***
Unfortunately, the newest part-timer never showed up for his shift, which meant I was about to work another unexpected double if I couldn’t find somebody else willing to cover for him. The owners hated when I gave extra hours to part-timers, but I hated how long I’d gone without a shower even more, so I grabbed the employee phone number list and started at the top.
I’d long since become conditioned to the sound of the door swinging open, to the point that I almost couldn’t even hear it anymore, but this time it sounded extra loud and important. I looked up without even thinking, like my subconscious was expecting company and forgot to tell me. Sure enough, it was a familiar face walking into the store. Our eyes met, and she walked straight up to the counter.
“Hi, Jack.”
It took me a second to place the young woman. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore dress pants, heels, and a jacket the same bright shade of red as her lips. The first time I ever saw her, she came casual, but now she was dressed to kill.
“Hi,” I said.
“I don’t know if you remember me or not, but my name is Rosa. We met last week.”
“Rosa Vasquez. Yes, of course.”
“First of all, I wanted to apologize again for calling you ‘ma’am’ on the phone.”
“If you came all the way down here just for that, trust me, it’s not a big deal.”
“Good. I’m glad. Secondly—” She widened her stance, put both hands on her hips, lowered her eyelids into a fiery glare, and raised both her volume and pitch by several notches. “HOW DARE YOU?”
Oh fuck.
I felt like the swamp frog who just learned the log he’s been chilling on was an alligator.
She repeated her words more deliberately. “How dare you? Do you think my time is worth nothing!? I gave up two other jobs for this! And on the day I’m supposed to start training, you ghost me? What, do you think you can just call me and have me come over for nothing?! Three times! You stood me up three times! I’m not some gas station booty call!”
She was so worked up she didn’t notice when the sheriff’s deputy walked in. I threw O’Brien a desperate look, but she just smirked, crossed her arms, and leaned against the door while Rosa continued.
“This isn’t women’s softball, Jack! You don’t get four strikes! I am so unbelievably angry right now, and if I start crying, I want you to know it’s because I’m angry! It’s not because I’m sad! I’m sorry, I just-I need a second to catch my breath!” She fanned herself as the tears swelled up in her eyes and threatened to flood the whole building, but she blinked them back and continued, “Everything about this is ridiculously unprofessional! All I wanted was to be treated with some common decency! But instead, I came in for my first day just so I can get called names and then fired by a guy who smells like a men’s locker room. Do you know how demoralizing that is? Then on my second day, nobody even bothered to tell me you were closed. Then my third day, you gave me your word you would be here and you weren’t.”
This whole thing was deeply discomforting. I felt ashamed. Not like regular shame, either. It was like getting lectured by a sweet old grandmother. The kind of shaming that lets you know you really fucked up. It didn’t help at all that Rosa was beginning to hyperventilate.
“It’s-it’s-I’m okay. I’m-okay...” She bent over, struggling to catch her breath. I grabbed one of the paper sacks we use for forties from below the counter and held it out. She took it with a quick, “Thank you,” and started breathing into it, stopping after a few breaths to say, “Sorry,” before returning to it.
Is she really apologizing to me again?
When her breathing slowed almost back to normal, I said “Rosa, I want to—”
She straightened back up and yelled, “Let me finish! I’m not done yet!” She waved her finger around for this next part. Not at anything in particular, just around. “Jerry told me you were cool. And you know what? You’re not cool. None of this is cool. This is the complete opposite of cool! You’re lukewarm, and you need to know it!”
She took a breath in preparation for the next wave, and I took my chance to squeeze in a few words while she was reloading.
“You’re right.”
She made a face like she’d just been stung by a bee. That might have been the exact right thing to say, or the exact wrong thing, but I didn’t have time to obsess. She’d lost the wind from her sails, and if I waited and analyzed and over-thought every little thing I was going to say, I’d never say it, so I shot from the hip and hoped I wasn’t about to embarrass either of us.
“You’re absolutely right. We were in the wrong here. We fucked up big time. Your time is worth more. You are worth more. We dropped the ball on this every chance we could.”
“Oh,” she said. It seemed the storm had begun to pass, but she wasn’t wholly convinced. She cautiously pushed me along. “Go on.”
“The owners should have followed up better after they hired you. When plans changed, I had a responsibility to let you know, but I didn’t. Calvin had no business being near... people. We failed every chance we got, and there is no excuse other than the fact that we’re irresponsible.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s… yeah.”
I could have ended it there, but I didn’t. “I’m not trying to defend what happened, but it has been a crazy couple of weeks. I think I was in emergency surgery the last couple times you came in. Honestly, I’ve been in and out of the hospitals so much lately, it’s hard to keep track.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed with emphatic sympathy, “Oh my god! I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay, really. I just wanted you to know why things slipped my mind. I mean, if I didn’t have Jerry dragging me along, I probably would have missed our friend’s funeral a few days ago.”
