The Power of a Gas Station

Transient spaces always fascinated me as a child which is probably why I bought a gas station in my old age. Is there any space more transient? No one wants to stay in a gas station, and no one should. Those chains that try to make theirs appear like small grocery stores misunderstand the power of these places. It is in these between places that true change can occur. If the customers can sit down with a breakfast sandwich for an hour, they lose out on the experience. There is magic to gas stations—a uniquely American magic. I’ve seen that power do great and wicked things. A young trucker who walked into my store once saw it first-hand.

After a hot shower, the man probably would have looked his age, but as he was, I was shocked to learn he was only 21. He came in on the last Thursday of November; a day that those with a family call Thanksgiving. I had given up on holidays many years before, but the sting of spending one alone for the first time was apparent on the trucker’s face. After filling up, he came into my modest store and tipped his hat to me as he passed through the door. My rectangular store was small enough that I could see him no matter where he went. There was only enough room for two short aisles of snacks and three coolers filled with beverages, but this man walked through it all like it was a museum. He gave every item on every shelf at least a full second-long glance. Calloused fingers from a long day’s hauling brushed over the hanging bags of discount candy. He never grabbed for anything, just looked. Any other owner would have told him to buy something or leave, but I could feel the pain inside him from behind the counter. This was a man stretched between two places and he was about to rip in half. 

“What’s on your mind, son?” I asked. He didn’t answer right away. It seemed like he was lost in the cooling fog of my Pepsi refrigerator. When the door closed, he finally turned to me. There were tears in his eyes that he was trying to bury amongst the sodas and beer. 

“I don’t mean to loiter, sir,” he said. “It’s just, I’ve been driving all day, and, for some reason, I can’t make myself get back in my truck.” 

This was that magic I yapped about earlier at work. Being compelled to stay in a place you were designed to leave is as unnatural as fire spouting from a wand. My station had chained this man to its floor. Now don’t get the idea that I had anything to do with this young man’s compulsion to stay. I am not and never was a wizard. The station’s power is its own to dish out. If anything, I’m a shaman translating the station’s intention and helping the affected through their experience. I know my native ancestors would be happy to hear that. 

“Come up here,” I said. I knocked my knuckle on a plastic case of lotto tickets. “Sometimes a game of chance is all you need to make sense of your feelings.” 

“I don’t know. I’m not much of a gambler.”

“Just trust me.”

He silently approached my counter and perused the display of scratchers. A pink and yellow one called “Loose Change” caught his eye. He pulled out a crumpled 1 dollar bill from his pocket, but before he could even get his hand over the counter, I refused it. 

“It’s on the station,” I said. Of course, he didn’t know how much I really meant that.

“You’re too kind, sir.”

The boy who looked like a man took a penny from my loose change jar and began scratching his ticket. Unlike him, I had been a gambler for much of my life so I knew what he should find. It’s a simple game. It gives you six coins and if they add up to $1, you win the prize shown. If not, try again. That was not what the store had in mind for this trucker. He scratched for a few seconds and stopped. Something about the card made him go rigid. He looked over at me, but I had busied myself with counting the drawer. I kept an eye on him in my peripheral, though. After a few moments, he leaned back over and scratched out the rest of the card. I didn’t want to look before he showed me to let the station talk to him directly. It wasn’t long before he was angrily shoving it in my face. 

“What the hell is this,” he yelped. He held the card face out, but his hand quivered so hard that I couldn’t get a good look. I took his wrist and forced it to settle. An image of a young dark-haired woman with a child in her lap stared back at me. The light of their beautiful smiles was almost too bright to look at. The girl looked modern, so I assumed that the trucker wasn’t the pictured child. A bubble of excitement popped in my chest. I couldn’t wait to see what the station had cooked up for me this time. 

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve never seen them before, but it sounds like you have.”

“If this is some kind of magic trick, you need to tell me. It’s the law.”

I laughed which only made the trucker angrier. He tossed the card on the counter and charged for the door. The station wasn’t through with him yet, however. The door he reached was no longer a door. The creases had been sealed and the hinges were gone. It was now little more than a window with a handle. I didn’t blame him for panicking after that. 

