Tales From the Gas Station: Volume Four, page 30
part #4 of Tales From the Gas Station Series
A moment later, Rosa and I were sitting on a red corduroy sofa in a dimly lit living room. Mrs. Cromwell sat across from us on a loveseat and puffed away at her smoke, studying us as the grandfather clock in the corner loudly ticked away the seconds. She didn’t seem to mind that we were getting her furniture wet. Judging from the look of things, there were enough layers of protective filth to keep the water from doing any further damage. Rosa, bastion of honesty that she was, told an obvious lie to break the silence.
“This is a lovely place you have here.”
Mrs. Cromwell responded, “Pretty girl, why you dress like this?” Rosa looked at me. Mrs. Cromwell reacted with a loud snap of her fingers. “Do not look at Jack for permission to speak.”
“Oh,” Rosa answered. “We, uh, just came from a funeral. And then we got lost in the woods. And then we were attacked by a horse that tried to pull us to the bottom of the creek.”
“Ah, yes,” Mrs. Cromwell said with a nod. “I knew this would happen.”
“You did?” Rosa asked.
Mrs. Cromwell had mastered the art of smoke-talking. She didn’t miss a beat as she removed one cigarette, stuffed a new one between her teeth, and lit it. “There are things that live in woods. They come from all over. There has always been order. Rules. But not anymore. Now, there’s panic. A great exodus. Everything wants to go home. They wait until last minute. Traffic bad. Suddenly, everyone breaking rules. They all need food for long journey. They don’t care where food come from. No more order. Nowhere safe.”
As she spoke, she extended her hand and snuffed out her used smoke in a clay pot containing a plastic fern and a few hundred yellow cigarette butts. “You stay here. We protect each other. Yes?”
Rosa and I shared a look. I could see it in her eyes. She couldn’t tell if Mrs. Cromwell was right or crazy, and she couldn’t decide which was worse. When I looked back, Mrs. Cromwell was on the move. When she passed the stairs, she yelled up for Mr. Cromwell to put on pants because they had company. Mr. Cromwell didn’t respond. And then, Rosa and I were alone.
She bounced Gaston in her lap and whispered, “Is this jogging anything?”
“What?”
“Any memories of Sabine?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works. Sabine only ever came here one time, and she didn’t stay very long. She, uh… she didn’t like it here.”
Rosa raised an eyebrow. “Why? Did something weird happen?”
“No. We just sat at the table in the kitchen and played Mancala with Mrs. Cromwell.” God, I was so tired of wading through traumatic memories. The closer I got, the harder it was to keep this wall up, and I needed to keep it up, just a little bit longer. I needed to focus on the now. I needed to forget. I needed to ignore. I needed to-
“Who won?” Rosa’s question broke into my thoughts.
“How am I supposed to remember? I was like eight or nine at the time!”
My answer came out a little louder than I expected. She backed off. For a moment, we sat in silence. Then, Rosa looked around at the yellow wallpaper and reclaimed furniture and remarked, “This place smells really, really-”
“I know,” I said. “It’s the tiger pee. It never comes out[30]. You get used to it after a couple weeks.”
Right then, Mrs. Cromwell returned with her arms full of clothes. She gave Rosa a yellow dress, some clean socks and shoes, and some other garments that aren’t anyone else’s business. She gave me a stack of Mr. Cromwell’s old-manniest old man clothes and instructed me to show Rosa where to find the shower.
When I came back a second later, I found Mrs. Cromwell in the kitchen, rubbing Gaston’s belly as he lay on his back on the wooden picnic table they’d set up in the corner decades ago. I’d changed into Mr. Cromwell’s old duds: A pair of khaki slacks. White dress shirt. Wool sweater vest. Tweed jacket. My new look was about 50% distinguished college arts professor and 50% weird library pervert.
Mrs. Cromwell looked at me and asked, “You no shower?”
“Nah. I’ve already showered one and a half times today. And to be honest, the thought of water freaks me out now.”
“You have the rabies?”
