We crossed Highway 77 and were about 60 miles from Topeka when I remembered that I had switched to the reserve tank before leaving the rest area. I estimated that I had maybe 25 miles of road left before the spluttering would start. I was watching for a gas station sign but...nothing for mile after featureless mile. Then a sign up ahead said 'Alma,' with an off-ramp going uphill to an overpass.
At the top of the ramp Moira said, "This Topeka?" I told her I didn't answer questions. I turned left and we crossed the bridge that took us to a street so badly eroded that it was more dirt than asphalt. The place was apocalyptic: dilapidated homes, rusty house trailers, jungles of weeds, and not a soul in sight. Not even a stray cat. Moira was squeezing my stomach; I suppose anxiously, but I didn't care. I needed fuel and this looked like a ghost town.
Blessedly, there appeared a whitewashed plywood sign on my left with the word 'Gas' handpainted in blue. An arrow pointed to a gravel drive, the entrance to a grain storage facility. It was Saturday and I worried that the place would be deserted. But the gate was wide open.
As I rumbled my way up the drive Moira was asking questions like a confused lawyer. I ignored her. There were four gas pumps on an oily stretch of ground near a corrugated metal warehouse; a silo looming behind it. Nobody around. Silent, except for the moaning wind and something nearby that squeaked like a creature in agony. I pulled up to the pumps.
"Why didn't you say so?" Moira said in a pleasant tone. She had not been anxious after all. It occurred to me that she trusted me to take care of her. I had her get off the bike and dismounted after her to look around for something alive.
A middle-aged man in overalls and a baseball cap came out of nowhere smiling at us. "Mind if I gas up?" I asked. He said, "Help yourselves," and then turned around into someplace that took him immediately out of sight. The building had lots of odd angles and deep shadows to go in and out of quickly.
Gas back then was around a dollar-forty a gallon. I filled the tank for five bucks. Meanwhile Moira was chattering about the rock bands she adored. I didn't have a radio or a smartphone and was completely out of the music scene. I told her that when I was her age I liked Neil Diamond. That shut her up for a moment. When she started up again it was about how she loved to dance. I caught sight of the overall'd man and strode over to him before he could vanish on me.
He waved away my fiver. "Keep it for down the road," he said, and was gone like the Cheshire Cat. I thought: Free coffee. Free gas. I like Kansas. I like it better even than Dorothy and Toto do.
Moira was doing a sexy dance number when I got back on the bike. I watched her dance for a good minute. She was doing it for our benefactor, I thought. But then she looked at me from under her eyelashes, smiling, and it was then that I felt a swollen confidence that just maybe...
For the next half hour Moira leaned on my back and spread her fingers over my stomach as we grooved through the lessening wind and the now-infrequent swarms of bugs. It was mid-afternoon and the desolate landscape was beginning to show signs of an approaching city. I pulled off the road at a spot that had clumps of big bushes.
"I have to pee, too," Moira said, and swung off. But what I wanted was a smoke and the tea bottle. She laughed her way to a bush that I could have reached in two strides, and there she squatted after pulling down her pants. I was glad that girls preferred trousers to skirts. Had she been wearing a dress she might not have opted for a motorcycle ride.
I was feeling pretty good. But then Moira came out with all her gaiety gone. She stood looking at me as if the worst news imaginable was trembling on her lips.
"Something wrong?" I asked. She shook her head, the gloom dissipating only a little. "No, I just forgot about it." And so I had to say to the girl who didn't like questions, "Forgot what?"
"Never mind," she said. Then: "Could you make a cigarette for me?"
A Highway Patrol car was slowing to a stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment