by Ron Carlson
Ruckelbar was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts when his father had a heart attack in the station that March and died sitting up against the wall in the single-bay garage. Ruckelbar was twenty and when he came home it would stick. Clare was back from Sarah Lawrence that summer, and it was all right for a while, even good, the way anything can be good when you’re young. It was fun having a service station, and after closing they’d go to the pubs beyond the blue-collar town of Garse, roadhouses that are all gone now. It was thrilling for Clare to sit in his pickup, the station truck, the same truck in which she arched herself against him at Upper Quarry and the same truck he drives now, as he rocked the huge set of keys in the latch of Bluestone and then extracted them and turned to her for a night. But she didn’t think he was serious about it. He was to be an engineer; his father had said as much, and then another year passed, his mother now ill, while he ran the place all winter, plowing the snow from around the station with a blade on the old truck that his father had welded himself. When spring came it was a done deal. The wild iris and the dogwoods burst from every seam in the earth and the world changed for Ruckelbar, his sense of autonomy and worth, and he knew he was here for life. Even by the time they married, Clare had had enough. When she saw that the little baby girl she had the next year gave her no leverage with him, she stopped coming out with box lunches and avoided driving by the place even when she had to drive to Garse going by way of Tipton, which added four miles to the trip. She let him know that she didn’t want to hear about Bluestone in her house and that he was to leave his overalls at the station, his boots in the garage, and he was to shower in the basement.
He’d gone along with this somehow, gone along without an angry word, without many words at all, the separate bedroom in the nice house in Corbett, and now after nearly twenty years, it was their way. After the loss of Clare and then the loss of the memory of her in his truck and in his bed came the loss of his daughter, which he also just allowed. Clare had her at home and Clare was determined that Marjorie should understand the essential elements of disappointment, and the lessons started with his name. Now, at seventeen, Marjorie was a day student at Woodbine, the prep school in Corbett, and her name was Marjorie Bar, shortened Clare said for convenience and for her career, whatever it would be. And Ruckelbar had let that happen too. He could fix any feature of any automobile, truck, or element of farm equipment, but he could not fix this.
AT HOME AFTER a silent dinner with Clare, he broke the rule about talking about the station and told her that DiPaulo had picked up the car, the one the boy had been sitting in every day for weeks. She didn’t like DiPaulo—he’d always been part of the way her life had betrayed her—and she let her eyes lift in disgust and then asked about the boy, “What did he do?” They were clearing the supper dishes. Marjorie ate dinner at school and arrived home after the evening study hall. It was queer that Clare should ask a question, and Ruckelbar, who hadn’t intended his comment to begin a conversation, was surprised and not sure of how he should answer.
“He sat in the car. In the driver’s seat.”
This stopped Clare midstep and she held her dishes still. “All day?”
“He came after school and walked home after dark.” It was the most Ruckelbar had spoken about the station in his kitchen for five or six years. Clare resumed sorting out the silverware and wiping up. Ruckelbar realized he wanted to ask Clare what to do about the camera. “Do you remember the accident?” he asked. “The girl?”
“If it’s the same girl. The three young people from Garse. She was a tramp. They were killed on Labor Day or just before. They went off the quarry road.”
Ruckelbar, who hadn’t seen the papers, had known about the accident, of course. The police tow truck driver had told him about the three students, and the vehicle was crushed in so radical a fashion anyone could see it had fallen some distance onto the rock. Clare seemed to know more about it, something she’d read or heard, but Ruckelbar didn’t know how to ask, and in a moment the chance was lost.
“Who’s a tramp?” Marjorie entered the kitchen, putting her bookbag on a chair.
“Your father has some lowlife living in a car.”
Ruckelbar looked at her.
“Any pie?” Marjorie asked her mother. Clare extracted a pumpkin pie from the fridge. Under the plastic wrap, it was uncut, one of Clare’s fresh pumpkin pies. Ruckelbar looked at it, just a pie, and he stopped slipping. He’d already exited the room in his head, and he came back. “I’d like a piece of that pie, too, Clare. If I could please.”
