editor's note: this is a
continuation of the short
story serialization we
began in the second quarter,
1998. it is presented here
in its entirety.
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carrie
by paul soupiset
Grey wash for sky.
The warm evening was rendered in blacks and whites, save the weathered,
red Coca-Cola sign bolted to the side of the Thompson Auto Stop. She had
been spending more time than usual at her part time job which consisted
of sitting on a barstool behind a formica 
counter-top waiting
for no one to visit the gas station. Hers was one of the few positions in
town which afforded the opportunity to escape into paperback accounts of
Someplace Else. Every two hours she would add ditto marks and initials in
the attendants' log, and at 8:55pm she would close down the register and
signal the end of her shift with the mechanical roll-and-bump of the vending
machine birthing a twelve-ounce orange soda.
By 8:59 she was outside in the heat balancing the bottle on a white brick painted ledge, momentarily freeing up both hands to pull and lock the front door. Working double shifts at the Auto Stop wouldn't appeal to most. But for Carrie, solitude was the order of the day. Walking slowly toward her pickup, she managed to snag the shoulder of her blue polyester uniform on the ancient, debossed Mechanic On Duty sign. She glanced back at the sign and smirked, shaking her head. Everyone in town knew the mechanic position hadn't been filled since the Nixon administration. "...take th' sign down, and ya don't get hurt...," she whispered.
She eased into the truck and groped for the keyring stashed under the driver's seat. "ignition" Now came the hilly trip home.
The next thing Carrie remembered was the sound of smooth pavement giving way to the familiar pop of crushed granite as the steering wheel spun slowly counter-clockwise, panning dusty twin beams of light toward the carport.
She sat still in the truck for a moment before turning the key and heading past the garden walk up to the porchlight.
----------
The new family room clock tolled once at 9:30, breaking the evening silence in the house. It startled Carrie who was thinking, alone, at the breakfast table. "nine-thirty must be ninety degrees outside " she whispered lazily, putting on a false southern belle accent to emphasize the syllable 'nine.'
"Why, it's ninety degrees, sir" She pictured the clock in the next room confirming her protracted words: the hour and minute hands spanning a precise ninety degree arc. "ninety degrees, I'm told nine-thirty tolled " She continued amusing herself this way for another two minutes, an artificial antebellum hothouse flower, wilted after a long day behind the counter-top reading borrowed paperbacks at the empty gas station. She brushed the light switch and headed for bed, taking a few minutes to mend the torn workshirt.
----------
Friday morning was quiet. Carrie prayed in the truck on the way to work. "Simple things confound the wise man," she thought to herself.
"Jesus, why'd'you make some educated and some plain? Why'd Jacob and Mom hafta go? Warm I Donna be a year from now?"
All questions for later.
9:27. In the station she unpacked her green canvas backpack, the same one she had used during her faltering stint at the community college. She placed her stationery, her books and a fountain pen neatly on the second shelf. She took out some club crackers and a green apple and set them on the third shelf. And then she noticed something she hadn't noticed the night before when she closed shop. Laid across the counter-top was a small baronial envelope with a red wax seal, looking rather silly and pretentious amidst paper oil funnels and air filters and gasoline fumes.
She cast a glance sideways toward the front door and then quickly flipped the envelope over with her thumb and index finger to read the front: 'Carrie.'
She knew enough about society circles in town to be certain of two things: no galas were ever planned this close to Independence Day, and she would never be on the guest list anyway.
Carrie didn't 'do' curiosity well.
9:28 Carrie flicked at the seal with her index finger several times until it gave, and then peeled the liner far enough to reveal the edges of two folded bills bearing the green-grey of currency. A half-second later they were out of the envelope and being unfolded to reveal the amount...
----------
(Five hours later an older couple en route from Florida would pull in under the Thompson Auto Stop portico looking for directions. It would be the first time anyone noticed that Carrie was missing.)
