Gas Station at the End of the World

The gas station tucked between your hometown and Memphis only accepts cash or party favours, so Marie opens her satchel over the counter and lets memories freckle the toothpaste-blue linoleum. 

An alabaster poker die. A spindle of hair-thin cotton. A deck of playing cards. A button popped from the collar of a school shirt.  This is all you have between you and the attendant is looking down at it like a janitor skirting a subway. You want to say: “That's our lives, it’s all written down, but you can't see what it means.” Instead, you keep your eyes on the cigarette case backgrounding the man’s head, the quilting of cardboard technicolour. 

“Come on,” Marie says, “There must be something you want. You gotta give us something.”

She’s halfway over the counter, one hand flat, the other in the air like she can wrestle a win out of it. The attendant looks up from the queen of spades pinched between his fingertips. He has the eyes of a barn owl, a globe of carnelian pirouetting from his left earlobe like a tiny execution. There's a paisley bandana knotted over his nose and mouth. Here is a man with a care for survival greater than yours. 

“Nothing here worth the trouble,” he flicks the card across the counter, “But I’d take a story. You lot clean?”

“A story? The hell’s that meant to mean, man?”

He shrugs, “Words. Easy deal, I thought. So, y’all clean or not?”

Marie catches your eyes, a question mark carved into her forehead. She is looking for an answer. Here is what you know:

Marie is clean.

You are unclean.

Neither of you are clean in the ways which matter.

Her tongue globes through the flesh of her cheek, pearled and sunburnt. Here she is, backlit, a messiah in the buttery sunburst of the open door. She shuffles down the collar of her aviator jacket and bares her throat. Skin the colour of burnt almonds, the colour of coffee and milk. No marks; nothing to see here. You lift your hair, present your throat to the boy behind the counter, hold your palm over the greening nape of your neck.

You are the only thing that marks Marie.

She leans against the counter and shoots a smile with too many teeth, a scattering of pebbles.

“That good enough for you, captain?”

“Sure.” He nods once, then twice. The traffic mirror in the corner of the shop chokes down your reflections and spits them back up a little bloated, a little faded. Seeing yourself is always like this these days; like staring down the dead. Seeing yourself is always like this these days; too near to swallowing glass.

——

The evening is the colour of an unripe plum and swallowed in the stench of motor fumes. Pools of gasoline smile up at you from the kicked-up pavement, raked through with purple and gold. Everything is quiet, unmoving. The boy sits down on the curb and you and Marie follow. He slaps three sweaty cans of Pepsi down by the toes of his roughed-up combat boots and gestures at you to take them. The tab slips under your fingertips and the drink goes down your throat like half-dead stars, a little flat in its violence. Sugar grits behind your molars, leaves your bottom lip rough and sticky.

The boy struggles with the pocket of his red plaid jacket, long hair curling over the grey hollow of his left under-eye. He places a joint between his lips where it hangs like a cut of straw. The boy cups his hands, ignites a match, and paints his jaw golden.

“I grow it in the back,” he nods at Marie, “Got a neat set up. Proper mattress, VCR, food, clearly.” 

Marie stretches out her legs,

“Cool it Romeo, we’re not truck stop hookers. Just proper poor, poor, starving ladies.”

“Ha. You’re hardly my type,” He ashes his joint against the curb, “And we actually call ‘em ‘lot lizards’.”

He blows out a plume of silver smoke that curls over his hooked nose like the strokes of the Van Gogh paintings that you studied tirelessly in art class. He pulls a chapped, red-covered notebook from his back pocket and thumbs his way to the middle of it. He takes a pen from behind his ear and clicks it.

“You two gonna talk or what?”

——

In the beginning, you stole the car from her father’s impound. A Chevrolet the colour of spoiled salmon, scraped to ribbons of silver at the bumper.

“This is a bad idea,” You’d said, the mark at the base of your neck not yet the size of a fingertip and your fear of loneliness the only thing bigger than your guilt.

“There are no bad ideas,” she said, a lollipop bleeding sticky red over her bottom lip, “Only lame-ass bitches.”

She dangled the key under your nose,

“Come on, Thelma. Let me be your Louise.”

She wasn’t a film buff, so you didn’t say anything; omitted the detail of a car swooping over the Grand Canyon, of certain death blacked out only by rolling credits. 

Fear makes monsters of us all.

At school, folded behind gum-stuck English desks, you’d studied a book about sailors, so from the stretch between your hometown and Nashville you played at being pirates. The static cracks of Billy Joel songs pushed through the radio became sea shanties. The silver insignia welded to the front of the truck became a sirenesque figurehead. You covered one eye with your palm and took from whoever you crossed paths with; dimpled cans of pears like minute treasure chests.