“You didn’t get any?” Marjorie said. “You must really smell like gasoline tonight.” She was actually trying to be light.
“He’s not a lowlife, Clare,” he said to her as she set a wedge of pie before him and dropped a fork onto the table. Even Marjorie, who had silently sided with her mother every time she’d had the chance, looked up in surprise at Clare. “It’s the boy whose sister was killed last summer.”
“Sheila Morton,” Marjorie said.
“The tramp,” Clare said.
Ruckelbar took a bite of pie. He was going to stay right here. This was the scene he’d drifted away from a thousand times. They were talking.
“She was not a tramp,” he said. “This boy is a nice boy.”
“He’s disturbed,” Clare said. “God, going out there to sit in the car?”
“Sheila was a slut,” Marjorie said. “Everybody knew that.”
The moment had gone very strange for all of them together like this in the kitchen. An ordinary night would have found Ruckelbar in the garage or his bedroom, Marjorie on the phone, and Clare at the television. They all felt the vague uncertainty of having the rules shift. No one would leave and no one knew how it would end; this was all new.
“She was, Dad,” Marjorie said, setting Ruckelbar back in his chair with the word “Dad,” which in its disuse had become monumental, naked and direct. They all heard it. Marjorie went on, “She put out, okay? One of those guys was from Woodbine. What do you think they were doing? They were headed for the Upper Quarry. It’s where the sluts go. You don’t try that road unless you’re going to put out.”
Ruckelbar had stopped eating the pie. He put down his fork and turned: Clare was gone.
A SUNNY SATURDAY in New England the last day in October: Ruckelbar lives for days like these, maybe this day in particular, the sun even at noon fallen away hard, but the lever of heat still there, though more than half the leaves are down and they skirl across Route 21 and pool against the banks of old grass. Ruckelbar sits in his old wooden office chair, which he pulls out front on days just like this, the whole scene a throwback to any fall afternoon thirty years ago, that being Clare’s word, “throwback,” but for now he’s free in what feels like the very last late sunlight of the year. It’s Halloween, he remembers; tonight they turn their clocks back. It doesn’t matter. For now, he’s simply going to sit in the place which has become the place he belongs, a place where he is closest to being happy, no, pleased he never moved, pleased to have this place paid for and not be running the Citgo in town chasing in circles regardless of the money, pleased to have the only station in the twelve miles of Route 21 between Garse and Corbett, nothing to look at across the street but trees rolling away toward Little Bear Mountain. Ruckelbar won’t make fifty dollars the whole day and he simply leans back in the sunshine, pleased to have his tools put away and the bay swept and the office neat, just pleased to have the afternoon. As he sits and lifts his face to the old sun, he feels it and he’s surprised that there is something else now, something new swimming underneath the ease he always feels at Bluestone, something about last night, and he tries to dismiss it but it will not be dismissed. It took years to achieve this separate peace and now something is coming undone.
Last night Ruckelbar had gone to Clare’s room. After Marjorie had finished her pie and left the kitchen, her dishes on the table still, he’d sat as their talk played again in his head, burning there like a
mistake. He hadn’t known the Morton girl and in defending her he’d let his wife be injured. But he felt good about it somehow, that he had protested, and his mind had opened in the realization that something in him had been killed when they’d changed Marjorie’s name, and he’d hated himself for not protesting then, but he knew too that he’d always just gone along. He lifted the two plates from the table and then put them down where they were. He went to Marjorie where she talked on the phone in the den and he stood before her until she put her palm over the speaker and said, annoyed, “What?” He said, “Get off the phone and go put your dishes away. Now.” He said it in such a way that she spoke quickly into the telephone and hung up. Before she could rise, he added, “I think you should watch your language around your mother; I’m sure you didn’t please her tonight in speaking so freely. She’s worked hard to raise you correctly and you disappointed her.”
