by Michael Kun
All the neighbors have gathered in the middle of the street to decide who will be the one to tell him. The dog is in a plastic garbage bag, and Mr. Winston is holding it.
“I can’t do it,” he says. “I’m already half an hour late for work as it is.” He passes the bag to Mrs. Magruder.
“Well, certainly I can’t. I hardly even know the baker. He never comes to my Christmas parties, and he doesn’t even call to say he’s not coming, even though it specifically says to R.S.V.P. right on the invitation.” She passes the bag to Mr. Scottsdale. But then she must remember the time Mr. Scottsdale chased the baker’s dog down the street on his riding lawn mower, because she grabs the bag back and gives it to Mr. Timmell instead.
“I’d rather not do it,” he says. “I might say something wrong. Honey, why don’t you do it? You’re good with people.” He hands the bag over to his wife.
“Not as good as Mr. Ross, though,” she says, and she gives the bag to me.
Mr. Kilkenny, Mr. and Mrs. O’ Mahoney, Mrs. Reaver, Mrs. Billingham, Mr. Roselli, and the postman are left, and I’m trying to figure out which one I should give the bag to. But suddenly the bag starts twisting and shaking, and everyone is watching. I put the bag down on the road, and the baker’s dog leaps out. It runs across the Reavers’ front lawn and toward the baker’s house. All of the neighbors are mad.
“Next time we’re not going to listen to Mrs. Magruder.”
“Next time we’re going to get a doctor’s opinion.”
I’m angry as well, and I start to head back up my driveway to my car. I hear someone crying, though, and I turn around. It’s Mrs. Magruder. She’s sitting on a rock by my mailbox just crying and crying.
I walk back down and ask her what’s the matter.
“Maybe my dog wasn’t dead,” she says.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The author has decided that he really doesn’t like that last story after all.
So, please tear it out of your copy of the book, then rip those pages into tiny little pieces before discarding them.
You can flush them down the toilet for all we care. The guy’s driving us up a wall.
Go to another publishing house, Michael.
You have our blessing.
Go!
Go!
THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO
When I lived in Elm Park, before I moved to New York City—this was back in the early 1970s or thereabouts, after I left college—I knew a man without three-quarters of his left arm. Earl Van Devere was his name, built like a truck. He had a massive keg of a chest, massive buttocks, and a single, massive arm, twenty inches around at its widest, if I were to guess. He lived alone in a room over the Park Laundromat, he had no friends or family, just me, and that was just for one night. He was nasty to everyone in town, and he tried to frighten children by making noises like monsters and ghosts. But he was like that even before the accident.
“What?” he said, whenever someone pulled into the Texaco station, which most people had to do since it was the only station in town and the last chance to gas up before Elmira, twenty-four miles away. His work shirt was worn, its collar shabby around his thick neck, the star on his breast pocket was bleached pink, and his manner was rough. “What?” He looked at cars as if they were beasts, each fill-up a test of the heart. The station was across the street from the Laundromat and his room.
No one knew much about the accident, the one that took his arm. There were plenty of rumors, some wild, some not, but nothing was for certain. Some said he was drunk and lying there. That’s what George Averill said. The girl at the bakery too. Some said he was trying to touch it. Some said he threw himself in front of the car on purpose. Me, I know. I just didn’t say anything. He never told me what happened, but I know. I know, I know, I know, I know.
Early one September, the night we got five inches of rain, a record, I thought I was about to hear the whole story, firsthand, from Earl, which would have been a neat trick, since Earl rarely spoke to anyone, and then only about cars. And when he spoke of cars, it was always about how much he despised them, the heaps. He worked around them all day.
It was the night I was trapped in the Laundromat without my umbrella, without my slicker, and without a thing to eat, that I found out. I hadn’t heard anything about the rain. No one at the bookstore had mentioned it, and there was nothing on the radio. Maria Hovey was the first who’d told me of it, as she took her baskets out to her station wagon.
