AUTUMN, ALL AFTERNOON

They were an idle and embittered lot, discontents who spent their lives hanging around the old Conoco station, bitching about everything under the sun.  Every one of them was in debt.  They owed the banks, they owed their relatives, they had “accounts” at the station, which were so large that none of them would ever pay them off.  But they hung around nevertheless, in their overalls, boots, and flannel shirts, drinking coffee, complaining how the government made life impossible, how the law protected criminals, how men were being shoved aside and their places taken by women, how millionaires were running the country to line their own pockets, how the Jews owned everything there was to own anymore and people like them were forgotten, and now it was the turn of the blacks, who got preferential treatment for everything under the sun, and they couldn’t get a fair price for a bushel of corn or a live hog, nor could they replace a worn-out vacuum cleaner for a wife who worked herself to the bone everyday and nobody gave a damn. 

     They looked out at the world as though everyone in it, everyone but themselves, was involved in a conspiracy whose outlines were just clear enough to detect, but which remained so impalpable they could never find a way to join it.  For join it they would, if they could.  But being on the outside, they had no alternative but to declare themselves its unalterable enemy, dedicated to exposing it, if only in their own splenetic humors, which percolated among them with a meanness and appetite for revenge that made them all a danger to themselves and their small and never-thriving community. 

     The greatest hater of them all was Al Weideman.  He was a lean and never-married balding man nearing fifty, a mechanic at the station, or should I say the mechanic--for he was the only one, and there was hardly enough work to keep him busy two hours a day.  Since the owner, Cecil McGuigan, a patient and long-suffering man who knew as intimately as anyone the life of the underdog, long married as he was to a domineering woman whose voice could be heard two blocks away when she chastised Cecil--especially for wasting his time with that crowd of spongers--since, as I said, this owner, Cecil, only paid him for the hours he actually worked, Al never earned enough to buy himself a suit and a pair of shoes.

     Sometimes they called him Sparky because he was so flinty edged.  He came to work at the Conoco station at eight o’clock, and by nine all the others were there.  They’d sit and drink coffee and listen to him fulminate as he changed oil in the town police car or checked the brakes on the sheriff’s car.  He had an opinion about everything and usually it was some cynical connection between someone’s or some group’s self-interest and the ideals he, she, or it espoused. 

     The others--farmers all, who planted in the spring and watched their crops burn up in the summer drought that was now in its third year--were glad to be led by Al’s fulminating resentments.  Although they couldn’t very well blame the drought on the government, they could blame the banks and the “moneyed interests”--as Al always took pains to point out--that took over their farms as they went bust all over the county, and they could blame the government for not saving them.  “Why would they do that?” Al would rant, “What’ve we got they want?  I’ll tell you.  Nothing!  Nothing but our farms!”

     “I’ll tell you what I’ve got,” Roy Jockheck bitched, “I’ve got more grasshoppers than corn this year,” rubbing his unshaven face as he spoke and sipping slowly from his Styrofoam cup.  He was sitting in the old swivel office chair which he had rolled out from behind the cash register and pushed beside the door.

     “Ha, I’ve got grasshoppers instead of corn,” Rick Molseed commiserated.

     “Get out those old mason jars, boys,” Al said, “and preserve them.  Sell ‘em in New Yawk,” he jeered. 

     “This year’s going to be the end for me,” Bill Pike said.  “My granddad worked the farm, and so did my daddy, and so did I, right up till the end.  But I owe three years’ planting now.  Never get a crop to pay off those bills.  Couldn’t even sell the place to pay.  Not large enough.  Have to go bankrupt.  Then I guess I’ll go join my brother in Arizona, wash cars at his place and make a living, for a change.”

     “That’s how the bastards do it,” Al said.  “They don’t drive you off and come guns a blazin’, like in the movies.  Nope.  In real life,”--that was a favorite phrase of Al’s--         “they just wait, like vultures, then come with their long slimy necks and eat the stuffin’ out of you.  We should do somethin’ about it.  We shouldn’t let ‘em take Bill’s place.  We should be there waitin’ for them, instead.  Blow their heads off and bulldoze ‘em into the ground.”

