Dolly and I were stopped at a gas pump somewhere off of Interstate 70 in Colorado, where the whole world was trees and sun-sparkled creeks that shadowed the highway curves. The state also offered long, lonesome stretches with towns so sparse that a girl had to pee by a backcountry gravel roadside if she missed a freeway rest stop.
In the cities, you could get by driving all-electric or electric-gas hybrids, plug in at home and refuel at sleek, almost odorless ranks of compressed-gas dispensing stations. Vintage car enthusiasts operated all-gasoline throwbacks like Dolly for an extra fee or for free if you were poor enough. But out here in the boonies all you could get was pungent, pricey gasoline in old-fashioned pumps. You still couldn’t beat fossil fuel for distance driving. And no farmer would run a hybrid tractor.
This shabby retro gas station (Deliverance West) had rest rooms, but I didn’t like the look of the grinning yokels in the Ford 350 across the concrete island from me. Since I’d been on the road two days from Wichita I’d learned that guys with super-charged pickups were aggressive on the highway. On solid ground they were as untrustworthy as vamps with artificially extended fangs.
“Hey! We can help you with that great big hose, little lady.”That taunting, pseudo-friendly threat gave me the same cold internal paralysis I felt at the orphanage when the older boys cornered me in a deserted hallway: against the wall, on my own, needing to bluff and bully my way out of the trap. Sweat prickled my scalp and sopped my palms. Despite all the time I’d spent on a workout mat in college, learning self-defense, the instant purgative spasms of visceral fear never retreated one step.And I couldn’t either. Surprise was my shadow partner. So was bluff. I eyed them, then cocked the nozzle on the gas pump over my shoulder, like an Uzi.
“You’ve got it all wrong, boys. I’m not little. I’m not a lady. And the help you need with your hoses is something you should consult a plastic surgeon about.”
They took about ninety seconds to decipher my comment. By then I was topping off the tank and not concerned about milking every drop from the nozzle, despite the highway robbery price of gas. Just get me outa here, Exxon, with no untidy oil spills. Particularly mine.
The mountain men’s bearded faces were finally falling as their grins grew feral.
“We seen ya on TV. Looked mighty good nekkid. Come on, Maggie doll, let us show you a real good time.”
Nekkid? What lame dialogue! And who the heck was Maggie? Not me!
They were right about one thing. This little lady needed to hop into her driver’s seat and hit all the door locks. But one man had vaulted around the pumps and was blocking the driver’s side door. The other had penned me in at the car’s rear.
One thing about growing up vamp bait in an orphanage where bullying is the house rule: you learn how to think on your feet if you don’t want to be someone else’s steak tartare.
I glanced at the combo pay-and-junk-food shack. Anybody remotely human inside had ducked out the back.
So I pulled the pump trigger and wasted ten bucks of Premium Unleaded dousing my helpful dudes from their shirtless overalls to their matching roadmaps of prison tattoos. My heart was pumping harder than the gas and my palms grew suddenly damp on the cool steel.
Bravado was one thing. These guys were brawny and stupid, a fatal combination.
“See this metal nozzle, fellas? I’m gonna turn it into a matchstick by striking it on the concrete in two seconds flat. You’ll both look good as holiday sparklers. Give my regards to George M. Cohan.”
They were so busy frowning at my mysterious vintage reference I thought their eyebrows would break their own noses. But their narrow eyes, light-colored and totally human, were still blinking with the dim primal urge to rape and pillage.
I sent the gas hose hissing at the guy by my left front fender, and when he naturally backed up, I leaped forward and swung the heavy Detroit-steel door hard into his torso.
His screaming oooof got me into the driver’s seat. I hit the locks, turned the key, and reversed hard. The dangling hose I’d abandoned swung like a pendulum, its metal head striking sparks on the concrete island.
I backed the other guy off my rear bumper and gunned out of the station onto the access road, then onto the entry ramp, and floored it. It was oddly fitting that I aced an oncoming gasoline tanker into the right-hand freeway lane.
If Achilles had been with me in physical form, he would have taken those yahoos off at the knees. Now his ashes rode shotgun in the back seat, my ghostly talisman.
What was the matter with those warped bad ole boys? Calling me Maggie! Must have been serious Rod Stewart fans. Right. Of course the rocker was still at it, though, delivering greatest hits on stage. It wasn’t clear if he was part clone, part hologram, all plastic surgery, or some entirely new hybrid of the Immortality Mob’s busy marketing schemes.
My hands trembled on the pizza-size steering wheel but Dolly’s alignment was rock steady. You could find these frozen-in-time steel cream puffs that’d been bought but lightly driven and stored in barns or garages for forty or fifty years at estate sales if you got lucky. Gas guzzlers, yeah, but horsepower enough to tow a Titan missile.
We sped at a sedate six miles over the speed limit toward Las Vegas. No motorcycle cop stops this ole girl. Who can you trust in this wicked world? No one.
Whenever I spotted a white Ford 350 in my rear-view mirror for the next one hundred miles, my hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel. That attack had felt weirdly personal, and I didn’t know those bozos from Adam or his firstborn.