You Should Turn Around

The roads are all the same.

I keep thinking this over and over, almost in disbelief.

The roads are all the same.

The same old curves, the same pin-straight stretches, the same farmers’ lanes (although some are overgrown now), the same winding streams and narrow, one-lane bridges that span them. There is the steep dip on South Creek Road and the nonsensical winding on Old Schoolhouse Lane. I laugh to myself. I could drive these roads all day. But it is noon now, and we need to find some lunch and a place to stay.

Galen’s gas station is still here. I can hardly believe it. I pull into a parking space and sit there. You seem relieved.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I feel better now.”

I’m not sure what to say to that, so I reminisce out loud. “This old gas station was here when I was a kid. Forty years ago. Used to be run by a man named Galen. He was so big he used the garage doors to come and go out of the gas station. He didn’t fit through the normal door.”

I shake my head in wonder. This does take a man back.

I catch some movement out of the corner of my eye, and I feel a chill race through my body. A very large man shuffles across the pavement.

Galen?

But as he gets closer I can see it’s not quite him. It couldn’t be him, anyway. This man is much too young, seems to be about my age. Galen would be in his eighties or nineties by now.

He taps on the window and I roll it down. His eyes squint suspiciously. “Help you?” he asks. He wears a limp ball cap pulled down low, the shadow hiding his eyes.

“Do you know Galen?” I ask.

His squint deepens, grows shadows. “Who’s askin’?”

“I’m Paul Elias. I’m from here. From Nysa. Grew up here, anyway.”

“Paul,” he says, and it comes out in a deep croak. He stands up as straight as he can and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. He slaps the small box four or five times against his meaty hands and twitches the pack so that one peeks out. A lighter emerges from his sagging pockets. He lights, inhales, and exhales my name.

“Paullllll.” He scowls to himself before asking, “What year’d you graduate?”

Smoke clouds out of every hole in his head like there is some inner fire.

“Seventy-nine.”

He shakes his head. “I was a year behind you. Can’t say I recall your face.”

“Does Galen still own this place?”

“Galen was my pop. Guess he still is, but he’s dead now. Has been for six years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s life,” he says, and the squint returns. “Why’d you come back?”

“This is my granddaughter.” I gesture over to you. “I wanted her to see the place where I grew up.”

He grunts, seems to communicate that this is perhaps the dumbest thing he has ever heard.