Full Service

Next Exit

The gas needle let go about a mile past the sign.

It had been riding a hair under half. Then it fell to E in one smooth swing, like a bathroom scale when you step off, and the Jeep kept rolling on whatever was left in the lines. I told the gauge to go fuck itself.

I didn't brake. I'd like that on the record somewhere. A full mile back, when the green sign came up on the shoulder with ELLIS RD NEXT EXIT on it in that county-road reflective, I'd put my blinker on for a road that isn't on any map, in case a trooper out here cared, and taken the ramp at thirty-five with my hands at ten and two and my heart going like a dryer with a sneaker in it.

I'd passed that sign plenty, out by mile marker 237. East and west on Forty, on my days off and a couple of times straight off a shift with my Michaels vest still on, and it was there every time I wanted it, right at the corner of my eye, and every time I kept my foot where it was and let it slide by and called that being a grown-ass man about it.

I could give you the shifts. Facing out the Strathmore wall by register four, the good heavyweight pads I used to steal out of the art building two at a time, while Doug the assistant manager reminded me to smile with my eyes. I stacked those pads by the hundred and never cracked one. The scar on my left palm hummed so hard at night that I slept with that hand under the pillow. I'd swear to weeks of that.

The ramp let me down onto a two-lane so new the yellow lines looked wet. Pines ran down both sides in rows, every trunk the same distance from the next. The bark was bark. I kept checking it in the headlights anyway, waiting for it to crawl.

I'd come for Sarah, with a speech. I'd been building it at the register between customers, tonguing it like a chipped tooth, and I had it down to four sentences. The third one I still didn't trust. I tried the first one out loud on the windshield to hear how it sat, and then I took my right hand off the wheel to wipe my mouth, and there was gravel in the heel of it.

Three chips of shoulder rock, pressed into the pad of meat under my thumb. The skin around each one had dimpled in and gone raw at the rim. I dug one out with my thumbnail. It came loose with a little tick and left a pit in the grain of the skin, and the pit filled with one bead of red so bright under the dash lights it looked fake. I wiped it on my jeans. I put the hand back on the wheel and left the other two where they were, and I didn't try the second sentence.

The Jeep coughed. It's a '96 Cherokee, the boxy one, hunter green gone to pool-table felt, with an inline six and a heater that only blows on the passenger side, where nobody sits anymore. It coughed again. Four empty cans of Black Lightning rolled out from under the seat and knocked against my heel, and the engine caught and ran rough and caught again.

Then the rabbit rose over the trees. It rode a pole taller than the pines, a cartoon rabbit sixty feet from ear tips to toes, lit from inside, one ear bent over at the tip and a grin that went back farther on both sides than a rabbit's skull has room for. Under it, in yellow letters taller than a man, LUCKY'S.

I knew the type. Highway gas stations the size of an outlet mall, with a cartoon animal on a pole and a guy behind a cutting board who yells about brisket every time one comes off the smoker. A place that size buys billboards for fifty miles in both directions, FUDGE 12 MILES and CLEANEST RESTROOMS IN AMERICA, a rabbit winking at you off every overpass until you give in and pull off out of pure exhaustion. The only thing that had pointed me here was the green sign. I'd gone looking for her and the road had handed me a gas station, and I didn't know yet if that was a no.

The trees gave out. The lot opened up, big as an airfield. Pumps ran off in rows under a white canopy that went on longer than I wanted to look at, a hundred of them, more, screens glowing and nozzles holstered and clean, and the light came off that canopy flat and total and ran to the edge of the asphalt and stopped dead at the treeline, as if the dark out there had a skin.

One semi sat at the far island, a long-nose Peterbilt with its reefer unit off and its cab dark.

The engine quit for good at pump sixty-two. I coasted the last ten feet with the wheel gone heavy in my hands and stopped square with the pump.

