Soil by Jamie Kornegay

Author:Jamie Kornegay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

23

There were two main routes into Madrid. The first was the old Silage Town Road. There was one rickety gas pump in Silage Town that sometimes worked, but Jay meant to steer clear of the village. Undoubtedly he would run into someone who would quiz him about his land, his wife, his white-dyed goatee. He decided to take the highway instead. Halfway to town there was a country store, Hilltop Grocery, where folks were less apt to know him.

Hilltop was an old clapboard house with four gas pumps in the gravel driveway. Big cigarette placards and rusty oil drums sat out front. A neon sign for a discontinued beer flickered in the barred window. Out by the road, a portable yellow marquee with its flashing arrow advertised, TRUCKERS TAN FREE. What looked like a scenic lake off in the distance behind the house was instead the sewage treatment plant, and often, especially in summer, the air got so sour it was hard to stay and pump a full tank.

Jay got out and uncapped the tank, removed the hose, and started filling. The pump hadn’t been updated since the eighties, with its spinning number wheel and the switch lever you flipped to turn it on. The price was modern enough, almost $3.50 a gallon. He wouldn’t be able to fill up, for damn sure. Barely enough to get to town and back.

The proprietor was a crusty geezer named Fletcher, who looked like a badger in a guayabera. He was always propped on a stool behind the counter. His family lived in the back. His wife prepared brittle sausage and crumbly biscuits in the morning, and a lot of the old kooks from the county met in the cramped sitting area to drink coffee and discuss fishing or what politics they’d picked up from raving TV jerks. Jay preferred leaving his meager bill here than at the corporate pump in town, with their automatic doors and security cameras, their wall of inscrutable beverages and Siamese-twin fried chicken addendum.

He stepped inside to pay for the fifteen dollars of gas he’d pumped. A harried lady stood ahead of him in line, and Fletcher yelled back at a teenage girl to get off the phone so he could use the line to run a credit card. Clutching his twenty, Jay chose a soda, a dusty bag of peanuts, and a mongrel sausage from a revolving display case. He noted the old-timers at the back of the room and obscured himself behind a display of music CDs when he felt them craning their necks for a nosy gander.

Fletcher rang his purchases, which came to twenty-one and change. Jay sheepishly asked to cancel the nuts.

Old Fletcher huffed. “Aww, just go on and take em,” he said with a cigarette wheeze. He nodded to the back table of geezers. “I got more nuts already than I can stand.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jay noticed the men whispering and appraising him from their dark corner. He hurriedly scooped up his dinner and thanked Fletcher, vowing to bring the extra dollar next time.

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