----------
12:45 The ranch hadn't changed much since her childhood. The entrance was paved blacktop now, and her truck eased over the cattle guards and down the sloping green hill. The river would be several more minutes west. Around the first turn, she knew she would find the foreman's house and the garage. The property was remote, and that afforded several helps to a young woman piecing together speculative plans. The house was empty at midday. Carrie continued driving downhill until the road ran parallel to the river. At once the cypress trees broke, giving way to brush. As the mesquite and cedar grew thicker, she began looking for a place to hide her truck. The migras never cleared the underbrush this far from the main quarters ... properly executed, the grey truck could remain in hiding for years.
She headed back uphill to the foreman's house and went inside the back door. It opened with a little difficulty.
Keys and bolts and locks weren't needed in the middle of nowhere, and in twenty years there had never been an instance of trespassing. Until now.
Careful not to leave fingerprints, Carrie held onto a tee-shirt as she went through the drawers of the master bedroom looking for a set of clothes to replace the blue attendant's uniform.
II
1:13 pm. Carrie walked slowly out along the grass and checked nervously for the envelope. She knew she was completely alone, yet her gaze darted: left, right, down. Fifty-three steps along the flagstone path to get to the family ranch house.
three hour drive just thinkin', Jesus
From the perfect green bluff just beyond the back door, Carrie could see down to the sliver of the shallow hill country river. Twice she paced the distance of the back porch to see if anyone would catch a glint of the abandoned truck's mirrors, far below.
Satisfied, she eased herself into the weathered porch swing that faced the bluff, the gate, and the serpentine trail that switched back and forth down to the limestone springs.
Her body stayed there, swinging under the shade of the trees another five minutes while her mind was set free to wonder and dream and fear.
three hour drive of thinkin', Jesus, and I don't know where it came from an' Lord it isn't really home when no one's there no more the house was practically mine an' now that Jake - I don't want to think you just gave this to me for nothing, maybe it's from the paintings God'r maybe maybe it's angelmoney like Mama joked
But the bewilderment wasn't so much attributed toward
the unknown benefactor but to the strange flight to which she was driven.
Here was wanderlust intermingled with determination to live out some existence
that was worthy of remembering--worthy of commiting the journey to paper
like so many paperback accounts back at the Auto Stop. Finally: Carrie had
the means to go Someplace Else.
She held the two, crisp thousand-dollar bills tightly in her hand, and followed the cedar and barbed wire fence up to the ranch road. At one of several deerblind gates along the front property line, she leaned against a makeshift baling-wire closure until it gave, and continued quickly up the main road several miles toward the place that working locals used for an after hours meeting place and unofficial bus stop.
Since her childhood, the family ranch was the only place Carrie had ever known sanctuary and escape. She used to drive out and study for finals at the junior college; several times she paid off the ranch foreman and his sons and held wild sorority bashes on the grounds without her father's knowledge. In the better days her brother was sent out to spend each summer living and sitting and painting under the watch of several paid caretakers - it proved less expensive and more therapeutic than institutionalized care. It was one of those summers - and from one of the selfsame caretakers - that Carrie learned about the party bus, the busstop, and about Mexico:
Most Friday and Saturday nights various herders and shearers - migras and gringos from surrounding ranches - would pile into a decrepit, jaundiced schoolbus (once used to transport previous generations to tungsten-lit gospel tent revivals) and speed down to Piedras Negras in order to blow half a week's salary on indiscretions, lodging and a quick Saturday lunch at Moderno's before heading back across the border to their respective quarters to engage in the art of exaggeration. Gas money costs five bucks.
Walking alongside the freshly sealed blacktop she kicked at all the displaced river rocks that fell beneath her stride, and contemplated the ride ahead. it's safety versus freedom. anonymity versus danger versus freedom versus safety versus death versus she eventually arrived at the impromptu bus stop: a faded, wooden picnic table painted red-white-and-blue, situated beneath the canopy of a big treaty oak.
That shade tree was the only oasis between the lower and upper forks of the river.