“You started it,” Marjorie said.
“Stop,” he said. “You apologize to her tomorrow. It will mean a lot to her. You’re everything she’s got.” Ruckelbar wanted to touch his daughter, put his hand on her cheek, but he didn’t move, and in a moment Marjorie left the room. He had not done it too many times to reach out now, and besides, his hands, he always knew, were never really clean.
Ruckelbar went upstairs and knocked at his wife’s door and then, surprising himself, went into the dark room. She was in bed and he sat beside her, but could do no more. He knew she was awake and he willed himself to put his arm around her, but he could not, pulling his fists up instead to his face and smelling in his knuckles all the scents of Bluestone.
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, a Chevy Two convertible pulls in to the gas pumps. At first Ruckelbar thinks it is two nuns, but when the two women get out laughing in their full black dresses, he sees they are gotten up as witches. One puts her tall black hat on and pulls a broom from the backseat ready to mug for any passing cars. Ruckelbar steps over. The bareheaded witch is switching on the pump. “Let me get that for you,” he offers. “You’ll smell like gasoline at your party.”
“Great,” the girl says. They are both about his daughter’s age. “What are you going to be?” she asks him.
“This is it,” Ruckelbar says, indicating his gray overall.
“Okay,” the other witch says, “so what are you, the Prisoner of Bluestone?” They laugh and Ruckelbar has to laugh there in the sunshine. Girls. His daughter would not believe that he laughed with these girls; there’d be no way to explain it to her. The valve clicks off and he replaces the nozzle. As he does, the broom witch takes it from him and holds it as if to gas the broom.
“This, get this,” she says. “Let’s get out your camera, Paul.” She’s read his name in the patch. The other witch has grabbed her broom now and poses with her friend. Hearing his name and their laughter elates him and without hesitation, as if he’d planned it, he ducks into the station and retrieves the Nikon camera. He takes their picture there, two tall witches in the sunshine, and as he does, a passing car honks a salute. One of the witches steps out now seeing the bright blue station as if for the first time and says, “What is this, a movie set? I love it that you actually sell gas.” She throws her broom and hat back into the car. The other girl, the driver, reaches deep into her costume, here and there, to find her money. She has some difficulty. Her hat falls off and Ruckelbar holds it for her, finally exchanging it for the nine dollars she pays him.
“Happy Halloween,” she says, getting into the car. “I like your outfit. I hope they come to let you out someday.”
The other girl has been at the car’s radio and a song that Ruckelbar seems to remember rises around them. As the girls begin to pull away, she calls, “You can use that picture in your advertising!” And she throws him a flamboyant kiss.
All day long the traffic is desultory, five cars an hour pass Bluestone, the sound they make on Route 21 is a sound Ruckelbar knows by heart. He knows the trucks from the cars and he knows the high whine of the school buses. He knows if someone is speeding and he can tell if a car’s intention is to slow and turn in. Just before sunset he hears that sound and a little white Ford Escort coasts into the gravel yard of the station, parking to one side. There is something odd about it and Ruckelbar thinks it is more costumes, two people, one wrapped like the Mummy, but then he sees it is a rental, and when the man and the woman get out and the man has the head bandage, he knows it is the owners of the Dodge van come to get whatever they’d left inside. People come the week after an accident and get their stuff. He stands and waves at the young people and then goes to unlock the chainlink gate, trying not to look at the man’s head, which is swollen crazily over the unbandaged eye.
The woman strides directly for the van as Ruckelbar says, “Take your time, I don’t close until six. No rush.”
The woman calls from where she’s slid open the side door of the van, “Bring the basket, Jerry. It’s in the back.”
