I have bought gas at that station every Saturday for forty years. I am eighty-one, and I do not move fast anymore.
Three young men were laughing by the pump. The blond one knocked my cap onto the concrete and emptied a bottle of soda across my windshield while his friends watched.
The cashier, a quiet fellow in a cardigan, came out from behind the counter and told him to pick it up. The big one swung at him. He caught it.
Then the other two walked around my truck.
The hood of the Ford
The tall one came around the front. He put his hand flat on my hood as he went by, the way a man leans on his own fence.
The heavy one in the green sweatshirt came around the tailgate. His shoulder caught my side mirror and folded it back against the door.
They were not coming for me. By the second step that was plain. They went wide, one to each side of the cashier, and the blond one stood square in front of him, opening and shutting the hand that had just been caught. A man at his left, a man at his right, a man in front. Nobody behind him but me.
The blond one was Brandon Cobb. His granddad Ray put in those pumps in 1971, and his daddy Glenn runs them now. I have known Brandon since he rode in a car seat on top of Glenn’s counter. The apples on that wooden stand by the door are mine. Brandon has eaten a hundred of them and never paid for one.
The soda was still coming off the bottom of my windshield into the wiper well. It was the orange kind.
My cap was on the concrete about a yard past my left boot. I bent for it. My back let me go about halfway and then it quit, and I stayed like that with one hand on the fender, bent over like a man trying to read something somebody wrote on the ground.
The cashier did not look at Brandon. He looked at me, over the top of his wire glasses, and he nodded once.
Like we had agreed on something a long time ago and he was checking that I remembered.
June’s sewing box
I bought that Ford in March of 1984 off the lot in Springfield. Forty-one steers paid for it. My wife June said it was the first new thing either of us had ever owned that did not eat.
Two summers later somebody started stealing diesel out of the tank behind my shop. Five gallons at a time, every couple of weeks. The third time it happened I sat in the shop with the light off until two in the morning.
It was a boy. Hair down to his collar, a gas can at his feet and a pry bar in his hand, working on my padlock. When I came out of the dark he dropped the bar and swung at me with his right fist, and I caught it. I was forty-one then and I had been bucking hay since I was nine. I caught it the way you catch a calf’s leg, without thinking about it.
He jerked it back. The back of his hand went across the hasp he had just pried loose and laid open from the first knuckle to the wrist.
The cap on my tank was hanging off by its little chain.
“Now put my cap back on,” I said.
He did. He was bleeding on it, and he did it anyway.
June sewed him up at the kitchen table with a needle she boiled in a saucepan and black thread out of her sewing box. Seven stitches. He jerked on the fourth one and she had to pull it and do it over, so it sits a little crooked of the others. I held his wrist flat on the oilcloth. I counted them, because counting was something to do.
His name was Dale Pruitt. He was twenty-two. He had been sleeping in a Chevy Nova behind the sale barn since his daddy put him out, and his daddy put him out because his daddy drank.
I gave him work. Three-fifty an hour, which was fifteen cents over what the law said, and a cot in the shop, and supper with us. He mowed the apple rows and propped the limbs and hauled the culls to the hogs. On Saturdays he rode to market with me and filled the Ford at Ray Cobb’s on the way home, and June made him write it down, because June liked to know where money went.
The book was a green cloth ledger from the five-and-dime. The first line in it is his printing, square and careful, like a boy who had been told once that his handwriting was bad. Six fourteen eighty-six. Ray’s. Fourteen point two gallons. Twelve dollars and seven cents.
He left in August. He put two men from the sawmill on the floor of the VFW one Friday night, and the sheriff’s car came, and on Monday I put on my church pants and went to see Judge Kowalski. I told the judge the boy worked for me and worked hard. The judge said he could go to the county or he could go to the Army.
I drove him to the recruiter in Springfield in the Ford. The recruiter had a goldfish in a bowl on his desk.
We got one letter, from Germany, in 1987. Then nothing for four years.
In the spring of 1991, after the war over there, June and I ran into his aunt Pat Pruitt at the IGA. June asked after him. Pat held on to her cart with both hands.
“Dale didn’t come back,” she said.
June cried in the truck. I did not ask Pat anything else. You do not make a woman say a thing like that twice in the bread aisle.
I kept the book going after that. Every Saturday, every fill-up. I write small, and I have never once bought a second book.
It was in my glovebox on the nineteenth of September, with Brandon Cobb’s soda running down the glass in front of it.
