Short Story: Road Dust

Short Story: Road Dust

The gas station hasn’t been operational for a month and a half. A girl with curly red hair sits by the dry pumps in a broken down Cadillac reading Simone De Beauvoir. She’s not a feminist though. The Cadillac is pale blue and is beaten up on the driver’s side all along the length of it, right to the back wheel. The tyres are flat, one is shredded. It must have been quite handsome when it was new but Dani never saw it new. She saw it drive into the gas station, thick with the dust from the highway, coating its childlike colour, fuzzing its strong edges. The man driving it looked like a hick and spoke like a hick. He chewed straw like a hick and eyed her like one too.

‘What’s a pretty little British girl like you doing out here?’ he had asked, looping his big red drunk-nose of a thumb under his thick dark belt. She had ignored the question, and asked instead if he wanted unleaded or leaded, in a tired voice, they were out of diesel. The man was nasty but eventually he went away. He laughed when she asked about the gas because the car was already falling apart. She asked him if she should call a doctor but he laughed again. He bought a can of coke and a chicken sandwich and wandered off down the highway, limping into the dust. He said he would be back for the car but of course he never reappeared. Dani checked it over but it wasn’t stashed with anything.

Now she sits in it and reads about how women are not truly free. She thinks about what the author meant when she wrote ‘free.’ She reads further and finds how the idea is helpfully broken up into sections, chapters, subheadings, paragraphs and sentences. Simone knew what she meant when she was writing it, but now it means something different to Dani.

She swings her legs out of the car. Her wedged shoes scuff the dust and a mist of tawny grit flicks up into the still blue sky and drifts away down the asphalt until it is lost to the sun. She walks across the yard to the toilet, the light crunch of her feet crackling in repeated echoes into the stillness of the day. It’s noon, it’s always noon. It’s always hot as well, of course.

The toilet cubicle is open to the sky and has a mirror made of steel or some other silvery metal that streaked easily. Dani refused to call it the Outhouse as she maintained that she didn’t live in a Steinbeck novel. She was from London. She looked at her reflection in the streaked slab of metal as she pulled up her knickers. The mirror was one of those long ones you get in public lavatories. In the confines of such a small cubicle it seemed inappropriately large, as you could watch yourself pee in it. Dani always thought how lucky men were because when they went there their backs were turned to it. There was a sign forbidding ‘number two’s’ on account of the open nature of the toilet and the somewhat abandoned sewer system. Several times a day Dani saw this sign taped to the clanking metal door of the cubicle and against her will she thought nostalgically about the loos in England that never had a sign like this taped to them.

Her face is sunburnt. So are her shoulders. She feels like someone is watching her but she can’t see us so she looks back to the mirror. She holds her hair up, several bracelets on her wrists jangling. In the light it glows around the edges like an auburn halo. Then she puts it down again, encircling her face and covering the sunburn on her shoulders. She pouts, checks for dirt in her left eye. Checks her teeth by grinning at the reflective metal. She doesn’t think about whether she is pretty or not, or whether a man would want to have sex with her or marry her, because all the men she had met here were either ignorant hicks or trigger-happy farm boys with a constant rod in their jeans. She’s eighteen in two and a half months so maybe she’ll go somewhere else then. Where, is unclear. She feels like a clichéd heroine in some awful mid-west fiction competition a lot of the time.

Dani walks out of the toilet cubicle and spits in the sand, wishing it were concrete or paving slabs. She wishes pigeons would part as she walks and wishes young intellectual men in nice, autumnal coloured coats with the collars turned up against the wind would try and subtly check her out and then quickly look back to their note books. She thinks how ironic it would be if she were to write the Great American Novel and pass it up under a pseudonym like Dusty Wilderflower or J.R. Goldenberg. She would probably write it about this gas station on Route Whatever-It-Was and all the hicks that feebly try and flirt with her. No one who pulled in knew that the gas had dried up and the tanks were just stale pits for cockroaches to die in. This misconception gives Dani the hope that one of the young intellectuals might pull in in an original Beetle and ask for unleaded or leaded. She’d be wearing her white dress that made her look like Joni Mitchell and she’d say, ‘hang on a minute’ her accent clipped and sharp against the lazy drawl of the landscape. She would run into what used to be the roadside café and grab her nineteen-sixties suitcase with the bull’s-eye on and toss it into the open door of the car. Laughing she would throw herself in afterwards and kiss her new intellectual husband as they drove back to London to the sonic embrace of ‘Pleeeeaaase pleeeeaaaase help me.’

