“Purgatory?”
“You didn’t see the name of the truck stop when you came in?” Alphonse asked. “It’s called Purgatory. Sometimes it feels that way too. We came for coffee and got trapped by the storm, like you.”
The men at the table asked a dozen questions of us. All about the truck, what it had in it, how much horsepower, where we went in it. They asked where we came from and about our families. When we tried to ask about any of them our questions were ignored. After a while of being grilled, Dan stood up and said we needed to check on the truck to make sure the fuel wasn’t freezing. As he swept me out the door he turned me to him and said, his face as white as the snow swirling around his head, “I think we were just talking with Capone and some other nefarious people from out of the past. I know it sounds crazy, but...”
“Alphonse? How could a dead Al Capone be here?”
“And Bugsy Siegel? And that Charles,” Dan said. “That could be Pretty Boy Floyd. I don’t know who George is. If he was Capone’s enemy, he’s Bugs Moran.”
“And I thought I recognized that boy as Richard Speck... Is it a place for Illinois’ old criminals and killers out of the past? But still, Dan, none of that can be true.”
“Is this place true? Is it real? Maybe it is a purgatory of sorts.”
“It’s our safe place. It saved our lives, Dan. We would have wrecked or frozen out on the highway if we hadn’t come here.”
“But something’s still wrong. 1950s decor and prices? Did we just get transported to the forties or something?”
“All I know is we aren’t out there on the frigging freeway about to die,” I said. “If I’ve entered Purgatory, it’s saved us...unless we died and came here. We...we didn’t die, did we, Dan? We’re not dead like the rest of them in there, are we?”
He hugged me while the snow came down to land softly on our cheeks and the chill wormed its way past our coats. It was still as white outside as it had been when we arrived. The blizzard hadn’t let up in the least.
“What are we going to do?” I asked against my husband’s chest.
“We get through it, like we’ve gotten through everything else,” he said, resigned.
Earlier in our marriage we’d lost our first born child, a boy. We clung to one another like our lives depended on it and maybe they did. We’d been broke, discouraged, and lonely. We could, together, find a way through this mishap of life too. We had to.
Besides, our wild imaginings were just that. We were exhausted and just weren’t thinking logically. You don’t run into Al Capone in any logical world.
We hurried back inside to the warmth and sat at the bar. Asking only for glasses of water, we asked the waitress if there was a TV lounge for truckers.
“No TV in here, sorry, that’s too newfangled for us. You tired, you can sit in the seats back in the phone booth area, lay down in them if you want.”
Dan and I looked at one another, growing even deeper in our paranoia. Newfangled?
We followed her instructions, wandered the long hallways and found a room with booth tables and phone booths of the old-fashioned sort, with doors, ledges holding phone books, and rotary dial black wall phones.
Dan went into one and tried it. No dial tone. He tried the two others. No dial tone.
We each curled up on the vinyl booth seats and lay talking softly until we fell asleep.
***
I woke to what I thought of as Speck kneeling down near the booth staring into my face. I sat up quickly and scooted over away from him. He rose, grinning like two kinds of fool. “You can’t get out of here,” he said.
“Dan!”
Dan woke startled by my cry, coming out of the booth with his fists balled. He was toe to toe with the teen boy, his chin quivering with constraint. “What are you doing?”
The boy backed off. “I was just telling your missus about the lengthy accommodations here at the truck stop. Meant no harm.”
I saw he had a knife stuck in his back pocket. I didn’t want Dan to get into a fight with him. I stood and came between the two, facing my husband. “It’s okay. I just woke with a fright, that’s all.”
The boy walked out of the room and disappeared into the hall.
“What the hell! Did he threaten you or anything?”
“He was watching me sleep and when I woke up and saw him he said, ‘You’re not getting out of here.’”
“Then that’s just what we’ll do. Let’s go try to start the truck and get out of here.”
People watched us as we made for the door. It wouldn’t open. Dan turned around, angry now, and said, “Unlock this door, please.”
No one moved or spoke.
“I said to unlock this goddamn door.” Dan’s voice had risen and he sounded serious as roadkill.
Alphonse came from his back table, his presence as large as the man. When he got to us he said, “Don’t blame us. We didn’t lock it and we can’t unlock it. I’m afraid, my friend, you’ve encountered what we’ve all experienced. We can’t leave this place.”
His dark eyes filled with sadness and with unshed tears. He knuckled his eyes and turned away to return to the card table.
Dan rattled the door knob. He said, “You’re all crazy as bed bugs. Come on,” he said to me and turned for the hallways. At the end of each was a door leading outside, and all of them were locked. Dan tried shouldering his way through each one, but the frames held and the doors seemed impervious to attack.
“Dan, I’m scared now.” I was shaking and my stomach churned. This wasn’t funny if it was a practical joke and if it wasn’t a joke, it was so frightening it threatened to defeat me. I couldn’t think. I felt cold and clammy. We couldn’t be trapped in a real purgatory with the spirits of killers and gangsters and women in pink lipstick.
