It is the kind of town that you only pass through on your way to someplace better.
I work at the only gas station on a forty-mile stretch of road where weary travelers stop by to fill up on gas, Ding Dongs that expired three months ago and cold, weak coffee. I run the check-out counter, clean the only toilet when someone complains loud enough, and sweep the dirt that accumulates on the cracked tile floor into a pile in the corner where no one can see it.
The town is comprised of seven-hundred-and-sixty-three people, and each year we grow smaller as the graduating class of Wilburn High School (named for the towns founder in 1801) flees the confines of this dying community in search of anything besides rows of cornfields and Friday nights at the Tasty Freeze.
Oh yes, I was born here. But then again, no one who lives in Coyote Canyon moved here voluntarily. Surely, being a Coyotan is an ascribed status. I'm not quit sure why I have remained. Fear of the unknown? Maybe. The dangerous clutches of comfort in routine? A possibility.
My mother died at the local hospital, my father passed while napping at the barbershop waiting for a trim. But there is nothing interesting in my parents or upbringing; perhaps that is what makes it all interesting. There is absolutely nothing at all remarkable about them, or me, or this town.
I've met people. Sure, you'd think working at a gas station would be unglamorous, and for the most part, it is. But sometimes a traveler will stop by and sit at the charred, rickety table in the middle of the station (the one we stole when the Dairy Queen burned down in the fire of '87) and have a sandwich from the cooler that probably expired six weeks ago but you wouldn't know since my manager makes me smudge the 'Best if Used By' dates with turpentine.
We will talk. The traffic comes in waves; sometimes I'll have five or six customers at once, and sometimes I won't see anyone for hours. So when someone does stop by to chat, I mostly listen. I don't have much to say, but it's surprising how much people will tell a total stranger. Maybe I have a friendly face. No, maybe I have an unimportant face, one of those people you'll say anything to because you don't really value their opinion. One of those faces that doesn't really matter.
To pick up extra work, I drive an ice-cream truck in the summer. Not much to do, extra money's always good. I like to talk to the kids, and they each have a different name for me. No one seems to know my real name, or they don't care to. It's not a remarkable name.
I like to talk to the kids about the weather and how hot it is. They are always interested in what new flavors I've got, and when I'm going to get another shipment of Pink Panthers. I love how their faces light up when they hear me coming around the corner, and see the way their pink tongues lick the drippy ice cream cones and melted goo off their fingers. But I especially like to watch their eyes widen and mouths drop when I tell them there is really no Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny is dead because the tooth fairy slaughtered him for his two front teeth and sold his skinned fur to the leprechaun that guards the end of the rainbow. Yeah, I get a real kick out of that one.
My favorite game is Pac-Man, I've gotten pretty good because we have an old game at the station that I play in between customers from the Nickelrama that got obliterated by the twister of '91. But even more I like to play Roadside Skee-ball with the ice cream truck, 10 points for cats, 25 points for dogs, and 15 points for elderly ladies.
It can get pretty boring sometimes. I'll read old discontinued magazines that we still sell at the station, or do a crossword puzzle in the Canyon Gazette - that's our newspaper. It's only two pages, front and back, and lists the names of people who died or got arrested, and it has a crossword puzzle on the back. There is a place to advertise, but every issue has only one ad for Bill's Pianos, which is ironic since no one here can afford an appreciation of music.
Sometimes there will be a local interest story written by Tom or Peggy Steed who run the paper. Like the time Wilmar Cooter was killed by his John Deere tractor. This was ironic since his dad was run over by the same tractor twenty years before. I thought it would make an even better story, so I ran down his fifteen-year-old son with the same tractor and made it look like an accident.
Sometimes I just get so bored I could go crazy. Like the time after I killed an elderly man who stopped by the station for a pack of Camels and then stuffed him in the freezer of the ice-cream truck and decorated him with ice-cream sandwiches and Everlasting Gobstoppers. I just parked my truck at the end of Cobb Street and stared at the moon over the treetops. I was just watching the moon sit there, looking down at me. It never moves, never changes. It has the same obligation, the same responsibility every day. I thought, I am like that moon. Locked into my place in the cosmos. Is this town my place to twinkle? But maybe I don't twinkle at all. Maybe my life is just like that rotting stump in the middle of a treeless plain, that which people keep because its roots are so deep and its been in that same place for so long it would disrupt the soil too much to remove it.
Ding Ding. Another customer. Looks like another one of those guys on his way to a family vacation somewhere. Probably has his wife and daughter in the car. He picks up a Snickers bar and a bottle of Coke from the cooler that I laced with Drain-o from the bathroom. He pays with a twenty, and as he walks out the door I wonder what it would be like to switch places with someone, anyone of the people who breeze into this life before returning to something better.
Oh well. We all have our place.