The vinyl let go of my shirt. I got out. The quiet had size to it. A light like that in the woods ought to have had a cloud of moths around it thick enough to read by, and I stood there turning in a circle and couldn't find one bug. I listened for the highway behind the trees and got nothing but the canopy buzzing over my head with a shop-light hum.

I had a debit card that was good until Friday and six dollars and change in the cupholder. Jammed in the ashtray was a pack of Knockouts with one gone. I'd been buying them at the Shell by my exit and pitching them out the window half full, and the first two fingers on my right hand had gone yellow at the tips. The pack was in my hand before I knew I'd reached for it. I put it back, and I counted that as a win until I remembered I was out of gas in the woods at a goddamn gas station.

The pump took my card and thought about it long enough for me to get my hopes up and then said DECLINED. I wiped the chip on my jeans, which has never once helped anybody, and tried again. The screen went blank blue, and then it printed, in the same block font as the octane numbers, SEE NIGHT MANAGER.

Out by the road the price sign had the rabbit grinning out of every slot and no prices on it at all.

Then the payphone rang. It hung on the wall by the ice machine, next to the front doors, a real one, steel box and armored cord, under a sticker of the rabbit giving me a thumbs up. I don't own a phone anymore. I hadn't heard a payphone ring since middle school, and this one was ringing the old way, a hard metal bell that went out across all those empty pumps and came back off the canopy late.

The little screen on its face, the one that's supposed to tell you INSERT COINS, was full of nines, edge to edge.

I knew those nines. The last time they got hold of me they said they'd be in touch, and then that Sarah said hello. That was the phone I threw at the highway. This one was bolted to the wall. Somebody'd thought of that.

It kept ringing. It was going to keep ringing until I was dead and then a while after. I picked up.

The handset was warm from somebody's hand and a little tacky, and the mouthpiece smelled like somebody's breath, Halls over a back tooth going bad. The line hissed in my ear for a while.

Then a voice, pleasant and dead as the airport lady who tells you not to leave your bags unattended.

Inside.

The hiss cut off and a dial tone came on, plain as Tuesday.

"Yeah, no shit," I told it.

The rabbit on the sticker kept his thumb in the air. I hung up and wiped my ear on my shoulder and went in.

Every Lucky's

The doors slid open on a wall of cold, and the smell got to me before anything else did. Brisket smoke laid thick over lemon floor cleaner, and under both of them a hospital hallway at shift change, that wiped-down sweetness that's only there to cover whatever they wiped.

Every tube in the drop ceiling was burning, rows of them going back into the store until the rows got small. All but one, way back in a corner over a booth by the windows. That one was dead. Under all that light was more stuff for sale than any building that also sells gasoline has a right to.

A wall of jerky ran thirty feet, sorted by flavor down to one called Sunday Dinner that I didn't want to think about. Across the aisle, forty-pound sacks of deer corn sandbagged the fudge counter. Up front sat a bin of rabbit's-foot keychains, two for five dollars, a few hundred little feet with the fur rubbed flat and greasy where people had picked them up and put them back, every one finished at the ankle with a brass cap crimped tight over the place where the rest of the rabbit used to start. A life-size cardboard rabbit in a red bow tie stood over the bin, beaming down at all those feet like a proud dad.

Black camera domes hung from the ceiling every twenty feet, shiny as blisters.

Under them the shelves were faced to the lip, labels out, every bag of jerky hanging dead straight on its peg, and I've worked retail long enough to know a store only looks like that in the ten minutes before it opens. If anybody had bought a thing in here, somebody had come along behind them and put it back.

The PA was playing a steel-guitar version of a song I almost had the name of. It hiccuped. A woman came on instead, level and bored, the same voice that had come out of my car radio on Ellis Road with the dial turned to off. The hair stood up on my arms before I had her placed.

"...GZS Radio, for the late shoppers. Here's ANGER INC., nineteen seventy-nine."

