For nine nights the biggest man I’d ever sold gas to walked into my station at 2:40 with a stuffed bear and a box of needles, and the tow driver at my coffee machine asked him, “Which arm tonight, junkie?” I kept my thumb on the panic button. Then a woman from family services walked in behind him.
I work the overnight register alone at a truck stop off Route 51 in Decatur, and alone means the sheriff is eleven minutes out on a good night.
So I watch people.
He was maybe fifty-five, broad as my beer cooler, with a short silver beard and old faded ink running from both wrists up under a leather vest.
His black bike sat backed in at pump four, still ticking.
He took the stool at the window counter, the one under the lottery sign, and emptied his pockets like a man setting a table.
A brown bear with little colored dots stuck all over its belly and arms.
An orange.
A red plastic jar with a lid.
And a box of syringes with orange caps.
I put my thumb on the button under the register.
He pinched the bear’s left arm between two fingers, pulled a cap off with his teeth, and held the needle an inch from the fabric.
His hand shook so hard the point drew circles.
He capped it. Breathed. Took the cap off again.
On the fifth try he pushed it in, pressed the empty plunger, and dropped the syringe into the red jar like it was hot.
Then he wrote something in a little spiral notebook.
Mullen saw all of it.
Mullen drives the county wrecker and drinks my free refills from midnight to five, and he has waited his whole life for somebody bigger than him to make fun of.
“Hey, Gandalf,” he said. “You shooting the bear or yourself?”
The big man peeled the dot off the bear’s arm and stuck a fresh one beside it.
He was back at 2:40 the night after. And the one after that.
Come night four there were oranges, a mesh bag of them, every one freckled with tiny holes.
Orange first. Then the bear. Arm, belly, the back of the leg, the other arm.
He quit whenever the shaking got bad.
He wrote it down every time.
Mullen started filming. A trucker slid a one-dollar bill across the counter and asked for whatever the big guy was having. Two college boys made the kissing noise you make at a dog.
The big man paid for his coffee in exact change and never once looked up.
That scared me worse than if he’d come over the counter.
I ate one of his oranges on the sixth night. He’d left it behind. It was a good orange.
On the seventh night I asked.
“Who’s the bear for?”
“Nobody.”
“You’ve stuck that thing sixty times.”
“Sixty-three.”
“So why do it here? Why not your own kitchen?”
He looked up at the light tubes over my head.
“Can’t see the little lines at home, Stacie.”
He’d read my name tag. I didn’t know what lines he meant.
At 3:25 eleven motorcycles rolled in off the highway and filled my lot from the air pump to the ice chest.
Headlights across the glass. The windows hummed in their frames.
They came in wet from the road, and the oldest of them, gray ponytail, a face like a locked door, stopped at the window counter and looked at the bear for a long time.
“Tony,” he said. “We waited at the rest stop forty minutes.”
“Go on without me, Ramon.”
Ramon looked at the red jar. At the notebook. At Tony’s right hand, which would not lie still on the counter.
Then he turned to the door. “Kill your engines. Nobody’s riding.”
A young one in a stiff new vest said, “We’re due in Peoria by six.”
“Then Peoria waits.”
“Peoria’s been there since before you,” Tony said. “Go ride.”
“Didn’t ask you,” Ramon said.
They stood around my store drinking my coffee and nobody said much.
Mullen kept filming. He was the only one.
At 4:02 a gray sedan with a state seal on the door pulled in at pump two.
The woman who got out had a lanyard, a folder flat against her coat and the face of somebody who had already decided.
“Mr. Soto,” she said. “I told you I’d come see it for myself.”
Tony stood up. He’s a lot of man, standing up.
“Ms. Olson.”
She didn’t look at the bikes or the riders. She looked at the bear.
“Her doctor won’t sign off until you can do it without help,” she said. “Four times a day. At three in the morning when her sugar drops. With those hands.”
Mullen laughed.
She didn’t.
“Her mother told the judge you pass out at a flu shot,” Ms. Olson said. “Her mother is sitting in county lockup tonight, so the judge listens to me now. I have a foster home in Champaign with a nurse on call. They expect her by seven.”
“She’s SEVEN YEARS OLD,” Tony said. “SHE AIN’T GOING TO STRANGERS.”
Mullen lowered his phone.
“Then show me,” Ms. Olson said.
She held out a gray pen with a dial on the end.
