Stuart Watson

Wamsutter

Highway readerboards warned of 60 mph winds, but Bart’s car offered all the warning he needed. Whipsawing along through the skittering skim of spun sugar, he found himself thinking he was in the world’s largest gallery show of abstract expressionist murals. Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, pinned to the arcing freeway. All layers behind the windshield frame, marshmallow cream atop the gray ink of coming night, sere hills, a sprinkle of snow. 

Bleak, but accessible. Wyoming was nothing but accessible, he thought, crunching numbers in his head. Behind him lay Evanston and Rock Springs. Darkness would wash over him before he got to Rawlins, a drive-thru bottle of bourbon, and bed. Until then? He hoped he could keep his eyes alive.

Come on out, his brother had suggested. “Roz is gone Monday to Thursday,” Eric added, verbally eliminating one impediment to a visit. Roz could be challenging. 

“We can drink without the evil eye. Take in some hockey. Hell, go to a strip club,” Eric said. 

Further inducement. Plus, he had coupons he had won in some radio promo, to a place called The Steak House. “That’ll get your mind off Mira.”

“Nothing like a hangover and a hockey puck upside the head to explain why your wife is playing footsie with her podiatrist,” Bart said. “Who would think a bunion is the new dating app?”

So here he was, hours from Party Central, praying he didn’t break down. Flying would have been easier, cheaper in some ways -- add up the cost of gas, motels, and truck stop food, because what reason could he possibly have to deviate from the interstate in search of better grub when he knew it didn’t exist in cowboy country? But speed wasn’t the solution. What he saved in travel time by flying would have come at the cost of time spent alone with his thoughts.

A road trip demanded his attention. Time to process. Sort the wreckage. Salvage what he could. Mira had met someone. Imagine that? The woman who sat up late, smoking weed, drinking box wine, and watching TV long after he went to bed. The woman who listened blankly as he told her of the intrigues at his office, the plotting, the back-stabbing, the petty quests for departmental power. He talked because she didn’t. Or at least it seemed that she had nothing to share, little going on inside beyond the to-do lists of daily routine.

“You never shut up,” she said when he tried to express his frustrations. “Take a breath. Let somebody else get a word in.”

“You could have jumped in. I wanted to know what was inside.”

Looking back, he admitted to himself what he never would have admitted to her. She was being kind. She found him dull beyond belief but was too nice to say so. When she told him she was seeing a doctor, it came as a shock. 

“About what?” he asked.

She paused, looked away, then back.

“Seeing.”

She had never said anything to him about the state of their relationship. She was nearly inert. In bed, she pushed his hands away. Years into the marriage, he learned that her father had done things to her (she didn’t say what), and her mother had slapped her when she reported it.

Their years all seemed so quiet, passive, lacking in edge. They never fought. What was there to fight about? He worked, she worked, they ate dinner together and watched TV together and he went to bed alone. And she was always there, asleep when he woke and left for work.

Bart thought the trip might be good. See Eric for the first time since he had quit Epi-Tech and moved back to San Jose. Climb into a bubble and sort his shit. 

“Why are you driving?” Eric asked. “Do you need money?”

“It’ll be OK. God gave us Wyoming so we could appreciate everything else.” 

This was only his second time over Wyoming’s share of the continental divide. Two decades earlier, heading west, he and Mira drove in near silence. It was mid-October, heading toward the coast, and darkness overtook them around Rawlins. It came with rain, then turned to snow, and was sticking as slush when he glanced at his gas gauge. The warning light was on. How long? He had no idea, nor how far they were from gas. Out there, middle of god-damned nowhere, what in the hell would he do if they ran dry? 

“Great,” Mira said, unaware of the gas gauge, looking out the windshield. “Snow.”

He grunted but shared none of his incipient panic.