“It’s going to come down cats and dogs,” she said to no one in particular. We were alone. She took a basket out to the car, then came in for another, and I looked out the window. The sky was gray, but no grayer than usual for that time of year.
“Is that right?” I said.
She seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t seen me there. “Sure is.”
“Funny, I didn’t hear anything about it on the radio.”
“You wouldn’t have. It wasn’t in the papers, and it wasn’t on the radio neither.” She hugged her last laundry basket to her hip and swung the door open. “I just have a fifth sense about these things.”
Maria got in her car and drove off, and I moved my clothes from washers to dryers. There was nothing to read except for the new issue of Time, which I’d started at work and finished during the wash cycle. There was nothing to do. I closed my eyes and listened to the dryers as if their churning were a lullaby, and when they came to a stop, I shook myself awake and folded my clothes on the counter.
That’s when the rain came, while I was folding. It started suddenly and loudly, so loudly that I could hear the water slapping against the pavement through the closed Laundromat doors. I pushed the doors open, and I stood in the doorway with my hands on my hips, watching, waiting for it to let up. It didn’t. The water rushed down the street like a tiny, shallow river, and the drops were so large that I could follow them as they passed in front of the illuminated Texaco sign. Every so often a car would pull into the station with its headlights on and its windshield wipers batting like they’d gone crazy, but no one came out to help. Specifically, Earl didn’t come out to help. The driver would hit his horn, wait, hit it again, then leave. Five or six cars went through like this, maybe more, and I recognized two of them: Charlie Mayer’s Jeep and Ed Walls’s Chevette. No one was getting any gas.
My shirts were on hangers and the rest of my laundry was folded in my basket. I was getting hungry too. I hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch, and that’d been a light one, just a sandwich and a cola at the C&O Grill next to the post office. There was a chicken thawing on my kitchen counter, and I pushed my shirtsleeve up to look at my wristwatch. It was nearly eight-thirty. I’d been there for close to two hours, and though I had no plans for the night other than the chicken, I decided that that was enough. I didn’t care if I got soaked or my laundry did. I could always bring it back the next day. So I put the basket on my head, I held it steady with one hand, held my shirts with the other, pushed open the door, and raced into the street like a halfback. Before I’d even made it to the gas station, though, I turned back. I was already wet to the skin, my shoes were damp and malleable, and my socks were soggy like washcloths.
“What are you, an imbecile or something?”
I stuck my hand in the doorway and looked up, then ducked back into the Laundromat. It was Earl Van Devere calling down to me from his room. I was surprised. It was a good night to be out spooking children.
“No,” I called back. “I’m just not in the mood to spend my whole evening here.”
“Should have brought an umbrella.” I could imagine the look on his face. He sounded amused.
“Should have.” There was a long pause, and I guessed that he’d shut his window and gone back inside to laugh to himself. I stood in the open doorway, looking for the moon behind the storm, and listened to the rain slapping.
“Well, Nicholas,” he finally said, “I’ll tell you what. You can stay down there all night or you could come up here if you keep your goddam mout
h shut.” Whenever I was around Earl, which was never often and never long, I was always reminded of something my father used to say to my brother and me when we were boys. He’d say, “God’s last name isn’t Damn.” I never said this to Earl, though. To him, for whatever reason, it was.
It was a tough choice, whether to go upstairs. I hesitated. “I’ll come up,” I answered. I thought he had a television.
Earl had been calling me Nicholas for as long as I’d been in Elm Park, which I took to mean that he liked me more than most people in town. I’d never heard him call anyone else by name, at least not by their given name, and me he called by my last name, Nicholas, rather than my first. What’s odd about that was that my nametag at the bookstore said Rob on it, nothing more.
