any of her husbands after she had fucked her way out of a pre-nup and that inevitably the chill in the bedroom drove the men to seek warmth elsewhere. And the bitter truth of history repeating itself forced her out of the co-ed dormitory and into her car that Daddy #1 had presented her upon graduation with the angry words “frigid cunt” and “cold bitch” threatening in a buzz to rise up and choke her.

“Where you go to college, smart girl?” asks the woman, not unkindly, her voice thicker from the swigs of wine was still drinking straight from the mouth of the bottle.

“I go to State. Um, it’s about five hours from here…” She is cut off sharply.

“I know where that is. I, myself, was born in a little town not far from there called Hopeless, Texas. Ha! I shit you not. I grew up with money. Hell, look at her eyes big up! Hahaha. It was my granddaddy’s money. Oil and pine trees. God, I miss that man. He used to swing me up in the air until my breath caught in my throat and I didn’t know which was going to kill me first, the gravity or my laughter.” A silence descends on the room, interrupted only by the sound of an irritated cricket and the distant whining of an oil rig. After a moment the girl looks up from her bitten cuticles to see that the woman has dozed off, head thrown awkwardly back, purple mouth agape.

The man in the ridiculous crimson attire has slid down on the pew. He sits with his legs spread comfortably, eerie eyes still riveted on the girl. She notices the moisture on his bottom lip, the golden tight curls by his temples, his thumbs tracing languid circles on his torn jeans. The girl’s heartbeat slides to the pit of her stomach, pauses for one teasing moment, and moves lower. She resists the urge to look away.