Full Service

I began work Wednesday morning, eight a.m., on an empty stomach. I was too nervous for breakfast. My mother dropped me off at the station, handed me my lunch bag, and then drove away, making a point of not looking back. I turned to confront my new life.

The Shell station sat observed by three churches—Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist—at the northeast corner of the intersection. It was a low yellow building faced with shiny tin panels. Above the front door was a yard-wide orange-and-yellow scallop, like a single eye with upraised brow, that stared back at the churches. Plate-glass windows looked out upon three pairs of squat, square gas pumps and two dusty black pneumatic bell cords that snaked across the driveway.

“Sutton!” boomed Mr. Davies from the doorway. “Let’s go!”

I hurried inside.

“This is the manager, Kirk Johanason.”

I shook hands with Kirk, a short, muscular fellow with a pale crew cut.

“Welcome to the salt mines, kid,” Kirk said.

I nodded and managed a half smile. I knew of Kirk. He was a champion wrestler several years ago at the high school; he had gone to the state tournament in the 152-pound class, and now was married with two small kids. He drove a baby-blue two-door 1963 Chevy 327, one of the nicer cars in town.

“Wait here while I get your uniform,” Mr. Davies said.

“Yes, sir.” While I waited, Kirk ignored me, so I looked around. The long glass countertop was scratched by coins and tools; its shelves below were filled with souvenirs of Hawk Bend: tiny birch-bark canoes, rubber tomahawks, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox salt and pepper shakers, agate key rings, aerial-view postcards, miniature metal license plates with twenty common names (“Al” through “Walt”), and bumper stickers (“There’s no job like no job!”). Behind the counter was the till. An oil-smudged plastic sheet covered its keys. Beside the till was a bright stand-up display of Shell No-Pest Strips, insecticide bars sealed in foil wrappers like candy bars that made my nose itch. I stepped away from them. To the left, farther back, were wire racks of engine oil, purple cans of transmission fluid, half-pints of brake fluid, and a shelf of black twelve-volt auto batteries. At floor level were new tires, Goodyear whitewalls, their high, fresh-smelling treads bearded with tiny rubber whiskers. On the walls above were fan belts drawn together at their centers with short, numbered cardboard sleeves. The belts lined the walls like a hatch of giant dragonflies.

Mr. Davies returned from his little office. “Products for every need,” he said, spotting me scanning the office, “a need for every product. We pride ourselves on sales and service here, Sutton—Shell service. Let’s get you into uniform.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, accepting a bag of clothing.

“Go in the can and put these on, Sutton. They belonged to Brian Tesker. He got drafted.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. Closing and locking the door behind me, I shed my clean (and pressed) jeans and shirt in favor of a rumpled Shell uniform: dark brown, wide-legged, wrinkled pants, a short-sleeved tan shirt that read “Brian” over the left pocket, and a bow tie with a couple of oil spots. The shirt was three sizes too large and smelled strongly of its previous owner.

“Don’t worry about the name badge. You’ll get your own soon enough.”

“Yes, sir,” I called, smoothing the wrinkles as best I could. In the dim, cracked mirror I straightened the bow tie, then stared at myself in uniform. My head had been transplanted onto another person’s body.

“Do they fit, Sutton?” Mr. Davies’ voice boomed close to the door.

“Sort of, sir.”

“Well, if they don’t, your mother can alter them,” he said impatiently.

“Yes, sir.” I kept staring at myself in the mirror.

“Let’s take a gander, Sutton,” Mr. Davies said.

I opened the door and stepped out.

Mr. Davies nodded. “Excellent. You’re in the army now, son,” he said. “Basic training starts with the seven-point Shell service code.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A road-weary driver sees the Shell sign from afar and what does that driver think?”

“Products for every need?”

“Shell gas. Shell oil. Shell service, that’s what he thinks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You come from a religious family, Sutton, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When that driver turns in and pulls up to the pumps, it is an act of faith, Sutton.”

“Yes, sir.” Weirdly, I felt a small thrill run through me; my uniform, the Shell logos on my shirt, had strange powers.

“Faith in what, Sutton?”

“Shell gas, Shell oil, Shell service, sir.”

“What kind of service?”

“The seven-point service, sir.”

“Good, Sutton,” Mr. Davies said. “Now repeat after me: Cheerful greeting.”

“Cheerful greeting.”

“Fill with ethyl?”

“Check oil.”

“Check water.”

“Check radiator and fan belt.”

“Wash windshield.”

“Provide extra service.”

“You’re going to go far, Sutton.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But what about number seven, Sutton, extra service?”

I waited.

“What do you think that means, Sutton?”

“Extra service?” I ventured.

“Precisely,” Mr. Davies boomed. “You notice something—dusty headlights, an overflowing ashtray—and you take the initiative, Sutton.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A loose hubcap, you pound it back on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Extra service is what separates the men from the boys in the great Shell family, Sutton.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Davies leaned forward, lowering his voice. “It is also what could win you one thousand dollars.”

My eyes widened.

“Shell, Incorporated, never sleeps, Sutton. There are Shell stations across the world. This may be Hawk Bend, Minnesota, but my station is no different from a Shell station in Parlez-Vous, France; in Sprechen Sie, Deutsch; in Coon’s Butt, Kentucky.”

I nodded.

“And how,” Mr. Davies said, leaning forward still closer (his coffee-and-whiskey breath made me squint my eyes), “do you think Mr. Shell keeps track of all his stations?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“He visits them, Sutton.”

“He does?”

“Indeed he does, Sutton. Mr. Shell visits every one of his stations. You won’t know when. You won’t know his car. You won’t know what he looks like, but one day Mr. Shell will come.”

Goose bumps swirled across my forearms.

“However, you will not know he is Mr. Shell until afterward,” Mr. Davies said, leaning closer to me. “Only afterward will he reveal his identity. But if you have performed the seven-point service plan—to his satisfaction —you will win, Sutton, one thousand dollars!”

At that very moment the driveway bells dinged; a car pulled up to the pumps. I froze, then looked at Mr. Davies.

“You’re a Shell man now, Sutton!” Mr. Davies thundered. “Go get ’em!”

I sprang through the doorway.

Not much later, after Mr. Davies left the station, Kirk said, “Don’t get sucked into that ‘Mr. Shell’ bullshit.”

I stared.

“I’ve been here three years and no friggin’ Mr. Shell has ever come.”

I was silent, then said, “But he could come.”

“Mr. Shell?” Kirk stared at me, then began to laugh. “Don’t you get it? There probably ain’t any Mr. Shell.” He laughed so hard he began to cough. Taking a key from the till, he went to the pop cooler and opened the lock. He rattled a bottle of RC Cola along the slots, popped off the cap, and slugged half of it down.

Kirk noticed me staring.

“Want one?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

“On the house. The old man’s gone, help yourself.”

I shook my head.

Kirk sighed. “You’re one of them. All right, come on, I’ll show you the back room.”

If the front office was well lighted and generally clean, the back room was a dark noisy dungeon. The tool bench was constructed of heavy pine beams long soaked through from oil, and battered from hammers and wrenches. Centered in the back room was the hydraulic hoist: a single shining column, as thick and smooth as a peeled pine tree, that rose from the floor. Powered by a thudding air compressor and hydraulic fluid, the iron arms of the hoist held up a Buick without complaint. To the right of the hoist was the tire machine; it looked like a torture seat, a backless chair with an upright spike and a pneumatic arm. Beside it, hung on the wall, was an array of curved picks, levers, pincers for removing foreign bodies from tire treads. A box of offenders lay there: nails large and small, a railroad spike, part of a muffler clamp, a rifle bullet, a piece of baling wire, a kitchen fork with most of its tines shiny and ground away. On the floor was a box of used wheel weights, bent gray molars of lead, and beside it the round tire balancer with its watery eyeball, a stationary black iris and a wandering pea-sized pupil. Coating the equipment, coating everything, was a fine grit of black rubber soot.

“Your main job is to watch the drive,” Kirk said, nodding toward the pumps, “plus help me back here when you’re not running gas. That and clean the johns.”

In the afternoon Kirk took a phone call. He turned his back to me, murmured a few words into the receiver, then headed toward the door. “Furnace call,” he said. Mr. Davies offered furnace service and repair along with heating oil. He also employed a third full-time man—Bud, the fuel-truck driver, whom I had not yet met.