So now it’s Ruckelbar bending into the little Ford and extracting a huge plastic laundry basket because the man Jerry says he’s not supposed to bend over until the swelling subsides in a week. “I have to sleep sitting up.” Jerry’s about thirty, his skull absolutely out of whack, a wrong-way oval, the skin on his exposed forehead about to split, shiny and yellow. Ruckelbar can smell the varnish of liquor on his breath. When he pulls the basket from the small backseat to hand it to Jerry, the young man has already wandered out back.
Ruckelbar takes the basket around to the open side of the van and offers it there, but the woman is on her knees on the middle seat bent into the far back, trying to untangle the straps of a collapsed child seat. Her cotton shift is drawn up so that her bare thighs are visible to him. Her underpants are a shiny satin blue and the configuration of her white thighs and the way they meet in the blue fabric seem a disembodied mystery to Ruckelbar. Ruckelbar looks away and steps back onto the moist yellow grid of grass where the Saab sat for eight weeks. He can hear the woman now, a soft sucking, and he knows she is weeping. He sets the basket there in the twilight and he walks back to the office. He is lit and shaken; he feels as he did when the witch said his name. On his way he hears Jerry break the mirror assembly from the van door and he turns to watch the young man throw it into the woods and then spin to the ground and grab his head.
Out front the sun is gone, the day is gone, it feels nothing but late. The daylight seems used, thin, good for nothing. He carries his chair back into the office and there in the new gloom is the boy, arms folded, leaning against the counter.
“You scared me,” Ruckelbar says. “Hello.” He sets the chair behind his steel desk and switches on the office fluorescents. He’s lost for a moment and simply adds, “How are you?”
“Where’s my sister’s car?” the boy asks. He looks different close like this in the flat light; he’s taller and younger, his pale face run with freckles. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt unbuttoned over a faded black T-shirt.
“The insurance company came and got it. It was theirs.” The boy takes this in and makes a face that says he understands. “Remember, I told you about this a couple of weeks ago?” The boy nods at him and then turns to the big window and looks out. His eyes are roaming and Ruckelbar sees the desperation.
The camera sits on the old steel desk, and in a second Ruckelbar decides what to do; if the boy recognizes it, he’ll give it to him. Otherwise, he’ll let this sleeping dog be. It feels like a good decision, but Ruckelbar is floating in a new world, he can tell. They can hear the loud voices outside, the man and the woman in the back, and Ruckelbar switches on the exterior lights.
“Where would the insurance take that car?”
“I don’t know,” Ruckelbar says.
“Would they fix it?”
“Probably part it out,” Ruckelbar says. “They don’t fix them anymore, many of them.”
“It had been a good car for Sheila,” the boy says. “Better than any of her friends had.”
“I hear good things about the Saab,” Ru
ckelbar says. “You want a Coke, something, candy bar?”
“I don’t know why I’m out here now,” the boy says. Their reflections have come up in the big windows. Ruckelbar drops quarters in the round-shouldered soda machine, another throwback, and opens the door for the boy to choose. “Root beer,” the boy says, extracting the bottle.
“You live in Garse?” Ruckelbar asks him.
“Yeah,” the boy says. His eyes are still wide, darting, and Ruckelbar can see the rim of moisture. The world outside is now set still on the pivot point of light, the glow of the station lights running into the air out over the road through the trees all the way to the even wash of silver along the horizon of Little Bear Mountain, and above the mountain like two huge ghosts floats the mirror image of the two of them. The leaves lie still. Standing by the door Ruckelbar can feel the air falling from the dark heavens, a faint chill falling from infinity. Tomorrow night it will be dark an hour earlier.
Now Ruckelbar hears the woman’s voice from outside, around the building, a cry of some sort, and then the rental Escort does a short circle in the gravel in front of the Sunoco pumps and rips dust into the new dusk as it mounts Route 21 headed for Corbett. Ruckelbar and the boy have stepped outside. They watch the car disappear, turning on its lights after a few seconds on the pavement.
“There’s a bonfire at the quarry tonight,” Ruckelbar says. “Garse does it. You going?”