Grandpa
Ray died in 2009 and Glenn kept everything the way it was. The bench, the barrel, the stand, and the deal Ray and I made in 1979: I bring the apples, he sells them, he keeps a third. I still have thirty trees. A neighbor’s grandson helps me pick.
Donna, who ran Glenn’s register on weekends for twenty years, retired last winter. In March there was a new man behind the counter on Saturday evenings.
He was about sixty. Slight, grey hair cut short, wire glasses, a tan cardigan buttoned over a white shirt even in July. He read paperback westerns between customers. The first time I came in he called me Mr. Hale. I figured Glenn told him which one was the old man with the Ford.
He said his name was Pete. He only worked Saturdays. He gave change with his left hand and kept his right down at his side with the cuff of the cardigan pulled over the knuckles. I took him for a man who had had a stroke and did not care to talk about it. I have known several.
In May Brandon started coming around on Saturdays with two friends. The tall one with the buzzed head was Travis. The heavy one with the curly hair was Kyle. They parked Brandon’s black Charger by the air hose and sat on the hood and drank out of cans.
When Glenn was out front, Brandon was all yes sir, Mr. Hale, how you doing, Mr. Hale. When Glenn was in the back, I was Grandpa. Was that truck older than his mama. Did I need help with the nozzle, Grandpa, it’s heavy. One Saturday he took an apple off my stand, bit it once and threw the rest at the trash barrel and missed, and left it in the oil spot for me to step around.
I went in and told Glenn.
He was counting the drawer and he did not stop counting. “Walter, he’s twenty-seven. I can’t ground him.”
“I’m not asking you to ground him.”
“He thinks the world of you. He says so all the time.” He put a rubber band around the twenties. “That’s just how they talk now.”
The next Saturday I came out from paying and my right front tire was sitting on the rim. Somebody had unscrewed the little black cap off the valve stem and let all the air out. Then they had opened my door and set that cap on the driver’s seat, standing up, where I would have to pick it up before I could sit down.
Brandon was on the hood of the Charger. He lifted his can at me.
“Heard you been talking to my dad,” he said.
July eleventh
Pete filled the tire for me that day. He came out without a word, dragged the hose over, knelt on the concrete in his brown trousers and did it one-handed, with the left. Brandon laughed the whole time. Pete never looked at him.
On the eleventh of July I called the sheriff’s office.
The deputy they sent out was Danny Ortiz. His mother bought apples off June for thirty years. He sat at my kitchen table and drank my coffee and listened to all of it, the apple and the tire and the valve cap standing up on my seat, and when I was done he set his cup down.
“Mr. Hale, I believe every word,” he said. “And I can’t do a thing with it. Not with ‘they bother me.’ Not with it being Glenn’s boy.”
“So that’s that.”
“Write it down. Dates. Times. Who. What they said. What they touched.” He tapped the oilcloth twice. “I can’t do anything with a feeling. I can do something with paper.”
So I wrote it down. I did not buy a new book for it. I wrote it where I write everything, in the green ledger, under the gallons.
Seven eighteen. Ray’s. Eleven point one gallons. B. Cobb called me Grandpa Snitch in front of a lady at the other pump.
Seven twenty-five. Charger at the air hose. Kyle spit on my tailgate.
Eight one. Travis sitting in my truck with the door open while I paid. Got out when I came.
Every Saturday. By the middle of September there were ten of them. Some weeks it was only a word. One week it was my wipers pulled up off the glass and left standing like rabbit ears. I wrote down the little ones too. Danny had said what they touched.
Something else started in August. When the Charger was there, Pete came out. He did not say anything. He walked out to the trash barrel and stood by it with his left hand in his cardigan pocket while I pumped, and he stayed there until I pulled out. The first time, Brandon got down off the hood of his car. The second time, he left.
The last Saturday in August I wrote in the book at the counter and walked out without it. I was halfway home before I knew. I turned around in the Methodist lot and drove back in the dark.
Pete was standing out by the pump, holding it under the light. He had it open to the first page, and his thumb was on the boy’s printing.
Twenty-six envelopes
He closed it and handed it to me.
“You’ve kept that a long time, Mr. Hale,” he said.
I said it had been my wife’s idea. He said he figured.
On the twelfth of September I went in the back to settle the apple money with Glenn. He keeps the office the way Ray did. A steel desk, a calendar from the feed store, a space heater that runs in every month of the year.
