Rusty Barnes

At the Esso

I held onto the nozzle, squeezing the trigger like the extra pressure might mean something, trying to see exactly how lightly I could press it and still get the tank filled in a reasonable time. There was nothing else to do, and I didn't have any prospects, much. I went to mechanic's school at the BOCES at night, and during the other three nights of the week and during days I worked here at the gas station. There had to be more than getting up to work and going to school to try to better yourself. I wore out pair after pair of fingerless gloves here pumping gas for rich people. Not much bettering about that.

The woman in the car rolled down her window just far enough to hand me a fifty, and I dug my roll out of my coat pocket and handed her change and smiled. If it was a movie I was in, I might have said something about how she looked cute, how her hair fell across her eyes just right. How her eyes looked nifty in the neon light. But it's no movie, my life, just trash TV, so I turned around and headed to the supply room for more paper towels to fill the dispenser. When I came back out she was still there, fixing at herself in the rearview, compact out, and a three-car line was behind her. She didn't care, though. It seemed like a nice way to be. I knocked on her window, which she rolled down, just a crack, again.

"Hey lady. You got to move. We got customers."

"Piss on 'em. I'm going." She winked at me, and turned the key in the ignition, and the CD player blasted some sort of country music at me, all screaming fiddles or something, and then she hit the gas and was gone.

I came in from the pumps rubbing my hands, and a blast of heat took me as soon as I opened the glass door. Corky's laugh rebounded off the concrete walls, high and nasal, his fat gut swaying like a blimp under his blue coveralls. "Y'all want me to do what?" he nodded his head at the phone as if the person he was speaking to could see him, and I wondered what he was doing, who he was scamming. "Girl I'd kill you I did that to you." He put the phone down by his side. "Chris, you fuckin punk, go fill up the oil dump on the first island. Steada listening to me."

I did it, out there in the cold, because I had to and because I didn't know what else to do, just ripping the cardboard boxes of Quaker State 10W30 and 5W30 and stacking them in the dump. That way I was sure to have to answer all the full-serve pumps too. Corky knew it too, the fat bastard. I could see him through the plate-glass window, laughing and gesturing to no one at all, watched as he picked up a packet of crackers and a Dr. Pepper, the way he did every night, and I was at the pump watching him again for perhaps the 3000th time in my life, and it struck me like a hammer then. I'd pumped more gas for these rich people more times than I'd ever fucked a woman, more times than I'd done just about anything in my life except maybe shit and piss.

I went back inside and Corky had finally hung up. He was looking at the porn behind the counter. I never looked at them, those Hustlers and Playboys and Ouis, all airbrushed and shaved and unpuckered women with no scars and asses that had probably never let a fart in their lives. Women beyond my means. I grabbed the fire extinguisher from where it hung on the nail by the front door, considered it a moment, and watched Corky flipping his greasy fingers through the pages. A crumb dangled in his scruffy chin hair. He looked up at me and straightened up, and I hit him in the face with the butt of the extinguisher. He staggered back spitting blood and teeth. I could see his lip swelling as I walked around the counter and hit him again, and then once more in the back of the head. He went down on his knees finally, then, and I kicked at him and missed. I put the extinguisher down, and grabbed the cash in the till, a handful of Payday bars, and a long 2-quart bottle of water.

Outside the sky had turned gray again, and I put the cash in one coat pocket, the paydays in another and dangled the bottle between my fingers as I walked down the street in the cold. I didn't know where I was going. I felt as if I should feel bad for Corky, but instead I was filled with a great expanse of peace, almost as if I'd taken communion. I thought about that pretty girl tearing out of the gas station parking lot for parts unknown, making herself up for a boy or a man or maybe even a woman, and saying piss on the world.

My step quickened. We all had our own little schemes, at the Esso. It had just taken me some time to find mine.

Rusty Barnes has stories and poems forthcoming in Post Road and Barn Owl Review. He maintains webspace at www.rustybarnes.com.

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