     They all fell quiet and contemplated this act of vengeance.  Cecil was working at his pistachio nuts, and everyone could hear him chew the little green-skinned kernel when he worked it loose from the shell.  What images played in their minds, only they and the Lord could tell.  But a deep sigh from Corey Clement suggested at the very least that their private thoughts were a balm to them at that moment.

     It was mid October, and the corn, if they had any, should have been dry enough to harvest for a week already.  But dry was what everything was.  When the breeze picked up, the air in the streets was hazed by dust.  Across the street from the Conoco station was the drive-up bank, out front of which was the time-and-temperature sign that flashed its lights in the glare of noon to all who cared to look.  It was flashing a temperature of ninety degrees.  For South Dakota, that was a record heat.  Just then, passing under the sign, they all could see Mary McGuigan, carrying her big shopping bag, her skirt blowing around her knees, making her way to the station. 

     “Oh, sheeit,” Al complained.  “That’s all for today, guys, all she wrote.  Be damned.  Here’s the boss’ boss.”

     And as he said this, a light cream-colored Mercedes Benz pulled up to the pumps, and a young woman got out and stood beside the car looking over at them.  Cecil and Al came to the door, looking across the street at the dumpy older woman gripping her shopping bag and then at the young elegant woman waiting beside her gleaming machine, the likes of which neither Cecil nor Al had seen before at the station.

     “Damn,” Cecil said, nodding toward his wife.  “What a time for her to show up.”

     “You gotta tend to Mary, so I’ll help the lady,” Al said. 

     “No, no, now, just hold on a moment,” Cecil said, holding onto his arm.  “This here woman’s looking for more than gas, I can tell.  I better see to her.  You just hold on, now.  This is my responsibility.” 

     His overalls unbuttoned from mid-abdomen to his neck, revealing a dirty white T-shirt, Cecil bashfully walked over to the young woman, all the while nervously wiping his hands on a greasy rag he had pulled from his back pocket.

     “Do you want help with the gas, ma’am?” he offered.

     “Yes, please,” she said.

     While he was pumping the gas, the woman stood beside him, as though she wanted to talk or ask him something, but he had turned himself away from her and busied himself with the pump handle, as though the gas needed help going into the tank.  She waited, facing him, quite close, and remained silent.

     Mary crossed the street and trudged up to the Mercedes as this little scene was taking place, and, arriving, said, in her brash voice, “Cecil, for God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?  Why are you turning your back on this woman?  My husband,” she said, turning her attention to the young woman, “has the manners of a barnyard animal, Miss.  Do you need help with directions or information?  God knows,” she went on, gesturing toward the station, where the men were peeping through the door, “there are so many idle people around here, we’d be doing the Lord a favor putting someone to use.”

     “Do you know how to get to the Nielsen farm?” she asked, timidly, turning from Mary to Cecil, who had twisted himself around to see her face as she spoke. 

     “Which one?” Mary asked.

     “There are three Nielsen farms near here,” Cecil offered, getting over his shyness and standing erect, leaving go of the pump handle, which went on pumping the gas quite fine all by itself.

     “I’m trying to find Orvin Nielsen?” she said, in a rising tone, uncertain whether they had heard of him, coming as she did from Los Angeles, where people generally knew only those they associated and lived with.

     “Orvin--that would be Bud Nielsen’s son, wouldn’t it?” Mary said, looking at Cecil for confirmation.

     “That’s so,” he said, and as he began to give directions, Mary stopped him, pointing to the men looking out the door. 

     “Do this woman a favor,” she shouted to the men, “one of you lead her out to Bud Nielsen’s.”