“No, although it would explain a lot.” I tried to think back to all the times I’d been attacked by raccoons in the past year. Holy shit, do I have rabies? Eventually, I concluded that I almost definitely didn’t, and I lumped that possibility behind the wall protecting me from all those don’t-think-about-it thoughts.
I took my spot across from Mrs. Cromwell. Gaston rolled onto his side to look at me, his long tongue falling out of his smiling face onto the wooden table. I rubbed his belly as Mrs. Cromwell lit herself another cigarette. After a quick puff, she pointed a finger at me and said, “You look well.”
“Really?” I asked, doubtfully.
“You don’t remember what you looked like when they took you away, but I do. Husband and me, we weren’t sure you were going to make it. Crazy sick kid. Husband thought maybe he should shoot you, put you out of misery. I told him, ‘No, we feed this one. He has fighting chance.’ And now look at you! I was right! Yes?”
“Mr. Cromwell wanted to shoot me?”
She shrugged. “The past is past.”
“Yeah, but-”
“My turn to go first. Yes?”
“Huh?”
She stood, walked over to the pantry, and returned with a Mancala board and a jug of wine.
“I appreciate all the help,” I said as she sorted the small stones into their respective positions. “I know I didn’t say that enough when I was younger, but it was true back then, too.”
“We don’t do kindness for that reason. We would have been kind whether you appreciated or not.” She made her first move. I responded. She took a sip directly from her jug.
I leaned forward and asked, “You seem to know what’s going to happen. What about you and Mr. Cromwell?” At this point, I felt safe in my assumption that these two weren’t from around here. “Why haven’t you evacuated alongside the others?”
She let out a shrill laugh like a hungry seagull.
“This is home! We stay!”
Fair enough.
She took her turn. I took mine. We played in silence save for the occasional audible puff or swig coming from her side of the table. The game was beginning to take shape, with the old lady coming out in an early and substantial lead.
“Are you really not worried? It feels like everyone else who knows what’s coming is certain that there’s no way to stop it.”
She took her move. No points this time. “The future, not written in stone. No such thing as certainty. Nothing guaranteed. Nothing cannot be changed.”
I took mine. No points. “What about the past? The past can’t be changed.”
Again, she laughed like a seagull, her teeth were already stained purple from the drink. “Past? Past is changed every day! It is defining characteristic of humans. If you don’t like past, you change it. Now, you just need to change future. Much easier!” She took a move and captured a small handful of my pebbles. Big victory, but it left her nowhere else to score.
“We can’t alter something after it’s already happened.”
She didn’t say anything. At least, not with her words. But her smirk sure said a lot. I took my turn. Small score. I saw an easy move that could net me another substantial stack of pebbles, but that would set her up for a blitz on her next go. Instead, I played conservatively. No more points this round. The board was thinning out.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. I see the point you’re trying to make.” She took her turn. I had already ensured she would have nowhere to score. “You’re trying to help me, and I appreciate that. I do. But it’s more complicated than I think you realize.” I took my turn. She took hers. She expanded her lead, but shot herself in the foot by setting me up. “I get it, okay? You’re trying to make me aware of how memories aren’t reality, right?” I made my move. Scored a couple of points. Made another. Another small victory. I had full control of the board. I stopped focusing on winning and simply looked for ways to block her from ever scoring again. “About how self-deception is not the same thing as altering the absoluteness of truth, no matter how hard we want it to be, and there are consequences for those of us who try to ignore that fact?” I had to admit (not out loud of course), that there was a period of time when I did what I had to do to survive. And yes, I may have killed a lot of people, but they weren’t real, and they surely weren’t innocent. They were all monsters. Monsters pretending to be human. It didn’t matter anyway because the BLaRc made it to where nobody remembered. So, why would Mrs. Cromwell even bring that up? Was she keeping tabs on me or something? I tried to look into her eyes for any kind of hint about how much she really knew, but she just furrowed her brow, drank more wine, and gestured at the board impatiently. I finished my turn with a series of captures. Tiny victory after tiny victory. “You’re trying to make me realize that I can’t run from my mistakes, and sooner or later I have to face facts, right? That I was a bad friend? A terrible boyfriend? That I don’t deserve happiness? That I should have stayed dead? Is that it? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Or maybe,” she said with a nod and a knowing smile, “not everything is about you.” She took another swig of jug wine, and made her last move. “Game!” she announced.