“Furnace. In the summer?” I said.

Kirk stared at me briefly, then left. He squealed out in his blue Chevy, and I was alone at the station for the first time.

It was an overcast cool day. I discovered it was the kind of weather that brought the tourists off the lakes and into town. Soon I had gas hoses running in four cars at once. I moved like a ballet dancer from car to car, throwing open hoods, pulling oil dipsticks, never forgetting a windshield, providing extra service, making perfect change.

When Kirk returned, he examined the till tape, scrutinized the gallons and the receipts, surveyed the front office. I pretended nonchalance. Bud, a potato-faced man in his late fifties who lived with his mother, arrived about the same time. He nodded a brief, almost shy hello to me.

“All well and good,” Kirk said, “except somebody walked off with four No-Pest Strips.” He gestured to the display box beside the cash registers. “When you’re pumping gas you got to watch the damn till area or you’re not gonna last here, Sutton.”

Later, after Kirk was gone, Bud said, “Don’t worry about it, kid. Kirk’s having women trouble.” Bud drew a mint toothpick from his shirt pocket, briefly counting the toothpicks remaining. He leaned on the counter to look out toward the street, toward the intersection. “Someday Kirk’s gonna get his in a vise,” Bud said. He rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and stared at the stoplight that clicked as it changed from green to yellow. “Mark my words, in a vise.”

That first short week, as Bud looked on, Kirk showed me the equipment of the back room. How to remove tires from rims on the pneumatic tire machine. How to fit new tires on rims. “With the tires as with the ladies, always use plenty of ‘wienerschlider,’” Kirk said, pointing to the bucket of rubber lubricant. Bud rolled his eyes; I kept an even face. That week I learned the correct way to secure a wheel on a car’s hub: one nut at a time in an alternating star-shaped pattern. This reduced the possibility of wheel imbalance. I learned the Shell approach to fixing large, split-rim truck tires: “Send them down the damn road,” Kirk and Bud said in unison. They meant the co-op station at the edge of town, where most farmers (though not my father, and the others, who fixed their own) took their biggest tractor tires.

“I saw a split rim blow off once,” Bud said, tonguing his toothpick to the opposite side of his mouth. “It took three fingers and the left ear off that … Benson kid? From that beef farm west of town?” He turned to Kirk for confirmation.

Kirk shrugged. “Way before my time.”

“Anyway,” Bud said, “she blew off right there.” He pointed down to a pale, curving scar in the concrete.

And, that first week, I met the customers. I met a local man, sagged and frail Mr. Batson, who drove a Buick station wagon with two spare tires in the rear and two more tires strapped atop. “Would you check my spares, son?” he said. His breath was rank and coppery.

“Yes, sir.” My little gauge sprang to forty-five pounds inflation. I checked it again. Thirty-two pounds was normal.

“Forty-five pounds?” he said.

I nodded.

“Let’s bring them up to fifty,” he said.

“Fifty, sir?” I said.

“You need plenty of air, son. You can never have too much air.”

“Okay,” I said.

Afterward I told Bud the hilarious story of the old man with four spare tires. “Weird,” I said, “very weird.”

Bud did not laugh. He lifted a hand sideways across his throat. “Cancer,” he said. “The old guy is full of cancer up to here.”

I met Stephen Knutson, the banker’s son, and his 1964 Corvette Stingray. “Fill. Ethyl. And be careful of the paint,” he said, not getting out of the car. He was a golden boy with John F Kennedy hair and straight white teeth, and for years had dated Peggy Leikvold, the prettiest girl in his class. I knew that he recognized me from school—he was a senior last year and I was a freshman—but he did not acknowledge that fact. A duffel bag and a couple of tennis rackets were stashed behind the bucket seats.

“Taking a trip?” I said cheerfully as I washed the windshield; small talk was something Mr. Davies encouraged.

“What’s it to you?” he said, looking at me for the first time.

He had undistinguished blue eyes. I shrugged and finished his windshield in silence, then topped off the tank. “That’ll be five dollars even.”

“Charge it,” he said, and drove off without signing.

I went back to the till.

“Was that the Knutson kid?” Bud asked.

I nodded. “He didn’t even sign for his gas.”

“No problem,” Bud said, and showed me how to write up a charge slip. “He’s a real ass. It runs in his family.”

I met Kirk’s wife, Lynette, a thin-faced, dark-haired woman who wore cat’s-eye glasses and was several years older than Kirk. She would have been pretty had she not plucked her eyebrows into black horseshoes. She drove a polished but rusted Ford station wagon with two kids in the back. “Is Kirk here?” she said, her eyes scanning the drive for his car or the wrecker. She had a whiny, suspicious voice.

“Kirk is engaged by a service call,” I answered in my professional voice, which cracked only momentarily. I had been coached and I knew my lines: a service call—no more, no less, Kirk had said.

“Service call? Where?”

“Bud took the call, perhaps you could ask him?” Bud’s face, visible at the window like a pale mushroom, now shrank away.

She glanced at the station, then at me. “Right,” she said sarcastically, the corners of her mouth drawing downward. She gave me a final glare, then sped off.

Bud came out to the steps and stared after her car.

“That’s Kirk’s wife?” I said.

Bud rolled his toothpick. “Shotgun wedding.”

I met a local housewife with blond hair piled high and sprayed in place. She seemed annoyed that I came out to wait on her, and she asked for fifty cents’ worth of gas. She kept looking toward the office, the back room. “Isn’t Kirk on today?” she finally said.

“Kirk is engaged by a service call.”

“I’ll bet he is,” she said.

“Is there anything Bud or I might help you with?” I asked.

She gave me a long look. “Bud—it’d be a cold day in hell. And you—not for a couple of years.”

My ears reddened like train semaphores.

“Unless you know furnaces, that is,” she said, raising one eyebrow at me.

“No, ma’am,” I stammered.

“There’s the main boiler and then there’s the pilot light,” she said, gesturing, drawing a circle with her hands.

I nodded.

“Oh, you do know furnaces after all?”

“Well, kind of—I mean I know what a pilot light is,” I stammered.

“Good. Good. A lot of men go through life never understanding the difference between a pilot light and the main boiler. My first husband, Bill, he never knew where to look. Matter of fact, he couldn’t even find the basement.”

I turned back to the station for help. Bud’s pale face peered, unmoving, through the glass.

“Be sure to tell Kirk that Darlene’s furnace needs its checkup, okay?”

For some reason I bowed, which tickled her fancy, and she drove off laughing. She made a sweeping, grandiose turn onto the highway—I held my breath as cars braked and swerved for her—and she proceeded untouched through the intersection.

“Son, you stay clear of that one,” Bud said.

I met my first war protester. Kirk and I were under the hoist fastening a tailpipe to the belly of an Oldsmobile when a yellow-and-white Volkswagen bus pulled up to the far pumps. It had a camper-type top, New York plates, and a peace sign painted on the side. The rear of the bus was curtained.

“What we got here?” Bud said. We straightened up to look.

“Commie antiwar protesters,” Kirk said.

“Sure as hell,” Bud said.

We stared. Then I turned to head outside.

“Let ’m wait,” Kirk commanded, reaching out for another muffler clamp. “They don’t like it, they can get gas somewhere else.”

We kept working. The yellow bus sat quietly in the drive. Several minutes passed. The driver, a bushy-haired fellow with dark, round sunglasses, remained behind the wheel. After a while he got out and stretched; face up to the sun, he held his arms wide and did a series of calf-raises and squats. He was a skinny fellow, made top-heavy by a large head, but he had excellent balance.

“A real weirdo,” Bud said.

“Watch this,” Kirk said. He headed into the drive. Bud and I went to the doorway.

“How may we help you, sir?” Kirk said.

“Good day, brother. Five gallons regular.” The man nodded to Bud and me.

“By all means, sir.” Then the man turned his face back to the sun, and Kirk winked at us.

“Check the oil, sir?”

“If you like, brother.”

Kirk went to the rear and opened the lid. He lifted the dipstick, returned it without inspection—then pretended to spot something beneath the engine. He went back around to the sunning driver.

“I noticed your muffler bearings are loose, sir,” he said.

Beside me Bud’s belly began to jiggle with silent laughter.

“Muffler bearings?” the guy said.

“Yes, sir,” Kirk said earnestly, “the muffler bearings. They rotate the compression baffles inside the muffler. When they’re loose, your engine tends to overheat.”