     No one moved.  The five of them stood dumbly looking out the door.  Whereupon Mary hitched up her shopping bag and marched to the office and pushed them aside to let herself in.  She hoisted the bag onto the counter and removed the big ledgers that held her husband’s accounts and angrily demanded, as she threw open the one that recorded their debts, they each pay something right then and there.  This had the desired effect, for they scrambled out the door and headed for their cars.

     Cecil came in and made change for the woman’s twenty.  She didn’t need much gas and apparently had stopped for the information.  Taking eleven dollars and fifty cents from the cash register, he went out again and gave the money to the woman and watched as the five men got into Corey Clement’s old ‘59 Dodge and sputtered off ahead of the Mercedes.

     In spite of the warm weather, the starlings had been gathering in their great swarms and moving criss-cross over the dusty fields and the town, and a dense flock of them came rolling over and disappeared behind the Conoco station among the tall Siberian elms that grew there, and Cecil looked up and shook his head as he turned and ambled back to the office.

     “I sometimes wonder we don’t cash in,” he said, shaking his head again and wiping his neck with the greasy rag as he stepped into the station’s little office.  “Bill Pike’s going south, he says, to work for his brother.”

     “Again?”

     “You think he won’t?”

     “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

     “Says he got to.”

     “Nor’west won’t do that to him.  You know that.  You’ll go bust before he does, what with them all leeching off you and you letting them.  Between them they owe us enough to retire on.”

     “Hmm, mmm, what can a man do.”

     “You can make them pay a little something!  Every month!  Instead of floating them forever.  None of them would let you owe.”

     “Hmm,” he muttered abstractedly, walking into the bay, where he had Thompsen’s pick up waiting.  Al had drained the oil and lubed it, and it only needed to be filled with oil now and rolled onto the lot where he put his finished vehicles.  The old man’s son would be by soon to pick it up.  Cecil was tired.  Tired of the heat and the drought and his wife’s crabbing and the guys not paying what they owe and the Conoco station and most of all he was tired of new cars, of keeping up with the technology.  He caressed the hood and front fender of the old pick up, patting it like a docile hard-working horse, as though he expected it to stomp and whinny in response.

     He thought of that lovely woman, elegant, young, driving such a machine.  He felt a pang of regret, a sense of waste and loss.  He moped, wiping his neck, looking down beside the engine block to make sure Al changed the filter.  He took the cans of oil one at a time, inserting the spout and wiping each one carefully when it was empty and then carrying it like some sacrificial victim that has played its part to the big drum he used for trash.  In the heat and silence of the otherwise empty bay, the work had the slow, ceremonial rhythm of a ritual and a ritual’s comforting effect on Cecil.  Leaving the pick up on the side of the station when it was done, he came back to the little office, where Mary was going over his receipts, tapping their numbers into her calculator and logging them into the ledger.

     “All done?” he said.

     “How could it take long?  There’s hardly anything here.”

     She had brought their lunches and now took them out, and he went to the storeroom where he kept an old refrigerator and brought round two cans of pop.  When they had finished, Cecil rolled the office chair outside in front of the door and sat with his legs stretched out and leaning back.  After a while he closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.  The sun had crept behind the station, casting a dark shadow over him.  And it was thus, in the midst of a comforting dreamless slumber, he was wakened by the scrunching, scraping bang of Corey Clement’s old Dodge jumping the curb in front of the station.  Rocking to a halt beside the bay, valves tapping, engine coughing, and tailpipe smoking like a barn afire, Corey shouted, “Cecil, Cecil, Al’s in trouble, you gotta come!” 

     Mary, who had been sitting behind the counter reading and dozing herself, came out and said that Cecil isn’t leaving and what did Al do now?