Tony rolled his sleeve past an eagle older than me and pinched his own arm.
His hand was worse than the first night.
Then the door chimed.
A little girl in a pink puffy coat over her pajamas stood in it, the sedan’s back door hanging open behind her, a zip case in one fist and her other sleeve already shoved to the elbow.
“Ari,” Tony said. “Back in the car.”
She looked at the bear with all its dots.
Then at her grandfather.
“Do it on me, Papa,” she said. “The bear doesn’t count.”
Ms. Olson clicked her pen.
Tony looked at the needle, then at the woman with the folder, and she was already writing.
4:09
Tony set the gray pen down on the counter, dial up, and let go of his own arm.
“Sleeve down, Ari.”
“Papa.”
“Sleeve down.”
She pulled it down. It took her two tries because of the puffy coat.
The caseworker’s folder was open on my counter, right side up for her and upside down for me. I’ve read lottery slips upside down for nine years. I read hers.
It was a form with boxes. The box beside Unable to demonstrate was already checked. Under that, in blue ink, she’d written Child self-presented. Grandparent declined. And the time. 4:09.
The clock over my cigarette rack said 4:08.
He hadn’t declined anything yet. He hadn’t tried. He was still holding the pen when she wrote it.
I took my thumb off the panic button. Nobody in my store needed the sheriff, least of all the biker on my lottery stool. The person I was scared of now had a lanyard and a state car.
Ari climbed up on the stool next to the bear and put her zip case in her lap like a purse.
Ramon had moved over by the coffee machine, close enough to Mullen that Mullen took a step back into the creamer.
Ms. Olson closed the folder over her pen to hold the page and looked at me for the first time.
“Is there a fax machine in here?”
The lottery tubes
The truck stop belongs to Rakesh. He owns this one and a Shell in Clinton, and he sleeps about four hours a night, mostly in his car.
Two things he did to this building matter.
The first one is the light. Three years ago the scratch-off players complained they couldn’t read the little numbers under the latex, so Rakesh put two extra fluorescent tubes in the ceiling right over the lottery stool. It’s the brightest square of floor in the place. You can read the year on a dime there. Truckers do their logbooks there.
The second one is the camera. There’s one over every pump and one in the ceiling straight above the window counter, pointed down, because that’s where people used to swap tickets. By my register is a monitor that shows the customers its picture, with a sticker on the frame that says SMILE YOU’RE ON CAMERA. The box in the back keeps thirty days, and it stamps the date and the time in the corner of everything.
Rakesh’s rule about the box is simple. I burn a clip to a thumb drive for the sheriff, for a drive-off or a fight. Anything else goes through him. He has told me that in English and in Gujarati and once in writing.
The first night Tony came in, he didn’t sit down right away. He stood in the door with his helmet in his hand and looked at the ceiling.
“Those stay on all night?”
“Unless the power goes.”
He sat under them.
On the eighth night he went to the restroom and left the spiral notebook open on the counter, and I looked, because I’m a person. Every line had a date and a time, then a number with a small u after it, then one word. 2:51, 2u, shook. 2:58, 2u, quit. 3:14, 2u, ok. Down the page the ok got more common. He’d circled the number on every line, like he was checking it twice.
That same week Mullen held his phone up across the store so Tony could see the screen.
“Gandalf’s got eleven hundred views,” he said. “You’re famous, big man.”
Tony paid for his coffee in exact change.
The ice machine dropped a cube every forty seconds that whole week. It still does. Rakesh says it’s fine.
So when Ms. Olson asked me for a fax, I knew it was a dollar a page and it sat in the back next to the camera box.
I lifted the counter flap and let a caseworker into my back room.
Two pages to Champaign
She fed her pages in face down, the way people do at the post office when they don’t want you reading their mail. Two pages. She dialed a number from a card in her lanyard sleeve.
The second page slid half out of her folder while she was dialing, and I saw it, because it was a picture of my store.
Four stills from a phone video, printed on plain paper. My window counter. My lottery sign. Tony with a syringe cap in his teeth and his hand a blur. Across the top somebody had printed the words that went with it when it was posted.
Which arm tonight, junkie? Gandalf’s back at the truck stop lol.
And under that, the account name. mullen_towing_217.
“Where’d you get that,” I said.
“It came in on the hotline Tuesday with a link.” She squared the page back into the folder. “The mother’s public defender sent it to the judge Wednesday. A man who shoots up in a gas station at three in the morning doesn’t get a seven-year-old with a pancreas that doesn’t work.”
