Mare Crisium

Kint’s, Now 24 Hours!

When she pulled into Kint’s she had the idea to tally the customers. Come back in the morning. Explode through the bell-spangled door and slap the paper over the lotto case and startle that greedy bastard. Three customers, she’d shout. Three! You’re losing money! She didn’t really care how much money he made. She hated the buzz of the neons and the coolers. The icicles trellising on the window. Tire sizzles out on the frost-scored apron. The creeps that came and milled in the aisles. 

It was already dark when she got there. She came in the backdoor, stomped waffles of snow from her boots, unfurled her gaiter. The fan was on, whisking the calendar, even though it was freezing. She shut it off. She’d moved past Todd, a cherry by the icebox, without saying hullo. She put her things on the shelf and screeched the stool to the register and sat with her head in her hand. Tore off the margin of the calendar for tallies. Soon Todd’s Dart jounced over the manhole and rumbled off and she was alone. 

The tick of compressors and the Cola clockhand. In these late hours there were shadows in the snacks. To pass the time she played with her tooth. A molar, broken from the gumpurse but sinewed to the root. She could clack it on her other, intact teeth, or she could pop it with her tongue. She could stretch the nerve hellaciously and pluck it. When it got sore she did other things. Filch Red Bull. Count the drawer. Nothing could pass time like tooth-fidgeting, like self-wrought ache. This shift was an extra eight hours on the paycheck but the paycheck wasn’t going to her anyway, not since Dale quit the chemical plant. Kint said People rely on our fuel through the night. Truck drivers. Next station is thirty miles down the fuckin ‘pike, Tori, okay? 

Eventually her jaw felt palsied and she had to stop and rub it. She toured the aisles. The breakroom was a helter-skelter cardtable and a glossy nude poster from the seventies. She never went in there. The poster was stripped with age but it still made her nervous. There was nothing to do but sit and spin and read nutrition labels. An outpost on the Arctic Circle.

Around ten o’clock she got her first customer. It was a person in a trapper hat pulled so far down she could tell nothing about them. They hardly cleared the kiosk. A pickup idled outside by the pump.

“Hullo,” Tori said. “Can I help you?”

They pointed a mitten at their truck. 

“You want to prepay?”

Head shake. 

“Something’s wrong with the pump?”

A curt nod. Tori hefted up from the counter and tried not to roll her eyes. Typically people could not understand how to punch in a PIN, or the buttons were too cold, and needed to be breathed on. She did not don her coat. She followed the person out of the store and into a shearing night. Snow-sprites skirled across the lot. The customer led her like an Inuk through a waste. When she came to the pump she readied herself to warm the keypad, frisking her raw hands, but then the whole nozzle was frozen in a great bust of ice and the customer was staring at it. They looked at Tori. 

“I’ve never seen this happen,” she said. The nightwind took her words. She held her arms. “Can you try that other pump over there?”

The customer stared at her. 

Tori wrinkled her forehead. Her nose was a steamfount. The customer gestured to the ice again.

“Yeah, OK,” said Tori. She got ahold of the handle. Put her boot up on the wale. The customer stepped aside. She yanked and twisted. Chopped. Grunted. The ice squelched but did not move. She leaned against the truckbed and looked over at the customer, the exhaust searing her nose. “I think it’s stuck,” she said. “There should be another pump that works.” 

The customer moved past her and hauled open the truckdoor and got inside. Tori moved to the other pump across the lot, signalling it with her boot. The truck pulled onto the road and its taillights faded in the sleet. 

Tori stood, arms wrested around herself, watching it go. Jaw slack. After a while she turned and crossed the pavement and the bellchime welcomed her back to the warmth. She sidled the counter, molar sealed in the gully of her gum, and struck a rageful tally on the paper.

These stale, humming hours. She looked longingly at the register. Mama needed money for the lights, for the car, for the mortgage. Dale sprained his leg six months ago. She brings his meals to the couch.

She had violined her toothstring so fervently that her whole face was panging. There was nothing else to do. Finally she shucked open the moonglossed window behind the counter and put her hand out there. Put her hand in the screaming windblast to see how long she could stand it. A floating birchstick wrist. She could only do ten seconds. She pulled in a windburnt claw with nails of kyanite. Holy shit, she said. She warmed it between her legs for a while. Then she tried again. The worst job at Kint’s was always stocking the walk-in freezer. Maybe these secret conditionings, these cryogenizings, could make them easier. Todd would say: How can she stay in there for so long? Kint would say: Here’s a raise!

Forty-six seconds this time. She flexed her knuckles. The trick was knowing you could pull it in at any time. It felt like wolves were nipping at it, ghostwhite. A nightscape as foreign and frozen as the face of the moon. On her third attempt, she did three minutes, and could have gone more, when a man entered the store in a great jangle. He was flannelled and ruddy and gruff. Tori slammed the window and spun to the counter.

“Hullo, sir,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Forty on two.”

“Yes, sir.” She rang his money and he went out. After a minute he came in again.

“Everything all right, sir?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I think your pump is broken.”

She peered through the frosted window to the pair of headlights by the frozen nozzle. “Oh,” she whined. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I figured nobody would use that one. I’ll just have you pull over to a different one. Try pump one. I can refund you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s broken. I pulled it out of the ice. It’s leaking.”

Her breath stalled. “Oh,” she said. 