     “After we left the Nielsen place,” Corey explained, “we were coming down route 18 when we saw the sheriff’s car leading Dave Havelin’s blue-black Suburban over to the Heckenlibles.  You know old Sarah has been failing, hell of a time to go out there and force that auction.  Al, he got all worked up.  Said he wants to bust that Dave Havelin.  Hell of a time, he says.  So we drive out there and find Dave and Pritch serving the papers on old Heck.  He’s just standing there, not saying anything, and Pritch, he’s got his hat off, kicking the gravel, and Dave, he’s looking all grieved.  Like he gives a shit.  So Al, he goes up and pops Dave right in the mouth, and Pritch tries to grab him and stop him, and Al, he pops him, and these two guys are lying on their backs.  So Al, he tells Pritch he’s gotta arrest him and take him to jail and puts out his hands like he wants to be handcuffed.  Crazy.  Al’s gone off, all right.  We followed them back to town and Al’s there now in the detention center.”

     “What about Heckenlible?” Mary asked.

     “Well, he’s got to get off.  Them papers were served.  The auction will be announced in tomorrow’s paper, I guess.”

     “What do you want Cecil to do?” Mary asked. 

     “He’s gotta get him out of jail,” Corey said.

     “We ain’t paying no bail money to get that crazy    son-of-a-bitch out of jail.  We just don’t have it, and we’re not doing it,” Mary proclaimed.

     “I don’t know, Mary, I don’t think you need any bail money.  Cecil’s his employer, he’s got to have him to work the station.  They’d just let him go if Cecil came down.”

     “That’s so,” Cecil said. 

     “Punching Dave Havelin.  What a stupid idea.  What did it get him?  I’d let him stay there if I were you, Cecil.  Teach him to stay out of people’s business.”

     “I don’t know, Mary.  I got to go.  It’s the right thing.”

     “And punching people?  That’s OK?  That’s the right thing?”

     “I didn’t say that.  It’s not, so you know what I think.  But I can’t leave Al there.”

     Meanwhile, Roy, Bill, and Rick had gotten out of the old Dodge, and when the decision had been made to get Al out, they said it was enough for them and they were going home.  Cecil got in the Dodge next to Corey and they took off, rumbling and smoking, toward the courthouse.  But when they got there, Al refused to be let go.  He said that if they let him go, he’d run to the bank and punch Dave Havelin into the next county, so they had better keep him there.  Cecil wasn’t in an arguing mood.  He looked at Al through the bars, shook his head, and said OK.  Corey then took Cecil back to the station and went home himself.

     It was hotter now than at noon and drier than a desert.  The trees were dropping leaves that had turned brown and crisp, never having glowed with their autumn colors.  Cecil could hardly breathe from the dust the light breezes swept into the air, and he was feeling sweaty but also dry and worn out.  Standing by the pumps where he had gotten out of the Dodge, he looked the station over, noticing that the Thompsen boy had come for the pick up while he was at the courthouse, and noticing also the two barrels of used oil he kept on the south side, between the garage and the stockade fence, and next to them the old Jeep transmission that he had scavenged for parts and which had been sitting there as long as he could remember.  He shook his head and wiped his neck with the rag from his back pocket.  He realized that he was standing exactly in the spot where that lovely young woman stood earlier in the day, and the thought of her filled him with a deep yearning sadness.  He took in a long breath, and, wiping his neck still, let it out in an equally long sigh as he walked to the bay and took up the push broom to sweep the leaves from the asphalt off to the side by the fence.  And this he did slowly and methodically, sweeping the leaves individually into little groups and the little groups into larger ones, and when he was done, he went to the office.  Mary was sitting behind the register, where she usually sat when she was there, watching him and reading and dozing.

     “George and Ruth came by and gassed up, and Pritchard stopped by to talk.  I told him you had gone to the courthouse.  His jaw was a little swollen, but not bad.  He’ll live.”

     “I saw Al’s hand looked broken,” Cecil said.  “He was in pain with it, I could tell.  I bet he hurt himself more than Dave and Pritch.”

