The song was in French, so neither Josie nor I could understand a word of it, but somehow I could hear the sadness caught in the notes. I liked it, but I wasn’t about to admit this. The music floated out to each corner of the yard, tightening the air. Nell shook her head just a bit with the words, the way someone does when they are particularly satisfied. A smile played on her lips, but she looked as she always did when singing, as if she would cry, too. Josie was watching Nell with a strange little smirk on her face, as if she thought Nell was incredibly beautiful or psychotic or maybe both.
When the song ended, with many repetitions of “Ne me quitte pas,” the needle caught a couple of specks of dust and crackled out before Nell lifted the arm. She looked as if the song had worn her out. Even though she hadn’t shed any tears, her eyes were wet, so she wiped them with the backs of her wrists.
“What does it mean?” I said, quiet, afraid of breaking some kind of grace that had fallen over us.
Nell didn’t look at me and didn’t speak until she had put the record back in its sleeve. She stared down at the album cover. “It means ‘Don’t leave me,’” she said.
None of us said anything for a time. The song had caused a great silence to collect in the yard, as if all the usual sounds of evening had retreated into the deepest part of the woods. Nell finally slid the album back into the milk crate.
“I know Bob Dylan’s stuff,” Josie said proudly. “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and all that. He can’t sing worth a dime.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of his singing,” Nell said, and didn’t offer to explain further. She held the Dylan album out to Josie. “Take it and listen to it when you get a chance. Especially ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.’ That one will rip your guts out.” She stacked the other albums up and put the record player atop them, then gathered them all up in her arms and stood, her knees popping. “I bet supper is almost ready, and we should’ve been helping Loretta,” she said.
“Wait,” Josie said. “What about the Beatles? Which is your favorite song?”
“Oh, God,” Nell said, walking away. She stopped after putting one foot on the porch steps and looked back at us, clutching everything to her chest. “Every damn one of them.”
“Nell, watch that dirty mouth,” said my mother, who was suddenly standing at the screen door. “And y’all come on and eat.”
As Mom went back into the house, I saw Daddy standing in the open kitchen door. He had been eavesdropping. His face was solid and straight-edged, the way the sky looks when a storm can blow up out of nowhere.
When Nell opened the screen door and held it so I could go onto the porch, he sank back into the kitchen, never taking his eyes from mine. I had caught him looking at me like this before, and I still couldn’t figure out what he saw when he stared like that. I thought that maybe he didn’t see anything at all. Instead, he was looking past me, picturing the trees of Vietnam.
“Well, go on, Eli,” Nell said with a little laugh in her voice. “You’re letting flies in.”
I ran across the porch and into the kitchen, where I was covered up in the smell of fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, and fried apples. I sat down at the table and grabbed up my fork and knife, but Mom said I had to go wash my hands first. As I was getting up, I caught a few muffled words that Nell was saying to Daddy, so I crept near the door frame and listened, even though I knew I shouldn’t. To have seen them would have risked their seeing me, but I could hear them just fine.
“And they’re sure?” Daddy said, and Nell must have nodded, because he went on: “What can they do?”
“They think they’ll have to take them,” Nell said. Her voice was quiet and dark, not her voice at all.
“There’s no way around it?”
“It’s cancer, Stanton. There’s nothing else they can do.”
I didn’t know exactly what Nell meant, but I was smart enough to know that cancer was a very bad thing. I had heard of it killing old people before. As much as I didn’t want anything else to agonize about that summer, I tucked it away in my list of other things to worry about when I sat with my beech tree. There was the atom bomb, the Rapture, the possibility that I might be possessed by the devil, the threat that my parents might someday not love each other, or me. And now I could add that Nell had something wrong with her.
If I had known how bad it actually was, that would have been all I would have thought about the rest of that summer.
I had begged Daddy for weeks to let me go to work with him.
For some reason, that morning he let me sit on his lap and steer the truck, although he kept one thumb hooked on the lower corner of the wheel, to make sure I didn’t wreck us. He turned up the radio and tapped his thumb in beat to the song, and I felt as if I were driving all alone, a grown boy in control of the world. After a time he kissed the back of my head, his signal to me to slide off his lap and let him drive the rest of the way. He always said if I drove too far, the cops would get us.
I hadn’t been kissed by my father in ages, so after moving, I sat there and looked at him for what seemed a long while before I rolled down my window and let my hand float up and down on the rushing air as the hills and river sped by.
When we came to the high bridge where the little boy had died, Daddy slowed, as if paying respect. I started to ask him what he knew about the dead boy, but there was something about his face that told me to not speak. He was peering over the railing of the bridge, his mouth set in a firm line, his eyes slow to blink. I thought I saw him swallow hard, his Adam’s apple rising in a gulp. Maybe he saw the child’s ghost and didn’t want me to know. His whole body changed — tensed, became bigger, more solid — when we passed over the bridge. But then we were back on the road and he was speeding up again, and it didn’t feel right to mention anything. I was having such a fine time that I didn’t want to spoil it by bringing up a dead boy. Before long we arrived at the station.
