An Unfortunate Situation

Rivulets of sweat rolled down BJ’s sides, saturating his shirt. He removed his hat, pulled the shirt up, and wiped his hairless scalp. It didn’t absorb any moisture, but the motion gave some cooling relief. Pendulous drops of perspiration cascaded from his eyebrows, stinging his eyes. He wiped his face on his sleeve.

“God almighty,” he said, sucking in a deep breath and breaking open his last bottle of water. He looked at his phone. “No damn service! Where the hell am I?” Sliding the phone into his back pocket, he shaded his eyes from the glare and peered along the two-lane blacktop undulating like a twisting snake in the mirage of heat bubbling from its surface.

Behind him, lost in the distance, his ’80 Gremlin sat along the side of the road, having succumbed to the south-Texas heat. “I should’ve gotten rid of that piece of shit a long time ago,” he said, grinding his teeth in disgust. He bent over with his hands on his knees, staring at his glistening legs and soaked socks. “Gotta find some shelter soon or I’m going to share the same fate as the car.” With that thought firmly set in his mind, he continued to trudge toward a group of buildings wavering in the distance.

Thirty minutes later, he stood before a gas station. The walls listing in surrender to the elements, the faces of the pumps cracked and crazed, 25 cents a gallon frozen in their final throes. Besides the station and its adjoining service bay, three other buildings, one on either side of the station and another across the highway, hung in similar stages of decay: broken windows, missing doors, and slumping porches. A breath of despair popped from his lips. “Shit.” He shrugged. “Well, at least I’ve got some shade,” and with that walked between the two dead pumps and through the station’s front door.

Fine sand blew in through holes in the windows, spiraling into small cyclones and dying in the corners and on a table against an opposite wall. The metal walls turned the room into an oven, mitigated only by the circulation of a warm breeze. It may not have been a gas station for a while, but it had frequently been used for shelter as evidenced by the detritus strewn about the floor. A door at the rear opened into the service bay, the rolling doors closed, and all the windows covered in newspaper. An ’81 Ford pickup sat parked in the bay. The back door to the bay swung in the breeze and banged a sinister rhythm against the metal wall. A sudden urge to leave knotted BJ’s gut. He spun on his heels and into the narrowed glaring eyes of a suspicious round face.

“What’re you doing here?”

BJ caught the dull glint of sunlight off the cold steel stuck in the waist band of this unfriendly face’s pants. “Ah . . . I, ah . . . my car broke down about three miles from here,” his eyes fixed on the tense face, he brought his hand up and tentatively pointed toward the roadway, “that way.” He lowered his hand and stuck it in his pocket. The glare became a scowl, his brows pitching down into a deep crease above his flat nose, and he reached for the pistol, but BJ raised his hands, exposing the palms and splaying his fingers. “Look man, I don’t know what’s going on here,” his words spilled out in rapid staccato bursts, “and I don’t want to know. I’m looking for someone to fix my car and to get some water.” His heart racing, his hands began to shake.

The face softened and he lowered his hands. A smile curled at the corner of his mouth as he pushed BJ’s hands down. “Nothin’ going to happen. I’m not going to shoot you, but you picked a bad time to show up.” He canted his head toward the mess that littered the floor around them and chuckled. “Not going to find any water or a mechanic around here.” Then he nodded toward the truck in the service bay. “Can’t give you a ride either.” Biting his upper lip, the face glanced at the chipped crystal of his watch. The second hand ticked off the seconds, much slower than BJ’s pulse. “Shit,” the face said, whispering. He turned to BJ. “You gotta get out of here. I got friends coming and they ain’t nice.”

“Where can I go?”

“Not my problem.” He walked toward a front window and pointed. “Over there. Across the road. Haul your ass over there.”

Voices wafted from outside the service bay. The face strode back to the bay and looked toward the back door, “Too late asshole,” and slipped the pistol from his waistband. “Find somewhere to bury yourself or they’ll do it for you.”

BJ’s heart jumped into his throat. His mouth dropped open. The face turned and clenched his teeth. “Go, you idiot or you’ll be dead!” BJ couldn’t move. The face’s eyes darted about the room and then he jabbed the muzzle of the gun toward a low cabinet in the corner. “In there!” The voices, at least three, entered the bay. BJ blinked as the face shoved him toward the cabinet and slid the door open. He pulled a shelf out and pushed BJ inside. Sliding the door shut, he dragged a chair in front of the cabinet and sat down.

“Yo! Who you talking to?”

“Myself.”

“Yeah?”

BJ peered out through a hole the cabinet’s lock once occupied. Three men stood in the doorway to the service bay. The one in the middle, talking, wore an unbuttoned sleeveless shirt over a wife-beater, sweat stained and dirty. A large, tattooed crucifix extended along the inside of his right forearm from the elbow to the wrist. “The Devil’s Man” was tattooed across his left bicep. Two men stood behind him, BJ’s gaze fixed on the long rifles slung across their chests.

“Yeah,” the face said. “You’re early.”