Dan took me back to the phone room and we sat facing one another in a booth. I hadn’t seen him look so haggard since our son died. I reached for his hand lying on the table and took it. I admired his thick, wide hands, his big knuckles. He wasn’t a huge man, but he was man enough, and I knew he didn’t lack courage. But this strange truck stop was taking it out of him and he seemed like an abandoned ship set afloat on the seas. He had no mast, no anchor, no crew.
He stood, walked to one small window in the room and looked out. He rapped the glass with his fist. He said, “It’s not going to break. It’s made of something unbreakable, like the doors.”
He stared into the lowering evening swirling with snow and hung his head in real despair.
***
We were in the truck stop three hundred and twenty-nine days. We know because we kept count in a little spiral notebook. We bathed, ate, and slept there. We played cards with Al Capone’s gang. We drank coffee with the waitress. We stood staring out the front window at our truck as the ice melted, spring came, then the fall with red leaves, and finally winter again. We despaired we’d ever be set free.
Then one day the boy I thought of as the mass killer Richard Speck, sidled over and from the corner of his mouth said, “Once a year the door down in the basement unlocks. It’s open now. Only a couple of us know about it. I have nowhere to go, but you do. Hightail it, kids. Don’t come back.”
We hurried, breathless, down rickety steps to a dark basement and ran to the door. It opened, steps leading up to the outside. We laughed, giddy, and scrambled fast up and out and around the building and into our waiting truck, the fresh air and sunshine like shots of adrenalin. Al stood at the front window, watching, frowning. He’d enjoyed our company.
Bye, bye, I waved, grinning. Bye, bye Purgatory!
Once backed out and on the road, I began to weep with relief. I said, “Listen, we never drive this route again. We never pull off this exit. We never go in that truck stop. And we never tell anyone. Agreed?”
He nodded. Then the rain fell, turned into a downpour, turned into a dangerous road hazard. We saw an exit advertising a truck stop and looked at one another.
We passed on by.
&nb
sp; Our next item is a genuine flat iron steak knife, originally purchased back before World War I and guaranteed never to rust or lose its edge. It’s passed through many households in that time and has lived up to its promised.
This classic household item was made available by author Nicholas Paschall of Texas. He said his wife of seven years no longer wanted it in the kitchen.
DIARY OF A MAD STEAK KNIFE
Nicholas Paschall
IT ALL started late one August night when a man decided to break into a house he thought was empty. Climbing up the lattice work to a balcony on the second floor, the intruder broke a glass door to gain entry, confident that his lookout was right when he said there wasn’t anybody home.
And he was right. Nobody was home. But the house was not empty.
It just had a certain steak knife in it…
As the burglar in black looted the upstairs, a woman reached for the knife, the same knife she’d always used when situations had gotten… dicey. A long, flat iron steak knife that she’d bought just before the Great War, guaranteed never to rust or go dull. She didn’t know precisely how many years had passed since then, but the salesman’s promise had held true to this day. She pulled the knife and looked upstairs, shaking her head.
“Nobody is going to hurt my family,” she muttered to herself, walking towards the stairs in the small house. She caught the man rooting around in the teenage girl’s room, going through her jewelry box as if he’d found Solomon’s treasure. He didn’t see her at first… they never did. So with little fanfare and without a how-do-you-do, she plunged the knife into the man’s side, pulling out with a sickening squelch that splattered gore over the walls. Before he could react, she grabbed the back of his head and rammed the blade into his neck, sawing through his larynx as she made certain he didn’t even have the chance to scream.
He dropped to the ground, choking on his own fluids as his eyes turned glassy like colored marbles. She wiped the knife clean on the back of his shirt and calmly walked downstairs, turning on the tap in the kitchen faucet to run the blade under it, cleaning off the bits of skin that clung to the iron. Wiping it down with a sponge, she carefully dried it with a rag before sheathing it back in the knife block, before returning to sleep.
***
I awaken to find the family has returned home and apparently called the police, countless bodies moving in and out of the house as they take down every little detail of the thief’s bloody demise. I, of course, listen in on every interview they have with the family, going so far as to sneak in behind the officers as they bring them into separate rooms. The girl is the most upset as her bed covers and carpet are ruined, the whole room smelling of death. I sympathize with her, I truly do, but I did what had to be done. They eventually find the knife and identify it as the murder weapon, and bring it and me down to the police station, locking us both up in a small room with chain link walls and a hundred or so cardboard boxes labeled with police jargon. I pout and try to go back to sleep, but just can’t get comfortable in this foreign place.
“You’re not going to be able to find rest here,” a man said to me, causing me to look up from where I’d been standing, hands folded in front of me as I leaned against the shelves. The man is as old as I am, with a bit of a paunch and a bald head. He has a kind smile.
“Oh, how do you do?” I said in greeting, holding out my hand. He looks at me for a moment before accepting my handshake, slowly pumping the hand up and down. “My name is Linda, Linda Hornstein.”
“Mark, just Mark,” He said, chuckling. He moves up beside me and leans against the shelves, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “So what brings a nice old lady like yourself all the way into a dump like this?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself old, but to answer your question I took care of a burglar that entered my home. He was ransacking the place and I just couldn’t have that!”
“So you killed him,” Mark finished for me. I give him a look and he cocks his head to the side. “Hey, no judgment here. I’m just glad you seem sane enough to talk to.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked, looking at him in confusion.
“Just that, you know, you’re not one of the crazy ones,” He said, shrugging slowly.
I let out a laugh. “I may be an old lady, but I’m hardly crazy. Why just the other day I was talking with the neighbor about the conditions the men are undergoing in the German conflict.”
“German conflict?” Mark repeated, staring at me for a moment. His eyes widen and he whistles.
“What?” I asked, looking at him, wanting to know what he thinks he’s uncovered.
He shakes his head. “Nothing, just thinking about the, er, conflict myself. Can you believe what is going on in that war?”
We spend the next twenty minutes talking about the Great War and how the Kaiser is forcing my husband to go off and defend our countries freedom, saving Europe from an iron-fisted rule of a tyrant. After a while I become aware of another person in the dimly lit room; a young Asian girl, her long black hair slick in some areas. Looking her over, she has protuberant eyes that seem to roll about in her head and a bloody stain on the front of her pretty blue dress. Clutched in her hands is a doll. She keeps running her hands through its hair.
Mark catches me looking and snorted. “Now she is one of the crazy ones.”
I slap Mark lightly on the arm. “Now why would you go and say something like that, she’s obviously just hurt!”
“Trust me, Linda, she is not hurt. Just leave her be. She’s been here a while…” Mark said, grabbing my arm.
I brush him aside. “All the more reason to try and see if she needs help.”
Mark throws his hands up in the air and stalks away from me, moving to the far side of the room we’re in. I walk over to the little girl, kneeling down to be eye level with her. Her wide eyes follow my movements, never blinking. I smile at her, a smile that she returns in a demure fashion.
“Hello there. My name is Linda! What’s your name?” I asked, looking her over. There seems to be a ragged hole in her dress where an old red and brown bloodstain seeped through.
“Julie,” she said wispily, still stroking the dolls hair.
“Julie! That’s a lovely name, don’t you think so Mark?” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“Hey now, just leave me out of this!” He said, holding his hands up, clearly not wanting to get involved with the child.
I frowned before turning back to Julie. I pale as I notice her face twist in an instant from a leering grin to her demure smile, all in the blink of an eye. I shake my head. “Have you talked to the police yet honey?”
She shakes her head. “No, they don’t want to talk to me. They just called my sister.”
“And why is that? Why didn’t they call your Mommy?” I asked, reaching a hand up to brush her hair over her ear. The hair is sticky, plastered to the side of her head. She just smiles at my question.
“Mommy’s gone, gone for good,” She said happily as if she had just decided which ice cream flavor she wanted on her sundae.
“She’s gone? Where’d she go?” I asked, looking at the little girl with concern.
Both of her eyes lock onto mine as her face splits into a wide, toothy grin, one that seems to split her face in two. “To Hell. I sent her there myself, just like you sent that poor man. All he was trying to do was get something to feed his family with, and you went and murdered him.”
Taken aback, I stand up from my kneeling position and take a step back. In the blink of an eye, the little girl’s face goes back to the serene, if slightly spacey, look she had before. I hear Mark chuckling behind me. I turn to see him approach.
“What is wrong with her?” I demand, looking over my shoulder at where she is, just to keep an eye on her.
Mark shrugged. “Like I said, she’s one of the crazy ones. She’ll be out of here in no time, she showed up sometime last week.”
“She’s been in here a week?” I asked, a
ppalled at the idea of being stuck in this lifeless cell for a week.
“Yeah, her box was brought in about a week ago. I haven’t asked her too much, at least not anything beyond what she did to her Mom.”
“She said she killed her mother, but she’s only nine or ten! How could she do that?” I asked, stepping away from the corner of the cage where Julie stands. Mark follows, shaking his head.
“I heard two of the officers talking about some shears, but it’s hard to know. I see a lot of people come and go, what with my box sitting on the unsolved shelf.”
“Unsolved?” I ask, confused.
“Unsolved homicides. Only mine wasn’t a homicide if you catch my drift.” He says, winking at me.
I don’t get a chance to ask him anything as the door opens up outside the cage, an officer walking into the room, flipping on a light switch. The hum of the lights above me gives me a moment’s pause, just long enough for the officer to show up inside the cage. He moves just like my family, slowly and with deliberate movements as if he were underwater. I watch as he kneels down and grabs a box, frowning as he pulls it out and stands up.
Julie smiles and takes a step forward. “That would be me. It was a pleasure to meet you, Linda,” she said.
“You’re going?” I asked, looking at the officer for a moment. “She’s going? She just told me she killed somebody!”
The officer, a young man with auburn hair, turns and looks at me, though his eyes don’t focus on me. He reaches past me and grabs another box, pulling it down from the shelves too, stacking it on top of the first box.
“He can’t hear you. Nobody can.” Julie said with a smile, moving up next to the officer. “It makes it all the sweeter that soon enough, I’ll be able to kill my sister too!”
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