     “Serves him right,” she said rancourously.  She had no use for Al and argued endlessly for Cecil to tell him off and get rid of him.  He always poisoned the air when he was around, and she couldn’t stand him.  He was the kind of person who saw only the worst side of everything and always had a remark handy to knock people down.  Cecil never defended him and would say when she complained, “Oh, I’ve stopped listening to him a long time ago.”

     “What do you suppose got into him?” Mary asked as Cecil pushed the office chair back inside and sat himself down in it.

     “Must be the unnatural heat.  Drive anybody crazy.”

     “Al bitches all the time, but I’ve never heard of him being violent,” Mary mused.

     “He wouldn’t let himself get out.  He wanted to stay so he wouldn’t go plow into Havelin again.”

     “Now that’s not like him.  Cecil?”

     “Yea?”

     “Do you think he’s really gone crazy?”

     “Sarah Heckenlible’s dying, you know.  They’re old and it’s time for them to get off the farm, anyway.  Best thing.  But it just gets to Al I suppose.  Who knows.”

     “What’s going to happen now?”

     “I wonder.  I wish I knew.  It’s been a bad day.  No business to talk of, hot, dusty, and I don’t feel so good.”

     “What’s the matter with you?  Getting the flu?”

     “Nah, it’s not sick I feel.  Just down.  I keep thinking of that woman asking for Orvin Nielsen.  She’s not from here, you can tell.”

     “And she makes you feel down?”

     “Not her, so much as how fine she looked.”

     “Why, Cecil, what’s this I hear?  You getting jealous of city people?”

     “No, Mary, not jealous.  I don’t feel jealous.  You know that.”

     “What then?”

     “I feel. . .uninvited, like I’ve been shut out all my life from something everybody is a part of.  I don’t know how to explain it.  I feel like the whole world has been invited to this grand party, and I didn’t even know about it.”   

     “That’s Al talking.  You do listen to him.”

     “No, that’s how I feel.”

     “Now, Cecil!”  She felt a sudden alarm at this confession of her husband’s.  She felt it as an unintended, and therefore seriously felt, criticism of their lives together.  She got up and went over to him and took his face between her hands and kissed him good and hard on the lips.  Then she went into the storeroom and came back with two cans of orange soda and opened them with a fizzy pop.  Handing one to Cecil, she said, “Let’s make a toast.”

     Holding up his can, he said, “A toast, to blond youth and party hats.”

     “No,” she said, “a toast to them who have grown old together and made life work in spite of the odds.”

     Noticing a hint of something odd in her voice and a certain curious look in her eye, he said, jokingly, “What do you mean, ‘grown old’?  I ain’t old.”  And he got up and did a little jig, holding his can of soda over his head.

     His exertion had reddened his face, and, turning round and round, he suddenly stopped and caught himself when he saw Pritchard, the sheriff, pull up and stop beside the office door.  Pritchard took off his hat and sunglasses as he walked round the front of the car and came to the door.  Cecil could see his face was getting black and blue on the left side.

     “What’s the matter, Pritch?” Cecil said, seeing the expression he was wearing.

     “I’m sorry I have to tell you this, Cecil.”  He paused for a long time, looking into the office and at Mary.

     “Come in, come in, Pritch.  What is it?” Cecil said.

     “We let Al out a little while ago because Havelin didn’t want to make anything out of the incident, feeling bad enough about the Heckenlibles, and neither did I.”

     “What’s happened,” Cecil said, fearing the worst, for Al had said he would go after Dave.

     “Well,” the sheriff continued, “Al went home and got his shotgun and went to the Nor’west bank and. . .,” he didn’t finish.

     “God,” Cecil said.  “Did he do him?” 

     “Havelin and himself.”

     Cecil reached out for Mary, who had come beside him, and held on to her, and she to him.  They said nothing more.  Pritchard had said he was sorry again, put his sunglasses and hat back on and drove away. 

     “Oh, Lord,” Mary said when the sheriff was gone.

     “That’s for sure,” Cecil replied, turning back to the chair and sitting himself down again.

