David Cashmore sat at the wheel of his Ford Explorer watching a geyser of steam erupting from under the hood; his wife Michelle sat in the passenger seat fuming. He imagined a similar geyser bursting from her ears; she looked at him contemptuously, what he saw in her eyes was beyond anger.
"You had to listen to your pals at the sports bar didn't you? 'Don't worry Chelle, it's a back road but it's fine and will cut thirty minutes off our journey.' Which numb-nut told you that?" Michelle seethed.
David just cringed behind the wheel.
"And of course we are both perfectly dressed to make mechanical repairs or go for a romp through the desert to find help! We might as well be on fucking Mars! We haven't seen a single vehicle since we left the blacktop back where we got gas!" Michelle's anger was simmering but David knew that she was about to boil.
Michelle hardly ever swore and when she did he knew that there was no reasoning with her until she'd expended her fury and calmed down from her tantrum.
David was dressed in an expensive Hugo Boss suit and Michelle was clad in a figure-hugging designer dress, nylons and heels, as they were en route to their friend's wedding to he held that evening at South Lake Tahoe. Michelle had wanted to fly from San Francisco but David had insisted on taking his new SUV for a nice long drive. The only way he had convinced Michelle to travel by car was to promise her an overnight stay in a five-star hotel at Lake Tahoe hotel followed by a day's gambling and another overnight stay in Reno.
Michelle rummaged in her purse and found her cell phone; she looked at the screen contemptuously, wound down the window and held it up to the sky for a minute and then threw it on the dash.
David cringed.
"Surprise! Surprise! No fucking service!" Michelle crossed her arms, fuming.
"I'll have to get the Triple A," David said, trying to placate her.
"You are a fucking dumb-ass! I just told you there is NO FUCKING SERVICE!" she snatched the phone off the dashboard and threw it at him.
"Maybe there's a phone inside," David said meekly.
The look of contempt that Michelle gave David required no words to be spoken.
When the engine had started to overheat they had pulled into an abandoned roadhouse service station. It looked deserted, the Texaco sign was faded and broken, hanging drunkenly from a rickety pole. The dusty driveway was choked with weeks, the ancient gas pumps were rusted; the hoses had been ripped off them likely by some scavenger. The awning over the gas pumps was equally corroded; holed and lopsided, almost ready to collapse, but at least it provided shade.
Not that the day was particularly hot; in fact out in the desert it was quite brisk.
David popped the hood and stepped out of the Explorer; he gingerly lifted the hood and waved at the cloud of steam, trying to dissipate it.
He stood there looking in the engine bay of his brand new pride and joy with a bemused look on his face. The collection of boxes, hoses, wiring looms and engine parts baffled him. He knew how to fill the window washer and check the oil and coolant and that was the extent of his mechanical expertise.
"Dumb-ass," Michelle had stepped down the car and appeared beside him.
"I think it's coming from that hose down there," David pointed into the engine bay.
Michelle snatched his hand away from under the hood.
"Don't get that fucking suit dirty David. You're taking me to that wedding if you have to carry me there; and there is no time to change our clothes," Michelle seethed.
David knew that telling Michelle that the chances of them making the wedding were about the same odds of them winning a jackpot in Reno would only infuriate her even more.
"Lets look inside," David tried to sound hopeful.
Michelle looked at the dilapidated roadhouse diner and shuddered. It looked even more forlorn than the gas stand. The sheet-iron roof that had once been adorned with a Texaco logo was hitched and broke-backed, holed in places and corroded. The windows that were not boarded over were dirty and cobwebbed and most of them were broken or cracked.
As they approached the door, which hung drunkenly from its hinges, they passed a rusty old Coke machine with the faded decal bearing the image of a smiling woman in a bikini drinking an ice-cold beverage with the words 'For Real Refreshment' peeling off it.
Michelle looked at the decal with suppressed rage and sighed despondently.
"Right," she muttered contemptuously under her breath.
David led the way into the ramshackle building and Michelle followed; both careful not soil their clothes and in Michelle's case, snag her nylons.
Most of the furniture had been taken away or vandalised beyond use. The place smelt musty; a lingering stench of mildew, stale cigarettes, stale liquor and a faint undercurrent of ancient fried food. The filthy floor was littered with beer and liquor bottles, drug paraphernalia, cigarette butts and decaying used condoms.
Some joker has pinned a pair of lime green satin panties to the flaking dry wall like they was on display in the lingerie section of a department store. The same joker had scribed graffiti on the wall besides the undergarment 'I fucked Stephanie here 05/12/18' with an arrow pointing to the crotch of the panties. Whoever Stephanie was, she was long gone and sans underwear.
Beside the panties a series of nineteen-sixty era framed advertising posters had been hung from the wall, probably in an effort to provide cheap decoration and cheer up the baby-shit yellow painted walls. Besides the usual advertisements for cigarettes, beer, motor oil and other products one would expect in a gas station was an advertisement for Hanes Underall Pantyhose. It featured the buttocks and thighs of a woman clad in sheer pantyhose with the slogan 'pantyhose & panties all in one'. Someone had drawn an ejaculating penis between the buttocks of the woman with a sharpie.
Michelle nodded at the lime green panties and then at the Hanes poster.
"A budding artist has been at work," she said sarcastically.
David was just happy that her tone had changed from anger to sarcasm.
He checked behind the dusty counter and any hope he had when he found an ancient rotary dial handset dissipated when he saw the cord had been ripped out of the wall long ago.
Michelle continued to explore the decrepit diner being careful not to touch anything or step into anything unsavoury. In the corner she found an old mattress with a crumpled stained blanket surrounded by several used condoms, one or two of which seemed to have been recently filled. Her gorge rose and she breathed through her mouth to avoid having to savour the stench.
"David..." she said, her voice shaky.
"Can we please get out of here," she turned her back on the makeshift sex nest and began to walk briskly to the door.
"Yeah let's go Chelle, this place is a dump and it stinks. Looks like we'll have to backtrack to the blacktop and hitch a lift to the gas station where we gassed up," David said.
David knew that this edict would likely send Michelle into another rage but she was too occupied with getting out of the creepy diner to become any angrier than she already was.
Just as they got to the door that they both heard the faint one-note drone of an engine. They looked at each other hopefully and hurried out the door and back to the Explorer. The road they had come down dissected two low hills in a sweeping descent and they could just hear the buzz of the engine in the distance.
They look expectantly at each other.