A guy started screaming like somebody owed him money. Behind him the band went at it, a drummer kicking a dumpster in perfect time and a guitar tuned with a pair of pliers. It went up into the ceiling tiles and rattled the price tags on their pegs.

At the coffee island inside the doors, a man in a black suit with the jacket buttoned was turning hot dogs on the roller grill with a pair of steel tongs, one at a time, though the rollers were turning them already. He had a face like anybody's down to the nose.

Below the nose there was nothing to stop for. The skin ran on down to his chin in one smooth sheet, a shade paler than the rest of him and fine-grained as an eyelid, and I looked too long, long enough to find the seam. A faint white line crossed where the lips should have been, cheek to cheek, puckered along its length, stitched from underneath and given years to heal. When he breathed through his nose the seam drew tight and eased off, and the skin over it dimpled like a sheet laid over a face, and whatever was back there pressed at it and was kept in.

My own mouth went dry. My brain, because it hates me, wanted to know who the hot dogs were for.

The scar in my left palm, which hums when it wants to and has never asked my permission, went cold as a dime left on a dashboard in January. I kept walking. My eyes wouldn't go back to him, and I didn't make them.

Past the fudge counter, at the cafe tables, a woman sat scratching lottery tickets with the edge of a quarter. The silver she'd scraped off lay drifted around her shoes in little dunes, like grit banked against a curb after the plows come through.

A guy had the corner booth under the dead tube, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette going, which you can't do in a gas station. He got one look from me.

The registers were somewhere up front. I was headed for them, I swear I was, and then my bladder reminded me it had been holding on since before the county line, four cans of Black Lightning deep.

VOTED CLEANEST RESTROOMS, said the sign over the hallway.

The men's room was a tile hall as long as a bowling lane, stalls down one side and urinals down the other, every stall door running floor to ceiling with a little green VACANT in its lock. The tile squeaked. You could have eaten off that floor. Somebody probably had.

At the far end of the sinks a guy was scrubbing his hands under water hot enough to fog the mirror around his head. He had twenty years on me and a Carhartt jacket gone white at every seam. He was working pink soap into his knuckles with a nail brush. The skin over them had scrubbed down to the color of boiled ham and split in the creases, beading red, and he kept the brush going. The water went down the drain in threads of red and silver. There was always more silver, cheap chrome spray paint dried down in the grain of him and in every fold of every finger, coming up out of his skin like he'd been painted from the inside.

I did what I came in to do. Then I washed up two sinks down from him, because I'm polite, and because the mirror was the only place in that room I could look at him without looking at him.

My face got to the glass first, the face you wear on the back half of a double.

He lifted his hands out of the water for more soap. The left palm had a zero cut into it with a line through the middle, old, healed white and glossy, the slash thrown hard from the bottom left and the skin gathered along it in little tucks where it had pulled itself shut.

Mine woke up. It went from dead quiet to humming in one jump, a tuning fork rapped on the porcelain, and in the mirror his hand closed around the soap and stayed closed, like his had answered.

His eyes went to my palm in the mirror, then up to my face. Neither of us turned around.

"You stopped for mine," he said. "Paint was still wet."

A square of tin fifteen feet up a pole on Ellis Road, the sigil sprayed on it in silver and still running, and me standing on the brakes for it.

He yanked two towels out of the dispenser and was gone before I'd gotten a single what-the-fuck lined up, the door sighing shut behind him on its slow arm. His hands had come out of that sink clean. I'd watched them. On the white plastic of the towel dispenser he'd left four silver fingerprints, wet, beginning to run.

I dried my hands on my jeans.

Paid

The brisket board sat between me and the registers, which I'm sure is on purpose.

A kid in a paper hat stood behind a butcher block the size of a door with a cleaver in one hand and a brisket in front of him, the bark on it black as a tire. When I got close he brought the cleaver down and the meat fell open under it, the smoke ring pink as the inside of a lip, and the juice ran out into the old knife scars in the board and stood there shining. FRESH BRISKET ON THE BOARD, he hollered at the whole empty store, loud, like they do.