     “I don’t understand,” she said, in some heat, “Dave Havelin had three kids.  What did he gain by doing that?”

     Her anger was rising, and Cecil had turned away from her to keep to his own thoughts.  “I just don’t understand,” she went on, “I don’t see any reason in it.”

     But Cecil felt almost like he did.  His thoughts came back to that young woman and her Mercedes.  Orvin Nielsen had spent a year in Los Angeles after graduating from college, but he came back to work the farm with his father.  He hadn’t heard of any woman, but why should he?  He wasn’t close with the Nielsens.  Her showing up must have been a surprise to Orvin.  But somewhere in the lost mullings and meditations of the years, as he ground to an ever finer powder the experiences of his own life, and listened to Al’s fulminations and complaints about people and about life in general, he detected the cause of Al’s actions.  He didn’t know how to explain it, but the woman had the same effect on him.

     He thought of her, recalling how pretty she was, how elegantly she was dressed--and expensively, he thought, for that mattered--and her shining car, that car which not one person he knew could afford to own, which she drove up that same gravel road that Orvin and Bud raised the dust on with their pick ups--and it all made a picture of life.  But more: it made the picture come to life!  What was only the image that drifted across his dreams came all solid and material into view.  And what was that image?  It was the image of freedom, freedom from necessity, from the demands that cut him off from his desires and forced him to suppress his living, freedom from the “first this, and then that, and then if there’s time,” which there never was.  Cecil didn’t know how to explain the effects the young woman had on him. All he knew is that she made him feel both depressed and alive.  And he knew she had pulled Al’s plug, just by showing up and standing there waiting for help.

     And all that frustration came to rest on Dave Havelin.  Hell, selling off to pay back the bank happens all the time.  It’s just that Sarah was so far along they could have waited till she was gone.  Al saw himself there.  Hell, again, they all saw themselves there.  The honorable thing would have been to go and do himself.  But that wouldn’t have been Al.  It made perfect sense to Cecil.  Not that he thought it was justified.  Al’s going to hell, he thought, that’s for sure.

     The late afternoon sun dimmed as the shadow of a cloud raced over the ground, over the station and over the drive-up bank across the street, dropping the temperature quickly enough to feel it on the instant.  Like a huge awning, the cloud cast a shadow over the whole town.  And in front of it now, where the sky was clear and blue, the sun’s rays streaked across to the horizon and down to the fields.  Cecil got up and told Mary to go on home and start getting supper up, for he wasn’t going to stay open but for another hour.  People would have to wait till morning to get gas after that.

     And when he was alone, he went to the storeroom and, thinking about the next couple of days and how hard they were going to be, took out of the refrigerator a can of Pepsi, and then he got the bottle of Seagram’s he kept in the storeroom for those occasions when he needed it and fixed himself a drink in the Styrofoam cup he had only just been drinking coffee from.  He made it strong.  Walking back to the office, he took a sip and sat down again.  It was quiet.  He noticed, as he had noticed earlier in the afternoon, a huge sky-covering flock of starlings, black and noisy, swerving this way and that under the dimness of the cloud and rolling over the station.  He felt a painful emptiness. 

     Raising the cup up, he said, “A toast.  To beautiful women and the men who love them.”  And then, as he was about to take a sip, he said, “Cancel that.  Not to beautiful women.  A toast instead to. . .,” and he paused, thinking, holding up the cup, “A toast to. . .,” and he couldn’t finish his thought, for it was too clouded and held too many complicated things.  Shrugging his shoulders, he sipped deeply from the cup, leaned back in the chair, and watched the sun once again light the front of the drive-up bank.  But it was the sun of late afternoon, a fall afternoon, however hot, and it was golden and soft.  He felt like crying.  His hand shaking, he lifted the cup and finished off the drink.  Then he got up and closed the bay door and took the cash out of the register and put it in the little zippered sack, and, locking up the pumps, drove home for the night.