The Lake, Pt. 2

Here’s the whole thing if you’d like to read it in one sitting.

The rolling hills to the west and north arched their backs, like luxuriant silhouetted felines stretching. The lazy, loping parabolic shapes looped three or four hundred feet then dropped again. Their outlines against the orange and pink horizon looked like gargantuan roller coaster tracks layered one atop another, their smooth graceful monotony broken by an occasional gnarled scrub oak.

Tam pulled her 1964 Ford Falcon Ranchero into the gas station’s gravel lot and stopped beside the antique pump. The read-out was still a scrolling dial, the metallic nozzle exposed and narrow, unfettered by the more modern vapor-seal nozzles at most stations. The garage of the little shack, its single bay shut tight behind a battered aluminum door, teetered and leaned against the main building like two drunks struggling to uphold one another. The entire station was the size of a two-bedroom ranch house. A buzzing, flickering sign atop a rusty, weathered pole winked the station’s brand over the narrow, two-lane road winding toward the blackening hills, and static-spitting neon jittered that the station was “OPEN” against a large picture window in front.

Tam got out and set her hands on her curvy, firm hips, encased in comfortable old jeans. Her battered, tired cowboy boots crunched the gravel beneath her. The gentlest breeze shifted her fiery locks, laced through the center with a gleaming silver streak, and brushed them from her forehead. She grinned at the setting sun, and turned toward the pump. She shoved the ancient nozzle into her gas tank fill spout and locked the dispenser handle wide open. The numbers on the dial spun and click-clacked, and Tam went toward the rickety building.

The door swatted and jangled a tiny bell on a hook when she pushed it open, its hinges screaming their age and desire for death. A reed of a man behind the counter got a bad jolt from it and snapped upright on his stool, his bent back launching away from the shelf lined with cigarette packs behind him, and he slapped his palms on the counter to stop his fall. Tam could almost see his heart throbbing behind his exposed ribs under his worn, snug plaid-pattern shirt. Wispy cobwebs of gray hair sailed on the slipstream he created in his frenetic jerk, never settling back atop the pink, shiny scalp. Half a second later his eyes focused at last, and he stared at Tam. A tiny black-and-white TV cast a spectral blue-gray glow on the big window facing the pumps, its tinny speaker buzzing like an angry insect.

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