“I’m never early. You’re late.” The sleeveless shirt stepped closer to the face. The two rifles remained in the doorway.”

“The truck’s empty,” another voice belonging to a fourth man said as he stepped between the rifles and into the station office.

The sleeveless shirt moved closer and stopped a foot from the face. “Where’s my shit?” he said in a low, menacing drawl.

“Hey, man, they’ll be here. It’s only twelve-thirty. You said one. They’ll be here at one.”

BJ held his breath, squeezing his bent knees together to keep from shaking the cabinet. Something crawled up his leg and he froze. A slim beam of light penetrated the missing lock’s hole, illuminating his knees. The tingling of small feet moved up his shin. Thank God it didn’t slither, he thought. It stopped at the top of his shins. He stared at his kneecaps. Long black, hairy legs appeared in the light, touching, feeling his knees, climbing over until perched on top, two gargantuan beady eyes glistening in the light. Oh! God! A tarantula.

“I’m tired of your bullshit!” the sleeveless shirt said. “You’re always late.” You give me a bad name with my customers when you make me late.”

“They’re comin’. They said they’d be here at one. C’mon man. Give them time. They’ll be here.”

BJ baked inside the cabinet, his breathing shallowed, but he never took his eyes off the large arachnid staring back.

The sleeveless shirt laughed and raised his voice to the others. “Well, what’d ya think? Should we wait?” Before the question garnered a response, a shot pulsed in the sultry air.

BJ jumped, then clamped his hands against his mouth. The tarantula raised up on its legs and hissed. BJ held his breath.

The sleeveless shirt howled. “Guess not. Don’t see any reason we can’t make the exchange without him.” The chair the face had been sitting in slammed against the cabinet.

The tarantula scurried down BJ’s thighs and into a pantleg of his shorts. BJ squeezed his eyes shut and strangled a mortal cry with his hands. It crawled from one side of his thigh to the other, the bristles of its hairy legs tingling against his skin. He panted, his breaths shallow and ragged. I can’t see! Where am I? The metal burned his hands. His mouth dried and his legs cramped. A wave of nausea twirled in his stomach and his head pounded.

“Let’s wait out by the truck,” he heard the sleeveless shirt say and watched through the hole as they walked into the service bay.

The walls closed in on BJ. He pushed against the cabinet’s door, but it wouldn’t budge. I got to get out of here! I can’t breathe! He pushed harder, unable to move it. Through the hole he saw the chair rocked up on its back legs and the face slumped in the seat, his head rolled to one side. His eyes an empty stare, blood matted his hair and ran down the side of his head. BJ pushed his back against the side of the cabinet to get more leverage against the door until a sharp sting on the inside of his thigh stopped him. Snarling through his clenched teeth, he punched his leg and said, “Get off me! Get the fuck off me!” The arachnid skittered from his pants across the floor of the cabinet and disappeared through a hole in the corner. BJ grabbed his thigh. A cramp knotted his stomach and his head spun. Visions of a thousand beady eyes crisscrossed the cabinet in front of his face. His mouth hung open and his tongue lolled over his lips as he tried to suck in a breath. In the distance, shouting voices and a volley of gunfire. Lightheaded, he rocked from side to side, shouting and banging the sides of the cabinet, then tumbled against the door and collapsed into unconsciousness.

###

BJ listened. He rocked; he was on his back. Cold. Wet. Someone wailed. Voices. Distant. What are they saying? Who are you? Where am I? The vision before his eyes wavered and bent and faded. A large tarantula stood over him, all eight eyes glaring. It leaned down, close to his face and snarled, the two prominent eyes fired with anger. BJ swung at it, screaming. “Get away! Get away from me!” The fangs snapped and then the mouth impaled his arm. “God! No!” BJ swung his arm trying to free it from the spider’s grip, but it wouldn’t let go. His arm froze. He couldn’t move it.

“You’re okay, sir. Easy.”

“What?” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “What?”

“You’re okay.”

When his eyes cleared, a paramedic had a grip on one arm and an IV fed fluid into the other arm. “I am?” The paramedic nodded. “Where am I?”

“On an MedEvac helicopter.” He opened the cooling blanket wrapped around BJ and put BJ’s arm inside. A machine misted the air, and a fan circulated it throughout the cabin. “You’re a lucky man.”

“I am?” His leg twisted in a painful cramp. He gritted his teeth. “I don’t feel lucky.”

“Well, if it wasn’t for your Gremlin, you might not’ve been.”

“My Gremlin?”

“Yeah. The state police found it and set out looking for you. They found you and got a drug bust in the process.”

“That piece-of-shit car? Didn’t think it would ever be worth anything.” He rolled his head and looked up at the paramedic. “You know anybody that wants it?”

He chuckled. “It’s junk. Cops said it was stripped. Wheels. Engine. Just scrap now.”

BJ, laughing, said, “Know of any good used cars? I gotta drive another thousand miles.”

“Well, that won’t be a priority. They’ll keep you in the hospital for a while. So . . . how about a drink? Water, of course.”

“You know what?”

“What.”

“I fucking hate tarantulas.”