I loved everything about the Ashland station: the smell of oil in the garage, the long black tube that ran across the pavement in front of the gas pumps, the bell that rang when a car drove over this tube, approaching for gas. I admired the way the wide metal shelf had been attached to the ceiling over the cash register. This shelf held brightly colored packs of cigarettes that were gotten to by reaching up and snatching one down. When one pack was removed, another slid down into its place, which struck me as ingenious. I loved the three separate boxes of candy bars that stood on the counter. The orange box for Reese’s cups, the brown one for Hershey bars, and the red one that held Zagnuts. There was no store at my father’s station, only these boxes of candy, along with the cigarettes, a glass jar that held Blow Pop suckers, and the oil filters, air hoses, and timing belts that hung on the wall behind the counter. There was a Pepsi machine out on the curb in front of the station that ticked especially loud when it was hot, struggling to keep the bottles cold.
My father owned and operated the gas station with only two helpers. One was an older man — called String because he was so tall and skinny — who was an expert at repairing engines. People brought their cars from miles around so he could work on them. String did not say much but always winked at me and produced a stick of Fruit Stripe gum from his shirt pocket, offering it with greasy fingers. Then he’d wink at me again and give his own wad of gum a loud chomp. The other employee was Jack, who had been the valedictorian of his senior class but wanted to work awhile before going to college. My father said that Jack was all book sense and nothing else, since he was dumb as Nixon when it came to practical matters. He tended to smaller jobs like pumping gas, cleaning windshields, rotating tires, plugging flat tires, or changing oil. Any new task had to be explained to him in such great detail that my father usually just gave up and did whatever had to be done himself. Jack was eager to please, though, and was good to me, often talking to me at length about books. That summer I was fairly obsessed with The Diary of Anne Frank, which Edie had read the previous winter and had talked about so much tha
t I had to read it to find out what all the fuss was about.
“There’s a lot of wisdom to be found in that little book,” Jack said after I told him what I was reading. “It’s amazing, really, what that little girl wrote. That one line, ‘Despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ That right there, now, I’ll just tell you, that’ll stand the test of time, buddy.”
I hadn’t gotten that far into the book yet, so I tried to tune out anything he said lest he spoil the entire plot. On his lunch break he ate a baloney-and-mustard sandwich he had brought from home, drank a Mountain Dew, and immersed himself in a book called Jude the Obscure, sitting on a stack of tires in the cool corner of the garage. Once when I asked him what the book was about, he told me it was only the best book ever written and that as soon as I got old enough, I ought to read it, and he was about to go on and on but the bell clanged, drawing my attention to a car that needed to be filled with gas, which was my job when I went along with my father to the station.
The drivers were tickled by the sight of a ten-year-old pumping their gas (I was too short to clean the windshields or check their oil, so Jack had to run out and do that) and sometimes gave me a quarter tip, which I saved up for the movies. I was hoping to go see The Bad News Bears, although my mother said Josie would have to take me since she couldn’t stand Walter Matthau. Lots of actors got on my mother’s nerves, and she had strong opinions about all of them.
I longed for a shirt like the ones my father, Jack, and String all wore. The shirts were dark blue, heavily starched. The best part was that they all had a little blue-bordered patch over their left pocket that announced their names. I had begged for such a shirt for the last two years but had never received one, always expecting it as a birthday present. Daddy said they didn’t make them in my size.
The gas station was situated on the side of the road between our house and Refuge in a space of countryside that had been devoted to a scattering of businesses. On one side of us was a small grocery, and on the other side was a pay-by-the-week motel where a few old bachelors lived year-round. The motel was painted turquoise and had a dry pool in its courtyard. This had once been the main road, before the interstate came through on the other side of town, and my father said that when he was a child, the motel had been considered fancy. People told how Lucille Ball had once stayed there, back in the fifties. On the two occasions I had ventured close to the motel to spy on people, it had smelled of lard and rotting sawdust. The first time I had seen nothing except an old man in Bermuda shorts, black socks, and a gray fedora with a red feather in the band, reading the newspaper as he sat outside his door on one of the plastic patio chairs that came with each room. The second time there had been a group of old men playing poker around a card table they had set up on the courtyard. They smoked and cussed, but that had been the extent of anything interesting.
The other side of the road was taken up by a mile-long cornfield. Beyond that was the river, which was why the cornfield was situated there in the first place, in the rich bottomland. And beyond the river were blue mountains that always seemed striped with jagged lines of heat.
It was especially hot that day, so hot that Jack pointed out to me how the gases shifted and moved over the pavement. He said that it was because of the oils trapped in the blacktop being conjured up by the heat. This was like something my mother would say, since she was always seeing the world through its science, and I thought how she and Jack would probably get along very well.
“Did you have my mother for a teacher in high school?”
“Yeaaaah,” he said, in his sly, slow way of dragging out one-syllable words. “She taught me that, about the gases. She was the best teacher I ever had. I always loved English and history, but she made me care about science.”
I had heard people say such things about my mother for as long as I could remember. I thought she was very noble, to be able to make someone love a school subject they hadn’t even thought of before.
