by John Brandon
THE GAS STATION OWNER
He closed at nine each evening and then, before he went home, spent a couple hours out behind the station drinking whisky on ice. There was a nice view from behind the station, and sometimes when he was too sober his house made him lonely. The moon was out and the desert floor seemed to glow. It was near midnight and still the silhouettes of the mountains that buffered Sandia could be seen. The gas station owner used less ice as the night wore on. The aching in his joints had subsided.
The gas station owner, earlier that day, had been reading a book about Oppenheimer and his gang, the atomic set, all the scientists who had been assembled from Europe. The gas station owner was jealous of people who got consumed with something, who could fall prey to an obsession of the mind, some intellectual entanglement that kept them up at night. The gas station owner was a practical person. He could think abstractly, but not in a productive way. He wished he could wander around in a stupor, his body lost but his mind focused, neglecting food and all hygiene. The gas station owner was currently drunk. That much was sure. If he was going to walk around in a stupor, it was going to be from Evan Williams.
The ice in the cooler was frozen together in one big chunk. The gas station owner arose and ambled into the back of the station and retrieved a butter knife. He sat and chopped at the ice until enough was broken off to make another drink—at this point, a few shards. Every night he told himself he needed an ice pick and every day he failed to endeavor to locate one.
The gas station owner had decided he wanted his nickname to be Shade Tree. These were the thoughts the whisky gave him. He didn’t want to be addressed as Shade Tree; he wanted it on his gravestone, and wanted to be buried under a big cottonwood. A suburb called Rio Rancho had sprung up north of Albuquerque and the gas station owner had seen in the paper that they were getting ready to dedicate a cemetery. It was not easy, in the desert, to find unbought gravesites under consequential trees. The gas station owner made a plan to call the place in the morning.
He heard a car pull in out front. It happened a couple times a night. The driver would get out and examine the pump, searching for a place to slide a credit card, then curse a bit and maybe spit, then continue on down the road because that was all that could be done. The gas station owner liked to think, in this day and age, that people still ran out of gas. He wanted to live in a world where that still happened. The gas station owner did not fool around with credit cards. This hurt his business, but not that much. He hadn’t heard a door slam, hadn’t heard the car out front pull off. In a minute he’d have to walk around and check it out, make sure some idiot kid wasn’t vandalizing the place, make sure it wasn’t a drunk who’d pulled off and passed out. The gas station owner slurped some whisky. It tasted like sugar-water. It tasted like stale tea. Clouds passed in front of the moon and the desert floor lost its luminescence. The gas station owner turned his head and someone was standing not ten feet from him, a tall man with thick hair and a baseball cap. The cap was sitting up on top of the hair. The gas station owner stood spryly, sloshing whisky on his sleeve. He faced the man, letting the man know he was alert, drunk but not too drunk.
“Help you, friend?”
The man looked over as if he’d just noticed the gas station owner, as if he’d sleepwalked out here. “I doubt it,” he said.
The gas station owner was not shaken. He was prepared to gently guide this man back to his vehicle or to fight him. The guy had on some kind of khaki outfit. There was a patch on his sleeve.
“You own this station?” he asked.
“Free and clear.”
“You Jay Fair?”
“People call me Mr. Fair when they’re standing on my land.”
“I’m here about the illegal shooting of some elk, Mr. Fair. Seems not everybody respects the seasons. Not everybody in the world follows the laws passed by their legislators. That may come as a shock to you.” The man still wasn’t looking at the gas station owner. He was looking off at the desert night. “You know anything enlightening about that topic?” he asked. “The topic of elk poaching?”
“I’ve never seen a rent-a-cop up close,” the gas station owner said. “I never go to the mall, so…”
The man wanted to smirk. He tapped the patch on his sleeve, which said FISH & GAME. The guy had something tied around his wrist, some type of animal call.
“Is that a whistle?” the gas station owner asked. “Do you have a whistle?”