God was listening. Reflective roadside letters kicked back the car’s headlights: Wamsutter 1 mile. Bart took the exit, gliding slowly through the slop to an island of light with a lone gas pump sitting under the black, leaking sky. No shelter. He had gotten out, filled the tank, and walked to the ratty tin-sided building with a neon “Open” sign inside what he took to be the office. 

Racks of plastic-wrapped donuts and chocolate-covered marshmallow bombs stretched to the left. A case of motor oil, pricing taped to the side. To the right, behind a low counter, stood a young woman, blonde, maybe 20. He quickly turned away. Told himself to breathe. He remembered fighting his intense desire to stare at her, to take in what he thought was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. It was all Bart could do, to pull out two twenties -- gas was cheaper then—and direct his eyes at all the crap hanging on the pegboard behind her while she dug a few coins of change from the register.

Her nametag said she was Sage. She handed him his change, said “thank you,” and stood there. Mira was in the car. They were hoping to get to Salt Lake before stopping. He had no reason to stay, to say anything, to scream what his head was thinking. “Why in the hell are you here, in this godforsaken place, when you could be on movie marquees everywhere, on the cover of fucking Vogue, with a staple in your navel, anything but … this?”

He stared at her a bit longer, before realizing he was staring at her longer than … what?

Appropriate? What was appropriate? 

Longer than he should? Should he, at all? 

Longer than she had come to expect? How could he know how long that was or how long ago she had quit expecting anything less.

“Sorry,” he said, and left.

He opened the car door, started to get in, and stopped. He glanced at Mira. “Forgot something.”

At the tinkle of the door opening, Sage stepped through the door behind the counter. 

He stood there, thoughts spinning. 

“Help you?” she asked.

He looked at her, trying to think of an answer. 

“Ice scraper?” he said. 

It was not a ruse. They needed one. Sage pointed. “Next to the oil.”

He got it, paid, and left. He slid into the driver’s seat, handed the scraper to Mira, and stared into the dark. One lone light shone a hundred yards off. He opened the door, and got out. 

“Where are you going now?” Mira asked.

“Restroom.”

When he opened the door, Sage was still behind the counter. He stamped his feet, hands buried in his coat pockets. Their eyes met. He was a mess.

“All the cash goes in a floor safe,” she said. “And that mirror.” She nodded over her shoulder. “There’s a guy behind it with a sawed-off.”

“Sorry,” Bart said. “Restroom.”

He didn’t need the restroom. He waited an appropriate amount of time, then left, glanced at Sage one last time, and stepped back into the storm. 

She returned to the office. She picked up a smoldering cigarette from the ashtray, and held it to her lips, her eyes settling on the yellowed pinup calendar, the artwork of the portly Hilda taking shelter from the rain in the hollow of a tree nailed to the wall just over her dad’s shoulder.

He sat on the other side of the table. “Quick thinking,” he said. “Clean the toilets. I’ll close up.”

As calendars go, Schmitlee Auto Parts, 1953, had passed its time. Schmitlee was her grandfather. Her dad inherited the pumps and the pinups. Now, here she was, next in line. 

After her dad went out front, Sage sat, picked up a pen, and turned to a notepad. She wrote, “The Best Thing in Town (Is the Highway Leading Out).” She slipped the sheet into a manila folder. She would finish the lyrics later, find guitar notes to carry them and add it to her weekend set at the Lariat. 

Bart saw none of that. All he knew was that he had been given a vision, in the middle of one of the most godforsaken stretches of highway he had ever traversed. It hung in his head for the rest of that trip. An hour west, they found a room at the Sage Winds in Rock Springs. See-through towels. Drooping drapes. Mira slept. He lay in the dark, neon blinking the name of the gas-stop goddess across his face.

As they continued their transition to the Coast the next day, his Fatima moment faded like sun-basted tempera. On random occasions, for reasons that defied explanation, the memory would come back to him. He would find himself wondering about what his life would have become had he impulsively implored the girl to save him.

He had never been the reckless type. Decades of empty landscape with Mira lay ahead. 

