The Rest Stop - 1. Chapter 1

THE REST STOP

corvus

The Ragdens always went to a horseback-riding ranch in Strawberry for their summer vacation, and Paul Ragden always drove. It was a four-hour trip that began in farmland, and quickly became wide stretches of dust and dried grass, brittle beneath the California sky.

Sally Ragden, eleven and restless, was scanninga travel brochure in the front seat. Her mother sat behind her, keeping a large straw hat angled against the midday sun.

"How do you spell ‘mesmerizing?'" Sally peered at the page through large, Minnie-mouse sunglasses. "Mom? Josh? Dad? Anyone?"

"M," Paul began, "E-S-M-E-R-I-Z-"

"Okay, that's too easy. What about... ‘Petaluna?'"

Paul grinned. "Place names don't count."

"They do too. Mom? Josh?"

Josh Ragden was staring out the window. Slowly, he turned to give the back of his sister's chair a stony look, and then resumed his vigil.

"Mom?"

"It's P-E-T-A-"

"I said Mom, not you, Dad," Sally interrupted.

Eileen Ragden stirred. "Paul, when are we going to be there?"

"Oh, just two more hours, hon. We're halfway there already."

"Didn't you say that an hour ago?"

"No, I didn't. I probably said an hour ago that we had three hours left, and we were only one-fourth way there."

"I think you said two more hours one hour ago. I'm quite sure of it."

"Well," said Paul, and he shrugged, smiled at the window. "Maybe I did."

Sally closed the travel brochure. "Does anyone need to use the toilet?" she announced. "Because I do. Reading in the car makes me feel sick."

"Don't even think about barfing on me, Sally!" Josh barked, pulling his legs in.

"Sally--" Eileen began.

"Rest stop!" Paul shouted, and their car, a battered Chevrolet with a noticeable dent in the front right door, veered onto an exit.

The parking lot shimmered with heat. The building, brown and wood-paneled, stood at the edge of the grass. The sky curved over it, down to a flat horizon. A picnic table stood on white concrete. Next to it, a sweltering green trash can.

Paul Ragden opened the back of the Chevrolet and hauled out the icebox. It was tricky keeping the icebox balanced on his hip while his other hand reached up to shut the trunk door, but he managed it, barely. On the way to the picnic table, he glanced at the only other car in the parking lot--a shiny new convertible, its edges looking strangely hard in the sunlight. He wondered, briefly, who would be traveling through nowhere in such a car.

"Want some food, Josh?" he asked after reaching the table. "Sandwiches. They're ham and lettuce and tomatoes."

Josh shrugged.

"I'll take that as a yes," said Paul, reaching into the icebox.

Josh glanced up, face baleful even while squinting at the sun, and shook his head.

"Guess not then," Paul muttered. He looked around. Sally had gone straight to the bathroom; Eileen was still in the car, enshrouded by her large straw hat. He tossed the sandwich lightly in his hand, and then, after a false start, walked over to the car.

"Eileen?" He knocked on the window. His wife slowly turned her head, as though she were deep underwater, and glanced at him through the tinted glass. She must be able to hear him, he thought, but he gestured instead, pointing at the sandwich, then at her, and then at his mouth.

She shook her head.

"They're good," he said loudly. "Ham and lettuce and tomatoes."

Eileen tilted the straw hat over her eyes, and shrunk deeper into the chair.

By the time Paul had returned to the picnic table, Sally had gotten back.

"It stinks in there," she declared, rubbing her nose. "There were flies everywhere, and someone had forgotten to flush the toilet. Are those sandwiches? Mm, I'm hungry."

Paul watched her struggle with the saran wrap before finally biting into the sandwich. She frowned, swallowed. "Dad, there're onions in here! I don't like onions."

"Oh, right," said Paul, flipping open the icebox and digging deeper. "I remembered that this time, and I made sandwiches both with onions and without. Let's see, maybe I can find one without onions--"

"No thanks, Dad," Sally said, wrapping up the sandwich and setting it on the table. "It's okay. I'm not hungry anymore."

"Not hungry anymore? Just after one bite?"

Sally shook her head.