My stomach rolled over and begged. I'd had a bag of Funyuns at lunch and nothing since. I stood there with six dollars, doing math I already knew the answer to.

"Two chopped," a man said beside me. "Extra pickle. One's for him."

A trucker, vending-machine wide, in a mesh cap and a flannel with the sleeves rolled. His left forearm was burned brown to the elbow and his right one was fish-belly white, thirty years of driving with the window down. He smelled like diesel and Juicy Fruit.

"Name's Miles," he said, and put his hand out, and I hadn't asked.

"Wade." His hand was hard and warm, a steering wheel left out in the sun.

He paid cash out of a chain wallet. There was a photo in the little window of it, two girls in Easter dresses squinting on somebody's front steps, and while he dug for a ten he looked at that photo the way you'd read a letter addressed to somebody else, careful, all the way to the bottom.

The kid slid two sandwiches across in foil. Miles walked them over to the stand-up rail along the window and set one in front of me, and I ate half of it before I remembered to say thanks. Black pepper and smoke, and pickles cold enough to make my fillings ache. The fat went to nothing on my tongue like it had been waiting its whole life for a mouth. Grease ran down my wrist into my sleeve and I didn't care what that said about me.

"Cherokee, huh," Miles said, with his eyes on the lot. "The four-liter?"

"Yeah."

"That six'll run till the body rusts off around it." He chewed. "Keep a quart in the back for that seal."

"It's been good to me." I didn't mention the heater.

"Hang onto it, then. Where you in from?"

"Forty," I said, like that was a place.

"Forty's a good road. Long in the middle. You come in off the Ellis exit."

He said it like he'd read it off my plates.

"She runs a lot of exits," he said. "They don't all let out where you're aiming. Taken a few myself." He turned his cup on the rail a quarter turn. "Came out all right, mostly. Came out somewhere, anyhow. Asked for Tulsa one time and got Amarillo. They got a steak out there, seventy-two ounces, you eat the whole thing it's free."

"What the hell is this place?"

"Lucky's." He took it in, the jerky wall and the cardboard rabbit, fond as a regular. "Same Lucky's everywhere. I've stood at this rail in Barstow. Valdosta, too."

"My card got declined. Pump says see the night manager."

Miles stopped chewing. He wiped his mouth with the back of the white hand and checked the registers and came back to me, and for a second the face he had on didn't fit him right, the way a borrowed coat sits wrong across the shoulders.

"Gas is never the expensive part," he said.

"So what is?"

Miles drank some of his coffee. He tipped his head past me at the registers. "He's expecting you." Then he pushed the rest of his own sandwich over next to mine. "Eat that first."

The registers ran along a counter longer than my apartment building, twenty of them at least, all dark but the one in the middle.

He was behind it, standing like he'd been standing there since they poured the slab. He wore a white short-sleeve dress shirt with a clip-on tie the same red as the rabbit's bow tie, and his keys hung off his belt on a retractable cord. His name tag was gold plastic with black letters. NIGHT MANAGER. He had the face of every manager who's ever told me my drawer was short, pleasant about it and already writing me up.

Behind him, high on the wall, a bank of security monitors showed the store in gray. Every square on that wall was a register, and he was behind every one of them, same clip-on, same keys. In one he was ringing up a woman in scrubs. In another, through the front doors behind him, it was snowing.

"Evening," he said. "Sixty-two?"

I hadn't told him. "My card won't go through."

"Your card's fine. We don't accept it here." He smiled, sorry about the policy. "Fuel's complimentary for you tonight."

"What's the catch?" I said. "I got to sit through a timeshare thing?"

He didn't laugh. He bent to a lock under the register with his keys and came up with a ledger, the old accounting kind, thick as a family Bible, its green cloth covers rubbed shiny at the corners from handling. The keys zipped back to his belt. He laid the book on the counter and opened it, and the spine gave a creak like a knee.