Glenn counted out my two-thirds and did not hand it over.
“Danny Ortiz called me,” he said. “You sicced the law on my boy.”
“I told Danny what happened.”
“Brandon’s a lot of things. He’s not a criminal, Walter.” He set the money on the desk instead of in my hand. “Forty years Dad gave you that stand.”
I let that go.
Then he jerked his chin toward the front, where Pete was ringing up a woman with a gallon of milk.
“You want strange, there’s strange,” he said. He pulled the top drawer of the desk all the way out. It was full of envelopes. Paychecks, the long kind with the little window, all still sealed, the rubber band around them gone soft.
“Twenty-six,” Glenn said. “Every Saturday since March. Fifteen an hour. He has never cashed a one. I said Pete, you’re making my books look crazy. You know what he told me?”
I said I did not.
“Said he wasn’t working for the wages. Said he owed a man out here, and Saturday was that man’s day.” Glenn shut the drawer halfway. “Twenty-some years in the Army, he says. Taught soldiers how to fight. Look at him. He looks like he teaches piano.”
“Owed what man?”
“Didn’t say. I figured he meant God.”
The name on those checks was showing through the little windows. I did not have my readers on me. I could make out that it was two words, and that the first one was not Pete.
Glenn pushed the apple money across the desk. “First week he was here, he asked me what day the old Ford comes in.”
I went out front. Pete got to the door before I did and held it open for me with his left hand. The bell over it rang the way it has rung since 1971.
The right sleeve
It was eight minutes after seven on the nineteenth of September. I know because I wrote it down later.
The three of them took one more step in, and he set his feet.
Left foot forward. Knees soft. His weight went down into the concrete the way a man settles before he lifts something heavy off the ground, and I have lifted enough heavy things to know what that looks like.
Then he did a thing I had not seen him do in seven months of Saturdays. He took hold of his right cuff with his left hand and pushed the cardigan sleeve up past the elbow, and the white shirt sleeve went up with it.
On the back of his right hand was a white line, from the first knuckle to the knob of the wrist. Across it were the little marks thread leaves when it has been in a long time. Seven of them.
The fourth one sat crooked of the others.
Kyle wiped his palms down the front of his sweatshirt. Travis rolled his neck. Brandon was grinning, and the grin was for me as much as anybody.
I had held that wrist flat on June’s oilcloth while she pulled the thread through. I had driven it to Springfield in this truck. I had carried his aunt’s five words home from the IGA and set them down and never once picked them up to turn them over.
I had his name in my mouth. My mouth was open and nothing would come out of it.
Travis moved first.
The apple stand
He came in low and fast, the way a tall boy does when he has made up his mind to tackle somebody. Dale was not there when he arrived. He had dropped under him and turned, and Travis went over his hip like a sack of feed coming off a tailgate and landed flat on his back. It knocked every bit of the air out of him. He lay there with his mouth working and no sound coming.
Kyle grabbed for him from the side, both fists in the cardigan. Dale twisted out of it, got a hand flat in the middle of Kyle’s chest and walked him backward three steps into the bench. Kyle went over the back of it. The bench went over with him and came down flat on the concrete like a dropped door. It had stood there since before any of those boys were born.
Brandon came last. He had his whole weight in it. Dale caught his arm going by, the way you catch a calf’s leg, and turned him, and laid him down on his back across my apple stand.
The legs went out of it. Apples went everywhere. Jonathans, the last good ones of the year, rolling under my truck and through the oil spot and all the way out to the pump island.
And then all three of them were on their backs. Travis on the bare concrete. Kyle in what was left of the bench. Brandon in my apples.
Dale’s glasses had not moved. He was not breathing hard.
I was right where I had been, bent over at my fender with my hand on it. I had not moved one inch.
Dale looked down at Brandon.
“Now pick up his cap,” he said.
Now. I said that word to him once, in the dark, with his blood on my tank.
Brandon got up the slow way, onto his side and then his knees. He walked over to my cap and picked it up and held it out. I took it. My hand would not hold still, so I set it on the hood.
Then he dug his phone out of his jeans.
“You’re done,” he said. He had his breath back and he was using all of it. “You hear me? You’re fucking done. That’s assault. That’s three of us. Three witnesses, you psycho. I’m calling my dad. I’m calling the cops.”
