On Monday morning, Tim, the night man, walked into the station.
“You’re a little early,” Kirk said. There was a lull in traffic; Kirk, Bud, and I stood in the front office by the till.
Tim grinned oddly; his face was whiter than normal. “Last night my old lady had a miscarriage.”
“Jesus,” Bud murmured.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I tried to think of more and better words, but failed.
Kirk clucked his tongue once, then looked out to the street.
Bud offered, “I didn’t even know she was knocked up.”
“Us neither,” Tim said, looking at us with a lopsided grin. “She was in the bathroom, and then she let out a scream.”
We were all silent.
He turned to get himself a soda, fumbled in his pockets for change.
“Your money’s no good here,” Bud said. He stepped forward and opened the pop cooler with his key.
Tim snapped off the cap from a bottle of RC cola.
“She said she was feeling funny, then she went into the can and pretty soon I heard her screaming,” he said. “It was about this big.” He held up his free hand and made a fist; it trembled slightly.
Outside the driveway bells rang.
“I got it,” Kirk said quickly, and disappeared.
Tim leaned back on the counter and stared out at the intersection. “What the heck—easy come, easy go, right?”
We were silent.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“In the hospital,” Tim said. He looked away, down the highway. “Which is why I stopped in. I should go hang around there tonight with her,” he said apologetically. “At the hospital.”
Bud glanced at me.
“We’ll cover your shift,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What, me worry?” Tim said. He reached behind both ears and pushed them out, elephantlike.
Bud and I stared.
“Alfred E. Neuman. Mad Magazine, get it?”
Bud and I managed a short laugh. “That’s good,” Bud said.
“Very good,” I agreed.
“I’ll be back tomorrow night just like always,” Tim said. “I’ll be here.”
“Sure,” Bud said.
We watched him walk away and get in his battered
little Chevy. He didn’t start the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat there smoking and staring through the windshield at the cars that passed, at the stoplight that clicked and clicked.
And so I took my first evening shift: five p.m. until midnight. Between shifts, I walked uptown for supper. At Paula’s Café I ordered a roast beef plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and apple pie. I didn’t drink coffee, but Paula automatically set a cup in front of me. I sipped it. With cream and sugar it was not half bad.
In the corner above the till was a TV, with the sound turned off. B-52S flew in formation and dropped their bombs, black teardrops that shrank away beneath the planes, went out of sight for several seconds, then blossomed into white flowers in the jungle far below. Closer in, helicopters flew low and sprayed pale streams of fire. The picture cut to an interview with Nguyen Cao Ky, the new premier of South Vietnam. He was a smiling, tidy man who wore a French-style beret; Paula paused by the television and turned up the volume slightly. Ky’s English was hard to follow, and the restaurant was noisy, but I caught the gist of it. The war was going well. Very well, in fact. It would soon be over—only a few more months.
“Like hell,” Paula murmured.
“Order!” the cook called.
Paula moved on, then brought a full plate my way. “Here you go, son,” she said. She paused to look at my haircut. “You going in the army or something?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said.
I dug into my food. I was hungry—but I’d hardly gotten started when someone slid onto the stool next to mine. “What say, Sutton?”
It was Stephen Knutson—Peggy Leikvold’s real boyfriend (maybe “real” wasn’t the right word anymore)—Stephen Knutson, who was supposed to be out of town. My recent afternoon on the hot seat with the Workers had been good practice for my poker face. I nodded his way. “How’s it going?” I said. I kept chewing.
He squinted at me. “I’m not sure. Maybe you can tell me.”
“How so?” I cut a square off my breaded roast beef, popped it in my mouth. Knutson was bigger than me, and had a Corvette, but guys like him didn’t impress me anymore.
“I understand Peggy comes into the station.”
“Her dad has a charge account.”
“And Dale Bender? He comes in, too?”
I shrugged. “Once in a while, I guess.”
“They ever come at the same time?”
I took a long sip of my coffee. I hated lying. “Maybe. Yeah.”
“They talk, or what?”
“I guess,” I said evasively.
“I knew it,” he muttered, then cursed and looked through the window.
I kept eating.
He swiveled back to me. “Word has it Peggy has been riding around with him in that Chevy.”
“Dale Bender, you mean?” It was like he had difficulty saying the name, but I didn’t.
He nodded.
I shrugged. “Hey, I just work there,” I said, and took a huge mouthful in order not to talk.
Knutson rearranged the salt and pepper shakers so they were side by side. “So what, you a sophomore now, Sutton?”