Paul shrugged, worked his face into a smile, and squinted at the sky. It was wide and featureless. He looked out at the grass, the highway, and realized with a mixture of sadness and elation that they were quite alone.

"I'm going to use the bathroom," he said, and left the table.

He told himself that the little things didn't matter. The sandwiches, Eileen's unresponsiveness. He was still telling himself that when he entered the darkness, the sharp scent of urine, and saw a man leaning against the counter. For a split-second, Paul stopped in surprise. A fashionable pink polo shirt, jeans that rode a bit too low. Hands jammed in the pockets, the thumbs sticking out. Forearms that revealed sinew and muscle. Eyes--he only caught a glimpse of blue. Then he was standing in front of the urinal, jerking down his zipper and pretending to be nonchalant. He waited--a tinge of embarrassment, his mind going forth on the momentum of his thoughts, still blankly considering sandwiches and his wife--but finally, release. It felt good; he could forget that he was being watched. Was he being watched? The thought that this was absurd crossed his mind. He had to control himself; he was not alone; his family was outside. The stream dwindled. A sort of calmness slipped over him, and he tucked himself in with practiced movements, a mechanized sleepwalker, then moved to the counter to wash his hands without looking at anything in particular. The stink stung his nostrils. He twisted the rusted knob and wrung his hands under the water, simultaneously glancing up into the mirror. The other man was staring at him in the glass. Paul held the gaze only for a moment, then dropped it casually, with an automatic smile.

"Hey," he said, in as friendly a tone as he could.

"Hi."

The voice had been low, a bit rough. Paul felt his heart thrumming in his chest.

"Traveling?" He twisted the knobs and turned to the wall.

"Yeah."

"Same here."

There were no paper towels, only an air-drying machine. He pushed it and held his hands, as wet with sweat as they were with water, in the current. Hot air rushed over his wrists. He wished suddenly that there were a mirror in front of him with which he could see the other man, who must be standing just behind him, maybe a step, two steps away. He was still staggering under this yearning when the current stopped, and he was obliged to step to the doorway, into the blinding sun and brutal clarity of the air.

"Are we ready to go?" he asked, voice somewhat raspy.

"Dad, Josh said I was a dyke again," Sally said accusingly. "What's a dyke?"

"I didn't say that!" Josh hissed. "Stop lying."

"I'm not lying," said Sally, pitching her voice upward and inflecting it with an aggravating lilt. "You called me a dyke, you did. Right after Dad went into the bathroom."

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

Sitting as he did, the wood burning the seat of his pants, Paul felt a sudden loathing towards the world, particularly his family, his car, himself. He hated that his parents had bought him this car against his will more than ten years ago, and that he hadn't managed to replace it. He hated that Eileen didn't feel a shred of affection for him, that he felt even less for her. "Oh for God's sake, I don't want to celebrate our anniversary!" she'd snapped he'd suggested it last month. "Not even if you made enough money to take us to a proper restaurant." He knew she had married him because there was no one else who would have her, because there was something involving her job as a teacher and a high school student and things he tried hard not to know. He hated that she pretended to her friends that she was quite happy, and that the small flaw in her happiness was entirely his fault. "If only Paul were a bit more... sensitive..." He wanted to rip off her big straw hat and those tawdry glasses and crush them under his feet, and sometimes he imagined himself doing so, even though he had never laid a hand on her. Those glasses and that hat were the only things she had cared about that morning, while he packed and Sally and Josh fought. "Why can't you dress more like a girl? Why do you have to wear boy's clothes and do boy's things? Why can't you play with Barbie like girls are supposed to?" "Because I don't want to, that's why!" "Then you're a dyke!" "I'm not!" "You are!" "Josh, Sally--" he'd said, but it was ineffectual. Eileen had stood to the side, the sunglasses already on her face and a smile on her lips that seemed to say, "Yes, this is what will happen; your children will grow to despise you because you are a pathetic father and pitiful man." And on the car, he had known that none of them wanted to go, he knew it more than any of them, but he had tried, with games and jokes, to entertain them during the ride, but all of it had met with silence. "Dad," Josh had muttered, his only words that day so far. "Stop trying." He hated his son because he was like his mother, and he hated his daughter, too, because she was like himself.