Twenty-five years later, driving east now, Bart’s mind wandered all over the place. Wyoming has plenty of room for wandering and wondering. He looked for antelope. Marveled at the scudding clouds. Wondered if there would even be a Rock Springs if not for the rock and the springs. Thought how the lack of trees left all the car parts and bed frames and washing machines exposed to theft. And how odd it was that no one appeared ever to lift any such item from the yard of anyone proud enough to display it there.

Bart smiled to himself. Such trust, to pile all your tired, old shit in the yard, knowing it highly unlikely anyone would steal a thing, but hopeful just the same that someone would.

In the bright sunlight of midday, the sign announcing Wamsutter came as a shock. In the mile of asphalt before the exit, the memory of that long-ago night came flooding back. Still here, after all these years. It wasn’t the first time he had thought of the girl (What was her name, anyway?). Or wondered what his life might have become had he cast all caution to the wind, and asked her if she had a car, if she would give him a ride anywhere, escape her life and help him escape the trap of his and just drive into the dark while his wife waited for him in their car, near the gas pump, in the falling slush, for God knows how long before she realized he wouldn’t be returning. 

What if he had, and she had smiled and said, “Sure,” calling his bluff, instead of (more likely, he thought) picking up the landline handset and saying, “Dialing 9-1-1” and starting to do that before he scuttled back to his car and Mira and his trip to a bureaucratic tech hell far beyond the high, frigid sentence of Wamsutter, his wife noting his agitation and saying “What’s wrong?” in fear that he would tell her he had just robbed the place?

None of that had happened, of course. Bart was good at making nothing happen.

Bart steered his car in the direction of where he remembered the service station to have been. Nothing looked familiar. Why did he expect that it would? A newer and larger building sat where he thought the dumpy station of yore had been. It had several pumps and a shelter for drivers filling up in the slush. 

He parked, and walked inside, to get a soda. When he got to the counter, a scruffy-looking character scanned the bottle and took his cash.

Bart fumbled the bills, then blurted his thoughts. “Gotta ask, long time ago, came through here, there was this … “

“Girl?” 

“It was snowing, dark, I stopped for gas …”

“Most people do,” the clerk said. “And most noticed Sage. Why’d you ask?”

“Sage?”

“The girl. Blonde. Purty. People stopped, even with full tanks, just to come in here and wander around, taking peeks between the corn chips and …. You know her? You a relative or … a perv?”

“No, just curious. One of those things that stick with you.”

“What’s that?”

“Seeing her. Here. Middle of …”

“Nowhere? Lots of purty things in the middle of nowhere, am I right?”

Bart nodded. “She still around?”

“Lord, no,” he said. “Left. Late ‘90s. Went to Denver. Got famous.”

“For what? She coulda been a model.”

The clerk nodded his head at the radio behind the counter.

“Listen to five minutes of this and you’ll hear her,” he said.

“Country?”

“As it gets. Even wrote a song about this place. Or what was here before.”

No surprise, but Bart didn’t recognize the name Sage. He didn’t listen to country. He felt oddly empty. He turned from the counter with his cola and walked out into the sun. He didn’t know what he had expected to find, least of all that girl still standing behind the counter a quarter century later, cast in amber, waiting to make change for him, for him to sweep her off her feet and append such mysterious beauty to his life. 

As he drove back onto the freeway, he couldn’t stop thinking about that damp and chill night so long ago. He felt himself growing heavier and heavier, sinking into his seat, pulled by gravity toward the center of his planetary hubris, toward the realization of the difference between him and her, the weakness that had led him merely to pass through her life, and the strength that had led her to rise up and out of it. 

Some part of his distant self had thought she would welcome his rescue. Such a fool, he had been, to think that her circumstance implied any such need.

He flicked on the radio and started scanning for a strong country signal. He wanted to hear her -- and hear if he might recognize himself in any of her songs, or if she had found better things to cry about.

Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland, and has placed literary work in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and other publications, all linked from chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon.