Strangers to Temptation. Scott Gould

are you talking about?” The door was still open and the cold air fought with the outside heat, and it was losing the battle.

      “She worries about your stomach and how it seems to be getting worse. She worries about you spending all your time in a Lincoln with another woman. She worries about money. She worries about me and Eli and what’s going to happen to all of us. She spends a lot of time sitting in the living room worrying.” I folded my hands and laid them in my lap.

      Eunice spoke up first. “Like I said, we weren’t doing anything. I’m too old for your father anyway.”

      “Be quiet, Eunice,” my father said, then looked at me. “And you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You’re just a kid. Act like one.” His eyes came back then. They weren’t as dark and buried in their sockets. I don’t know if it was the way the bright light from the sunlight hit them, but I saw them clearly for the first time in what seemed like years. And I could see that he was afraid in his eyes, not afraid of me, but afraid of things changing. That’s why he liked Eunice and the Lincoln. It was the same thing every time, every day on the hill during the hot part of the day. He could depend on that, on something staying the same. And he could hide from everything else that shimmered in the heat on the other side of the windshield.

      “I’m going back to the house,” I said and climbed out of the car. I adjusted the bandage on my head. The place where my forehead split was beginning to throb with a little more desperation. My father didn’t move. Eunice reached over and cranked up the fan on the AC a little.

      “You need to stay away from church,” my father said. I stuck my hands in my pockets and shrugged my shoulders. I felt the edges of a quarter I didn’t know I had. It had appeared like some kind of summer miracle. I didn’t hand it to my father. I tossed it toward his open window, and he fumbled with the catch. The quarter disappeared into tall grass that needed cutting. “I’m going home,” I said. “‘Bye, Eunice.”

      I walked all the way to McGill’s with my bandage wrapped around my forehead, like I was marching home wounded from war. The Esso station was between my house and the river, downhill most of the way. When I started out, I thought I would be a little light-headed, because of the heat and the throbbing across my forehead, but the closer I got to the station, the better I felt about things.

      Emerson McGill liked to open his station right after church for people who wanted to fill their tanks for the upcoming week. He probably figured he could pump enough gas and sell enough Pepsi to make it worth his while. I stayed on the sidewalk the whole time while I walked, looking forward for cracks in the cement. I don’t remember seeing another person the whole trip.

      The front door of the station was wide open. Mr. McGill sat behind a glass counter of candy and cigarettes, fanning himself with a bulletin from the Baptist Church. I could see the line drawing of the big church building passing back and forth in front of his face. In the open back door, he’d propped a huge warehouse fan that sucked air from behind the station and blew it into the tiny office space. On the wall, clipboards stuffed with orders and invoices fluttered like wind chimes. “You got a sash on your head, son,” Mr. McGill said.

      “I had an accident in church,” I said. His coffee mug sat close by his free hand. He stopped fanning and took a sip.

      “Ain’t we all,” he said.

      I didn’t know how to answer that, so I launched into my proposition. I asked Mr. McGill if he’d noticed that he was missing a lot more gas than he was selling.

      “Well, my numbers don’t always jive,” he said, waving at the clipboards, “but I was never good at arithmetic. I figured something was wrong with the pumps.”

      I told him that I wasn’t going to name names because that wouldn’t be the Christian thing to do. (I believe I might have made that up. I am not sure that turning in thieves is precisely the Christian thing to do.) But I said that I could solve his mathematics-and-pump dilemma for the low, low price of five dollars a week.

      He sipped again. “Let me get this straight. I’ll pay you five bucks every week and give you the keys to the pumps, just so you can make sure they’s turned off,” he said, “and I’m going to make money with this operation?”

      “You’re giving away more than five dollars’ worth of gas every week,” I said. “I mean, do the math, Mr. McGill.” That might have been mean, but I was reaching for a dramatic effect.

      He took a longer sip from his coffee mug and reached underneath the candy display. He pulled out a leather wallet the size of a paperback book and fished a five dollar bill from among the slips of scrap paper and receipts.

      “Here. It’s worth a five to see if you’re a con man or a genius.” He slid the bill to me, then dug through a drawer in the cash register for the pump keys. They didn’t really look like keys to me. He walked me outside and showed me how they worked. “It never occurred to me that people would actually steal gasoline,” he said, shaking his head. “People aren’t right in the head sometimes.” Later that same afternoon, I rode my bicycle down the easy hill toward the river to the Esso station and clicked off the pumps just before the evening settled in. I made money that summer.

      The Lincoln ran out of gas sometime in July. I’d like to say it was around Independence Day, but that would more than likely be a lie. I watched my father ease the car off the hill toward the gas station one night, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to pump any fuel into the tank. He pulled the car back into its customary spot a few minutes later, and the next day, he and Eunice abandoned their daily rituals when the engine idled for the last time. I knew he was too cheap and broke to pay for his comfort, and Eunice was too mixed up by grief to understand why the Lincoln’s engine was suddenly dead. In two weeks, the grass and weeds crept up the tires and from my house you could see the brown summer dust layering the windshield of Eddie Baxley’s Lincoln.

      My father started spending his days on our back porch, chasing a square of shade that ran during the day from west to east. I’m not sure if my mother was happy about him being around, but I did hear the two of them talking more. I ended up with a little scar that runs diagonal across my forehead. Not exactly stigmata, but I do find myself touching it each time I walk inside a church.