He called both. Glenn lives up the hill behind the station, and his truck was in the lot in four minutes. Danny Ortiz was on nights that week. He took eleven.
By the time Danny got out of his car Brandon had told it four times and it had gotten better every time. They had been standing there minding their own business. The old man came out of the store swinging. Kyle about split his head on the bench. Glenn stood next to his son with his arms crossed and looked at Dale like he was something he had stepped in.
“Pete,” Glenn said. “Go home. You don’t work here.”
Dale did not answer him. He pulled his sleeve back down over his hand.
Danny looked at the bench, and the apples, and the three of them, and then at me. “Mr. Hale. You see this?”
I did not answer him either. I walked to the cab. It took me a while. Brandon talked the whole time, about lawyers, about how his dad knew the prosecutor, about how this old man had been out to get him since May. I opened the glovebox and took out the green book and the pen I keep clipped to the cover.
I wrote it on the hood, next to my cap, where all of them could see me do it. Nine nineteen. Ray’s. No gas. B. Cobb, soda on my windshield, knocked my cap down. Swung at the cashier first. Then the other two.
Then I opened it to the eleventh of July and handed it to Danny.
“You said paper,” I said.
Danny read it under his flashlight, turning the pages with one finger. Brandon told him it was a crazy old man’s diary. Glenn told him I had had it in for the family ever since Ray died, which made no sense at all. Danny did not look up for either one of them.
“Eleven Saturdays,” he said. Then he looked over at Kyle, who was still sitting in the wreck of the bench. “Kyle. August first. Who was sitting in Mr. Hale’s truck?”
Kyle looked at Brandon. Then he looked at the concrete between his shoes.
“Okay,” Danny said. “You three go sit by my car. Not in it. By it.”
“Dad,” Brandon said.
“Go sit by the car,” Glenn said, and he did not say it kindly.
Danny put my book inside his jacket. “I’m going to have to hang on to this, Mr. Hale.”
“It’s got forty years in it.”
“I know it,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Glenn waited until his boy was out of hearing. Then he walked over to me through the apples.
“Dad let you have that stand for forty years,” he said. “And you kept a book on my son.”
“I kept a book on my gas, Glenn.”
“Get your apples off my lot. And buy your gas someplace else.”
I looked at my apples. There was no getting them off his lot. Half of them had gone under the pumps.
Danny had his notepad out by then. He turned to the cashier. “Pete, is it?”
“Dale Peter Pruitt. Army called me Pete.”
Danny wrote it down. “You want to tell me what a sixty-two-year-old man is doing working Saturday nights for fifteen an hour and putting Glenn’s boy through a fruit stand?”
“I owed him.”
“Owed him what?”
Dale looked past him at my truck. At the windshield, where the soda had dried to a skin.
“About forty years,” he said.
Twelve pumps
Yesterday was a Saturday. I bought gas at the new place out by the highway, where there are twelve pumps and a screen that talks to you while you stand there, and nobody is ever behind the counter twice.
There is no bench. There are no apples. Mine are on the ground in the rows at home, most of them. I could not pick thirty trees by myself and I had nowhere to take them.
Dale drove out to the farm at four and rode in with me, the way he has every Saturday since. He will not drive the Ford. He says it is my truck. He pumped and I sat in the cab with the window down and did not hurry, and he did not hurry me.
My cap was on the dash. The bill still has an orange stain on it that June would have gotten out.
The green book is in a plastic bag at the courthouse with a sticker on it. Danny says there will be a court date for Brandon after the first of the year, for my windshield and my tire and the other things, and that I will get the book back when it is all over. I am eighty-one. I do not know which of us will be finished first.
While the tank filled I asked him about his aunt Pat.
“I didn’t come back,” he said. “Not here. Not in thirty-nine years.” He hung up the nozzle. “She wasn’t lying to you.”
“June cried in the truck.”
He did not say anything to that for a while.
“Why didn’t you tell me in March?”
“Figured you’d want the diesel money.”
He had bought a new book at the Dollar General, green, the closest thing they had. When he got back in he opened it on his knee and wrote the first line in it. Square and careful. Ten seventeen. Highway. Eleven point four gallons.
Then he handed me the pen.
If there is somebody you owe like that, a Saturday is as good a day as any to go see them.
After that ugly moment at the pump, these stories of people standing up to cruelty may stay with you: a stranger left out in a blizzard, an intern facing down workplace bullies, and a cook whose fifty dollars was on the line.