“He’s practicing.”
“So he says.”
The fax started to squeal.
I went back out front. Mullen was at the coffee machine where he always is, pouring his fourth free refill. Ramon was still next to him.
“You put him on the internet,” I said.
Mullen shrugged with the cup. “It’s a public place. I can film what I want. That’s the law, Stacie, ask anybody.”
“Somebody called family services with it.”
“Wasn’t me. I posted it. People share stuff. That’s not on me what people share.” He looked at the riders and then at the door and then at his phone, which was still in his hand. “I didn’t say nothing that wasn’t true. He’s got needles. He’s sticking stuff. What am I supposed to think?”
Nobody answered him, so he kept going.
“I’ve got a county job. You think I want to get mixed up in a custody thing? I don’t even know these people. I just thought it was funny. Big guy like that scared of a bear.”
Ramon took the cup out of Mullen’s hand and set it down on the counter.
“Put the phone in your pocket,” he said.
Mullen put it in his pocket.
Ramon leaned in close enough that Mullen’s back was flat against the creamer.
“Your funny is the reason that little girl’s riding to Champaign,” he said.
Ari’s zip case
I tried to fix it then. I’m not proud of how.
“Ms. Olson, I’ve seen him every night,” I said when she came out of the back. “Nine nights. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t nod off, he buys coffee and he does the bear and he writes it down. I’d tell anybody that.”
She opened the folder and uncapped her pen.
“What’s your last name?”
I told her.
“And you’re employed here as what?”
“Cashier. Overnight.”
She wrote while I stood there. Then she read it back to me, because she wanted me to hear it.
“Store employee, non-medical, states subject has handled syringes in a public business, overnight, on nine consecutive nights.” She looked up. “Thank you. That’s helpful.”
Ramon made a noise in his throat. Tony didn’t make any.
So I’d made it worse, in blue ink, with my own name on it.
Ari unzipped her case on the stool. There was a little meter in it, a tube of strips, a roll of glucose tablets and a sticker sheet of colored dots, the same dots as the bear. Half of them were gone.
“I’m one-twenty-six,” she told me, and turned the meter so I could see. “That’s a good one.”
“That’s a good one,” I said.
“Papa puts the dots where I’m allowed. Then he does the bear in the dot. Then he takes it off so he doesn’t do the same place.”
She said it the way kids tell you the rules of a game.
Ms. Olson didn’t write that down.
“Who checks her at three in the morning, Mr. Soto?” she said. “When you’re shaking like that and you can’t read the dial and there’s nobody in the house but you.”
“I can read it.”
“You told the nurse you couldn’t.”
Tony looked at the light tubes. He didn’t say anything.
In the back room the fax beeped twice and stopped. Then it printed the receipt it prints after every send. I went and got it, because nobody ever takes the receipt and Rakesh hates it when they pile up.
It had a little picture of her first page on it, the size of a postage stamp.
11:40 p.m.
I carried it out and held it under the lottery tubes, because it was the only light in the store that would let me read it.
Department of Children and Family Services. Transportation request.
Child: A. Soto, age 7. Pickup: 6:15 a.m. Destination: Champaign placement. Reason: grandparent unable to administer insulin.
Requested by S. Olson. 10/30, 11:40 p.m.
The transmission line across the bottom said it had gone through at 4:16 this morning.
Tony walked in my door at 2:40. She’d asked for the ride three hours before that, then driven out here to watch him not be able to do it.
I put the receipt down on the window counter next to the bear, face up, in front of Tony and Ramon.
Ramon read it. Then he read it again with his finger under the time. He didn’t hand it to anybody. He slid it a half inch toward Ms. Olson.
“That’s a standard pre-arrangement,” she said. “You request transport ahead in case. I’ve got two other kids tonight. If I wait until five in the morning to call a driver there’s no driver.”
“In case of what,” Ramon said.
“In case he can’t.”
“You checked the box at 4:09,” I said. “That pen never left the counter.”
“I checked it when the child offered her arm and the grandfather said back in the car. That’s a decline. I’ve been doing this nineteen years. I know what a decline looks like.”
The young rider in the stiff vest had come over to read it too. He said a word I’m not going to put here.
Tony picked the receipt up, looked at it for about as long as it takes to read a time, and put it down again.
