The Last Station
by N. D. Coley
part 1
I had never made a wrong turn before, not in all the years I had taken the Fairmont on the routes that cut through the woods, where old roads carved trenches of pavement through those hills and mountains, cutting into a green canvas that cried out against people like me, fools racing in hunks of metal with an engine, spewing combustion in the air.
I had taken the wrong path. I was certain. Clouds had gathered against the advice from the radio, and dark ones, too, pregnant with the rain that would fall to the mountains to keep them from becoming too thirsty. It had not started to rain, not yet, but the air was heavy with wetness, the kind of moisture that lets one know that there are only minutes to go before the clouds feed the ground again.
The trees were different this time. Not in kind, but in arrangement. Drive the routes as long as I have, and your instincts will record how tall each tree is. They will teach you, one trip after another, which branches are alive and dead, and which ones stick out too far, and which ones are slumped and which ones bend to the left and right. I can look at almost any scene in front of me and, in seeing the size and arrangement of the rocks, and how the hills dip and where the streams dart in and out of the woodlands, know where I am.
If you drive long enough, deep through these woods, that which is familiar will take on shapes. I have seen the form of a man positioned, on his knees, ready to fire an arrow into the heart of an animal. I have seen bushes that resembled children at play. It is not hard to see things like this. Before long the trees become people and the people become lovers, wrapped up in each other, careless to that which is around them.
When I turned left where I should have turned right, the trees lost all their shapes. They resembled nothing and told no stories.
The Fairmont crested a hill and descended, longer than I think I had ever gone, into the heart of a valley that I had never seen before. As I drove on, the clouds above pressed inward. The trees became taller and the rocks bigger, more packed, more numerous. It was lovely but new and, as I descended and lost daylight, I became afraid. There is nothing so frightening as being lost. This is the root of what makes us all afraid: lostness.
I guided the car around a wide left bend, and then a right bend, and as I did so the road narrowed and there was no longer a shoulder. The trees pressed in, constricting the road from both sides, and I drove until there was no pavement, but gravel and dirt. I leveled out and continued, and that’s when I saw the light in front of me, straight ahead.
It was a soft yellow light, set close to the road, in front of an old gas station. That there was any station here at all was incredible to me. The routes through the mountains had few destinations, especially this far in, and I had certainly passed a sign that said “Last Gas for 40 miles” hours ago. In this country, one might find a cabin or a mill, relics from a time when the sun and wax and a fire were the only things that gave light. Nobody lived in them.
But there it was, a building with large, rectangular glass windows all around. The windows were cloudy and had a green film over them. The front window had a long crack that ran from the floor up to the gutter. A flat roof capped the structure, and its top was filled with clumps of dirt and moss. A small shrub made its home in the middle.
It was very much like that station where, as boy growing up in the valleys of Western Pennsylvania, I had first met Elmira. I had not thought of her in such a long time, but the memory was always there, waiting for me to pull it up again.
I was 7. My father had given me 50 cents and told me to roam the store and pick out some candy. As I walked up and down the aisles, my eyes fixed on potato chips and 5th Avenues and Paydays, and I drooled and thought about how good chocolate settled in the belly. I rounded a corner down another aisle, and there she was, a little girl in a white dress with a blue ribbon around the back. Her hair was wavy and long and black. It glowed under the fluorescent bulbs in the drop ceiling.
She was on her knees, sobbing, one cheek rested against the floor. Her gaze was fixed under a shelf filled with Mounds and Almond Joys. One arm was outstretched, and a hand had disappeared underneath the display. Her cries continued in irregular, choked fits.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She turned her head to me, and I learned then, even so young and without the chemicals that tell an older boy to fall in love, what it meant to be taken away by the face of someone else. Her eyes, round and narrow and bright blue, were like a perfectly colored picture, like someone had filled in shades within the lines on a sketch and gone no further. Her checks were soft and her skin was white, but not quite pale, as if she had never had a speck of dirt on her face and never would. I froze.
“I’m... I’m sorry, she sobbed. I’ve lost my charm. My very special charm. It was my grandmother’s. I can’t reach it.”
I shook my fingers and motioned her to move to the side. She squirmed a bit and cleared some space. I lay beside her, pressing my face against the cold flooring. I reached an arm through and moved it about, my arm brushing against hers. I moved my hand up and over her fingers, nudging her thumb and shifting her arm to the side. I grunted and pressed my shoulder against the display and, in a moment, the charm was in my hand. I tightened my grip and pulled back, moving my hand up and over hers again, prying her fingers open and nestling the charm in her palm.
I stood up, and she stood up. We were both covered in black clumps of dust. She pressed the front of her hands against her dress, brushed the dirt away, and giggled. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Miles.”
“Well, I’m Elmira. But you can call me Emmy.”
“Hello, Emmy.”
“All my friends call me Emmy.”
“Am I your friend?”
“Yes. You helped me find my charm, didn’t you?” With that she placed the charm over her head and let the chain rest on her neck.
The charm was in the shape of two dragons. Their heads bent own, and they faced each other. Their tongues met and the forked tips, each with a flame on top, touched each other. Below this kiss sat an orange colored heart. The heart was split in two, with a jagged crack going through the center. A chain dangled from one half, making one end a bracelet. Emmy pulled down on one side of the dragon and removed half the charm.
“Give me your wrist,” she said.
“Oh no, that’s yours and special. I hardly know—”
“Shh,” she said, pulling on my hand and fastening the bracelet.
“This means we’re friends, Miles. You helped me, and you’re my friend, so it’s yours.”
I looked into Emmy’s eyes. If I had been older, I would have understood this to be the feeling that adults feel when they come to love something instantly, without thought, without knowledge. But I was just a boy and I was stupid. “Thank you,” I said. “Will I see you again?”