The columns were ruled in red and blue. A neat hand ran down the left side, line after line of writing I couldn't read upside down, and the date column was blank top to bottom. In the last column, on every line, there was a handprint, palm and fingers, dozens down that page and more pages thick behind it. They were the gray of a bruise on its way out, yellowing at the edges, every one darker at the heel where it had pressed hardest. Up close the paper had a grain to it. Little pores. A crease ran across the page where it had been folded once, soft and pale as the one inside your wrist.

"There's a handling arrangement." He found his page. "Lucky's is acting as intermediary on a delivery, and you'd be carrying for us. Well. For the sender."

"Carrying what?"

"A message."

"From who?"

"I don't discuss principals."

"Who's it for? What's it say?"

"It's addressed." He smoothed the page flat with the side of his hand. "The recipients will collect. They usually do. As to the contents, you won't recall them and you won't be able to share them. It's sealed for your protection."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you're welcome to walk." His eyes went past my shoulder, out the doors to the hundred lit pumps and the black wall of pine beyond them. "People do. It's a lovely night for it."

Me, on foot, out past where the light stopped at the trees, into whatever that dark had for a surface, with six dollars in a cupholder and a dead Jeep behind me at pump sixty-two. I've seen that movie. The guy who walks gets found in a ditch by a jogger, and Channel 4 runs his DMV picture, the one where he looks like he did it. Fuck that.

The only words that had ever come down the line from Sarah were a hello, secondhand, off a number made of nines. Maybe this was hers. Maybe it belonged to Ellis, who could have kept me and didn't, which as far as I was concerned meant I owed her one.

The scar was humming toward the book like a dog when you pick up the leash.

My hand came up off the counter on its own and hung there over the page. It was shaking. Sweat had found the scar and sat in the bottom of the zero in one bead, and my T-shirt had glued itself to the small of my back. Somewhere behind me the brisket kid's cleaver came down on the board, once, hard.

"Left hand, please," the night manager said. "Palm flat. Like you're checking a stovetop."

He reached across the counter and took my wrist, polite about it, his fingers cool and dry, and pressed my hand flat on the book with his own on top of it, the way you'd help a kid press a leaf between sheets of wax paper.

I've been over it a hundred times since, and I can't find the part where I said yes.

The paper was warm as somebody's back, and it gave under my palm like a back gives, skin over muscle, and then it went on giving, and my hand sank into it to the first knuckle, and the prints on either side of mine were warm against the sides of my fingers, a whole page of people who had laid their hands down here and were laid here still, and it was the nicest thing that had happened to that hand since the last time Sarah held it. I hated the book for that.

Then a pressure at the base of my skull, the dull push a dentist's needle makes going into the gum before the numb comes. The numb came. It ran up the inside of my left arm along the vein, cold as a bad IV, up through the shoulder and under the hinge of my jaw, and it pooled in the floor of my mouth and sat there.

"...so if it is her, you tell her I'm," I was saying, and that was the whole sentence.

My hand was in my lap. I don't remember taking it off the book. In the last column there was a fresh gray print with the sigil watermarked into its palm, and the night manager was writing in the column beside it with a Lucky's pen, in no hurry, a man filling out a slip for a package.

"Got all that," he said. "Ninety seconds. You did wonderfully."

"Got all what?"

He finished his line and blew on it. "Your reply."

Whatever I'd said in those ninety seconds, I didn't have a single word of it left. I'd been halfway through something for Sarah with my mouth while the rest of me was somewhere else, and now it sat in his book, upside down to me. Tell her I'm what?

"We'll hold it for her," he said. "If she comes through any Lucky's, it'll be waiting at the register." He turned the book partway toward me and turned it back before my eyes got there. "Held for pickup."

I opened my mouth to ask what happened if she never came through, and there was a word in it.

