A little out of the way place in the mystic north.
By Joel Deutsch
Daniel was the only customer at the station, so he had his choice of pumps. He pulled up beside one of the islands, got out and stretched. His arms and legs ached, and the air was damp and chilly. So as soon as he swiped his Visa card through the pump’s scanner and got the nozzle securely seated in the filler pipe and the pump trigger locked on automatic, he grabbed the sweatshirt from the front seat and tugged it over his head.
To get around to the food truck, he had to drive past the cashier’s booth where the attendant, a young man in his late teens or early 20s with lank, shoulder-length blonde hair, sat behind the bulletproof window. A muffled cacophony of heavy metal electric guitar and drums leaked through the louvered talk portal and the scooped-out gap of the money tray. The attendant glanced up, checking out the egregiously macho car and its incongruously middle-aged, bespectacled driver with his still-thick reddish-brown hair meticulously styled. Daniel was sure he caught a smirk, and wished he’d bought something a little more subtle to replace his aging Lexus when he’d had an intimation of some kind of changes coming over him, early in the year. He hadn’t known what those changes were, but he’d known something was happening, even if he couldn’t have said what it was. Something hormonal, maybe? There had been discussion about male menopause, lately, on the TV talk shows, and a feature article in Newsweek. Or maybe it was just the proliferating birthday candles and general mid-life disquietude. Or maybe there had just been discontents– no, Sheila always said, grant yourself agency, accept responsibility—maybe he had felt a lot more dissatisfied and disappointed in his marriage than he knew, or that he wanted to know.
Even one of those behemoth Subs that would loom up in a car’s rearview on the San Diego Freeway like a supercharged Bradley tank would have been better. But no, he had to get a fucking Camaro. From a fucking cop, no less.
Sam, Daniel’s father, had known all about car choices and image. He’d started out as a salesman of women’s sportswear before he bought out a floundering men’s clothing store on Los Angeles Street and parlayed it into a chain with outlets at every major shopping center from Northridge to San Diego and then, when indoor malls came in, at the malls.
“Let’s say you’re on a sales call,” Sam had said enough times for Daniel to memorize the riff, “and your customer sees you pull up in a Chevy. What does the man see, is what you have to ask yourself. A prudent businessman? Not on your life, pal. What he sees is a fella who’s not making the grade. A Pontiac, same thing, except then what he sees is a loser who’s shelled out a few bucks extra trying to pretend he’s not a loser. To make the right impression, you’ve got to move up to the right step in the product line.
“Of course,” Sam had admonished, “you don’t want to go overboard. Let’s say for some reason your customer is having a bad day, and he looks out his office window, and there you are, pulling into his lot in a snazzy new Fleetwood or a Coupe de Ville. does he think you must have something on the ball, because you’re driving a Caddy? That you must be a good, honest, successful businessman, the kind who inspires confidence? Nope. What he sees is a sharp Jew with a swelled head coming to yank the wool over his eyes, and he’s not gonna let that happen, no matter what you do when you get inside his office. Not if you give him a whole box of Garcia y Vega cigars, a bottle of Canadian Club, or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You lost him as soon as he looked out that window. That’s why I went with the Buick. Buick says solid, it says dependable, it says you’re doing well enough, thank you very much, and that’s that.”
Daniel reparked next to a dusty red mini-van and got out. On the far side of the lonchería, one end butted up at a 45-degree angle against the truck’s nose, sat a single-wide Gulfstream house trailer with louvered windows and a full-length yellow canvas awning. Though obviously not new—where light from the truck’s open service window hit it, Daniel could make out the brown drip of rust marks beneath some of the steel rivet seams in its aluminum skin— the trailer was in fairly nice shape.
Together, the food truck and the trailer enclosed the rear corner of the service station’s tarmac, and centered in the patio area thus created within their open embrace was a round white table with a furled red, white and blue umbrella, its seats attached to the ends of radiating support rods.
Between two of the seats, pulled up to the table in a wheelchair, sat a man wearing the strangest, most motley confusion of military garb Daniel had ever seen: Camouflage pants tucked into combat boots, a faded blue satin flight jacket, a green beret perched at a jaunty angle on his graying, pony tailed hair. A drooping salt and pepper pirate mustache gave his face a permanent scowl, and the small gray bush of a soul tuft hung off his lower lip. In the ear Daniel could see, he wore three silver studs, one in the lobe, the other two stuck through the cartilage above it.