She shook her head. “My uncle,” she whispered, “is pumping gas and waiting for me. He doesn’t like it when I make friends.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice.”
“It isn’t, but he’s not a bad man. My father tried to hurt me one time. A long time ago. My uncle thinks everyone will hurt me but him. I’m sorry. I need to pay for our gas and go now.”
My heart felt stiff and frozen. I looked at Emmy, this girl, and all at once the world seemed so unfair to me. Why shouldn’t I be her friend? In my mind I already imagined us having a picnic, somewhere nice, perhaps on the top of a hill surrounded by pines, with just enough sun coming through to light our blanket. I saw us sitting, laughing, eating fruit and tossing the seeds at each other. We rolled down the hill and got grass stains on our clothes and didn’t care, and we held hands and ran, far and fast away, down through the woods, dodging trees and tripping over clumps of leaves and rocks. We threw off our shoes and waded through a stream, and the water felt cold. She reached into the water and splashed at me, and I at her, and all I could hear was the sound of her giggles.
And suddenly she was gone. She wasn’t in front of me or at the counter. Outside there was no car but my father’s. If I did not have the charm on my wrist, it would have been like she wasn’t there at all. And that was that.
I pulled the Fairmont up to a pump and shut off the engine. I might as well fuel up, I thought. The pumps looked like frail tin boxes. They were rusty, with faint red paint, and the markings on the buttons for regular and high octane were faded. A sign on a chain dangled next to me. It read: “Full service only. Please wait in your vehicle.”
I sat and waited. The rain had begun to spit, but it was not a full-blown rain just yet. The light outside the station flickered. Two hawks soared over it, spread their wings, and disappeared beyond the station and into the sky, swallowed up by the clouds.
There was a knock at my window. I rolled it down to see a man, a long and lanky figure. His neck was nearly without muscle. It was a stick, a windpipe with a head mounted on it. The head on this neck had a pointed chin, and the face was lined with splotchy stubble. The mouth on the face was bent, with cracked lips. A piece of straw was trapped in the corner of one side. The face bent down, and I saw a pair of eyes almost without whites, black and penetrating. The man wore a trucker cap, smeared with oil and dirt.
Two bony hands rested on the door, and the man spoke. “Can I help ya, son?”
“Just stopping for fuel,” I said. “Regular is fine.”
“Hmmm. Stopping here, at this station?”
“Sure am.”
The man looked at me and narrowed his gaze. He straightened and backed away from the car. “Sorry, son. Can’t help ya.”
“Out of fuel?”
“Nope. Plenty of gas. Just can’t help ya.”
“I don’t unders—”
“Move along now.”
I started to turn the ignition when I heard the vehicle come barreling behind us. I looked through my rearview mirror and saw a Buick, a boat of a car, swerving wildly. The windshield wiper blades rubbed away the spitting rain and screeched against the glass.
The Buick sputtered and stopped at the pump opposite mine and, in a moment, a woman burst through the driver’s side door. She was tall and wore a trench coat.
Suddenly the man was towering over her. He stood up straight and clenched his fists. The woman howled and dropped to her knees, gasping and sobbing. She reached out and flung her hands on the man’s boots. He backed off, leaving her splayed out on the dirt.
“No, no!” she pleaded. “No, this isn’t the right place. I’m not supposed to be here.”
The man crackled his knuckles, cocked his head to the side, and bent down. “That’s what everyone who comes here says, ma’am. But I know you. I’ve been expecting you. Get in the car.”
“No, no. No, I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Ma’am, I’m rather particular about not putting my hands on a lady, but I’ve got a job to do, and there’s no rule about not forcing you if it comes to it.”
“No, no, please.”
“Get in the car.”
The woman stopped sobbing. She rose to her feet and wiped a glob of snot from her face. She nodded and stepped back into her car. The man straightened his cap and picked up the gas nozzle and inserted it into the tank. All went quiet except for a rhythmic glugging sound, and it seemed to go on forever. Then there was a click. The woman turned her head and looked at me. Two tears streamed down her cheeks.
I had not seen tears like that since I was a much younger man, a boy fresh from college and ready to make his way. The tears I remembered were those from an ex-girlfriend. Someone whom I thought I loved until it came time to kiss her, and when I finally did so, sitting on the couch in her living room, the sounds of Vincent Price film playing from a black and white TV, my lips touched hers and I felt nothing, though the charm on my wrist, something I had never taken off since I put it on, seemed to burn and itch.
I tried to kiss the woman next to me and felt nothing, but I heard the voice of that girl, Emmy, telling me that yes, we were friends after all. You’re my friend, Miles. Yes you are. My friend, my friend. I pulled back and shook my head and did not have to say much. The woman seemed to understand instantly, and her tears were slow and heavy, and thick. I had nothing to say to her. I could only get up and leave.
It was so often like that. No matter how I forced myself to feel something real, time after time, woman after woman, the effect was always the same: dry and cold and empty. I left so many tears in my wake that I stopped looking altogether, and I took a traveling sales job that, by design, would have me on roads so isolated that I would barely see anyone for years. This is how I found myself on my current route, sitting at this station.
The woman in the trench coat turned the ignition, but instead of the roar of combustion and the rumbling of exhaust, there was different sound, much like that of a heavy wind that comes past the breakers on a shore and ascends up the cliffs and onto land, the kind of wind that can be heard as much as it can be felt.
The light outside the station brightened, and the glow swelled and became much bigger and it hid my view of the station and the trees and the clouds above. The light expanded, and the wind grew louder and whooshed and, in an instant, the light was just a small glowing thing again, and the Buick was gone.
I rubbed my eyes and turned in all directions. No Buick. No trail of dust. Nothing. The rain was coming down steadily now.
Copyright © 2021 by N. D. Coley