One word, sitting behind my bottom front teeth where your tongue goes when you're about to say something you shouldn't. My tongue could find the edges of it. I'd have sworn it had two syllables, then I'd have sworn three. I went to talk around it and my jaw locked, and my stomach came up under it. What came out was air. I tried again and bit my tongue hard enough to taste pennies.

"Then we go on holding it," the night manager said, as if I'd gotten the question out. "We've never lost one."

He closed the book over my print and his handwriting, and bent and locked it away under the register, and the keys rode their cord home.

My left hand closed on nothing in my lap.

My body was already handling the word. It went at it like a splinter gone in too deep to push out. Heat back behind my teeth, the meat in there swelling tight around the thing and laying scar tissue down over it in pearly layers, a scab on the inside of me, until the word sat sealed in its own little room.

The register chattered and pushed out a receipt. He tore it off against the teeth and handed it over with both hands. The rabbit at the top, grinning. Under it, in block capitals, PAID, and under that a long white tongue of paper with nothing printed on it at all. I folded it into my back pocket.

"Have a lucky night," he said. "If you'd like to check on your reply, ask for the night manager."

"You too," I said.

On the monitors over his head, in every gray square, he was handing somebody a receipt with both hands.

Not Working

My legs walked me to the cafe tables and dropped me in the first chair they came to, which was across from the woman with the lottery tickets.

Up close she was fifty, maybe, and had been fifty a while. She had on a satin Chicago Bulls jacket from the first championship, the red gone pink at the cuffs, and a perm grown out so long it was mostly history, and she scratched with the edge of a quarter in short hard strokes, a woman scraping ice off a windshield before a shift she hated. Silver latex was packed into her cuticles, and a fleck of it had stuck to her bottom lip. The shavings around her white Keds had drifted deep enough to bury the laces.

She didn't look up. "First time carrying?"

"How the hell'd you..."

"You keep touching your teeth."

I was. I put my hand down flat on the table and left it there.

She blew the silver off a finished ticket and laid it face down on a stack of others, all face down. On the one she'd been working, before she flipped it, the rabbit grinned up at her from where the numbers go.

"I took mine in '91," she said. "August. I was driving a Cutlass with no air, and I'd have said yes to anything with ice in it."

"What happened?"

"Nothing." She started a new ticket. "Man said they'd collect. Nobody came."

"So you live here."

"Where else are they going to look."

"I was talking when I came out of it," I said. "He wrote it down."

She kept scratching, short hard strokes, then shorter and harder, until the corner of the quarter went through the ticket and bit into the tabletop, and she left it standing there.

"Shit," she said, to the ticket.

"He says he'll hold it for her. The girl it was for."

She looked at the quarter a while, standing up out of that ruined ticket. "I talked through all of mine, I know I did. Came out of it hoarse clear to Joliet." She worked the quarter loose. "He never took the cap off his pen."

Up in the vent over our heads the air kicked on, and the whole drift of silver around her ankles lifted together and turned over in that white light, a thousand flakes catching it, and hung there around her shins and came down again like the snow in a paperweight after somebody's given it a shake. Some of it settled in the gray at her part. Some came down on the backs of her hands, in the soft creased skin over the knuckles, and stayed. She didn't look down.

"Jordan still playing?" she said.

"Which time?"

She thought about that for most of a ticket. "Good for him."

"What happens when they come?" I said. "For mine."

Her hand stopped. She raised her eyes to me for the first time. They were the tired brown of a motel bedspread, and they stayed on me a long time.

"When they open you up," she said, "watch what else they take."

"What'd they take from you?"

"Nobody opened me." She went back to the ticket. "I've watched them do it to other people. Over by the fudge, every time. I don't know what it is with the fudge."

I checked the fudge counter. Glass cases of it cut into bricks, peanut butter and rocky road, and a little sign in a plastic stand that said SAMPLES.

"Who in here can help me?"

Her eyes went around the store. They hit the roller grill and came off it fast, and went to the registers and came off those slower. Then she lifted the quarter and pointed it at the back corner.

"Him," she said. "He's the only one in here not working."

I went back there. The booth sat in the one dim spot in the whole lit-up barn, and the guy in it was watching the lot through the window like there was a show on, all those empty pumps running out to the edge of the pines.

I slid in across from him without asking. It didn't occur to me to.

"Sit down, then," he said.

He let me get settled, and waited out the brisket kid hollering at nobody up front. "You didn't ask my name."

"I'm Wade," I said, which was the answer to some other question. He let that go by and went back to the pumps.

I used to draw people. Two semesters of figure drawing at a school I couldn't pay for, and before that every margin of every notebook since fourth grade, and the habit hadn't quit when I did. I put him up on the model stand in my head. Lines first.

He was all tendon and angle, built like a guy who forgets to eat, and the lines were already on him. Ink climbed out of his collar and up his neck in strokes I couldn't follow, and more of it ran down his shins into a pair of black eight-eye boots scuffed gray at the toes. Cargo shorts. His hair was pale and spiked up wild, gone near white back there in the gray. On the dark shirt, a white hand raised with an eye open in the palm of it, watching me about as hard as he wasn't.

One of his eyes was blue. The other one was white, iris and all, white straight across. If I'd been drawing him I'd have left that eye bare paper and let the page do the work. It tracked me fine.

The ashtray in front of him held a dozen Knockouts, every one smoked down to the same quarter inch above the filter and laid in a row. His coffee was steaming. There wasn't a ring on the table under the cup or one drip down its side.

My left hand was on the table, palm up. I'd put it there without deciding to, and under the dead tube the scar had a shine on it like a fresh burn, the circle rounder than I could ever have drawn it freehand.

He looked at the scar first. Then the white eye moved to my forehead, steady, like there was print on it and the print was small.

"Somebody's using you for a mailbox," he said.

"Can you get it out?"

He turned his own right hand over on the table, next to mine. There was a mark in the center of his palm that my eyes kept sliding off, a word on the far side of a shower door. Two hands palm up on a Lucky's table, his and mine, and the Knockout burning in the ashtray between them sent up one gray line of smoke, and the air from the vent didn't bend it.

"I could," he said. "Not my mail." He turned his hand back over.

"The night manager wrote something down," I said. "Something I said for her while I was out of it."

His white eye went up the long bright store to the register.

"Then he's holding your mail too."

"Too meaning..."

The PA popped, and the same song started again from the top, the dumpster drums and the pliers guitar, first time tonight as far as the speakers knew. The corner of his mouth went up and stopped partway.

"I knew the singer," he said.

"Bullshit. You're my age."

"He was louder live."

"You come here a lot?" I said.

He thought about it. "Some."

He didn't ask about Sarah, so I told him anyway. I kept it short. Sarah and me throwing that sigil up on every overpass we could reach, until she went in and I went in after her. The web full of people where the road ran out, every one of them lit, and her burning brightest, happier than I ever managed to make her, and how she told the thing that ran the place no, she wouldn't have me. How I came to on my knees by a guardrail with this cut into my hand and gravel in the other one. Two chips of it were still in there.

There was a pen in my hand. A Lucky's pen, out of the cup by the napkin dispenser, and I'd been drawing on a napkin the whole time I talked without once looking down. I looked down. The napkin was covered edge to edge, zeros with lines through them, overlapping, layered on each other till the paper had gone gray, and every slash a little too steep.

"I quit drawing when she went in," I said. "Now it's only this."

He looked at the napkin a long time.

"You drove all that way for a verdict," he said.

My eyes stung and I sat on it. I folded the napkin in half, then in half again, so there'd be less of it.

I had the speech, all four sentences worked smooth, and the third one was where I asked her for something, and the whole way out here I'd been telling myself it was the one that needed work.