The man had turned his head farther away. He was looking in the opposite direction of the gas station owner.
“What’s so interesting out there?”
“Nothing,” said the man. “I don’t like looking at poachers, is all. It makes me sick to look at a poacher.”
The gas station owner performed a sigh. “Poacher” seemed a trumped-up term for somebody who caused an occasional trespassing elk to become dinner. Obviously this ranger guy thought he was something special. That was why he was poking around in the middle of the night instead of during business hours. He thought he was some desert hero. The gas station owner wasn’t going to ask about the late hour. He was going to pretend it was noon instead of midnight. “Look, I’m pretty busy with my whisky. How does this go? How long do you keep staring into space and making accusations? I could get insulted and demand a duel, if that’ll speed things along.”
“You’re not permitted to mention fighting a duel to me,” said the man. “That’s threatening a state employee.”
“Your checks say State of New Mexico on them and you’re proud of that?”
“You got a nice setup here.” The man took his hat off his hair then squeezed it back on. “Real nice.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The man cleared his throat in a way he believed was meaningful and walked off. After he turned on his heel the gas station owner only heard his first few steps. He wanted to call after the man, but kept his peace. After a minute, the car could be heard. It ran smooth—a well-kept government car. The gas station owner sat back down, not sure he wanted more whisky. Maybe he was done for the night. Maybe it was time to head home. That ranger or whatever he was probably wouldn’t be back. He’d wanted to let the gas station owner know he was aware, wanted to scare the gas station owner. And maybe it had worked. The gas station owner didn’t hate the idea of getting mixed up with the law, but he also didn’t love elk meat. He’d taken it because it was there. That’s how he lived his life—accepting what came along—and now they were hassling him even for that. He was tucked away, living a nothing existence, and the world still couldn’t leave him be. The desert wasn’t aiding or abetting him. It was goading him. The desert couldn’t wait to give him up, even to some uniform from the city. There was no man the gas station owner feared, but the desert could put a shudder into him. That true loneliness, that lack of ill will. The desert had no respect for him. It wasn’t goading him. It was going to stay quiet and unfathomable. It was a distracted murderer, this land they all lived on. The gas station owner was drunk, but these were the right thoughts.
SOREN’S FATHER
He’d let the mail build and now was reading it all in one afternoon. Mostly crazy people—a woman claiming to have conceived her daughter immaculately, a young man from Japan who’d written a song for Soren. Several were professional requests. A lady at a college in California was doing a study. A guy in Boston was working on a book about extraordinary children and wanted to focus a chapter on Soren before the coma, on his everyday habits and personality. Of course, support groups had sent literature. And someone had sent a prayer shawl, though Soren’s father didn’t know what religion it was for or how it worked.
Women told their winding stories, some calling Soren’s father an inspiration and deeming Soren an angel. These women considered themselves mystics, considered themselves misunderstood. And then there was one that seemed different, succinct and confident, from a woman in Santa Fe who thought Soren’s father might need a break from the clinic and wanted to ke
ep him company when he took that break. This woman’s way of wording things was neither rash nor sappy and she didn’t say much about herself except that she would be around when Soren’s father decided he wanted a comrade for a couple hours—someone with whom, she said, to duck away from the gusts and flash floods of life. I’m not going to claim to be normal, she’d written, but I will report that this is the first letter I’ve written in years.
Soren’s father slipped this woman’s letter under a sweater that was folded on the dresser, and the rest of the mail he carried down the hall and dumped into the trash chute. He walked down to the nurses’ station and told the nurse behind the desk, a plump gal with perfect fingernails, that he didn’t want any more of his mail, that he wanted it thrown out. The nurse drifted back from the counter in her rolling chair and slipped a blank sheet out of a printer. She told Soren’s father to write his request out and sign it, and he did so, his fingers feeling untrained, childlike.
