Excerpt from Chris Alan Miller's "Gasoline"

I pump gas for a living. Oregon state requires that someone pumps gas to keep unemployment low. It's not like they have 401K plans or health insurance, but it's solid. I mean, I can count on $6.50 an hour with my experience, two-hundred and sixty a week, plus change. Oregon has a five cent deposit on pop cans and bottles, and that's what it is, a deposit. You pay the nickel up front at the cash register, tacked on real sly by the state, and the only way to get it back is to recycle the can. Tourists, they don't know about the deposit and they leave all sorts of bottles and cans. Natives, they just don't care, most of them. So I fish thirty-five, forty returns a day out of the trash. I return the bottles every week, banking the ten bucks in a special savings account. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, and Susie doesn't know about it, but I'm hoping that someday we'll need it and it'll be there for us.

Susie's one dying goal in life is to be a mother. She lives for kids. She watches the little squirts at the ShopKo drop-in center while moms run around snatching toothpaste, toilet paper, and Magic Wand back massagers. She's been working there for three years. We've been trying for 30 months to have a kid, and we aren't married. She says she's not getting married until she gets pregnant-that's how bad she wants to have a kid. She's waiting until someone can put up the goods. It's tough. We start three days before she's scheduled to ovulate and go three days after and hit most of the days in between at least once. You've only got a 24-hour window of opportunity, you know. I looked it up at the library. It's tough for your boys. There's cilia whipping up a current against them and the whole environment's all acidic, so most of them get fried before they even get a chance to get going.

But there's more to it than that. I suspect it could be my environment, all that gasoline I'm pumping. Your skin soaks it right up. There's not much proof yet and never anything in the newspapers about it, and who knows what other pesticides and carcinogens are lurking out there for us. How about Alar? That's a Northwest kind of carcinogen. Washington Red Delicious apples, the crispy famous ones shipped to Japan and eaten everywhere but in Washington state, were covered with it for years. Enough of it causes cancer, sure, but what about the reproductive system? We've got alligators in Florida that can't get it up, water fleas in Georgia that shoot blanks, and Great Blue Herons near Denver making babies with one leg. They grow up fine, and they can fly all right, but when it comes to standing in the lake for eight hours a day waiting for a frog to stab, they just don't have it. Bird watchers feel a little breeze come up and the next thing they know the poor heron has lost its balance, taken a tumble, and it's left thrashing around, wings everywhere, scaring frogs and losing its dignity. I mean, what's that tell a guy like me?

I took to wearing some of those latex rubber gloves that doctors wear, but my boss said to knock that shit off because the customers were looking at me funny.

"You look like a friggin' idiot," he said.

So I'm careful, but there's always a little backsplash. Volkswagens are the worst. German engineers can create airbags, surround-sound, and specialized tires, but they can't get a gas tank right. The curve is all wrong. Dipshit Germans, anyway.

So you shop around, get tired of the view. I've worked at Texacos, BPs, Exxons, and Shells, but my latest is the super full service Chevron at the main entrance to the Highland Estates subdivision. I work the super full service island closest to the store. I wash windows, check oil, check antifreeze every now and then, and I top off windshield wiper fluid on the house. The Chevron has nice bathrooms and a couple pine trees by part of the parking lot. Once a week I see a guy come by in a truck to water the trees and a few rose bushes. He's got some sort of contract. I wouldn't mind doing that.

I'm in a good location, though. We've got people coming in and out of the subdivision, doctors, lawyers, and CEOs, mostly. Guys who drive sports cars and moms in four-door sport utilities with three kids in the back. But I get all kinds. This guy pulls up one day in a green Jag with the top down. About ten feet before he comes to a stop, he takes his arms off the steering wheel and stretches them out above his head, one hand holding a burning cigarette with the end fanning orange in the wind. As he pulls to a smooth stop he takes a long drag and says, "Fuck, what a long-ass day." He's not even looking at me. He pops open the side gas door then flicks an ash onto the gas and oil-stained concrete. It's still glowing. In my head I have pictures of a soft-sounding "whump" as the concrete ignites underneath my feet and the nozzle I'm holding in one hand catches fire. The flames dance around the end of the nozzle and I look at them licking there, inside and out, as I feel the hair on my legs curl and stick to my skin. But I step on the orange ash with one foot and tell the man in the Jag to excuse me, sir, but could you please put out the cigarette. I gesture to the gas pumps and the no smoking sign.

"I'm not pumping the gas," he says, and takes another drag. "I don't think that it's a problem." And then he hands me this half-sneer of a smile, because, really, all I am to him is some no-face gas station attendant, and I want to open up the hose and soak him in gasoline.

But I just say, "You're really going to have to extinguish it, sir, it's too much of a risk, and it's the law."

