Thumbsucker (19 page)

“So business is all a big joke to you?” I said.

“I’m twenty-six. I’ve gained a certain perspective.” He held out a can of RC for me.

“I’m fine.”

“You look thirsty,” Chris said.

“I like to pay for things.”

That afternoon Chris serviced a station wagon crammed with Little Leaguers in caps and jerseys. I watched him work as I filled a VW Bug. When he went to the car’s rolled-down window to be paid, the driver, a woman, pointed to a sign: “Declaration of Total Satisfaction.” It said that unless the attendant checked the tires, washed the windows, and offered to check the oil, the customer was not obliged to pay.

“You forgot my tires,” the woman said.

“I checked them visually. Your pressure’s fine.”

“We’ll compromise,” the woman said. “We’ll split it.” She dug in her purse as the bratty Little Leaguers pressed their sluglike tongues against the windows. Chris flipped them the bird and the kids began to holler.
The woman twisted around to shut them up and Chris grabbed her purse through the window, ripped some money out, tossed the purse back in the car, and walked away.

Chris handed me a five. “For standing backup.”

I gave him back the money.

“I like your honesty. Leaves twice as much for me,” he said.

Later, after five or six more cars, Chris stole another RC and lit a cigarette. He gazed out at a field across the highway where a Farmall tractor was mowing hay. The acne scars in his cheeks resembled fossils and his bony Adam’s apple looked like a skull.

“My sister and brother-in-law are sharks,” he said. “I’ll take all the five-finger discounts I can get. Truth is, all I’m doing here is marking time while the game plays out on higher levels.”

“What game is that?”

“High finance. Tax shenanigans. You really think people get rich by selling gasoline?”

“Rockefeller did. He founded Standard.”

“Rockefeller was a crook,” Chris said. “His father was a small-time flimflam man.”

The driveway bell rang twice. Chris flicked his smoke away.

“I’ll take the Mustang,” he said. “You grab the motor home.”

I was showering after work with Lava soap when Mike came in and sat down on the toilet. He bowed his head and spat tobacco juice into the bowl between his open knees.

“How’s work?” he said.

“Okay.”

“You sound unsure.”

I scoured my armpits with the gritty soap. “It’s not like I expected.”

“Never is.”

“I have this manager, Scott’s brother-in-law. He’s stealing company property.”

Mike spat. “A cost of doing business, I’m afraid. Half the price of milk these days goes to make up for shoplifting, they say.”

“People shoplift milk?”

“They shoplift everything. Milk is where they recapture the lost profits.”

I held out my arms in the spray. Gray water rolled off. The grease wasn’t on my skin but underneath it—a spreading, shapeless black tattoo.

“How much oil is there?” I asked Mike. “Chris says that Standard has wells in Lake Superior that if they ever started pumping them, gas would go down to a dime a gallon.”

Mike flushed the toilet; my shower water ran scalding. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve heard these stories.”

I scrubbed at the grease; I felt let down, betrayed. The company uniform had made me proud.

By my third week of working under Chris, I was drinking my fill of RC cola and eating free lunches from the snack machine. Chris was partial to pretzel twigs and corn nuts, but I was too modest to steal such popular items. I held myself to the peanut-butter crackers.

Scott stopped in every few days to check the books. He smelled of VapoRub and cough drops and always seemed to be searching for a shop towel to wipe his dripping nose on. Chris said Scott had a problem with cocaine and hosted all-night parties at his house, whose guests included stockbrokers and bankers.

“Basically, they’re the power elite,” Chris said. “You and me are just chits. We’re human currency.”

“I’m saving for a car. That’s all I care about.”

“Big Oil’s got you exactly where they want you, then. Another young American bites the dust.”

Slowly, under the pressure of Chris’s teasing, I began to cut corners in my work. I ignored people’s tires. I left windshields bug-streaked. For three days running I put off cleaning the rest rooms, leading to a catastrophic spiral of plugged-up toilets, overflowing trash cans, vandalized towel dispensers, and flooded floors. The men’s room graffiti grew filthier and bolder, climaxing in a life-size drawing of revving chain saws attacking a woman’s crotch. I tried to erase the drawing with steel wool but only succeeded in scuffing up the wall, which made the image look more obscene somehow.

One morning, during a cola and pretzels break, Chris informed me that he was dropping acid.

“Leave me out of it,” I said.

“Tough. I already slipped some in your pop.”

