The Gas My Neighbor Kept Taking

5:40

Clint’s truck turned onto Cottonwood Lane at 5:40. I have told you he was a man of habit. That day he did not miss it by a minute.

I watched his face through the windshield as he rolled up to the sawhorse. He had that wide, easy look of a man at the end of his day who has done nothing wrong, and when he saw the party, it brightened. Larry waved a fork at him, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel. Somebody moved a sawhorse for him, and he eased into his own driveway, ten feet from his front door, parked crooked, and cut the engine. He climbed down with his lunch cooler in one hand and his hard hat in the other. He looked at all those faces, and he smiled at them, and he started up the walk, rolling his shoulders like he was getting ready to say hello.

He took three steps before he saw it.

He stopped so quickly that his boot scraped on the concrete.

For about five seconds, nothing happened at all. He stood there with his head tilted and his mouth half open, looking at a red-globed gas pump on his front porch the way a man might look at a bear. The whole street had gone quiet. I could hear a fryer hissing. I could hear Larry’s tongs go down on the tray.

“What in the world,” he said.

He laughed. It was a small, startled laugh, the kind you give when you think somebody else has made a mistake. He looked around the street as if to say, who is responsible for this? A couple of the kids snickered, and the grown-ups did not.

He took a step forward, and his boot hit the hose.

It rang. It was exactly the sound of an old filling station, two sharp pings, ding-ding, that every person over fifty on that street had heard a thousand times as a kid. The sound rolled up the whole block. About forty heads turned at once.

Clint jerked his foot back. He looked down at the hose, and then he looked up at the sign.

I watched him read it. I watched it go across his face the way a shadow goes across a field. First he read the top line, CLINT’S FUEL STOP, and he smiled, because he thought it was a gag. Then he read SELF SERVE. Then the numbers. Fourteen weeks. Two hundred twelve point four gallons. Seven hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents owed to D. Norris.

“Clint?” said Larry from the fryer.

He did not answer. He was looking down the street. He found me, in my lawn chair across the road, with my plate in my lap and my hands folded. We looked at each other for a long moment.

“Clint,” Terri said. She had come out from behind her table of beans, wiping her hands on her apron. She walked up to the foot of her own walkway and stopped beside the hose. “What is this?”

“It is nothing.” His voice came out high. “It is a joke. Darrell is playing a joke.”

“What does it mean, two hundred twelve gallons?”

“Terri, it is not…”

“What does it mean?”

“It is just, I borrowed some gas.” He tried to laugh and failed. “A couple of times. We are neighbors. He does not even drive that truck.”

“A couple of times,” she repeated.

Somebody in the crowd made a noise, and it was not a nice one.