"Jesus fucking Christ," he snaps and stomps on the gas, leaving twin black tracks for twenty feet. I looked at them for over a month before the rubber wore off.

They aren't always like that.

Sometimes it's a soccer mom, frazzled but happy, who will give me a smile and slip me an extra five spot. But mostly it's just fill and go, fill and go.

*

Susie's tried twice before me. She's twenty-nine. She gave each of the other two guys three years, and she loved them both. That's a lot of trying. She's been checked out. Her schedule is a little irregular, but otherwise normal. The doctors told her fertility drugs wouldn't be worth the money-her eggs appeared to be fine, and it was just a matter of timing. Susie couldn't afford fertility drugs anyway, not even with the both of us put together. Besides, what would we do with sextuplets?

When we first met, I was wearing my black cowboy boots, eight-years old and given to me by my father on my eighteenth birthday. I'm six-feet-four inches tall, and I was planning on having a beer with a buddy, but I stopped to gas up with my employee discount at the Texaco where I was working at the time. My boss asked me to stay because Pete called in sick. I was all dressed up, blue jeans and dancing shirt, but hey, I'm a team player, what was I supposed to do? I heard this car coughing up behind me like it was about to throw a rod. I turned around and saw a light blue Ford Escort trailing smoke out the exhaust. There was a woman behind the wheel and she was shielding her eyes from the setting sun when the brakes squeaked and it stopped, right in front of me. The paint on the hood had been chipped off by gravel. I walked around to the driver's side. She had pretty brown hair, long and straight, and nice brown eyes. She was cute in a rumpled blue-jean shirt, and she took a deep breath then let it out. She looked me up and down for a second through her open window then said, "My, aren't you a tall glass of water."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I smiled my crooked smile, my mind revving up and shifting gears, and that's when it came to me, the line that got her hooked. I said, "On a hot day, even." Then I winked.

She snorted and smiled.

"Sounds like you have a problem," I said.

She nodded. I popped the hood. Her oil filter was split along one edge, and her dipstick was dry. I told her. "You want me to call a tow truck?"

"Oh," she said, shaking her head. "Can you change the filter here?"

We didn't have a pit or a hydraulic lift, and I was about to say no, but she tossed me this little please of a smile. I pushed her off to the side so I could service other cars while I did it. "If you don't mind waiting," I said. So I pumped gas, crawled under the Escort, pumped more gas, changed the oil, and got funny looks from other customers. She didn't say much, just paced around watching, saying, "Thanks. I really appreciate this. Thanks." I imagined her looking at me every now and then, and I tried to move so I looked strong and competent. When I finished, it was dark, and I felt pretty damn good-I wasn't grubbed up in work clothes like usual. I mean, I felt like a man, right then, oil on my hands, my tight blue Wranglers just a little dirty.

She thanked me and started to drive away, but she stopped and her reverse lights came on by the license plate. She backed up until I was beside her door then grabbed my hand and wrote her name and number on my palm. She said, "Call me. Ask me out to dinner." I did, and we hit it off over barbecue ribs and strawberry-rhubarb pie at the Charco Broiler.

*

You get to a point where you're ready to throw your dad away for good, just forget he ever existed, and then he shows up with a brand-new cowboy hat in one hand and these arms that want to hug you. At first you don't want to do it, you want to kick his ass up and down the sidewalk, but you don't because you're drawn to him somehow, pulled like there's gravity in your guts. There's something in feeling another man's arms wrap around you and give you a shy squeeze. There's a whole set of solid smells like clean sweat, cheap cologne, and shampoo. A kid just can't fight that.

What I'm trying to say is I wanted to have kids, too. I wanted to feel solid like a dad and smell like a dad because no matter what you are in the world, no matter what kind of deadbeat piece of shit you are-who might even live in a shack without an address-you're always going to be a father. And that means someone is going to love you even when he doesn't want to. He's going to look up to you and seek out your qualities and wonder which genes made it through the transfer.

Maybe Susie feels the same way. She grew up with divorced parents, too, I don't know-that's not anything new. I do know we think of the same things and say them out loud at the same times. We're connected that way. There's no man and wife marriage, but we're solid, at least throughout our three years, unless a baby comes. We almost had one about a year into us. We were in the fourth month when I came home, and she met me at the door because we were pregnant and so alive, forever touching each other. She put one hand on my chest, gave me a kiss, then crinkled her nose at me. I smelled like gasoline, like always. "Get in the shower," she said. "And then I'll meet you on the couch."

I climbed in the shower and lathered up with a bar of Irish Spring-not because I liked it, but because it smelled the most and covered the scent of gas. I heard the bathroom door open and Susie pad in. The top of the toilet seat rang out against the porcelain water tank.

"Hey," she said. "I'm here. Don't peek."

Back to IR Spring 1999