“I’m not sure if we’re allowed to dispose of mail,” the nurse said. “I hope we are. For some reason, that sounds like fun.”
CECELIA
The wind had done something to the TV antenna, leaving Cecelia and her mother with one fuzzy network and two religious stations. Cecelia wasn’t about to mess with it. Her mother was the one who sat in front of the set all day, and apparently losing the bulk of her viewing options wasn’t going to change that. Cecelia wanted her to show some interest in getting the antenna fixed—even calling Cecelia’s uncle, even getting out the phonebook and flipping to TV repair, even just getting upset about it. Her mother almost never watched the network. She watched the church channels. On one people were always giving testimonials and asking the viewers to sow a financial seed, and on the other scores of black folks in robes sang all day, their arms outstretched to the heavens. Cecelia’s mother had received brochures from these channels. She’d mailed off for them. The brochures sat in a tall pocket on the side of the wheelchair. They were gaily colored, on heavy paper. Once you were on the mailing list they had their hooks in you.
Cecelia went in to her bedroom and closed the door. The semester was winding up and she was not excited about the prospect of having nowhere to go for three weeks, of having to manufacture excuses to leave the house. She could say she had band practice, since her mother still had no idea that her band was gone. She could say a lot of things. It wasn’t like her mother was going to give her the third degree. So long as she had her stupid chickens and her unnecessary wheelchair, Cecelia’s mother wasn’t going to do much detective work concerning her daughter.
Cecelia cleared some things off her floor, then began taking down each one of her postcards, a steady line of them that spanned all four walls at about head height. There were over a hundred. Cubist prints. Album covers. A boxing ape. An old lady with an Uzi. The postcards had been meant to inspire Cecelia’s songwriting. She didn’t need them anymore. She was through creating. She was doing nothing, a tourist in the war of her life. She let the postcards fall, one by one, into a garbage bag, dropping the pins into an old sneaker and then into its mate. The postcards felt like nothing in the garbage bag. They had taken her years to compile and now they were nothing. Cecelia tried not to look at them, tried not to have parting moments with any of them. All the postcards down, her room larger and brighter now, she rested the sneakers, stuffed with pins, inside the garbage bag. She’d won some ribbons when she was young, for debating. She couldn’t think of anything less important to her now than debating. She had a couple soccer trophies, though she’d never been any good. There were other items, certificates and plaques. Cecelia took it all in the one bulging bag out to her car and drove up the old Turquoise Trail, the bag next to her in the passenger seat, rippling in the wind.
She got out and toted the bag through the cacti. There wasn’t going to be a ravine or a cliff. In the desert you couldn’t get rid of anything. The desert held what you gave it until people from a different era came poking around. Everything was a fossil from the first day it existed. Cecelia took the sneakers out and set them aside, then rested the bag under an embittered evergreen shrub. She told her fingers to let the bag go and they obeyed. She loosened the laces of the sneakers, dug a little hole with her foot, and poured the thumbtacks in, covering them back over and tamping like they were seeds.
REGGIE
The main hall shrunk and the library and bar both vanished completely. Even though Reggie had not sat and read a book—had only skimmed them in order to busy his hands and hear the sound of flipping pages and smell the failing glue—he missed the library. It had been a cozy alcove. In the main hall the perpetual dimness was trying, but in the library the same light had seemed soft and drowsy. Reggie hadn’t had one single drink at the bar but he missed it now that it was gone. It had been the only color outside the red leather of the piano bench and the big reading chair. He especially missed the perpetually ripe lemons and limes. Where the archway leading into the library had once been there was now concrete painted thickly gray. The library may still have been there for all Reggie knew, just inaccessible now, blocked off. Where the bar had been there was simply empty space. Reggie thought the floor looked faded, but that could’ve been in his mind. It reminded him of when he’d fix up a rich guy’s yard, a lawn, irrigated at great expense, and there’d be a kayak or something lying there and when you picked it up the grass underneath was sickly and pale.