His eyes went back up to Rakesh’s ceiling.
Can’t see the little lines at home.
The notebook with the circled numbers. The two extra tubes Rakesh put in for scratch-off players. The camera pointed straight down at the stool.
I reached across the register and turned the SMILE monitor around to face the window counter.
Under the lottery sign
On the screen was the stool from above. Ari’s coat. The bear. Tony’s hands on the counter. In the bottom corner, white numbers. 10/31 04:21:38.
“What is that,” Ms. Olson said.
“Rakesh’s camera,” I said. “It writes the time on everything.”
“I’m not interested in your security camera. This is a gas station. I’m not going to put a gas station video in front of a judge, I’m going to put a doctor’s note in front of a judge, and there isn’t one. You don’t get to set up a stage for him because you feel bad. That’s not how this works. Mr. Soto, if you want to do it, do it, but I’m done waiting on—”
“Sit down, Tony,” Ramon said.
Tony sat down on the lottery stool.
Under those tubes his face had no shadows on it at all. Ramon turned around and pushed the riders back with one arm, all ten of them, until there was nobody within six feet of the counter but the girl on the next stool and the woman with the folder.
“Nobody touches him,” Ramon said. “Ari, you hold the bear.”
Ari held the bear.
“How many,” Tony said.
“Two units,” Ms. Olson said. “Like the nurse showed you. If you can’t see it, you can’t—”
He raised the gray pen into the light and turned the dial. It clicked. On the monitor you could see the little window in the side of the pen and the number in it, and it said 2.
He pinched the skin of his arm under the eagle.
His hand shook. On the monitor the needle drew one small circle and then it didn’t.
He put it in. He pushed the button down with his thumb and held it there, and his lips moved, counting, the way the nurse must have told him to. At ten he took it out.
The corner of the screen said 04:23:05.
Nobody in my store said anything. The ice machine dropped a cube.
Tony capped the pen and laid it down in front of Ms. Olson, dial up, so she could read it.
“Again,” he said. “Watch it again.”
“That’s one time, in a—”
“Then watch it again.”
He did it again on the other arm. 04:24:51. His hand shook less.
Ms. Olson stood there with the folder against her chest. She looked at the monitor and at the receipt on the counter, with her own name and 11:40 on it, sitting where eleven bikers and a county tow driver had read it.
“I’ll want that footage,” she said finally. “Both of those. And I’ll want it today, not when your manager gets around to it.”
“I’ll burn it now,” I said.
“You’ll lose your job for a man you don’t know.”
I didn’t answer that. I went in the back.
When I came out with two thumb drives, one for her and one for Tony, she was on her phone with her back to everybody, canceling a driver. She said the word canceled twice, the second time louder, like the person on the other end didn’t believe her.
Then she opened the folder on my counter, drew a line through the check beside Unable to demonstrate, and wrote something next to it and put her initials.
“Doctor’s office, Thursday, nine a.m.,” she said to Tony. “Her doctor. Not a gas station. If you can do that there, he signs. If you can’t, she goes, and I won’t be calling ahead next time either.”
“Thursday,” Tony said.
On her way out she stopped at the coffee machine.
“Mr. Mullen,” she said. “County wrecker. That’s right?”
Mullen said yes.
She wrote that down too.
Mullen reached for the pot out of habit.
“Refills are a dollar, Mullen,” I said.
Pump four, a Sunday
Rakesh watched both thumb drives on the box that Monday, all nine nights of it, then wrote me up and moved me to days. Days don’t pay the overnight differential. That’s two dollars an hour I don’t have anymore.
He didn’t fire me. He did take the sticker off the monitor.
It was a Sunday in November, 2:40 in the afternoon, when a black bike backed in at pump four, still ticking.
Tony came in first. Ari came in behind him in the pink coat, no pajamas this time, carrying the bear by one leg.
The bear didn’t have any new dots on it. She’d put a bandage on its arm.
Tony bought a coffee in exact change. Ari bought a bag of oranges with money she counted out of a zipper pocket, and she set one of them on my counter and pushed it at me.
“Papa does it at the kitchen table now,” she said. “He got a lamp.”
I peeled the orange.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who works a register alone at night and watches people for a living.
For more stories about bikers showing up when someone needs them, read the eleven bikers who let a little girl paint their nails pink, the biker who waded into a canal, and the eleven receipts that revealed a hidden kindness.
