The Quick Stop

The gas pump on the left was broken. It had been broken for six months and Tom Briggs had not fixed it because fixing it required going to Cleveland and Cleveland required leaving the station and leaving the station meant that Maggie would have to ring up the coffee herself and Maggie was not good at ringing up coffee because she talked to people and people talked back and Maggie did not like it when people talked back.

Tom stood behind the counter and watched the rain hit the parking lot. It was a thin rain, the kind that Ohio gets in October when the leaves are turning and the sky is the color of a dirty dish and the world feels like it is slowly forgetting what it is supposed to be.

A truck pulled in. Big rig, eighteen wheels, the kind that shakes the ground when it stops. The driver got out, tall and thin, wearing a jacket that had once been blue but was now the color of something you couldn't remember.

"Fill her up," the driver said.

Tom took the nozzle and walked to the truck. He put his hands on the nozzle and he pushed it into the tank and he watched the numbers on the pump go up and he thought about how numbers go up and you can't stop them and you can't slow them down and they just keep going until they reach a number that means something and then they keep going past that number because numbers don't know when to stop.

The driver leaned against the truck and watched Tom work. "You ever see a wolf around here?" he asked.

Tom paused. The pump was still running, the numbers still going up. "No," he said.

"Me neither," the driver said. "Just asking. My wife says she saw one last week. Near the old barn off Route 9."

Tom finished pumping the gas. He handed the driver his card. The driver paid and got back in the truck and drove away and Tom stood there for a moment in the rain and watched the taillights disappear and then he went back inside the station and turned off the broken pump and made a cup of coffee and sat down and watched the rain.

---

He saw the wolf the next morning.

He was unlocking the front door at six in the morning, the kind of morning that is still dark and smells like diesel and wet asphalt, when he looked up and saw it standing behind the old barn that was not really a barn anymore, just a collection of rotting wood and a roof that had given up five years ago.

The wolf was medium-sized, grey, and its left front paw was bad—dragging slightly, the claw missing, the flesh scarred from something that had happened a long time ago.

Tom looked at the wolf. The wolf looked at Tom. Neither of them moved.

Tom went inside and locked the door and made coffee and opened the station at seven.

At eleven, he looked out the window and the wolf was still there.

At three, he looked out the window and the wolf was still there.

At six, when the station closed and Maggie went home to her empty apartment and her two kids who didn't talk to her and her ex-husband who didn't call, Tom locked the door, walked around to the back of the station, and stood in the rain and looked at the wolf.

The wolf did not move.

Tom went inside, opened the refrigerator, took out a package of ground beef that was about to expire, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and carried it to the back of the station. He set the bag on the ground ten feet from the wolf and walked back to the door and went inside and locked it and made a cup of coffee and sat down and watched the rain.

---

The next morning, the beef was gone.

Tom did not say anything. He did the same thing the next morning and the next and the next. A pound of ground beef, wrapped in plastic, set on the ground ten feet from the wolf, and then Tom went inside and made coffee and sat down and watched the rain.

On the fifth day, the wolf was gone. Tom waited until noon, and then he walked around to the back of the station and looked at the spot where he had put the beef. It was gone, licked clean, the plastic bag torn open and scattered by the wind.

He went back inside and made coffee and sat down and watched the rain.

On the seventh day, the wolf returned. It came at dusk, when the sky was the color of a bruise and the rain had stopped and the world was quiet in the way that only rural Ohio can be quiet, which is to say not quiet at all but full of small sounds that you only notice when you are standing alone in a parking lot at six in the evening looking at a wolf.

The wolf sat down. Tom sat down. They sat there for twenty minutes, the man and the wolf, in the parking lot of a gas station that nobody used anymore except for the occasional truck driver who needed gas and coffee and a place to use the bathroom that had a lock on the door.

Maggie came out of the station at some point. She stood in the doorway and watched them for a while, and then she went back inside and closed the door and turned off the lights and went home.

---

They developed a routine. The wolf came at dusk. Tom put out beef. They sat together for twenty minutes. The wolf left. Tom went inside.

It was not a friendship. It was not a bond. It was not anything that had a name. It was simply two beings who existed in the same space at the same time and who had decided, for reasons that neither of them could articulate or even fully understand, to share that space without hostility.

Tom did not think about it much. He was not the kind of man who thought about things much. He thought about the gas pump, and the rent, and his son in Cleveland, and the fact that his left knee ached when it rained, and the fact that he had not felt like going anywhere in three years.

The wolf did not think about it either. Animals don't think the way humans think. The wolf did not sit in front of the barn at dusk and reflect on the nature of human-animal relations or consider the philosophical implications of accepting food from a species that had spent ten thousand years trying to eliminate its own. The wolf came because it was hungry and the beef was there and the man did not threaten it and the space between them was a space that both of them could inhabit without fear.

One evening, a month into the routine, Tom brought two cups of coffee. He set one on the ground near the wolf and sat down and drank his own. The wolf did not touch the coffee. It sniffed it, turned its head, and looked at Tom with those dark, unreadable eyes.

"Right," Tom said. "Coffee. Duh."

He drank his coffee in the dark, in the parking lot of a gas station in rural Ohio, next to a wolf, and he thought about how strange it was that this was not strange to him, that this was just another Tuesday, another evening, another moment in a life that was made up of moments that were not extraordinary but were, in their own quiet way, real.

---

The wolf stopped coming in November.

Tom noticed on the third day. He put out the beef, and he sat down, and he waited, and the wolf did not come. He waited until dark, and then he went inside and made coffee and sat down and watched the rain hit the parking lot and he thought about how the wolf was probably gone, probably moved on, probably found another place to sit and another man to sit with and another routine to follow.

He put out beef for a week. Then he stopped.

Maggie noticed. "You stopped feeding the wolf," she said. It was not a question.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

Maggie stood behind the counter and rang up a customer's gas and watched Tom through the window as he stood in the parking lot looking at the old barn, and she thought about asking him more questions, but she didn't. She had learned, in the two years she had worked at the Quick Stop, that Tom didn't like it when people asked him questions.

Winter came. The rain turned to snow. The gas pump on the left stopped working entirely and Tom did not fix it because fixing it required going to Cleveland and Cleveland required leaving the station and leaving the station meant that Maggie would have to ring up the coffee herself.

In March, when the snow melted and the leaves started turning green and the world started remembering what it was supposed to be, Tom walked around to the back of the station out of habit, the way you do something out of habit even after the reason for doing it is gone.

The old barn stood there, rotting, its roof caved in, its walls leaning at angles that suggested they had given up a long time ago. There was no wolf. There was no beef. There was no trace of anything having ever happened there at all.

Tom stood there for a moment in the spring air, the sun warm on his face, the smell of wet earth and diesel and coffee and rain and nothing, and then he turned around and went back inside the station and locked the door and made a cup of coffee and sat down and watched the rain.

---

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