Third Shift

The woman in white lurched across the parking lot.

There was an off-ness about her. I could see that immediately. She seemed as though she might be drunk, or in some other way removed from being fully in control of her faculties. It was an off-ness I knew all too well, and had come to be very adept at recognizing. Working the night shift at a gas station, especially one right on the edge of town, where you see regular townspeople and travelers alike. makes you an expert on odd, desperate people. It makes you almost immune to their particular ability to induce discomfort, at least as long as you’re behind the counter. On the clock I’d easily serve people without batting an eyelash that during the day I would have crossed the street to avoid.

I guess I kind of become one of them during that time. I mean, as the person working a third shift at a gas station, you’re kind of a desperate and odd person yourself.

I watched the woman measuredly. I’d seen this walk many times before. It was the walk of someone who really shouldn’t have driven up to the store, as this woman had. She could barely gauge how far the ground was from her feet and move them in a timely manner. I shook my head slightly, a gesture solely for my own benefit as the store was abandoned. The woman was goofy looking now, but behind the wheel of the car, she was a downright menace. The quiet thought of refusing the woman service, something I had done in similar situations before, came to me. The woman was parked by a pump. I could refuse to provide gas, give her the number to a cab company.

Looking back towards the desk, I caught a glimpse of myself in a small mirror sitting on the counter -- a plump, pleasant woman. My face was old and creased and full of character -- nose too pointed, lips too thin -- but beautiful in its own right. Natural pockets of reddish pink bloomed on my nose and cheeks. I’m rounding out towards sixty, with my white hair dyed platinum blonde. I don’t mind the white hair - I’m long beyond dyeing my hair to try and hide the fluffy white strands that started to spring up in my mid forties. I just like the youthful sheen the platinum blonde dye gives the white hairs - it took me from “Bingo Night” to “Cool Grandma”, in my opinion.

I looked healthy and happy, and I was, for the most part, and recently un-retired. The gas station job was partly to help out with my daughter Emily’s medical bills (Lupas is an expensive disease), but also just to get out of the house more. Ever since my wife, Marilyn, had passed from breast cancer five years before, I’d found myself forlornly wandering the house we’d shared. It was full of all kinds of memories -- she’d started calling me Big Bird at some point (My name’s Robin, so it was a play on that, I think) and in retaliation I’d begun calling her Mare Bear. The names had eventually evolved into me constantly buying any kitschy bear-related thing I came across, and her constantly assaulting me with sesame street stuff. I couldn’t bear (no pun intended) to take down any of the bear stuff, but it was such a constant reminder of her absence. When I caught myself crying over Marilyn’s afghan (grizzly bear in front of some mountains, one of my first gifts), I’d promised myself I’d get out more. And with Emily needing the money anyway, I figured I’d take a job that got me out of the house during those lonely early morning hours where even the sun couldn’t keep me company.

The woman was almost to the door now, and I rethought my original assumption. This wasn’t alcohol, or at least not just alcohol. this was hard drugs. I thought probably meth, maybe really severe cocaine, maybe a combination of the two. The woman was gaunt, horribly thin, and covered in cuts and bruises. I also noted what looked like a few cigarette burns. Her white dress, which, even given the location - (the edge of El Paso) seemed a bit light for the weather, was stained in several places and torn in a few more. She also appeared to have been at least partially submerged in water at some point, as the bottom half clung to her body and I could see a line of darkened splotches of cement extending behind her. El Paso was very rarely what most people would consider cold, but the temperature did drop some with the sun, especially at the twilight of the year. It could get down to about fifty degrees before windchill, and today hadn’t been a particularly warm day.

Her knobby knee-caps were bruised and covered in goosebumps. When she got to the door it seemed like a huge effort for her to pull it open. I couldn’t help but flinch when the woman bumped her shoulder on the door in her effort to snake into it before it closed. I’ve never been particularly thin in my life, and thus don’t have any experience, but I have this suspicion that things like that hurt more when your bones look like they’re about ready to bust through your skin. The woman looked around with a dazed stupidity, her eyes seeming to have trouble focusing. I thought the woman might be close to coming down, because while she was definitely on something, she seemed to be past the point where she was having a good time with it.

Her face changed for a moment. Her brow was furrowed, and her face seemed drawn. She looked almost ready to cry for that brief second, but that look faded in and out around the slack-jawed nothingness. She cycled through these for a moment before returning to the blank slate, and I wondered if it was a delayed reaction to hitting the door, or just a few moments of clarity. The woman, now seeming a little more focused, swept her eyes around the store again. She stopped on the roller oven, home of terrible hot dogs and questionable things simply called “rollers”, which were kind of like giant egg rolls full of meat and cheese. I’ve never tried them, even though they’re only a dollar and pretty big, just on principle.

Up close, the woman was even more of a sight to behold. She seemed like she might be quite beautiful, but there was a lot that made it hard to tell. Her face was mostly clear and fairly pretty, save that one of her eyes looked recently blackened, but partially healed. More yellowish bruises, not as dark as the others, basically invisible when she’d been further away, bloomed across even bigger patches of her skin. Nowhere seemed without one -- her legs, arms, and breasts all sported a couple. And on her left arm, and breasts were those cigarette burns. This was more than just self-inflicted drug-addled accidents, this looked like outright abuse, or a severe penchant for fighting. Her nails, which looked as though they’d once been long and painted, were jagged, as if she had clawed at something and chipped off bits and pieces of them.The whites of both of her eyes were bright pink. I added weed to my growing mental list of drugs this lady was probably on.

The woman turned toward the oven. I could see that her hair, long, brown, and a terrible mess, had started to fall out in a few places. Jesus. I thought. She’s got the habit really bad. The woman began her awkward, lurching walk again, toward the spinning food. I realized right then that I had just put all of the rollers out not too long ago, and that none of them would be fully cooked yet, still sitting behind the little grease splattered sign that read “Items behind this sign not done cooking!” with a little smiley face on it.

I cleared my throat. The woman made no notice. I found myself, to my own amazement, a little afraid of the woman. I’d dealt with drug addicts before, sometimes ones that wanted to argue with me, sometimes ones that wanted to argue with me while holding guns. Even a couple that tried to come over the counter at me, but I’d kept them all at bay with ease and without a flicker of panic. Being a lesbian in the and 70s and 80s in Texas was something of an unofficial training for this job. There’s no name I haven’t been called and no type of person I haven’t had attack me at least once. But something about this woman -- the nails, the hair, the eyes -- had me spooked enough that I had to steel myself to speak.

“Ma’am? Ma’am.” The woman didn’t turn around, but she did pause her shambling walk. She seemed to be listening. “Those aren’t ready to eat yet, they’re not cooked all the way.”

The woman remained paused, her back to me, as if considering this. Then, wordlessly, she began shuffling toward the rack of spinning cylinders. I had thought she might be coming down off of whatever she was on, but seeing her restart her walk made me reconsider. Her depth perception and movement speed seemed to be getting worse, not better. And she didn’t seem to understand the concept of “undercooked” at the moment, either. Reaching the rolling rack, the woman ignored the greasy tongs hanging in front of them and snatched three of the half-cooked rollers directly off the hot metal. I winced in empathy as the woman’s hands made full contact with the scorching metal. Maybe the woman wasn’t an abuse victim or a fighter, but simply often too high to have self preservation or common sense.

I glanced out the window towards the woman’s car, parked somewhat haphazardly at a pump. It was a nice car, an innocuously tan mid-sized sedan. It looked way too nice for a druggie to afford, more like something you’d see the mom who always volunteered to carpool the soccer team driving. I wondered if it was stolen. Or perhaps she was one of those poor souls you saw hovering around a dealer, blankly following their every command and performing whatever dangerous stunts amused them in the hopes that they’d reward them with some of what they craved. Maybe this was his car, which he’d sent her out in for a snack run.

The woman did not place the rollers, which despite being undercooked, should still have been exceedingly hot on the outsides, in the provided sleeves designed to keep the product warm and insulate it from burning people. She gripped two of them in her left hand, which I could see was already turning red, and the third in the right. And as she turned around -- I had to try hard not to wince at her bright pink eyes -- she took the one in her right hand and raised it to her lips, tearing off a piece. The movement was very reminiscent of a coyote tearing into roadkill, as if the woman had regressed to a more animal state in her stupor.

I felt my skin prickling with gooseflesh. Every part of me wanted to run and lock myself in the utility closet. My mind struggled to make sense of my borderline panic. It was just another junkie, or so it seemed. But something was wrong.. off. I can only compare the feeling to looking at an optical illusion that seemed normal until you flipped or rotated it and it devolved into body horror. (I just googled the name of that optical illusion, it’s called the Thatcher Effect.) It felt as though I had recognized the horror even if the image hadn’t been flipped yet.

I looked at the woman’s face, the soft yellowish green bruise on her cheek and sickly yellow of the area around her eye. It was unpleasant, but not particularly frightening…

Just then I thought of another type of optical puzzle -- spot the difference. Her cheek hadn’t been bruised when she’d walked in -- surely I would have noticed that? I quickly began re-running my mental footage of her entrance. I could actually seem to remember specifically noting her face as one of the least affected areas as far as bruises were concerned. Could I have missed a giant gross bruise right in the middle of her cheek? I felt more nervous than ever. That bruise was like the dot at the bottom of an exclamation point in my mind -- I hated it.