"Ellis sent me home," I said. "She didn't have to. She could've kept me."

"She sent you out."

"What's the difference?"

He tapped his ash. He'd said it like a man sticking up for a friend, and that was all I was getting about her.

The only one in here not working. I counted the butts in the ashtray again. The coffee was still steaming.

"You off the clock?" I said.

"Never." He let smoke out the side of his mouth, away from me. "Not on it in here."

"So what the fuck do I do?"

He leaned in. Over us the dead tube ticked once, thinking about coming back on, and stayed dark.

"Everywhere out here has a keeper. Get their name before you sit. No name, no stay."

"Why?"

He looked out the window at the pumps. With his thumb he rubbed the mark in his right palm, once, the way you'd rub at a ring you quit wearing.

"Blind man gave me a room once, when I had nothing," he said. "First thing I did was ask his name."

"You never told me yours," I said.

"Next time." He put the Knockout out at the same quarter inch as all the others and gave me the blue eye. "You're buying."

Up at the far end of the store, behind the one lit register, the night manager stood where I'd left him, and on the monitors over his head he stood behind all the others. His gold tag caught the light all the way back here. NIGHT MANAGER. You could pin that on anybody.

I'd put my hand on his book and given him ninety seconds of my mouth, and I'd never once asked.

I got up.

Full

I didn't run. Running in a store gets you looked at.

The main aisle took longer going out than it had coming in. The cardboard rabbit was still beaming down at his bin of feet. Up by the doors the man at the roller grill had stopped turning hot dogs. He stood with the tongs at his side, his eyes on the back corner, over my head.

I checked behind me. The guy in the booth had his eyes on him.

Neither one of them moved. I walked the long space between those two looks with the skin gone tight on the back of my neck, and it was like crossing a yard between two dogs on chains, each one at the end of his, and the yard exactly as wide as the chains are long.

The scar went cold when I passed the roller and started humming again once I was by. I kept my eyes off the man with no mouth. He had somebody better to look at.

At the doors I looked back. The roller was turning with nobody behind it. The tongs lay on the steel where a hand had put them down, and the hot dogs went around under the heat lamp, sweating. Way in the back the guy in the booth was watching the place where the other man had been. Then he picked up his coffee.

The doors let me out into all that light.

I walked past the payphone with my shoulders up around my ears, waiting on it. It didn't ring. The little screen on its face said INSERT COINS, same as any payphone in any town that still has one, and I liked that a hell of a lot less than the nines.

The Jeep sat at sixty-two where it had died, the nozzle still in its holster. I hadn't pumped a drop. Under the engine the seal had left its black spot on that white concrete, the only dirty thing on the whole lot.

I got in and turned the key. The six caught on the first try, smooth, and the needle swung up past half and settled on F like it had never been anywhere else.

I dug the receipt out of my back pocket and flattened it on the wheel under the dome light, the rabbit grinning over PAID and all that blank paper, and tilted it up close, hunting for a watermark or a code. Nothing printed anywhere. I put it in the visor with the registration.

The Peterbilt was gone from the far island, and nothing out there had made a sound leaving. I pulled out past the hundred pumps onto the two-lane, and the rabbit rode in my rearview, grinning over the pines, until the pines closed over it.

A ways on, in the dark, I cranked the window down and let the cold have my face.

Back there, under every register in every Lucky's at once, half a sentence of mine sat in a green book, held for pickup, and if she ever came through a door under that rabbit he'd pass it across to her with both hands. I tried finishing it myself, out loud, to the windshield. Every word I put on the end of it had his handwriting on it.

I went after the word. I opened my mouth and went in with my tongue, back behind the bottom teeth where it had sat all night with its hard little edges, and found smooth gum and the taste of brisket.

It had gone in deeper than a tongue can reach, down wherever I keep the shit nobody gets out of me without a knife.

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Full Service by Vect0r, 2026. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: share and adapt it for noncommercial use, with credit, under the same licence.