The roadside café looks like it always looks. Red, laminated sort of chairs stuck together in rows of two around square beige tables covered in dust. The glasses that hang above the bar had not reflected the yellow light of the road for longer than Dani wanted to remember. The floor tiles squeak beneath the wedge heels, throwing up dust much like the sand from the yard, only in darker hues. They usually use the back door because there is little point walking through here any more.

She pushes open the green door by the bar that has a sign stuck to it with the same peeling brown tape that instructs the user of the outside commode. In black marker the sign reads STAFF ONLY. It always makes Dani laugh. The middle-aged man purporting to be her father snorts into the armchair he’s slumped in beyond the door. His bare, ragged feet rest on a pile of unread books. Books are everywhere, gathering dust and dead flies like a cemetery of literature. Dani thinks it looks like a visual requiem to culture, as if society is out the window somewhere but you cannot quite see the edge of it.

‘Whatcha readin’ now, Dani-girl?’ he says. His voice is coarse and dry.

‘Feminist anarchist existentialist sex treaties,’ she says, pouring herself a glass of water from the fridge in the adjoining kitchenette. The café kitchen is too big for both of them to look after.

‘Oh that old thing again. Righty-o.’

‘Dad, when can I move back in with Mum?’

‘Oh, not now, sweetheart.’

‘She’s not doing too bad now. She said so in her email.’

‘You know that the nurses help her write them.’

Dani sighs. She always sighs at this point in the conversation, and each time it gets heavier.

‘I know.’

The dad sits up. ‘I know this isn’t the best place in the world for a young girl like you, with all that ambition. But, well, it’ll have to make do for now, sweetheart. I know it’s not perfect. But it’s not so bad is it? Have you written any more of your magnum opus today?’

Dani lets out another heavy sigh, more disgruntled than the last, leaning against the fridge, which jolts.

‘Everyone round here is an ignorant hick.’

‘Dani, I told you not to call them that. This isn’t a Steinbeck novel. They don’t know any better and they haven’t had the opportunities that you’ve had. Now I don’t want to hear you using that word again, okay?’

‘Well they are.’

‘Dani –’

‘Especially that hick Cody.’

‘Cody’s a sweet helpful boy, Dani.’

‘He’s never even been on a plane, Dad. He thinks Africa is a country in South America.’

‘I’m not having this conversation again, Dani. Make me some coffee and leave me alone for a bit will you? I’ve got to finish that article for Time.’

Dani makes instant coffee and pouts like she did in the metal mirror. Her dad has two sugars and notices if she puts just one in but she still does it every time. It’s become a sort of ritual that they both understand is inevitable. In a way, they welcome it.

Dani is now standing in the centre of the road. The markings down the middle have never been repainted because hardly anyone ever comes along here. A line of pylons stretches forlornly away somewhere. They are more of a road than the road is. Dirty scrubs and discarded parts of things are all Dani can make out. Standing in a road and knowing there is no danger is strange. It feels as if the road is broken.

A few minutes ago when she was imagining society being else where, just beyond the window, she was partially imagining the town that’s nearest to the gas station. It is two miles away and if she squints she can see its first or last few houses lurking beyond the heat haze. It is definitely not the culture that she longs for and she hates having to go there for groceries but it is still a town with other people in it. There are even a few girls Dani’s age but she regards most of them as skanks and they yell TRASH! at her whenever she walks past.

She clip-clops back to the sky blue Cadillac and makes herself comfy, sprawling across its milky leather upholstery. Even though there is no discernable wind the pages of Simone De Beauvoir have blown to some other chapter, some other subheading. Dani doesn’t mind. She’s skimming it anyway. She likes to skim-read because it makes her feel like she is in a great hurry, as if she might have to rush off somewhere at any moment. She considers kicking her shoes off for a second but decides against it, just in case something happens. Now, where was she?