He got up unsteadily. The sun beat down like a drum's heavy rumble. Sally and Josh had lapsed into silence, or perhaps they were still bickering, but he was barely aware of them. He said something, an excuse of sorts; it made no difference as he walked into the darkness again.

The man was not standing as he had before, leaning against the counter. Paul scanned the room, his eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness. Then he saw it: under the space of one of the cubicles, he noticed feet, ankles, legs. The same fashionable jeans, the expensive shoes. The pants, he noticed with a quickening of his heart, were not bunched around the ankles. Paul hesitated; he had never done this, only thought about this with wistful misery while lying alone in bed, while cleaning away the dishes by himself, while staring at the ceiling from the cold grave of the bathtub. His hands were trembling. He knew he was moving like a puppet in the hands of an apprentice, as clumsily as broken clockwork, but he didn't care. He pushed open the adjacent stall and slipped in, shut the door behind him, locked it, sat. He swallowed. Waited. The stench of urine seemed to cover his skin, from the sides of his neck to his chest. He glanced at the walls; predictably there were words written there, all sorts of lewd messages and nonsense--"I LOVE TIGHT PUSSY" "HORNY 8:00 TONIGHT"--that he hardly registered. The edges of the door, he saw, were splintered. The toilet paper dispenser was empty. The floor was slick under his feet, and dirt from unknown shoes seemed to have formed symbols on the tiles. It was utterly quiet.

He heard a stir. The man in the next stall had moved, was moving. There was the sound of the door being unlocked. Paul stared at the shoes, shiny even in the dimness, and watched them step outside the stall towards the doorway and vanish into the sunlight. The silence seemed to buzz a little. He gripped his knees with his hands and stared at the door in front of him, the blank beige door scribbled with pencil marks, ink streaks. He waited for the shoes to come back, but the silence stretched on, so thick it seemed to fill his head like the hair gel he'd used that morning. His insides felt like lead. Presently footsteps came again, but he had barely managed to muster hope when he heard Josh's voice, a disinterested drawl.

"Dad?"

Paul cleared his throat. "I'll be out soon."

Josh left, his shoes scraping heavily across the ground. Paul Ragden drew a deep breath and stood, his knees a little shaky. What had he been thinking? he thought suddenly, sharply. Reality slammed into him. If he had ended up doing something with that stranger (a stranger whom he'd just happened to meet at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere!), Josh surely would have walked in, and- It was too terrible to ponder. It was good that the man had stepped out, he thought, instead of... And anyway, it was probably just his stupid fancies. His mind could get carried away sometimes, spinning the most impossible threads. Paul washed his hands, his face, and walked out without drying either.

Sally had resumed eating her sandwich. "Look, Dad," she said in a conspiratorial voice. She pointed at the lavatory complex. Towards the back, in the shade, were two men, standing so closely that their faces were almost touching. "What are they...? Are they...? Josh said..."

"They're, well, different," said Paul. He fixed the lid onto the icebox. "Come on, back to the road again."

"Are they--gay?" Sally asked, almost in an awed whisper, trailing her father through the parking lot.

"They're fairies," said Josh in a tone of disgust.

"I expect they are gay," Paul said. He glanced back casually, following Sally's engrossed gaze. "Josh, could you open the trunk for me?"

The icebox returned to the trunk, Paul slipped back into the driver's seat. The Chevrolet swung back onto the highway, rumbling down the sun-leeched concrete. Paul had to frown with concentration; the shimmer of heat made him wonder if the road was truly there or not.

"So were they really... gay?" Sally asked.

"I guess so," Paul said. "I don't think normal men do that sort of thing."

"They're fags," said Josh.

"Josh..."

"So is it a bad thing, to be gay?" Sally interrupted. She turned in her seat to glance back at the rest stop, now a speck in the wilderness of dry gold.

"It is," Eileen said. She shifted her large straw hat and lifted a hand to adjust her glasses. "It's a horrible thing. Disgusting. Isn't it, Paul?"

"Yes," said Paul, glancing into the rear view mirror. "It is."