That’s how I knew Earl, through the bookstore. For years he’d been coming in to buy books about cars, everything from their maintenance to their history. He never bought any other kind of book, and it didn’t take long to catch on to the pattern, maybe two or three months at most. Sometimes we’d have the book he was looking for on the shelf, or he’d find one there that interested him, but usually I’d have to call the publisher to order a copy. That’d take anywhere from a week to three weeks, depending upon inventory, and Earl would come in every afternoon to check, cussing if his book hadn’t arrived, which was most of the time. Once in a while, if I was in the mood for a walk, I’d take the book over to him at the Texaco station as soon as it came in. I was hoping that he’d pull me aside and say, “Nicholas, let me tell you why I buy so many of these goddam car books,” but he usually just handed me the money and walked back to his office, tucking the book beneath what was left of his left arm, turning his back to me.
Other than ordering those books for him, the only times I’d ever have anything approaching a conversation with Earl was when I’d fill up the tank or when I’d offer him a ride if I passed him walking. He never got in, not once. He’d say, “Don’t need a ride,” and just walk on. I remember wondering how powerful his thighs must have been. He was always walking when he wasn’t at the station, and never with any direction, it seemed. Once, I passed him eight miles up Route 22, just outside Danbury. When I rolled my window down to see if he needed a lift, he acted as if he hadn’t even heard me, but I knew he did. My car ran pretty quietly back then. Later that day, driving home, I passed him again, still walking on the shoulder, a good twelve miles from the Texaco now, three miles past Danbury, four miles short of Digger’s Lake, the only spot farther along of even the remotest interest. I didn’t stop that time and felt horrible for it, but Earl was always walking.
I left my clothes in the Laundromat, on top of one of the dryers, and ran outside to the doorway that led to his room. There were no lights in the stairwell, and I hung on to the rail with one hand, stepping carefully. His doorway was closed and locked, and I pounded on it.
“What?”
“Earl, it’s me. Nicholas.”
“What do you want?” It was as if we hadn’t just spoken.
His door rattled when I rapped on it again, rattling from the cheap, old wood and the poor fit. The doorknob clicked three or four times before the door opened and then I was in. The first thing I noticed was the books.
The books were everywhere. On bookshelves. On the kitchen counters. Stacked in piles two feet high on the floor. On the arms of chairs, on the windowsills, on the tables, under the lamps. Everywhere. It was a library. It had the same smell about it, the same aura of studied serenity, this despite the shabbiness. The books overwhelmed the shabbiness. There was grime, there was tattered fabric, there was Earl, but mostly there were books.
“Thanks,” I said after a moment, standing in the center of the room. Rocking on my heels, I waited for Earl to gesture to sit. He didn’t, he just went back to the kitchen sink along the far wall of the room, so I sat on my own, pulling a book off of one of the chairs spontaneously, as if I’d be bare and conspicuous without one, and fingering its binding. Assembly Line Techniques. Absently, I leafed through it. There were fewer pictures than I’d expected, and the text was dense and complex, the print fine. There were numbers everywhere, floating through the prose like flies.
“You understand this?” I asked, holding the book up above my head.
He turned and squinted. “Which one is that?” I read him the title. “Would I have the goddam book if I didn’t?” He could have said that about any of the books in the room, he didn’t need to know its name, and he turned to the sink again.
“Are you going to keep talking?”
“Sorry, Earl,” I said. “I hadn’t meant to be such a chatterbox.”
Earl walked over to a chair in the corner, carrying a cup of coffee. He set the cup down on the arm of the chair, picked up a book from the floor, his bicep a ball, and sat. He flipped it open indiscriminately and began reading. It was a thick, navy book called The Henry Ford Years, and he started about two-thirds of the way in. Every now and then he sipped at his coffee, slurping it like a child, sometimes looking over at me, but he said nothing. He was a quiet reader. That, or he was skimming. The pages turned with a mad regularity, and his huge chest bounced with his breath.
I put my book down, went to the window, and pulled back the shade. It was coming down as hard as ever. Maria Hovey’s fifth sense hadn’t failed her: it was cats and dogs, and then more dogs. “‘Earl,” I said. He smirked. I pointed to his cup. “Mind if I get some while I’m up?” He returned to his reading, and I went over to the stove, took a cup off the shelf, and filled it. I couldn’t find any spoons or sugar and didn’t ask. I moved back into the living area, this time taking a seat by one of the bookshelves. I leaned forward to browse. Report of the State Highway Commission: 1971. Auto Aerodynamics. Repair Manual for Chrysler Engines. The Kings of Funny Cars. Cars! Cars! Cars! Approaching the Speed of Sound. Customizing. Some I recognized, having ordered them for him. Most were obscure or old.