A station wagon pulled in with three flat tires caused by driving over a construction site. While Chris put the car on the lift, the passengers—a mother, a father, and two cute little girls—leafed through old
Road & Tracks
in the office. We brushed the tire treads with soapy water to locate the punctures, then removed the rims. I sanded down the rubber around the bad spots, glued on patches, and remounted the tires. When I finally double-checked for leaks, soap bubbles formed where air was still escaping.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Chris scratched his scalp, raising a flurry of dandruff. “We’re reptiles, man. We shed our skins. You see this?”

“Why are these tires still leaking?”

“We’re goddamn
lizards
.”

The father stepped into the service bay. “You finished, fellows?”

“Our work is complete,” Chris said oddly. “You’re on your way.”

When the station wagon drove off, Chris waved at it but no one waved back, which seemed to hurt him.

“Those were nice people,” he said. “I didn’t charge them.”

“Their tires weren’t patched right.”

“No.”

“They’ll have a blowout.”

“Don’t do that,” said Chris. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“I hope they’re wearing seat belts.”

“Stop it. Ouch.”

We agreed that it might lift our spirits to clean the rest rooms and really make them shine. After bleaching the toilets, snaking out the drains, mopping the floors, and Windexing the mirrors, we renewed our assault on the chain-saw graffiti using shop towels soaked with starter fluid. The black Magic Marker lines smeared but didn’t fade.

“Who does this stuff?” I said.

“Rich businessmen. All this anonymous sex shit’s done by businessmen.” Chris shut his eyes. “I’m tripping, man. I’m crisp.”

The driveway bell sounded. Chris flinched and dropped his rag.

“Can you go?” he said.

“I’m going.”

“I’ll keep scrubbing.”

“You keep scrubbing.”

“I’ll be right here.”

“Right where?”

“Here. In the bathroom.”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

Chris said, “I know what you’re thinking. Me, too. Those tires.”

I bought a car, a retired sheriffs cruiser with smears of rust and primer on the doors where the insignias had been sanded off. A partition divided the front seat from the back. The cruiser’s big V-8 got lousy mileage, but that didn’t matter; I gassed it up for free. On weekends, after closing up the station, Chris and I would drive around for hours just to burn the fuel. Once, for a laugh, we pulled over for a hitchhiker—a girl from school whom I’d heard was sweet on me—and made her sit behind the metal screen as if she were our prisoner.

Except for a brief phone call now and then, Scott had stopped checking up on us at work. We dismantled the Total Satisfaction sign and tossed it in the pit behind the station where we dumped old batteries and tires. We gave up wearing our uniforms except for the caps, which we needed to cool our heads.

Summer was ending. School was in three weeks. During one of our aimless weekend drives, I asked Chris if he planned to stay on and run the place.

“You haven’t figured it out yet?”

“What out?”

Chris took a slug from a bottle of chilled peach wine. “Why do you think they don’t care how much we steal from them? Why do you think they never check the take or match it against the meters on the pumps?”

“Because they’re rich?” I said.

“They act like it. Fact is, they shot their wad a
month ago. The settlement from their Dairy Queen’s all gone.”

“I thought they owned a Burger King.”

“Big dif.”

Chris drank the rest of the wine, rolled down his window, and pitched the bottle backward onto the highway. “Here’s what I’m saying: those tires behind the station, or maybe those greasy rags around the shop, are going to catch fire exactly two weeks from now. Mysteriously. An hour after closing.”

“Right.”

“Don’t believe me. Stay innocent. It’s smarter.”

“This job is getting too weird for me,” I said. “I’ve had it. I quit.”

“It’s a little too late for that.”

By ignoring the fire until afterward, Chris said, I’d be able to act convincingly shocked by it. He also warned me again not to quit, which might make me look disgruntled to the insurance company and turn me into a suspect. The best thing to do, he told me, was sit tight. The arsonist, a pro from out of town, had already cased the station, he said, while posing as a customer.

“Who?” I said. “That guy in the Ranchero?”

“Black guy. Big arms.”

“Is it him?”

“You’re prejudiced.”

“Who? This is driving me crazy.”

“Join the club.”

Though I woke every day expecting to be told that the station had burned the night before, nothing happened. I went to work as usual. Chris had begun to deteriorate, though. He hit a deer on Highway 5 one morning and spent the whole day picking fur out of his bumper. The next day he opened a radiator cap and a geyser of coolant sprayed him in the face. That same afternoon I found him in the shop inhaling from a Baggie filled with starter fluid.

Later that week Scott invited us to lunch to celebrate Eva’s thirty-seventh birthday. Chris insisted on setting the alarm and walking around back to lock the service door. He also suggested we go in separate cars, but I said that that would be wasteful. We took his van.