She covered her mouth. “Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I swear, I didn’t know! I wouldn’t have come down here if—”
“No, it’s okay. I’m glad you did.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You caught me right when I was supposed to be getting off, but I had another employee quit on me without any heads up. I haven’t had a break in a couple of days, and I wanted to go and check on Jerry.”
“Jerry? Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m worried about him. He’s been really sick ever since the funeral.”
“Oh my god!”
“Do you think you can you start now?”
“Start what?”
“Work? Like, right now? I need someone to watch the register for me. It will only be for a couple hours, tops.”
She looked at the ground. “I mean… If you’re serious, yeah. Of course I can.”
“Great!” I grabbed my crutch and hopped up. “How far did Calvin get in your training? Do you know how to work the register and turn on the pumps?”
“Actually, he wouldn't let me near the register. He called me a ‘dirty brown heifer’ and said I was only good for cooking and cleaning.”
Whoa. No wonder she was mad. The fact that she even came back to work for us, twice, was incredible. I wouldn’t have held it against her if she had burned the building to the ground.
I gave her a one-minute crash course on the critical stuff, told her if she had any questions to just follow her gut, and if there were any problems or complications to just cover them with newspaper until I got back.
The last thing I did was call Jerry. I warned him that I was on my way over to his place, and I was bringing a can of chicken noodle soup and something to drink.
Chapter Sixteen
A couple miles downhill from the gas station, deeper into the hungry forest, an unassuming dirt path intersects the main road. That path winds through the overgrown wilderness, leading to a metal gate—a scarecrow tied on with rusty barbed wire and a “Do Not Enter” sign posted on a tree nearby. Somewhere beyond that sits a dome-shaped metal building with no windows. This abandoned compound is all that’s left of the old Mathmetist comm
unity.
We pulled up in front of the building, and O’Brien put the car in park and honked the horn twice. I looked out the window at the bleak structure and wondered how it could be possible for a person to live alone in a place like this without losing his mind, but then I remembered who I was here to see.
As I unbuckled my seatbelt, O’Brien asked, “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No,” I said. “I think it might spook him if he’s outnumbered.”
“I'll stay here and keep the car running.”
For someone presenting as such a hard-ass, her humanity had a bad habit of emerging from time to time.
“No, it’ll be okay. I'm not going to make you wait, and this might take a while.”
“Call me when you’re done. Or in case you need backup.”
“Will do.”
I stepped into the freezing cold with the drink and canned soup and crutch-walked towards the compound. As soon as Jerry opened the front door, O’Brien sped off, leaving us alone. He hustled out, quickly shutting the door behind him, then walked up to meet me wearing nothing but a bathrobe and pink crocs.
“Hey, bro, you really didn’t need to visit. Where’s O’Brien going?”
“She got called to another crime scene. You know how it is with this town. Never a dull day.” I handed him the bottle of Pedialyte I’d snagged from the gas station, and he stared at it like it was an ancient artifact.
I explained, “It’s to help out with the flu symptoms.”
“What do I do with it?”
“You drink it.”
“Oh. Oh good. Thank God.”
The wind kicked through the trees, stinging my exposed skin. Jerry didn’t flinch.
“Hey, you think maybe we can go inside where it’s not freezing?”
He seemed surprised. “Uhhh… I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Would it be better for us to wait here until O’Brien gets back?”
He looked over his shoulder at the entrance to the compound. “Yeah, no, sure, you can come in, but… um… don’t judge me? It’s usually a lot cleaner than it is now.”
“I don’t care. You’ve seen the gas station after the raccoons got in and had their way with it. It can’t be much worse than that, right?”
It was much worse than that. It was so much worse than that.
The building itself was a simple barracks-style collection of twin-sized bunk beds, with a commercial-grade kitchen located at the far end. The floorplan was wide open, save for the bathrooms. Clearly, privacy was not high on the Mathmetists’ list of priorities.
Garbage was piled up wherever there was space for it, with piggy trails from one end of the building to the other. There were more cigarette butts than I could count, but not a single ashtray. The place smelled like Jerry had misplaced some old seafood, and the faintest aroma of vomit formed the cherry on top of the layer cake of disgusting. The interior of this building was colder than our walk-in cooler, and I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “How do you live like this?” He stopped and gave me a pained expression. “No, I mean, literally, how? I would freeze to death in here.”
“Oh, I don’t spend a lot of time in this part of the property anymore. I only come in here to use the bathroom, play my records, and practice my parkour. It may be cold, but the acoustics are great. Come on.” He waved his hand and started towards the kitchen area. “I’ll show you my room. It’s a lot less tragic in there, I promise.”
I followed him through the mess, consciously making an effort to ignore my surroundings and failing miserably. There were cans, bottles, and empty condom wrappers, and I swear I saw some kind of six-legged rodent scurry through the mounds.
There were also a fair number of gnomes set up here and there, and it looked like he’d been collecting Christmas decorations from around town. In the kitchen, he’d built a six-foot tall sculpture using the body of a snowman yard ornament and the plastic head of a black Santa. It was wearing sunglasses and a parka riddled with moth holes.