Bud’s belly heaved with silent guffaws.

“Are you saying I need new muffler bearings, then?” the man said, still facing the sun. “Or could these muffler bearings be fixed?”

“I could try to fix them,” Kirk said. “Though it’d take a while.”

“I see,” the bushy-haired man said evenly. He turned and smiled at Kirk. “Then you could also fix my gravel pump?”

Kirk stared.

“And change my Goldwater fluid? Brother, brother—I may have long hair but I do all my own repairs.”

Bud laughed audibly from the station doorway.

“Not that I’m being negative about you, brother,” the man added, placing his hand on Kirk’s shoulder.

“I’m not your damn brother,” Kirk said, batting away his hand.

“We are all brothers,” the man said, and headed to the bathroom.

While he was gone Kirk finished the gas. He looked over his shoulder to the closed men’s room door, then suddenly bent low beneath the rear bumper of the van. Taking a small wrench from his pocket, he reached underneath, and moments later was standing up again wiping his hand on his pant leg. The man returned, paid for his gas, and then the yellow peace van headed west.

“What did you do to him?” Bud asked.

“Opened his oil plug a half turn,” Kirk said, staring after the hippie van.

“Geez,” Bud said.

“‘Brother, I do all my own repairs,’” Kirk mimicked. “Let’s see him fix a fried engine about an hour down the road.”

Bud nodded. Kirk grinned at me; I looked away.

“Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere—boom!” Kirk said.

“If the buzzards don’t get him, the coyotes will,” Bud said.

“Ought to send that kind to Vietnam,” Kirk said, his grin fading as he stared after the yellow van. “That would teach him a lesson.”

I met a beautiful woman in a blue Mercedes. Late in the afternoon, with Kirk gone on another furnace call, the bells rang twice—soft bells—well-spaced bells. I was fast learning their code: a single ring meant that a passing kid had stomped on the cord. Fast, loud bells meant a local tradesman—carpenter, roofer, plumber—always in a hurry and needing “just a squirt” of gas. Medium-paced bells meant the average tourist car. But slow bells meant a motor-home driver or else an old lady, both of whom entailed not seven-point service but seventy-times-seven.

Framed in the battered doorway of the back room, centered on a shiny white rectangle of pavement, sat the Mercedes. It was the small kind, a coupe. A woman drove. She wore sunglasses and a pale scarf tied at the chin. I hurried out.

“Good afternoon!” I said brightly. “Fill with ethyl?”

She didn’t look up at me. “Fill. With ethyl,” she murmured.

Her sunglasses were slightly pointy, with a narrow mother-of-pearl rim across the top. The lenses were deeply black, the kind I could not see through. I suddenly thought of Mr. Shell: surely there was no Mrs. Shell.

The car was dusty, bug-specked, and carried Virginia plates. The backseat contained a single large leather suitcase. I squatted behind the car to look for the gas cap and was rewarded. During my first week I had been stumped by a 1956 Chevy—the cap was behind the left taillight—and only yesterday by a 1959 Cadillac—high up in the right rear fin. To ask the driver was to have failed. When the pump whirred as its iron nozzle chilled in my hand and the sweet gasoline smell rose, I returned to the driver.

“Check your oil and water, ma’am?” I said. Why couldn’t there be a Mrs. Shell?

“If you wish.” Her voice was barely audible.

I went to the front of the blue Mercedes and searched for the hood latch, another test of professional competency. I ran my fingers over the grill, then under the bumper. I got down on my knees. I lay on my back. I went to the back room for a flashlight. I spent several minutes before the car, searching, feeling everywhere for the hood latch. Bud watched me through the station window. Finally I went around to the driver’s side. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, my ears burning. “I can’t seem to find the hood latch.”

“Hood latch?” she murmured. She looked up at me for the first time. She had fine brown hair, an oval face with a thin, perfect nose. Her skin was clear and untanned.

“The oil,” I said. “I was going to check your oil.”

“Of course,” she said—I had the feeling that behind her glasses she blinked; remembered where she was. “The hood latch is inside, down here somewhere.” She opened her door and pointed down.