“Yes.” When I turned back to him, he was smiling weirdly. A flat, fake smile.
“That’s a fun grade. You’ll like it.”
I shrugged.
He picked up a sugar packet, flipped it hand to hand several times. “Got your license?”
“Yes.”
“Got a car yet?”
“Working on it,” I mumbled through my food.
“Ever drive a Corvette?”
I looked at him. “Can’t say as I have.”
“They’re something else,” he said. “Quickest cars around.”
“Maybe,” I said.
He stopped moving on his stool. “Hey, nobody in this town can beat me—for sure not that heap Bender drives.”
I was silent.
“Anyway, want to drive it some time?” Knutson said.
I turned. His eyes were overly bright and jerky.
“Me?” I said. I coughed once—a shred of roast beef down the wrong pipe.
“Sure. You got a license. Why not?”
I shrugged. “Okay. When?”
“Right now if you want.”
I checked my watch. “I might have a few minutes,” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Knutson said to Paula, and took my dinner check.
When I settled into the driver’s seat of the Stingray, it felt like I was sitting on the ground. I looked out my side window; cars towered above me. Inside, the cockpit wrapped around me like a rib cage. My hand fell naturally onto the stick shift, its hard round knob.
“Standard four-speed with a lift-up, lock-out for reverse,” Knutson explained.
I nodded.
“Go ahead,” he said. I fired the engine.
“Wow,” I murmured, my poker face long gone.
“A full 365 horses,” Stephen said. “Let’s get out of town and you can run through the gears.”
Carefully I drove north past the station. Kirk turned his head as the Corvette grumbled by; Knutson did not look—purposefully it seemed. I concentrated on moving smoothly through the gears.
“Nice,” Knutson said. “You’re a natural.”
In each gear the horsepower felt like a big hand on my lower back shoving me forward.
“Take a left,” Knutson said. “We’ll head up to the strip.”
I knew where that was. Everybody did. Three miles north and west, just beyond the lake, was the flattest, straightest strip of asphalt around, perfect for drag racing, but with an additional feature. The land on both sides of the highway was mainly bog and low brush; thus there were no homes or farms—no busybodies to call the sheriff—and the sedge had saved lives in the occasional rollover. There were only a few trees of substance, and those were well past the finish line. Both start and finish points were marked by a slash of white paint across the highway. The distance between the two marks was exactly 1,320 feet—a quarter mile. Every spring the local highway department painted over the white stripes; by the Fourth of July, fresh lines reappeared.
“Full stop,” Stephen said. “Let’s see how you are off the mark.”
In first gear I brought up the rpm’s; eased the clutch up halfway while holding the brake with my toe. The Corvette hunched its back and leaned forward.
“Now!” he said.
I torched the tires for fifty feet, then smoked them again in second gear, and again briefly in third. In seconds we were going ninety miles per hour, the swamp brush a blurry tunnel of green. I backed off well before the finish line.
“Hey, we were just getting going!” Knutson shouted.
I could not keep a grin off my face.
“Like I said, great car, eh?”
“No kidding,” I said, tapping the brakes as we slowed, then coasted.
“You want a Corvette, you should have one,” Knutson said.
I looked at him. He was not joking.
I checked my wristwatch. “Listen, I gotta get back to work.”
“Sure,” he said. “Pull over. I’ll drive.”
We traded places and headed back to town. “Anyway,” he said at length, “about Peggy. I want you to keep an eye on her.”
I stared ahead through the glass.
Knutson looked at me. “There are a lot of creeps around. Creeps like Dale Bender.”
“It’s busy at work,” I said. “It’s not like I have a lot of time to keep track of everybody.”
“But you see everybody who drives by,” Knutson said. “You know everything that goes on in this town.”
“Not everything,” I said.
“Plus she likes you—”
I turned to him.
“Thinks you’re a nice kid, is what I mean.”
“Right,” I said drily.
“So if she says anything, goes anywhere—and Dale Bender’s involved—I want to know,” he said. “That’s all.”
I was silent.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” Knutson added.
“Like how?”
He had that odd smile on his face. “Later this summer I’ll be going to orientation down at the U,” he said. “The Corvette will just be sitting in the garage. You could take it for a few days.”
I looked at the cockpit, the stick shift. “Are you serious?”
“Hey, why not? You already passed your test run.” He laughed too loudly.
I said nothing.
“Good then, it’s a deal,” Knutson said, and slapped my knee. “Hey, here we are, kiddo.”