The man went to the door and waited for her to follow. She figured she had acclimated and did not reach for her coat. She followed him out to his running board. The nozzle lay like a dead blacksnake on the pavement, jetting gasoline. Tori looked around. This new moon void of a night, a banshee night. Ice fanged the canopy and the wind screaked through it. “You paid forty, right?”

He didn’t answer. The amber pool relaxed around their boots. Inside she gave him his money and he stomped out. 

She sat with her forehead in her hand. Then she jumped. When Kint counted the drawer in the morning it would be off. It would come straight out of her pay. Her pay that went to keeping Dale’s cable on. To buying his groceries. She pulled the paper aside and struck another tally. 

If someone were to buy forty dollars of chips or beer, and pay cash, and she did not ring it in, then the deficit would be covered. There was no way that could happen. She could explain that a customer broke the pump, but the money lost was still going to come from somewhere—that was policy.

She leaned back in her stool and contemplated. The cooler doors reflected a passing shadow. The roller chk-chk’d. She glanced at those dirty aluminum recesses and drowsing jerkeys. A light fixture sputtered over the corner that she could not see from the counter. She could say they were robbed. Held at gunpoint. She was so composed, though. He took the money, but at least she was okay, right, and how awful would it be to recoup the loss with her pay—this traumatized employee who played it so cool but was still shaken up? She was pingponging her molar from one tonsil to another when it slipped back her throat and she started gagging. She reeled off the stool. It was tickling her airway furiously. She coughed and retched and rocked herself but it did not move. A scrabble on the countertop; a clatter of Skoal pucks on the floor—finally she reached back with her fingers, gasping, past the wet uvula and wincing vesica piscis and pinched the thing out. A spray on the lotto case. She stood breathing. The tooth hung limply inside her cheek. The violence of the scene brought back the scene that had caused it—the check slipped under her mattress, Mama, taut and flaring, asking where it was—Dale shouting from the couch—the viperous backhand and the pop and the relenting. 

She went to the cooler and lifted out a sixpack of Busch and brought it to the counter. It was midnight now and she thought she might count the hours with beer. Drive drunk in the predawn, maybe not toward home. Somewhere hot. Leave a loogie in Kint’s logbook. Perhaps a quick stop home to hobble Dale and then out again. Blame Todd for the missing beer.

No. She was a good girl. Went to work, friendly with the customers. Cosmetology classes every Wednesday evening. Helping Mama with dinner, most of the time. It was something in these long nights, these dreary cooler thrums. Beer-sear on her lower lip.

By two in the morning she had her feet up and a bag of pretzels split open on the counter. Beercans scrunched. When the third customer came, she composed herself slowly. The man jogged over to her in a great hustle. “Can I have your bathroom key?” he said. The bells clamored.

Tori looked at him. He was in hunter’s orange. His left leg all quaky. He brought in an aura of dead midwinter cold and cigarette smoke. Coalblack hair, all tousled. She rolled the pretzel bag gracefully and tucked it on the shelf.

“I need a personal item in exchange,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s company policy. So that you return the key.”

He looked at her, then scrambled in his pockets. He came up with a lighter and placed it on the counter. Then he smiled and reached out.

“Sir, you can buy a new lighter for a dollar. It has to be something of value.”

He groaned and went searching again through his johns. Finally he crashed his whole keyring on the case. “There,” he said. “Whatever. Key.”

She opened the register and lifted the coin tray and got him the key. He ambled off through the aisle and disappeared in the bathroom. The echoes were such that you could hear everything inside. She had been wrong about freezer duty being the worst job: it was bathroom cleaning. Scouring jizz off the walls until they whimpered. The tobacco spitblasts on the mirror, the grime in the spigot. The hunter was making quite a ruckus. And it being Monday—yes, it was Monday, and it was her turn to clean, before first shift. She raked her hand down her face. Kint would check it first thing. She had four hours left. She put a jagged third tally on the paper and sat breathing hard. She pressed the molar crown tight against an adenoid, so tight her whole palate blazed. Despite the subzero night, she felt hot and fluttery. She would come home in the morning and nap and Mama would burst in all in a huff and tell her to wake up, to help get lunch put together, and Dale would be supine and belching and staring at her ass and the hunter’s keys glistered in the glare of the spastic OPEN sign and he was moaning in the stall and the whole shift’s wage was going to cover the pump damage anyway. She got up from the stool and snatched the things on the counter and the shelves and the beercase and went over to the door.

When she opened it and stepped outside an icicle broke off the eave and shattered to tinsel at her feet. She froze. Looked up and down. An inch, maybe two, from diving straight behind her sternum. Ice bayonet to the heart. 

She stepped over it and went out into the howling lot and the man’s Ranger was parked right by the fucking broken pump and she unlocked it and got inside. She stabbed at the ignition and started the engine. Struck the lighter and rubberbanded it and hurled it out the crank window as she passed. The Busch buzz and the thrill and the ominous memento mori drilled the pedal to the floor. Her hair rioted in her face.

When she saw the flamebroil in the rearview she pulled her molar taut over an incisor and bit the nerve clean off. A quick clap of eye-gush pain and then relief. She spit it out on the berm. There was a doe in the truckbed and it jostled all the way down the Interstate and her hand cocked out over the window numb and blanched. She followed the moon south.