I looked down at the empty board. It was a close one, but in the end, I’d squeezed out a victory by a single point.
Gaston rolled onto his feet and let out an excited ARP as Rosa walked into the room wearing Mrs. Cromwell’s yellow dress. While my own outfit was a size or two too big, Mrs. Cromwell’s clothing fit Rosa surprisingly well. Gaston excitedly ran to the edge of the table and nearly dove off before I caught him.
“Who won?” she asked.
“I did!” Mrs. Cromwell stated with a proud, purple smile. “I always win.” I didn’t correct her. It wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway.
Despite Rosa’s half-hearted protests, Mrs. Cromwell got to work preparing us dinner. Rosa might have put up more of a fight if not for the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything since before the funeral. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten anything substantial and realized the only things in my stomach were mystery drugs, forest alcohol, and creek water.
Mrs. Cromwell handed me a sandwich on a paper plate and said, “You bring to husband. He take dinner in office. Be quick. Pretty girl and me talk about you until you get back.”
“You can actually just call me ‘Rosa,’” said Rosa as she pulled Gaston away from the Mancala board and fished pebbles out of his mouth. “Maybe you can teach me the rules and when Jack gets back we can all play a game together.”
Mrs. Cromwell shook her head. “No. Two-player game only.”
“Oh, but I thought…”
I was already gone before she finished the thought. Now that I remembered how hungry I was, I was eager to do whatever necessary to get dinner started.
I carried the plate up the stairs into the noticeably warmer air. My first thought was that the AC unit up here must have been broken. By the time I reached the top step, the temperature had risen at least ten degrees and the air was positively tropical. I knew Mr. Cromwell was a tough cookie, but the fact that he worked under these conditions was truly impressive. I was already sweating, and I hadn’t even made it to his office yet. I started down the hallway towards the room at the end. The door was cracked open. The light inside was off. I didn’t want to bother him if he was asleep, but I really didn’t want to startle him if he was awake. Even when I was a child, Mr. Cromwell exhibited classic symptoms of old-man brain. That, combined with the fact that he was often accompanied by a lethal weapon, told me it would be a good idea to announce my presence in advance.
“Mr. Cromwell,” I said softly. By the time I reached the door, there had been no response. I knocked a couple times. “Mr. Cromwell, it’s Jack. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’ve got some food for you.” No response, still. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and was met with a heavy wave of heat and putrid stench that stung my eyes and made me gag. I took a second to compose myself, then stepped into the room and flicked on the lights.
The first thing I saw was the living garbage, all over the floor and cabinets. Anywhere there was space. Hundreds, no, thousands of paper plates, stacked on top of one another. Each with a complete meal scooped on top, wriggling with maggot larvae. Sandwiches. Eggs. Half-decomposed remnants of what might have been sushi or lasagna; it was impossible to tell at this point.
The second thing I saw was Mr. Cromwell, slumped over his writing desk, cheek to table, very much dead. The empty sockets that once contained eyes were now hollow voids staring emptily in my direction, seeing nothing. Mr. Cromwell had been dead for a long, long time. The organs and wet tissue were dried up. His skin was barely more than a memory. His hair and nails were stuck in place, but little remained outside the skeleton. If I had to guess, I’d put his death somewhere around the time I graduated high school.
The story revealed itself to me in the form of unmistakable clues. I dropped the sandwich onto a pile of garbage by the door, sending up a small swarm of black flies that quickly resettled on rotting foods in other corners. Then, I approached the remains of the old man. He was still wearing his usual garb: boots, underwear, tank top. His right hand rested on the table next to his head, the finger bones wrapped around his old revolver. I brushed a few paper plates out of the way to see what he’d been working on at his time of expiration.
Below the plates and food debris, there were disorganized stacks of papers spread from one edge of the desk to the other. A large portion of the pages were completely stained by long-dried blood. Wherever there wasn’t blood, there was the maniacal scribbling of a diseased mind. The strangest thing was that I recognized his work. He’d drawn countless eyes. All of them looking up from the pages. Some ink. Some pencil. Some humanoid. Some insect. Some others. He’d seen something on the other side of the void, and it compelled him to fill every page with this message, the message that mortals couldn’t understand, the message that drove him mad. I checked, just to be sure. The gun still had five bullets left. And Mrs. Cromwell, poor Mrs. Cromwell… Suddenly, our conversation over the Mancala board took on a whole new meaning.
Wait a second.
Against all odds, a new thought cut to the front of the line. What was that Rosa said about Mancala? She wanted to play a game with the three of us. But, as Mrs. Cromwell pointed out, Mancala was a two-player game. Why would Rosa think otherwise?
Because I told her about my memory with Sabine! But I didn’t tell her the details. The details that I only now realized made no sense. Sabine played Mancala with us, but she couldn’t have played with us because it’s not a three-player game. She didn’t even want to be here. But why? I closed my eyes and urged my brain to focus one more time, and I tried to remember the details of that day.
“We need to get out of here,” she kept saying. Whenever I asked why, she would say the same thing. It made no sense. I kept telling her it was okay for us to be here, that the Cromwells were fine with it, that my mother didn’t care where I was, but she kept saying, over and over, “We need to leave. The cops are coming. The cops are going to be here any second. We need to leave, Jack!”
I was down the stairs and in the kitchen five seconds later.
“We need to leave,” I said.
Rosa, ever the inquisitor, asked, “What do you mean?”
“The cops are on their way. No time to explain.”
Mrs. Cromwell walked calmly over to the refrigerator, opened the freezer door, and pulled out a set of car keys. “Here,” she said, tossing them to me. “Take car. Be careful.”
I caught them in the air and started for the front door.
“Wait!” Rosa said, inhaling her sandwich while trying to catch up to me. Through a completely full mouth, she managed to ask the question, “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. But we can’t stay here.” I reached for the door but the knock from the other side stopped me inches away. I held my breath.
A few seconds passed. I turned to look at Rosa standing frozen right behind me, cheeks full of sandwich that she dared not chew. Mrs. Cromwell stood next to her, a cigarette dangling from her lips.
Another knock at the door, followed by the doorbell.
I held still and hoped that whoever it was would go away, but I guess I didn’t hope hard enough. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew this escape wouldn’t be an easy one.
“Sheriff’s department!” This was bad. We weren’t just dealing with another bumbling deputy. We were dealing with Amelia O’Brien herself. She knocked again and announced, “I can hear you moving around in there. Are you in trouble? Do you require assistance?”
Was she about to kick the door in? That was absolutely a possibility. I looked at Mrs. Cromwell and tried, without using words, to ask if there was a back door we could use. Mrs. Cromwell must have misinterpreted my gestures to mean, “Start talking to the sheriff.”
“Go away!” she exclaimed. “I am legally naked!”
“Mrs. Cromwell, please open the door. I need to ask you a few questions about a dangerous fugitive. This is a matter of life and death.”
“Okay,” she responded. “Give me ten seconds to put on clothes.”
Really? “Ten seconds”? Why would she put such a short timer on something this important? Ten seconds to find a hiding spot. Ten seconds to figure out a plan. Okay, I got this. At least ten seconds is better than nine seconds, right? Although at this point, I’ve probably been thinking about it for a couple of seconds, so that means I’m down to at least eight seconds. Oh shit, they’re all looking at me! What am I going to do? I need something. I need a PAPER BAG!
Mrs. Cromwell opened the door and put on her sweetest, most innocent voice.
“Yes?”
O’Brien kept her tone cool and direct, “Good evening Mrs. Cromwell. I hope I’m not interrupting anything. Are you alone right now?”
