by William Bebb
*****
“I want an Icee!” A little girl in the back seat of a van screamed through the open window.
Her father ignored the impolite request and continued looking under the hood. He heard a distant sound that might have been thunder but ignored it. There were much more pressing concerns than worrying about thunder on a cloudless day.
The check engine light had lit up and the temperature gauge had been climbing steadily into the red zone on the van's dashboard for the last thirty minutes. That's when he pulled into the parking lot of a remote and extremely nasty looking convenience store.
Looking in utter bewilderment under the hood, he silently cursed his wife for suggesting their stupid cross country adventure. If this were his old 1970 El Camino, he had back in high school, he'd be able to identify and fix the problem in just a few minutes. But the van's engine looked more like it belonged in a spaceship than a car. There was no carburetor that he could see, no belts he could easily reach, and more wires than grains of sand in the desert, he thought in disgust before slamming the hood down.
“Hey, grumpy bear. Be a sweetheart. Go get Amber and me a couple of Icees. And see if they have any of that fudge the Indians make, like they had at that reservation in Nevada,” his wife, Mercedes, called out from the front passenger seat.
He silently turned and walked past the overflowing trashcan toward the store's front door.
“Ow! Son of a bitch!” he yelled as squadrons of yellow jackets and wasps attacked his skinny pale legs. He jumped back using his floppy hat to shoo them away and exposed the bright pink patch of skin in the middle of his sizable bald spot.
“Watch your language, grumpy bear,” his wife called as his daughter cackled loudly from the van's backseat.
“Look mommy. I got daddy cussing and jumping around on my video camera. I'm going to put it on the internet when we get home,” he heard his daughter saying before going inside the store.
“Beer’s in the cooler,” said a woman behind the counter wearing a name tag that suggested her name was Daphne.
The store wasn't cool, but it felt much better than it did outside.
“Do you have an Icee machine?” he asked, looking hopefully around the store.
“Sure do. I keep it up my ass. All I got is what you can see, crazy legs,” she said, laughing and gesturing at her roadside empire.
He wandered down the aisles picking out an assortment of candy bars, considered asking about the fucking Indian fudge but felt certain that Daphne would probably tell him it was up her ass as well and settled for some cans of cold soda. As he walked by the beer section, he stopped and pulled out three cans of his favorite brand. Setting his selection of goodies on the counter, he smiled at the cashier. “Yes ma'am, uh, do you happen to know where the closest mechanic might be?”
Daphne began ringing up the items and asked, “Closest? Or the one closest that might be able to fix your ride? That will be seventeen dollars and forty five cents,” she said, with a smug smirk.
He handed her an ATM card and she handed it right back, saying, “Sorry cash only. It's store policy.”
He looked in the hidey holes of his wallet until discovering and fishing out a hundred dollar bill. “Okay, here,” he said, placing the cash on the counter. “And as to the mechanic, I need one that can fix it and who is also the closest.”
She left the hundred dollar bill sitting on the counter and gave him a look she saved for extra special idiots. “You poor thing, it must be difficult going through life illiterate,” she said sarcastically, while gesturing at an old badly stained piece of paper taped on the wall beside a framed one dollar bill and a one peso note with the words: No bills over 50 dollars, printed on it.
As he read the sign, he heard his wife honking the van's horn. He stood up straight closed his eyes and counted to ten. He was about to open his eyes when he heard the horn blaring outside again. Deciding twenty might be better, he continued to count. Breathing deep with his eyes still tightly shut, he couldn’t see Daphne’s initial look of confusion melt into an ear splitting grin as she sat on her stool and watched thinking, this is the most fun I’ve had in more than a month.
Opening his eyes, he smiled with considerable effort and said, “Look, Daphne, how about we make a deal? You call the closest qualified mechanic. Have him come out here as fast as possible and you can just keep the change.”
Daphne quickly bagged up his items while grinning at him and made the hundred dollar bill disappear as if by magic. “I'll have my cousin, Brandon, down here in two shakes of a rattlesnake’s ass. He used to work as a mechanic at a dealership in town until it went out of business. Go enjoy your snacks. I'll have him here in no time,” she said, reaching for the phone.
He carried out the bag of groceries and handed out the various goodies after proudly announcing that a mechanic was on the way.
“This isn't an Icee. Yuck,” his darling daughter complained from the back seat as he popped the top and sipped from his can of beer.
“Did you get the Indian fudge? I bet you didn't even look for it,” Mercedes said angrily before opening the door and climbing out. “That’s just fine! Go ahead, sit there swilling beer while I go into that wretched little store and do your job for you,” she screeched at him before marching across the pavement to the door and screamed as a small squadron of angry yellow jackets attacked her.
He grinned as she went inside, sipped some more beer and then stared thoughtfully at the blue sky. Is it really my job to find and deliver fudge- scratch that- Fucking Indian-made fudge and Icees to my ungrateful family? Is this what I went to medical school for?
He smiled and thought about having new business cards made up. Doctor Pedro Alvarez, part time surgeon, full time procurer of fucking Indian fudge. Chuckling quietly, he finished the first beer and popped open the second can.
“Daddy, it's hot,” his daughter whined from the backseat.
“You truly have a gift for understatement, pudding head,” he said, taking a small sip and looking around at the miles of desert in all directions. Something caught his eye and he called back to his daughter, “If you think you're hot, how do you think that idiot over there feels?”
“What idiot, daddy?”
“That nut over there,” he said while pointing at a man, wearing black pants and a white shirt with a tie, trudging slowly across the shimmering sand toward the store.