She wore a skirt, not a miniskirt but not long either, and she swung her legs to the side. I reached down, my tan arm alongside her white calf, and felt for the lever. “Got it,” I said, and quickly stood up.

She didn’t reply.

Behind the upraised hood I recovered my wits and found the dusty blue finger loop of the dipstick. It withdrew from the engine block long and brightly chromed, like a fine and drooping sword—but stained with black blood. I did not like the looks of that oil. Carefully I wiped the blade, inserted it, withdrew it again. Black, gritty oil hung well below the full line.

“You definitely need oil—at least two quarts!” I said, showing her the dipstick.

“Thank you,” she murmured. She handed me her Shell credit card.

“Have you changed it recently?”

“It’s my husband’s car. He usually took care of those things. But he’s not around now. He left me.”

I was silent. Then I said, “Usually there’s a sticker or a tag of some kind that tells when the oil was last changed. It’s probably on the driver’s door frame.”

She shrugged.

I opened her door again and crouched to read the tag. Then I read the odometer. “It hasn’t been changed in fifteen thousand miles!” I said.

“Is that bad?”

“Yes. Very. I could change it for you right now.”

“No, thank you. Just put some in.” Afterward, she signed for her gas, then looked around. “What town is this?”

“Hawk Bend. Minnesota,” I added.

She watched a station wagon arrive at the far pumps. Some kids piled out and raced for the restrooms. She stared intently at them, then looked toward Main Street. I followed her gaze—and saw it through her eyes. One block of storefronts with painted tin awnings and fake fronts to modernize the red brick underneath. A bait shop. A clothing store. An ice cream store, open only in summer, with a candy-striped stagecoach on top. Elmo’s Barbershop. A pool hall. One old general store, without awnings. A Woolworth’s. Paula’s Café. A bakery. Two hardware and two auto-parts stores. A lumberyard at the far end of town.

“What do people do here?” she asked.

“I dunno. Tourism, logging, farming, construction.”

“And winters?”

“A lot of places close up. People just kind of get by,” I said.

She turned to me. “And you?” She looked at my shirt, at the darker, blank oval where my mother had removed “Brian” (my own name badge was supposed to be here any day).

“Paul.”

“Paul,” she repeated.

“My folks have a dairy farm. I’m a sophomore in high school. Will be, that is,” I bumbled on, though I had the feeling she wanted a different answer. “Three more years and I graduate.”

“And then?”

“College, probably, though there’s the draft. The war in Vietnam.”

She nodded, then took another long look at Hawk Bend.

“Are there any nice girls here, one you could marry?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” I stammered.

She looked far away down the highway “That might be the best—marry someone you’ve known for a long time, someone you grew up with, then stay here, because the world out there is very overrated, Paul.”

I was silent. Her blue Mercedes left the station, paused at the stoplight, then headed west.

I met an older man driving an immaculate 1953 Cadillac. He wore a pale silk shirt, pants pleated and wide-legged, and auburn leather shoes with pointed toes and a miniature brush on top. I had never seen clothes like that, not even in Kendrigan’s. His shoes (they were right beside me as I ran gas in the big tank) stood out in particular: the tops of his loafers were a delicate leather mesh that squeaked softly when he moved, like expensive, oiled horse tack. He smelled of Old Spice and cigar smoke; of faraway places. My hands suddenly trembled on the pump handle: It was Mr. Shell.

“New on the job, son?” he said pleasantly.

Had he seen my sudden tremor? “Yes, sir.”

He smiled.

I provided him the seven-point code, all the while looking for some way to give extra service. The cigar smell. Sure enough, a butt lay in the wide chrome ashtray. “Empty that ashtray for you, sir?”

“Why, thank you, son,” he said, and stepped aside.

I not only emptied the butt, I buffed the ashtray.

“Good job, son. Name’s Blomenfeld. Harry Blomenfeld. I’ve got a charge account here. My driver usually takes care of the car, but he’s laid up today, so I’ll sign the slip.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, hugely disappointed.

Later that afternoon, when Bud returned from a fuel oil delivery, he noticed the charge slip. “Kid Can was here!”

“Who?”

“Kid Can Blomenfeld.”

“Who’s he?”

“Right here. Here’s his slip,” Bud said, holding it up.

“Shouldn’t I have let him charge?” I said quickly.

