by Matthew and Nathan Williams
Abe spotted the sign for Arco and drifted into the right lane.
Weren't they owned by BP? Or was that Amoco? He could never keep it straight. Abe had determined to boycott BP since the whole Gulf spill mess, but the tangle of subsidiaries and partners was hard to keep straight. Plus, even he’d admit, he tended to be a little intellectually lazy with stuff like this.
What the hell. One of these days he was going to get a Leaf or one of those other electric whips when the price came down and they added a few more recharging stations back home in Wicker Park.
His gas allowance for this assignment was pitiful. Fifty bucks a day. And of course he had to take his own beat up Jeep out here—the one he really didn’t need for city driving but it was mom’s and since she passed he couldn’t bear to sell the old thing.
He took the turn-off, rolled gently through the stop-sign and hooked a right. The gas station was about a hundred yards down, across from a Jack in the Box—another business to which Abe extended his all-powerful personal boycott, ever since they put those four kids in the ground with E coli back in 1993. That one he didn’t have to worry about forgetting. There were ideals, and then there was self-preservation.
Abe steered over to an open pump, stopped the car, and hopped out. The station was plenty busy. As he watched the numbers on the pump turn he could feel a few cold pairs of eyes and wondered how much he stood out in a place like this. Was he just an ordinary interloper or a visitor from Mars?
But this country was always surprising. He’d find himself in the most desolate county in Wyoming, and behind the counter selling him cigarettes would be a middle-aged Cambodian woman. It was always in flux, always agitating people from south to north and back again, from the coasts to the center and from the center to the coasts. Was California the fastest growing state or the fastest shrinking? Whichever it was it would be the other soon enough. Black folks had fled the South for generations and were now streaming back. His own uncle’s wife Sandy had sworn up and down for decades how she’d never step foot south of Pittsburgh and then suddenly here they were announcing they’d bought the cutest little bungalow on the Carolina coast. Industrial cities hollowed out and then were flooded again with bike-riding programmers. It was a perpetual motion machine of people looking for something better just down the road.
In some places, change was more glacial, and this patch of dirt just over the horizon from the Rockies certainly seemed like one of them. Not the sort of place Abe typically went hunting for a story. But this one, the one that at first seemed like a hoax, the one that he doubted and poked and nurtured for weeks, this one might just be worth it. If it was half as big as he hoped, it could break his career wide open.
The pump clicked to a halt. Abe didn’t even look at the total. More money he didn’t have. But if this trip panned out? Shit. A job with a real magazine? A book deal? Appearances on cable news? “Happy to be here, Rachel… Anytime, Chris… You know who to call, Ed…” It was about time he enjoyed a little success. He’d paid his dues.
But for now he was getting ahead of himself. The story out here wasn’t exactly a sure thing. And if it fizzled, as so many others had, he’d have just another year writing about police abuse, striking teachers, predatory landlords, health code violations at trendy restaurants. All that hyper-local crap.
He hopped back in his Jeep and quite unexpectedly found himself face to face with a serious-looking woman sitting in the passenger seat.
He startled, ever so briefly. But weirder shit had happened to him. After a beat: “Come on, lady... What are you doing?”
She simply stared back at him, as if evaluating him somehow.
Abe looked around. He didn’t want to get in an altercation with a stranger in a place like this. He stayed deliberately calm and polite. “Ma’am, I really have to ask you to get out of my car.”
No response. He glanced her over, his journalistically-wired brain taking in a thousand details at once. She was casually but smartly attired. Closer to plain-clothes cop than meth head con artist. Didn’t wear a wedding ring—or any jewelry for that matter. If she had a larger motive it wasn’t on her face.
“If you need a ride, I’ll make a call for you. A friend who can pick you up or something? I’ve got to meet somebody up the road or else I’d offer you a ride. Sorry.”
She looked him over for a second, made a quick decision—about what, he couldn’t tell—and turned to face forward. “Just keep driving. We’ll find a place to talk.”
“Can we talk here? Maybe across the street at the, uh, Jack in the—“
“Are you… somebody I should know?”
Instead of answering she lifted one of her boots—he now noticed she was wearing yellow cowboy boots under her jeans—up on his dashboard. Whoever she was, she didn’t lack confidence.
Abe slammed his door shut and turned the ignition. “Okay.” He buckled his seat belt and threw the car into gear. She kept her eyes ahead as he drove them out of the gas station and back onto the highway...