The woman drew close, and her head lolled downwards as she continued to devour the roller, obscuring the bruise enough for me to catch the breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding. When she was done, a mere two bites and ten seconds later, which felt like the longest period of time I’d ever waited on a customer, she reached into her bra, head still lowered, and pulled out a 20 dollar bill. Cheese and grease from the roller, smeared on her hand and, presumably, her downturned face, stuck to the bill as she slapped it onto the counter. It made a wet sound. I looked at Andrew Jackson’s disapproving, grease-smeared face, hesitant to reach over to the other side of the counter.

Some deep, small voice, in a part of my mind I barely hear from or understand spoke up then. Don’t reach toward it.

This voice is a quiet and rare, but a powerful presence. I’ve heard this just twice before. The first time was when I was a kid and the neighbor’s rabid dog had locked eyes with me. The only other time was when I was 20, and I saw a man outside one of the tiny, low-key gay bars my then-girlfriend, Sandra, and I had frequented. He’d seemed normal, nonchalant, but the voice had told me that he was not, and we should leave. Sandra, the relationship then still very new, had not taken my “I have a bad feeling, can we leave?” well, having promised several friends that they were to meet her new squeeze today. She had stormed off into the bar, leaving only a whiff of her intoxicating scent behind. I had wanted to go after her, but the soft, firm voice had spoken up a final time (until today), saying I should leave.

So I did, going home to my shitty apartment alone. Once there, obviously, I was beside myself for fucking up the new relationship over some random creepy guy outside of a lesbian bar. It’s not like there’s a shortage of those, even today. Fetishizers, frat boys that don’t really understand what “lesbian” actually means, religious folks getting mad (there was especially no shortage of those back then.) But this guy hadn’t felt like any of those. Still, I was kicking myself in the ass about being so paranoid until I’d gotten the call. My friend, Matilda, sobbing and near hysteria, told me over the phone that Sandra was dead. Everyone was dead. One girl had survived because she’d been in the back, where a door to the alley behind the place was tucked away, and had ran out it at the first sound of gunplay. She’d fled to a nearby home and used the phone to call police, but by the time they arrived, it was too late. A man, armed with two M14s, had slipped into the bar around 3, when it was about to close and everyone drinking was decently drunk. He sprayed the place down with bullets, and with as small as the place was, no one survived. Then, he’d turned the gun on himself. When I saw his picture in the paper the next day, it was the man I’d seen outside the bar.

I remember that whole thing so vividly, but the soft voice that had emerged from the furthest parts my mind most. I guess that might be what some people refer to as intuition, but I don’t know if that’s the right name for it. Whatever it was, it still sticks with me to this day, along with a bottle of perfume she left at my apartment. I wear it every year on her birthday, and I wore it to the funeral her family refused to attend after finding out where she was killed..

I didn’t question the voice this time.

Trying to sound pleasant, and mostly succeeding, I thought, I said “Will that be all for you, ma’am?” I left the bill where it was. I figured I could take it and put it in the drawer after the woman was long gone. I’d already decided that this was the plan.

The woman was silent for a moment, head still lolling on her neck, looking almost like a child trying to avoid looking at an adult when they did something wrong. Then, finally she spoke. Her voice was a bit ragged, but sounded surprisingly pleasant given how she looked. I guess I’d been expecting some kind of crypt-keeper or mummy voice, dry and cracking. But this woman sounded like she was just a bit tired, or had just woken up. “Put the rest on the pump, please.”

I hesitated. The thought occurred to me again to refuse to provide the woman with fuel. Maybe I can should tell her I don’t want to be liable for her accident. Suddenly the area of my mind where the warning voice originated from sent an alarm, wordless and loud and frightened but it was too late. The woman’s head snapped up, and her arm shot out, where my arm would have been if I’d reached for the bill. The movement was so startling that I didn’t register anything but the jolt of fear in my stomach at first.

Then I focused on her face, and saw, to my horror, that the bruise on her cheek had grown from its sickly yellowish red to a deep purple. Her nose was bleeding out of one nostril, her pupils were huge, seeming to take up her whole eye. “Now, now, let’s not let those nasty thoughts in, Big Bird.”

I jumped back from the counter, hurrying to approve the gas transaction. That voice had changed my mind, I just wanted her away from me as quickly as possible. The woman’s voice was different, quite suddenly. Though the tone probably would have been the same if you’d compared recordings, the way it spoke was so different it was like a different person. It lilted, soft and velvety, like a child singing a nursery rhyme, but had a jagged quality that did not sound childish at all, and there was a slight spanish accent to it now that had certainly not been there before. Mostly, though, every word sounded malicious, like a threat. Even though with the lilting, soft voice shouldn’t have sounded cruel and monstrous, it did. The area behind the curtain in my mind was now sending out a low-level buzz. My whole body was pulsing with electricity, ready to run.

I tried not to think about how she’d called me by Marilyn’s nickname, but my mind was racing. How did she know? I didn’t say anything. All I did was think it. How did she know? Could she really read my mind?