“No, no—he’s good for it. He always pays cash at the end of every month,” Bud said.

“So what about him?’

“What about him?” Bud said. “He’s a big-time Chicago gangster. At least he was.”

I looked down the highway; the Cadillac and soft-spoken Mr. Blomenfeld were long gone. “A gangster? Sure,” I laughed.

At that moment Kirk came in.

“Paul waited on Harry Blomenfeld!” Bud said.

Kirk laughed loudly.

“Is there a joke?” I said.

“You, Sutton,” Kirk said. “You’re the joke.”

“Everybody knows Kid Can,” Bud explained. “He’s got an estate out on Big Sandy Lake, high fences, bodyguard, you name it.”

“He seemed like just a nice old man,” I said stubbornly.

“Nice?” Kirk said. “Nice? He once killed three men himself and had them run through a dog-food grinder. He went to trial but all the witnesses conveniently disappeared. Probably ended up as dog food, too. That’s where he got the nickname—Kid Can.”

I swallowed but held my ground. “Why would a gangster live in Hawk Bend, Minnesota?”

“’Cause he can never go back to Chicago, stupid,” Kirk said.

Toward week’s end, I spoke for the first time to Stephen Knutson’s girlfriend, Peggy Leikvold. Her father had a charge account at the station. As a senior at school that year, Peggy had been the glowing sun of the hallways. She pulled along an orbit of admirers, beginning, in closest ring, with the senior boys and ending with small, skinny fellows like myself who could only gaze from the far-off minor galaxy of tenth grade. She and Stephen Knutson were headed to the university in Minneapolis in the fall.

Today Peggy was alone. Peggy in her white sleeveless blouse.

“Hello. Fill with ethyl?” I said, trying to keep my gaze from slipping down her brown neck. I was successful, though I felt myself blush.

“Regular,” she said, and leaned near the mirror to fluff up the dome of her short blond hair.

I hid out beneath the hood of the Ford Safari wagon, checking the oil and radiator, letting my blood subside, then came around to top off the tank. As she signed the gas ticket I gave in to temptation. Her tanned shoulders, the brown and downy rise of her breasts, the damp crescents under the arms of her sleeveless blouse—I stared shamelessly. Peggy Leikvold was a strong, athletic girl who was also valedictorian of her class. She was a girl who always seemed to be from somewhere else, not Hawk Bend.

“Have you seen Dale Bender?” she said suddenly, looking up at me.

“Dale Bender?” There was offense in my voice. Dale Bender was a fullback who had graduated, barely, the previous year. His family ran a logging and sawmill operation north of town.

“Yes, Dale Bender,” she said impatiently.

“Sorry, no,” I said.

She signed the charge slip and drove off.

On Friday, I met a white-haired nut-brown man driving a battered 1952 Oldsmobile with Nevada plates. He wanted ten gallons of gas in exchange for a belt buckle made of silver with bits of inlaid turquoise. I held the buckle in my hand; it was heavy and cool to the touch. I could see my father wearing it Christmas Day or on his birthday.

“Deal!” I said. I had enough money in my wallet to cover the gas.

The old man nodded wisely. He had a long thin braided ponytail. “It is a buckle of great power, my son,” he said. “You must keep it in this protective box until you’re ready to wear it or give it away.” He took the buckle and placed it in a little box that had thick cotton inside; with a quick flourish of his hands he knotted string around the box. I checked his oil, finished the gas, then received my box and its buckle. As he drove away, I took the box inside.

“Hey, Bud, you have to see this belt buckle,” I said, describing my prize as I untied the string. “I’m going to give it to my dad.” Bud watched as I opened the box and unfolded the neat layers of cotton. Inside, at the bottom, was a single smooth gray stone.

I stared.

Kirk, just back from Elmo’s with a fresh haircut, stepped forward to look. His new flattop smelled of butch wax. I whirled toward the door, looked west past the stoplight; the old man and his car were long gone.

“Nice buckle,” Kirk said. “Except the belt loops are missing.” He and Bud laughed until they had to wipe their eyes.

“Sorry, kid,” Bud said.

That evening I told my mother about the belt buckle. She smiled; her blue eyes shone like the turquoise. “So, Paul,” she said. “You’ve met the public.”