I got out at the station drive and watched the Corvette chirp rubber back onto the highway. Bud came out. “Wasn’t that Stephen Knutson?”
I nodded.
“What’d he want?”
“Take one guess,” I said.
Traffic that evening was endless. On duty alone, I did the best I could, running gas and checking oil and scrubbing bug spatter from windshields. At midsummer, the remains of insects were thicker and more colorful: heavy-bodied beetle parts with red-and-yellow blood, summer flies with long pale bodies, furry wings of giant moths, grasshopper heads as hard and shiny as marbles—so many insects that radiator grilles caked and cooling systems ran hot. I realized I could not help everyone; I
could not get to them all. At one point a customer left before I could wait on him.
For the first time in days I thought of Mr. Shell. He was featured in the latest company newsletter along with a kid in Michigan who won a thousand dollars by fulfilling the seven-point code for Mr. Shell. There was a photo of the kid shaking hands with Mr. Shell who, “in order to hide his identity,” had his face blacked out. Mr. Shell was not a big man, not a small man; he wore a short-sleeved shirt, no tie, and had no distinguishing moles or tattoos on his arms. “Mr. Shell is always on the move,” the article read. “He may arrive anywhere, on any day, at any hour. Are you prepared to give full service—and more?”
The driveway bells dinged; it was only a car full of tourist girls.
Later that night, Stephen Knutson’s Corvette appeared. He turned sharply into the station. The hardtop was off, and Peggy Leikvold rode with him. Knowing she was on display, she sat low in the seat, and stared straight ahead. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Fill it, ethyl,” Knutson said. He had on strong-smelling cologne, and paid no attention to me. I took my time on the windshield, but Peggy wouldn’t look up at me either.
“Charge it,” Knutson said, and left with a squeak of the tires. I wrote up his charge slip, then returned to another
customer. I was crouched behind a battered Ford when I heard the rumble of Dale Bender’s Chevy Its wide-set yellow eyes grew from the north, then swung into the station.
“You seen her?” Dale asked. “I was supposed to meet her tonight.”
I stared. Dale was cleaned up and his hair gleamed and tumbled in a dark waterfall. He wore the same aftershave as Knutson. Around me the air was suddenly humid and close.
“You just missed her,” I said.
His dark eyes brightened with pleasure. “What was she driving?”
“Riding,” I said. “With Knutson.”
Dale’s face went blank. Then his eyes shrank to the hard shine of beetle shells. “Did she say anything?”
I shook my head.
“Which way did they go?”
“I was busy. I didn’t get a good look.”
He cursed, then shifted into low gear and rumbled up to Main Street.
A full hour later I had three gas hoses running when Knutson’s Corvette came back into town. Directly behind him, a yard off his bumper, was Dale’s Chevy.
“Hey, kid, you gonna check my oil?” a customer called from his station wagon.
“In a minute,” I said.
“Anytime would be fine.”
I ignored him. Knutson and Dale slowed for the
stoplight, which, as it had to, turned red. Dale swung into the opposing lane, which, as it had to be, was empty. Dale looked past Knutson to Peggy, who would not turn. Her cheeks were shiny; she was crying. Dale revved his engine—a deep-throated bark of horsepower. Stephen Knutson’s Adam’s apple bobbed, then he brought up the Corvette’s rpm’s. For one long moment everything in Hawk Bend paused.
When the light clicked green, the intersection heaved. Blue smoke billowed from wheel wells and both drivers wrestled their steering wheels to stay straight. Knutson left early, but Dale made up ground through first gear. I hurried toward the street to watch them go. The Corvette and the older Chevy howled north side by side, Dale in the wrong lane. Oncoming traffic veered to the curb as both cars smoked their tires in second gear and slewed dangerously close. The Corvette had the better transmission, the quicker shift; Dale had more horsepower. In third gear he slowly drew ahead—a bumper’s width, a half-car length a full-car and then two car lengths. He swung in front of the Corvette. Knutson hit his brakes. He darted left, down a side street, and Dale’s big Chevy slung itself straight on for several more blocks before it could brake and turn. By then Stephen Knutson and Peggy were gone.
“Damn kids!” a customer squawked. “They’ll kill somebody.” He was balding and sat in a dusty station wagon; the backseat had been chewed on by kids or dogs. I topped off his tank.
“Ten dollars even.”
He waited. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
I stared at him.
“My oil?”
“Sorry.” I popped his hood, pulled the dipstick.
“And get my windshield, too,” he called. “I thought this was a full-service station.