What you don’t tell the boy is of the chapter on gangrene, how the sailors would lop limbs off at the base to stop the swirling spread of disease. You don’t tell the boy of the joke, whispered through a cicada-heavy night, Marie’s fingers tracing your neck. 

“Hack it off,” You’d said, “And we’ll end this mess once and for all.”

“I’d keep it on my mantle.”

But things felt different after this, and Billy Joel sang alone through the radio.

You tell the boy about the family Nashville, their slow-working faces, their mold-coloured skin. The girl, her child’s eyes reduced to hollows, her fists like rotted stone fruit, her teeth rusted with blood. What you don’t tell him is how in them you’d seen yourself and Marie had to settle you, palms at each side of your skull like a cage. You tell it through a different lens, keeping the three swift kills at the end of a snapped-off bedpost, the tins of food and bars of soap stolen away into a yellowed pillowcase, omitting the pale recognition of what was to come.

In the story “You have to leave me, I can’t have you end like this,” becomes, "They can't be left, not with the disease spreading the way it is. There’s only monsters here."

It’s true, really, if only sparing a few key details.

But he wants a better story and he tells you this, his fingernails planted between cracks of ashy asphalt, his heel crushing down on an empty Pepsi can. So you tell him the story about the girls kissing in sharpie-ridden bathroom stalls, hands locked under math-class tables. You tell him how you climbed your neighbour's fence and stole into their pool, floated on your back in the water that did not belong to you, imagining that your eyes were someone else’s. How, at your first party, you drank too much and kissed a boy who was not a girl and felt like your lungs were burning. How, two years later, she kissed you behind a paint-peeled milk bar, and you felt like you had the final piece to a puzzle you didn’t even know you’d been solving.

Or should you say how these days memories come to you backwards, slotted into reverse?

Your father coughs blood into a handkerchief and then smokes twelve cigarettes, ashing them into his own urn.

You run away from something you cannot outrun with the girl and end up back in your bed, where the air is soapy clean and nothing has ever hurt you. 

A newborn crawls back into her mother and makes a white-picket life in the gap before living. 

Do you say how your own humanity is unravelling, but you won’t tell?

——

The boy leans back onto the cement, plaid-clad arms hoisting up his frail body. He looks at you, then Marie. In the melting sunlight, his eyes are bleached clementine. He flips his notebook shut and removes the ballpoint pen from between his lips, where it has left behind a bruise of watery ink. He stands and, one by one, kicks the cans standing before you. They roll off, scraping asphalt as they go, until they land and come to a stop in the middle of the vacant lot.

"I'm thirsty," he says, "Wait here."

As he leaves, he tosses the ballpoint pen in the air and catches it without looking, again and again. Sunlight scabs the red plaid of his shoulder blades. Once he’s swallowed up by the red and white haze of the gas station, Marie turns to you, takes your chin between her fingers. You clamp down on her wrist and try not to notice the press of bones, the sinews pressing against her skin like they might break away. You push her hand away.

“I’m poisonous, darling, don’t forget.”

——

The boy returns with one can of Pepsi, a buckknife, and a look in his eyes that spells 'survivor' like the scar under your skin spells 'death.' He is quiet, stripped of boister, and it takes a moment for you to register the press of a blade at the nape of your neck, pushing at your collar. You reach up to grab at his arm.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Marie moves to speak and he holds out his hand, pulls the bandana back up his crooked nose.

“Sorry ladies,” The knife-tip bites hard enough to draw blood, “You seem a nice pair but ‘nice’ isn’t worth my life.”

Marie’s hands move inside her jacket. The boy jerks his head, and the knife digs deeper,

“And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

 ——

Here is a story the boy won’t hear; here is the story of why you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

Here is the story where the boy is laid dead on the asphalt with a bullet buried between his barn-owl eyes, and all you can do is cover his face with his own bandana, ransack his home, and get in the car.

Here is the story where you slip pills tight between your molars and and the girl beside you says, 

Spit, spit goddamn it. I'm not doing this alone.

But you both know you’re running on borrowed time.

Here is the cherry-coke air freshener penduluming from the rearview mirror. Here is the revolver set back in the glove box. Here are the fists beating the sun-singed dashboard, the ache of your fresh pearl knuckles.

 You’re an asshole, you’re an asshole. Don’t talk, just drive.

He was going to kill you, you idiot, you sentimental moron.

Just drive.

Marie thinks that in order to be clean one must first be dirty. Marie thinks holiness is worth jack unless it lives first as sin. 

Marie thinks a lot of things.

Here is the story where the girl holds out her hands as a saint and you spit mushy pills into her cupped palms like milk teeth, because you’ll do whatever she tells you, for better or worse. Here is the part where she pulls a coin from the dead boy’s wallet and places it face down on the back of her hand.

Heads or tails? Win or lose?

I don’t want to play anymore.

We’ve got a long way to go until the end, Red. Just play the game.