My father often announced — out of nowhere, for no known reason — that Americans loved their cars even more than they loved their dogs. So I felt running a gas station was pretty important, too. My mother taught people how to do things, and my father took care of things that some people found impossible to learn. And during the oil shortage last year, he had supplied everyone with gas easily, even though we had seen cars lined up in the cities on the evening news.
The best thing about the gas station, however, was that my father was a different person there. Somehow he was more relaxed there than at home. Our house, and my world, was always covered up in women. My mother, Nell, Josie, Stella, Edie. Those five were such big presences that a couple of them alone would have been overpowering enough. But here, at the Ashland station, my father was in a man’s world, and one he knew inside out. I wondered if being here reminded him of the good parts of being at war, the way men are able to trust one another and become close in ways they might not under normal circumstances. I also saw that while my father was mostly at a loss for expertise at home — often being called on only to be the middleman between Mom and Josie’s fights, or some such thing — here he was always in control. At the station he knew the answer to everything. People didn’t question him. They looked up to him. Of course we looked up to him at home, too, but usually with a seed of doubt in our throats. He was not very good at explaining himself, and we were a family that liked to have things clearly laid out for us. At the station, he and his small crew had a sort of shorthand. He could holler out a line of numbers and String would magically appear, producing a particular brake pad or oil filter.
Daddy tried to show me things, to teach me how to change a tire or simply glance at a shiny row of sockets and know which size I needed for the job at hand. He sometimes put his oily hand atop mine to direct me in the correct way to tighten or loosen a bolt or nut. He looked me in the eye. And most of all, he talked to me. He talked to me more during one day at work together than he would have during an entire week at home.
Still, the women made it clearly known what they wanted me to do at home, and he did not. He was vague with his demands, and there were rarely second chances. My father did not like to explain himself twice and expected me to learn how to do something after one discussion. Here I felt the need to impress and often failed. He also cussed here occasionally, which my mother would have frowned upon. She said while cussing might not send you to hell, it would make people think you were rude. When he let loose a bad word, he’d wink at me as if this was our secret. There seemed to be an understanding between us that I was not to cuss until I became a man. Only then would it be acceptable, and even then it was preferable to do this only in front of other men.
During our lunch break, I read my book while we ate. My mother had packed our lunch. A ham-and-cheese sandwich for my father and peanut-butter-and-jelly for me. She had wrapped some Pringles up in aluminum foil for me. Daddy got us each a Zagnut bar off the counter and bought us each our own bottle of Pepsi from the machine. We sat on tires in the back corner of the garage, where it was cool and shadowy.
“Do you have to read that old book even while you’re eating?” he said, chewing a couple of my chips.
“It’s so good I can’t hardly lay it down.”
“Well, reading’s good,” he said. “But learning how to fix a motor will come in handier for you.”
“It’s about this little girl who had to hide from the Nazis.”
He stopped chewing, offended, and looked at me for a silent moment. “I know who Anne Frank is,” he said, his whole face tightening. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
I marked my place with a postcard of the Lincoln Memorial that Nell had sent me a year ago, and laid the book aside.
It was so hot we could hear the cicadas — my father called them heat bugs — screaming even over the dirty little radio sitting atop a huge red toolbox. When “The Most Beautiful Girl” came on, my father sang along very loud while he changed tires or installe
d air filters. It was no wonder we could hear the insects mourning the heat, though, because my father never turned the radio up very loud. He said the customers didn’t like to pull in and be blasted away.
The thunderstorms usually rolled in later in the evening, just before dusk, but that day we had just finished our lunch break when the sky fell open. Daddy was in the garage, lying on the wooden rolling bed that enabled him to scoot up under cars, checking an oil leak on an El Camino. String had half his body hanging out of the engine of a Charger, which was also pulled into one of the bays of the garage. Jack had nothing else to do except sweep cigarette butts off the concrete slab that served as a small porch. Very few cars had come along lately, so I had settled in on the pile of tires to read my Anne Frank book. I was just to the part where Anne kissed Peter when we felt the air change. Then the low rumble of thunder. A warning, a music.
Jack looked up at the sky. “Man, it’s going to be a bad one,” he said, and pointed to the horizon over the far hills. “Look — those clouds are almost green, they’re so full.”
I ran in and put my book on the counter so it wouldn’t get wet, then came back out to see the rain moving toward us through the corn. The storm churned in like a moving wall. The tops of the corn trembled in the downpour, and a boom of thunder made the ground shudder. I looked down, expecting to see the concrete of the slab cracked open, but it wasn’t. The cloud chamber paused as the rain thrashed the road in great, round plops, so hard that the rain looked like it was falling backward, rising up out of the blacktop and sizzling skyward.
“That’s ozone,” Jack said, as if transfixed. “That smell.”
Then the storm moved forward and hit the station like an ocean wave. Jack stood on the porch, broom in hand, and flattened himself against the plate-glass window behind him, but I ran out to the gas pumps. I stomped over the hose, but its bell was lost to the sound of pummeling rain and crashing thunder.