A vacant hour passed, lost. Maybe two hours. Dannie’s fertile time of the month had come and gone and she was not pregnant. Nothing had happened inside her, she could tell. Nothing in her body. In her mind, though, things were happening that should not have been. Sometimes Dannie could not elude the thought that Arn might not be real. He might not be a real person. He had no e-mail account and no phone number. Dannie and Arn never went out and so she never saw other people talk to him. He had clothes and some possessions, but Dannie could’ve planted that stuff. When your mind put itself to work on a delusion, it built in reasonable explanations for things, for why you might not be able to go out in public with a person and see other people talk to him. The person could work nights and be a homebody who was perfectly happy to spend his time only with you. There would be a reason why you couldn’t remember getting to know the person, why you could only remember not knowing him at all and then knowing him as you did now. Dannie could’ve dreamed Arn up and then loaded her fridge with bacon.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
He closed at nine each evening and then, before he went home, spent a couple hours out behind the station drinking whisky on ice. There was a nice view from behind the station, and sometimes when he was too sober his house made him lonely. The moon was out and the desert floor seemed to glow. It was near midnight and still the silhouettes of the mountains that buffered Sandia could be seen. The gas station owner used less ice as the night wore on. The aching in his joints had subsided.
The gas station owner, earlier that day, had been reading a book about Oppenheimer and his gang, the atomic set, all the scientists who had been assembled from Europe. The gas station owner was jealous of people who got consumed with something, who could fall prey to an obsession of the mind, some intellectual entanglement that kept them up at night. The gas station owner was a practical person. He could think abstractly, but not in a productive way. He wished he could wander around in a stupor, his body lost but his mind focused, neglecting food and all hygiene. The gas station owner was currently drunk. That much was sure. If he was going to walk around in a stupor, it was going to be from Evan Williams.
The ice in the cooler was frozen together in one big chunk. The gas station owner arose and ambled into the back of the station and retrieved a butter knife. He sat and chopped at the ice until enough was broken off to make another drink — at this point, a few shards. Every night he told himself he needed an ice pick and every day he failed to endeavor to locate one.
The gas station owner had decided he wanted his nickname to be Shade Tree. These were the thoughts the whisky gave him. He didn’t want to be addressed as Shade Tree; he wanted it on his gravestone, and wanted to be buried under a big cottonwood. A suburb called Rio Rancho had sprung up north of Albuquerque and the gas station owner had seen in the paper that they were getting ready to dedicate a cemetery. It was not easy, in the desert, to find unbought gravesites under consequential trees. The gas station owner made a plan to call the place in the morning.
He heard a car pull in out front. It happened a couple times a night. The driver would get out and examine the pump, searching for a place to slide a credit card, then curse a bit and maybe spit, then continue on down the road because that was all that could be done. The gas station owner liked to think, in this day and age, that people still ran out of gas. He wanted to live in a world where that still happened. The gas station owner did not fool around with credit cards. This hurt his business, but not that much. He hadn’t heard a door slam, hadn’t heard the car out front pull off. In a minute he’d have to walk around and check it out, make sure some idiot kid wasn’t vandalizing the place, make sure it wasn’t a drunk who’d pulled off and passed out. The gas station owner slurped some whisky. It tasted like sugar-water. It tasted like stale tea. Clouds passed in front of the moon and the desert floor lost its luminescence. The gas station owner turned his head and someone was standing not ten feet from him, a tall man with thick hair and a baseball cap. The cap was sitting up on top of the hair. The gas station owner stood spryly, sloshing whisky on his sleeve. He faced the man, letting the man know he was alert, drunk but not too drunk.
“Help you, friend?”
The man looked over as if he’d just noticed the gas station owner, as if he’d sleepwalked out here. “I doubt it,” he said.
The gas station owner was not shaken. He was prepared to gently guide this man back to his vehicle or to fight him. The guy had on some kind of khaki outfit. There was a patch on his sleeve.
“You own this station?” he asked.
“Free and clear.”
“You Jay Fair?”
“People call me Mr. Fair when they’re standing on my land.”
“I’m here about the illegal shooting of some elk, Mr. Fair. Seems not everybody respects the seasons. Not everybody in the world follows the laws passed by their legislators. That may come as a shock to you.” The man still wasn’t looking at the gas station owner. He was looking off at the desert night. “You know anything enlightening about that topic?” he asked. “The topic of elk poaching?”
“I’ve never seen a rent-a-cop up close,” the gas station owner said. “I never go to the mall, so…”
The man wanted to smirk. He tapped the patch on his sleeve, which said FISH & GAME. The guy had something tied around his wrist, some type of animal call.
“Is that a whistle?” the gas station owner asked. “Do you have a whistle?”
The man had turned his head farther away. He was looking in the opposite direction of the gas station owner.
“What’s so interesting out there?”
“Nothing,” said the man. “I don’t like looking at poachers, is all. It makes me sick to look at a poacher.”
The gas station owner performed a sigh. “Poacher” seemed a trumped-up term for somebody who caused an occasional trespassing elk to become dinner. Obviously this ranger guy thought he was something special. That was why he was poking around in the middle of the night instead of during business hours. He thought he was some desert hero. The gas station owner wasn’t going to ask about the late hour. He was going to pretend it was noon instead of midnight. “Look, I’m pretty busy with my whisky. How does this go? How long do you keep staring into space and making accusations? I could get insulted and demand a duel, if that’ll speed things along.”
“You’re not permitted to mention fighting a duel to me,” said the man. “That’s threatening a state employee.”
“Your checks say State of New Mexico on them and you’re proud of that?”
“You got a nice setup here.” The man took his hat off his hair then squeezed it back on. “Real nice.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The man cleared his throat in a way he believed was meaningful and walked off. After he turned on his heel the gas station owner only heard his first few steps. He wanted to call after the man, but kept his peace. After a minute, the car could be heard. It ran smooth — a well-kept government car. The gas station owner sat back down, not sure he wanted more whisky. Maybe he was done for the night. Maybe it was time to head home. That ranger or whatever he was probably wouldn’t be back. He’d wanted to let the gas station owner know he was aware, wanted to scare the gas station owner. And maybe it had worked. The gas station owner didn’t hate the idea of getting mixed up with the law, but he also didn’t love elk meat. He’d taken it because it was there. That’s how he lived his life — accepting what came along — and now they were hassling him even for that. He was tucked away, living a nothing existence, and the world still couldn’t leave him be. The desert wasn’t aiding or abetting him. It was goading him. The desert couldn’t wait to give him up, even to some uniform from the city. There was no man the gas station owner feared, but the desert could put a shudder into him. That true loneliness, that lack of ill will. The desert had no respect for him. It wasn’t goading him. It was going to stay quiet and unfathomable. It was a distracted murderer, this land they all lived on. The gas station owner was drunk, but these were the right thoughts.