Reggie’s laps around the hall were shorter now and took up little time, but they helped him empty his mind, a difficult thing to do when you were trying to do it. He walked backward for variety. He marched. One day he came around what he considered the last bend, the stretch where one lap ended and a new one began, and he stopped stock-still when he saw that the piano had been repaired. Reggie stood in silence for a minute and then approached the piano and stood before it like someone who’d worked his way to the front of a line. To be honest, he was dumbstruck. The piano seemed to have been restored to the exact condition it had been in before Reggie destroyed it. It wasn’t new now; it was still old but perfect again. Reggie could feel that he was smiling. He couldn’t tell if he was amused or if he was smiling in menace like the skull on the belt buckle his uncle had given him. The bench wasn’t fixed. The bench was scuffed and gashed. Reggie pushed it out of the way and stood directly in front of the piano. He brought the tip of his finger down on an A-sharp and to his ear it was precisely in tune. Reggie didn’t touch another key.
The light in the hall seemed to have dimmed even further, but like the stain left by the bar this could have been in Reggie’s mind. Or maybe his eyesight was faltering. Reggie had intermittent success denying it, but almost always now he was frustrated. Frustration was his baseline emotion and there was little to do about it except take it out on the tools. Reggie gripped the harmonica and reared back and hurled it straight up into the shadows and waited the moment or two that passed before it zipped back down and crashed to the floor. The harmonica was broken. Reggie shrugged. He left the thing lying on the ground, knowing it would likely be fixed. Reggie wasn’t sending a message this time like with the piano; he was breaking things because it felt good. Reggie was vastly disadvantaged. This was a game of patience and his opponent had an infinite supply. His opponent would win. You couldn’t beat a higher power. But also, somehow, it made no sense to give in. It made no sense not to extend the fight.
Since the moment Reggie had found himself in this hall—after perishing in the middle of a lovely day while humming a lovely new tune he couldn’t now remember—he’d been muttering to himself the way anyone did when alone. But now he got down flat on his back on his mat and openly addressed his captor. He spoke clearly without yelling. What he wanted to know was what bad thing he’d done, what important thing he’d left undone, to be singled out. He’d never once in his life on earth wished to be singled out. Had he wasted a talent? Had he broken sacred rules? What insidious problem had he been a part of? What duty had he shirked? Reggie asked his questions
and then listened to the quiet swell up behind them.
He started to hear a buzzing, a low interminable ring, a noise similar to the ringing the morning after a show, but deeper than that, as if it had been planted in his head, as if it would grow rather than dwindle. Reggie was being harassed. He would be shoved and taunted until he gave up his songs.
The hall was shrinking even more and could no longer even be described as a hall. It was a room. Laps were now absurd. Reggie’s mat was gone and the floor was cold. There had been no temperature up to now, but the floor was growing chilly under Reggie’s bare feet and under his back when he laid down to rest. He rested in the spot where his mat had been, and it didn’t take long before he’d be shivering. He would’ve given anything to sleep like the living, to sleep like he used to, to be warm under a blanket and feel a slight hunger but be unwilling to get up for a snack because the bed was too cozy. He thought of what the morning felt like after a night of sleep, a steamy shower, a big breakfast that required a series of decisions—what kind of toast, how you wanted your eggs, bacon or sausage, hash browns or home fries. If the bar returned Reggie would’ve had a drink. He’d have an Irish whiskey with one ice cube in it because that’s what his father drank on the rare occasions when his father drank.
Reggie had never been stubborn when he was alive and suspected he was only faking stubbornness now. There were a couple things he did well and took pride in, but winning for the sake of winning had never interested him. Winning had never filled him with joy and losing had never devastated him. He’d played chess with Mr. Dunsmore to be polite, but had never been invested in the outcome. He’d put forth enough effort in school because everything went smoother if you earned good grades, but receiving a C had never gotten under his skin.