Time passed. The rolling terrain afforded her a twenty-second notice of approaching traffic, yet she thought it safer to just wait behind the oak to avoid being spotted by any of the foreman's family. Sundown. She had just finished dining on the green apple and club crackers from her backpack when the headlights of the old yellow junker came into view. Only three silhouettes could be discerned inside as the bus crept toward the roadside picnic table as part of its Friday night ritual. The door pivoted and extended an open invitation to Carrie. She boarded.
She sat, detached and silent, much like the other three travelers, listening to the numbing fugal theme traded back and forth between radio static and the churanga intermittently broadcasted over the tejano radio as the bus barreled on through the night. The blurred landscape grew darker. Engine drone. The instrument panel's dim phosphorescence gave the young cliquista driver a demonic look. "This time yesterday I was a gas station attendant," she thought and drifted off and fought the oncoming sleep and tightened the grip on her backpack
She awoke about nine or ten to the air brakes' discharge at the designated dropoff point a few blocks from the border crossing. The travelers paid for their passage silently. "This might as well be El Rio Styx," she thought as the party disbanded and walked out into the night.
Crossing the border was uncomplicated on foot, and she walked into the mercado and made her way past the tourist traps and into a wide open space to her left.
There, along the eastern perimeter of La Plaza de San Diego del Oeste was a small rust-covered gate made of scrap metal. A silly, throwaway detail caught her eye, and made her laugh: above the hasp was a debossed sign, identical to the one that stood sentinel over the Thompson Auto Stop. The gate's lentil announced a taqueria was to be found inside. She pulled the gate open and headed down a stepping-stone path lined with Christmas tree lights. Her head was buzzing by this time--a mixture of hunger and curiosity--and she sat down in the courtyard at the first table she bumped into.
Peppered black for sky. She sat and pictured how she looked against this exotic backdrop.
I want to order a Coca-Cola. Some college boys from the states were the only other customers in this hole-in-the-wall. To Carrie they looked like the clean-scrubbed type of guys who used to be interns on her dad's newspaper.
Awaiting the phantom service she overhead bits of their excited conversation, and at length began to understand the plan unfolding that night: they were in Mexico for a weekend searching for some sort of experience straight out of the movie Fandango-Carrie inferred their roadtrip and subsequent burial ritual was either intended to cement the fleeting covalent bonds of their university days or to cover up something sinister. She listened some more, halfheartedly, visualizing a young Costner sitting around the same table, years ago.
The boys stood to leave. She returned to waiting. Burial. She thought about the possibilities with resolve.
death brings burial an' separation, Jacob said, but glorification--that's diff'ernt entirely...
Suddenly Carrie walked up to the counter and asked for a bottle of Dos Equis, overpaid the lady sitting near the counter, and hurried out the courtyard and followed the college boys as they headed into the streets. She drank the large bottle's contents as she walked, shadowing the pack as they walked northeast, further into the hills, back up away from the lights and toward the river. The boys huddled and stopped. She circled around past the pack, not waiting to see them--not wanting to see them. Fifty yards away she crouched, hiding, fatigued and buzzed, planning.
She took the money out of the envelope--this time yesterday I was a gas station attendant-- and she took the bottle and felt a little dizzy and her hands groped for a stick or a piece of rock, 'Jesus?'
'Jesus?'
She reached a place she thought she could remember and tried to quickly memorize the landscape and features there in the middle of the night. She reached out her hand and took the bottle and rolled up the two thousand dollars and stuffed it down into the neck of the beer bottle. She looked up again, muttering--muttering, "a pickaxe would be great right now." Then she noticed a bone fragment wedged into the dry earth near a chaparral thicket. She took it and dug for about five minutes. The dirt was stubborn and only allowed six or seven inches. Carrie placed the bottle side-ways in the dirt and covered it.
She emerged into the clearing and ran past the boys back down the scrub path toward town, towards the border, toward the bus that would take her back to her sanctuary, back to the ranch, back to the truck, back to the house and then, eventually, back to Thompson's Auto Stop, where she would sit and store up dreams of the places she might go one day.
Bus pulled out into the night to the dizzy sounds of the norteñas.
She slept well.