“The hell?” He barked. “How did you…? That’s not possible.” 

I came around the counter with the card in hand. As he uselessly pulled on the handle of what was formerly a door, I held out the picture that caused all this mess. He refused to look at it for a while and continued yanking on a solid wall. Eventually, he gave up and granted me his attention again. 

“Who are they, son?” I asked, softly.

“The door…” He mumbled. “You have to let me out of here, man.”

“I’m not the one who trapped you here, and I know that the force that did would want you to tell me who these people are.”

The trucker was understandably hesitant for a while. He kept looking back and forth from his feet to the door, but never at the photo. I thought he might try to break the window, which never ends well. He actually took the next most likely option, collapsing to the floor and hugging his knees. I don’t know what it is about the supernatural, but that position always seems to comfort those first experiencing it. It wasn’t easy in my old age, but I lowered myself to the ground as well. We sat face to face in silence for a long while until a breeze that could not have come naturally blew the picture from my hand to his feet. Right into the trucker’s field of view. He made a sound poisoned with guilt at the sight of it. 

“Her name is Tammy,” he said. “The little girl is Angela.”

Just saying that seemed to take a lot out of him so I waited before responding.

“Who are they to you?”

“I…I got Tammy pregnant at the end of senior year. Her family is really religious so she didn’t want a…you know…My ma and pa would have killed me if he knew I was sleeping with girls before marriage. Pa used to hit me just cause he was in a bad mood. So, I…I didn’t tell them. It was hard but we kept it from them for two years…but they found out…they always do…”

The trucker was silent again for a long time. I knew I couldn’t force this out of him, so I waited. Eventually, he pulled in a deep breath and continued through tears. 

“They uh…They disowned me after that. My parents, my sibling, my grammy. None of them would talk to me. I was so angry. I didn’t know what I was gonna do being so angry, so I left. I left my girl and my baby girl behind. I didn’t want to start blaming them and…hurt them. So, I went away. I thought it was the right choice at first, but now…The further I get from them the more I second guess…”

The trucker broke down into a sniffling, crying mess. The façade he walked in with was completely shed. I made some coffee and handed him a cup once he regained a semblance of composure. One thing had totally changed, he now couldn’t take his eyes off the photo.

“Son, if you had the chance would you go back?” I asked.

“I can’t go back now. It’s been too long.”

“Time can always be made up if you put in the effort. Truly, if you could go back, would you?”

“Yeah, I would,” he said without hesitation.

Immediately after the last syllable left his mouth, my landline started to ring. I normally had to tell my guests that the call was actually for them, but this young man had gotten a grasp on the station’s power. He jumped up and walked to the phone. He sent me a look of fear at me before he picked it up. I smiled and nodded in return. He lifted the receiver to his face and said:

“Tammy?”

Based on the trucker’s reaction, Tammy hadn’t been expecting him. Normally, calls from past loved ones were redirected from another target. It sounded to me like Tammy had been trying to call the vet when she was met with the voice of her child’s estranged father. I understand that a good story would include the couple’s entire dramatic phone call, but I’m not one for eavesdropping. I remember that their talk started out tense but ended with quite a lot of crying. When the phone was finally hung up, I approached the trucker again.

“Are you heading out?” I asked.

The trucker didn’t respond but instead pulled me into a hug unlike any I’d had in years. He told me that he came from several hours west. He’d be with his woman and child in a few days.

“I don’t know what you did…” He started before I interrupted.

“I think you did most of the doing tonight.”

We left it at that. He walked through the reformed door, and I never saw or heard from him again. Maybe he sought me out years later to thank me, but he probably couldn’t find my station. He wasn’t meant to. My secret hope for everyone I and my station have helped is that they totally forget about the magic they saw. That they live their lives on the better track we set them on and don’t think about how they got there. These are places that are designed to be forgotten but don’t worry about me. I’ve carved my name into the world with changed lives. That is my service to humanity and it’s all I need.