“What the heck is that?” I asked as we passed the abomination.
“Just something I’ve been working on in my free time.”
“It’s horrifying.”
“Thank you.”
We walked past the scary Santa and up to the back door, which he pushed open. I kept close behind, following him outside into the back yard of the compound. When I saw what was there, I was blown away.
This must have been how Dorothy felt when she first stepped into the Land of Oz. The air out there smelled like summer camp, with an inexplicable warmth to it. Jerry had woven a canopy of white Christmas lights all above us, glowing bright enough that this place was probably visible from space. A gas generator grumbled loudly somewhere in the forest nearby, and I could see that he’d organized a collection of mismatched chairs around an enormous fire pit in the center of the yard, next to a tall stack of logs and car tires.
But the most impressive part were the sculptures.
All around us stood creepy humanoid creations. Like the Santa/snowman from before, they were unsettling monuments to what a man can achieve with too much time on his hands. The level of detail varied from one to the next. Some wore Halloween masks. Some were disturbingly lifelike. Some were little more than scarecrows, fashioned from old clothing stuffed with newspaper and staked in place. There were maybe a dozen or so, standing at the perimeter of the yard like guards on duty.
A familiar school bus was parked on the opposite side of the fire pit, close to the tree line. It was the same one the Mathmetists had used to visit the gas station the day before they all ascended to the “feast of Samhain.” I quickly realized that this was where Jerry was headed. I stayed close and tried to avoid eye-contact with any of the sculptures.
When I followed him onto the bus, I was relieved to feel the warm blast of heated air hit me in the face. The bus itself was exactly what I expected from Jerry’s room.
All but the back two seats had been stripped from the vehicle, with the rest of the space converted into a humble hippy-style bachelor pad. There was a mattress against the wall, neatly made with sheets tucked in and a quilt on top. A couple bean bag chairs and a hot plate sat on the other side below the thick extension cord running through a duct-taped crack in a window. Somehow, he’d managed to find space for a hammock, a television with four different gaming consoles, and a bookshelf packed with comics, DVD’s, and—believe it or not—books. He also crammed in a work desk covered in loose papers.
He took a seat at the desk and cleared off the pages sitting on the bean bag chair next to him. I spotted a few other sheets of paper scattered about with notes written front and back. It was never my intention to snoop, but I couldn’t help but glean a few sentences as I passed by.
There were names of people, followed by short notes. The first one I caught was: “G. Johnson - Heroin.” On another page, he had written “Derick Taylor - Chronic masturbator.” I took my seat on the bean bag as he stacked the loose sheets together. On the back, I spotted, “Matt Peters - Shot dad in the stomach.” He threw the sheets into a drawer before I could read anything else, and I tried to make myself forget whatever I had just seen.
He smiled and asked, "Can I get you something to drink? I have water and, uh..." He read the name on the side of the container in his hand. "...Pedialyte? I think there’s still some whiskey around here somewhere too if you need—”
“I’m okay.”
“I really wish you could have seen this place when it was tidier. I’m actually a very clean and organized person. You believe me, right?”
“I believe that you believe that.”
“Okay, cool.” He opened the bottle of Pedialyte and poured some into a shot glass, then threw it back like tequila and made a reflexive retching face.
"Listen," I started. "I’m glad I finally got a chance to come and see your place, and your nightmare Christmas army."
He laughed and made a single syllable noise that sound
ed like, “Chyeahright?”
“But I'm here this evening for a different reason.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. There’s not really a good way for me to say this, and I don’t have much practice with serious talks.”
“Oh shit!” he exclaimed. “You’re here to fire me again, aren’t you?”
“I’m here because I’m worried about you. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to wallow alone all the time, and I wanted to come and give you some company. Trust me, it helps to have somebody to talk to.”
“What?”
“We can talk about anything you want. It doesn’t have to be deep. It can just be two guys having a conversation.”
He raised an eyebrow and said with a confused frown, “That’s so sweet?”
“Look, I don’t like how sappy this Hallmark moment feels either, okay? And I’m not going to pretend to know what you’re going through. I can’t describe the beetle in your box. But I do know what it’s like to lose someone you care deeply about. To build your entire world around another person so that when they’re gone, you don’t know how to make sense of what’s left. I know what it’s like to lose somebody you love.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and chewed off a hangnail in silence, then said, “You’re not talking about Tony, are you?”
“No.”
“Is this about that girl from your journal?”
Well, I guess there’s no going back now. I told him we could talk about anything. I brought her up. I did this to myself. And maybe, on some level, I wanted him to ask me about her.
A sigh escaped my mouth. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry man, that really sucks. She… died?”
“There are some things that are worse than death, you know.”
He looked at the ceiling of the bus and said, “Oh, trust me, I know.” He grabbed another shot glass from the drawer, lined up two shots of Pedialyte, gave me one and threw back the other. Then he asked the question I was dreading.
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Sabine.”
“The owners’ daughter?! Is that why they keep giving you all the good shifts?”
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 20