The man was typing, two fingered, on a laptop, its screen aglow, beside which were arranged a takeout coffee cup and an aluminum foil ashtray, a smoldering cigarette resting in one of its corners. He was wearing fingerless black leather and mesh gloves, like the ones Daniel himself used for working out at the gym so as not to give clients a calloused hand to shake. As Daniel passed, the man looked up, expressionless, then took a drag on the cigarette, a swallow of the coffee, and turned back to HIS computer.
On the rear quarter of the truck’s side panel, emblazoned in red cursive script within gratuitous quotation marks, were the words EL DIABLITO. the little devil, Daniel translated, drawing on HIS two undergraduate SEMESTERS OF Spanish. Beneath THAT, in the same sweeping style, was the epigrammatic declaration, AQUí me quedo.” Here I Remain. The truck’s interior was lit by a hanging twin-tube overhead fluorescent fixture, there was no sign of anyone. Opposite the stainless steel counter was a grill, close beside it a wall-mounted rack of cooking tools, and next to that a display filled with cellophane bags of tortilla chips and potato chips, chocolate bars, and packs of cigarettes. At one side of the counter, near a large coffee urn, also stainless, with a black plastic spigot, was an old-fashioned chrome service bell. Daniel tapped it with one finger, but nothing stirred inside the truck.
Daniel was about to tap the bell again, harder, when he heard the door of the house trailer open, and he turned around to see a mestizo dwarf in a sleeveless undershirt, rumpled trousers and rubber flip-flops emerge to clamber down the two steps at the trailer’s door and come toward him.
“Right with you,” said the little man, scurrying bandy-legged behind Daniel and up a stepladder into the back door of the truck, reappearing inside, hastily knotting a child-size chef’s apron around his middle before hoisting himself up onto a high stool.
He couldn’t be more than a few inches over four feet, Daniel estimated; Daniel himself was anything but a commanding presence, topping out at a hair over 5’8” on a good day, but this was, well, this was short. The man’s upper body, the little paunch (paunchlet, Daniel found himself thinking) notwithstanding, looked fit and powerful. The limbs, especially short in the upper arm and thigh, were absurdly small, as if made for another body entirely, although, like his chest, they were also muscular. But the head was proportionate, and his face, despite the unusually broad forehead an oddly flattened- looking nose, and a set of teeth as crowded and crooked as Daniel’s were before he’d gotten braces in junior high, was close to handsome.
Daniel guessed the man to be somewhere in his forties: His black hair was thinning, and age lines spidered out from the corners of his sleepy eyes.
See anything you want?” the man asked, stifling a yawn, his voice a strange amalgam of mature weariness and boyish pitch.
The menu board on the wall above the grill offered the standard selections of chicken and beef tacos, enchiladas, and burritos. No carnitas, Daniel noted with disappointment, and no horchata, either, the sweet rice beverage he used to love sipping ice cold through a straw at the car wash. Just Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, iced tea or coffee. But the limited menu set his mouth to watering, regardless, and his stomach to rumbling.
Well, I’m sure as hell starving,” he declared, startled at the sound of his own hearty voice. “How about some coffee to start, while I take a couple minutes to think it over?”
“Shhh” the little man shushed, a finger to his lips, jerking his head toward the trailer. “Not so loud. My wife. The baby.”
“Sorry,” Daniel said, more softly. “I had no idea.”
“No problem,” amigo. When I get up and come out here to cook something, the smell doesn’t bother them. but the talking wakes up the baby, and the baby wakes up the mother. You know?” he plucked a Styrofoam cup from an inverted stack beside the coffee urn, filled it, and handed it over.
“Sugar? Cream?”
“Black’s fine,” Daniel said, taking a sip and setting the cup down.
“Coffee,” muttered the little man to himself, extracting another cup from the stack and holding it under the spigot. “Yes. Good idea.”
“Name’s Daniel,” Daniel heard himself say as he stuck out a hand on a sudden impulse. Normally, he wasn’t the kind of person who went around chatting up bartenders, waitresses and bank tellers, and certainly not pint-sized strangers at taco stands miles from home in the pre-dawn dead of night. But nothing was exactly normal anymore for him these days, was it.
Miguel,” said the other, the grip of his scale-model hand around Daniel’s fingers surprisingly strong.
To be continued….