I swallowed some coffee and looked around the room, Cars! Cars! Cars! on my lap. It was difficult to see the furniture for all the books. There was a small, wooden dresser on one wall. There were six chairs, most of them worn, scattered about. There was a cot, folded and tucked away in one corner. There were three small tables with lamps, Earl sitting beside the largest of the tables, the lamp on. There was no television, and there was no phone. I went back to the book.
Cars! Cars! Cars! was light reading, simple and childish, with full-page, glossy photographs of dragsters and race cars. Every sentence seemed to end in an exclamation point. I worked through two or three pages of the author’s excitement before I heard the horn outside, then I put the book back on the shelf and went to the window. I pulled back the shade and peered out. Syd Carlisle’s tan Volkswagen had pulled into the Texaco.
“Earl,” I said.
“What?”
“Syd Carlisle’s down at the station.” I said this with a certain urgency that peeved Earl. He didn’t care whose car it was and he made a point of not looking up from his book.
“If you want my opinion,” he said plainly, “on a night like this, Syd Carlisle ought to go straight to hell.”
I released the shade, and the breeze snapped it back against the window. I looked around the room for Earl’s keys, on the stacks of books, on the tables. They were on his dresser, and I grabbed them, ran out the door, down the stairs, and out into the street. The water was up to my ankles, pulling at me as it ran, and I had to keep a hand at my forehead to see. I made it to Syd’s car and stood there, hunched, tucking my hands in my armpits, as he cracked open his window.
“Earning a little extra dough, Rob?”
“C’mon, Syd, give me a break. How much do you want?”
The Texaco sign was enormous from where I was standing, the only light in the sky, dwarfing the moon, a speck.
“Top it off,” he said, then closed his window hurriedly.
I unlocked the pump for the regular gas, unscrewed Syd’s gas cap, and held the nozzle, squeezing it. I wiped at my forehead wit
h my shirtsleeve. It was of no help. When the nozzle clicked off quickly, it startled me, and I looked at the meter: less than three gallons. I put the cap back, then the nozzle, and went over to the driver’s door.
“Jesus, Syd,” I said, “you didn’t even need three gallons.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. He didn’t feel guilty about dragging me out in that mess. “Just wanted to make sure I had a full tank for tomorrow morning. Big day tomorrow.” He’d probably expected Earl.
Syd handed me his money, less than two dollars, rolled up his window, grinned too widely, waved, and drove off. I didn’t run back to Earl’s. There was no sense in it. I couldn’t have been any wetter. I walked back, slowly, sloshing through the street, looking at my wet reflection in the Laundromat window, and I took the steps upstairs slowly, stamping my shoes outside his door. A large puddle formed where I stood, then trickled down the steps. I found the key to the room on Earl’s key chain and opened the door. He was still in his chair, reading The Henry Ford Years, and I put the keys and money on the dresser. I waited for him to say something. He didn’t.
“Earl, a towel?”
“Bathroom.” He waved his hand, the size of a baseball glove, toward the second of two thin doors beyond the bookcases, before the kitchen area. The first, I assumed, was a closet. I’m sure there was little in it.
The bathroom was small, just a shower stall, toilet, and sink, pressed tightly together, fifty-watt bulb over the sink. I pulled one of the bath towels off the shower rod, mussing up my hair until it was near dry, wiping off my face and neck and hands. I pulled off my shoes and set them in the stall, ruined, then my socks, ringing them out over the toilet before stuffing them into my shoes. I took off my shirt and hung it on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and stood in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, raking my hair with my fingers. That was when I noticed the photograph on the basin, propped up against the soap dish.