The woman smiled. It was horrible, it stretched much wider than any smile should. It seemed to go all the way to her ears. Her tongue, still covered in bits of gas station roller bits, lolled out of it, a purplish slug. I felt myself shaking. I feel like -- no, I know -- that if I had looked at that smile for too long, I would have gone insane. And I knew it even in that moment, but I couldn’t look away. As I watched, frozen and horrified, a small blood vessel popped in the woman’s eye, and blood began to pool in it slowly. I wanted to claw at my own eyes so I didn’t have to look at that hateful smile.

“Oh god, please!” I screamed. “Please stop, I’ll do whatever you want, just please. Fucking stop.”

For one terrible moment, her grin only seemed to widen. But then, mercifully, it shrank again, now a contented smirk. The woman slid the dollar over to my side of the counter, waggling her eyebrows. Blood that had splattered onto her hand from the nosebleed smeared across the counter. I knew what she was telling me -- she knew I’d been afraid to reach. She knew, somehow, and was taunting me. She thought it was hilarious. I took the bill, gingerly, not looking away from the woman's hands -- cracked nails and all - as I did so. The woman didn’t move to touch me.

“That’ll be all for me.” she said, in her barbed-wire-wrapped-in-velvet voice

Then a change came over her face, a determined, wary sadness. It was like the moments of clarity when she had first come in, but longer. “Please help me.” She whispered, in the original voice again, no accent. “Please, oh, god, help me.” She said, voice breaking. I felt my heart break a little for the woman. She was sick in a way I couldn’t - and can’t, even now with time between me and the event -- fathom. Even as I wanted to reach out and touch the woman’s face, give her some last vestiges of comfort before she was gone, I saw her start to disappear into the slack-jawed nothingness again.

The woman leaned closer across the counter. That terrible smile threatened on her lips, again. The look in her eyes, the left one now about ⅓ full of dark blood, set off the wordless panic buzzing in the back of my mind again. She’s going to attack me. I thought. She’s going to attack me and hurt me. The woman tensed, and I wrapped my hand around the bat I kept under the counter, knowing even as I did it I would be too slow to stop her.

But the woman froze suddenly, her head snapping towards the front door, and the car outside. I didn’t follow her gaze, keeping my eyes on those ripped up nails, hands gripping the counter so hard they were white.. She said something in Spanish, back to her smooth, threatening voice and ripped her hands off the counter with such force I jumped. She gave me a rueful smile, and said. “Gotta go, Big Bird.”

I felt my eyes widen again at Marilyn’s pet name. The woman threw her head back and laughed, a gross, hyena-like sound, and I stood trembling, waiting for her to attack, just like with the rabid dog when I was a kid. But then she darted away from the counter and shoved her way through the door. I didn’t take my eyes off her as she retreated to the car, loping along and almost falling twice. She ripped open the safety latch above the gas valve, and shoved the pump’s handle into the hole. My mind screamed LOCK THE DOOR LOCK THE DOOR GO LOCK THE FUCKING DOOR. For one, seemingly eternal, horrifying moment, it seemed I was still too afraid to move, but then my legs began working, and I dropped the bat with a clunk.

The woman seemed to hear it clunk against the ground, even as far away as she was, and turned back towards me. I struggled with my key, and my shaking hand missed the lock. The too-huge grin was spreading across the woman’s face again, sanity-threatening even from a distance. She raised her hand slowly, and gave a cheerful wave. I trembled, key clattering against and finally into the lock. With a soft click, I turned the deadbolt. The woman moved as if to move back towards the newly locked door.

Gotta Go, Big Bird. The words echoed in my mind and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. She took another step towards the door, and I tensed, ready to retreat to the supply closet as I’d wanted to before. But, just as suddenly as before, the woman’s head again snapped towards the car. She stalked to the driver's side and climbed in.

“Thank God, she’s leaving” I murmured out loud. “Thank god, oh my god, she’s gone, oh thank you Jesus…”

I looked at the car, and my breath caught in my throat. A young girl, no more than six or seven, appeared in the back window. She was far enough away, behind the tinted back windows, that I couldn’t see her very clearly, but she seemed to be going through the typical motions of someone who had just woken up -- rubbing her eyes and pushing the hair out of her face. At least that explained why I hadn’t seen her before. She did a double take of where she was, and I saw her face turns towards the driver. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, and she began pulling on the door handle. It didn’t open, likely child-locked, and she began to pound on the window. Even as obscured as she was by the darkness and distance, I could the dark ring of bruises around her neck.

The woman reached a claw-like hand into the backseat and dragged the girl by her hair into the shadowy depths of the car.

I picked up the phone and called the police right then and there. They’ve found the car now -- the used the footage to get the license plate. They found it just a few days later out by the edge of the Rio Grande, but no sign of the owner.

Or her daughter.