Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle

Author:Jill McCorkle [McCorkle, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2024-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Filling Station

With the approach of his sixtieth birthday, Ben McCallum found himself thinking a lot about death. He was always a little behind the curve getting where he wanted to be and so it made sense that his bout of “middle-aged crazy” would come not in the middle but closer to retirement and the home stretch. He had no cravings of the normal clichés—cars, boats, women, gambling; his mortal craving was simply for peace of mind. He longed for the kind of safe comfort he remembered from a brief time in childhood when he lived out in the country with his grandparents. He craved small spaces and simple equations with clear answers. Then the FOR RENT sign appeared like a message.

He had always been attracted to seemingly forgotten places—rooms above garages, or downtown businesses, small, deserted-looking houses of tar paper or cinder blocks. Sometimes he passed such places and allowed himself to linger in an imagined life, to follow the trail of a sweat-slicked child—eyes adjusting from the bright daylight to the darkened interiors, where he might stretch out on the cool wooden floor in front of a box fan and doze off. A rusty screen door, stale country smells he knew from his own childhood. He imagined a quilt-covered cot and leftovers on the stove. The house of his childhood was still there, just beyond where the old drive-in theater had been—the overgrown marquee with all kinds of graffiti about what was “Coming Soon”: Jesus / the end of time / Tony and Sue / higher taxes—and Bernie’s Seafood, recently closed and boarded up, a place he loved as a kid because there was a huge aquarium filled with giant goldfish and a collection of other things people had managed to put in there, an old rusty cap gun and a cigarette lighter and the bride and groom off the top of a wedding cake. There was a little sign taped to the glass and written in a bubbly way like the fish said it: PLEASE RESPECT MY HOME, but it seemed every time he went, there was something new down there in the gravel—handcuffs, lipstick, snuff tin.

His grandparents’ house was now a convenience store—they would have said fillin’ station—with a single gas pump so old it didn’t take credit cards, a faded Esso sign and a cardboard cutout of Richard Petty that looked like he had the shakes whenever a car passed. But, if Ben ignored the gas pump and signs and just focused on the distant treeline and listened to the passing train, he could almost conjure his grandparents in their old spots—her in the kitchen and him perched on that concrete stoop—the same one still there.

He wanted to escape. But from what? That is the question he imagined someone would ask of him: What more could you possibly want? He had a thriving business—a billboard with his name on it welcomed people into the city limits—nice house, charming wife, two grown daughters seemingly happy in their own lives.

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