The Station
- solidfoodpress
- Jun 5
- 13 min read
By Sam Hootman
Henry liked his job. That surprised a lot of people. Working from ten at night to four in the morning was not a desired shift at the 24/7 gas station. The convenience store sat next to a big overpass with its six pumps. The area was rough enough that the urbanites pushing in slowly only stopped to fill up there when they really didn’t have a choice. But it wasn’t as dangerous as they thought it was.
Henry parked his beat-up old sedan behind the store like he always did. It had more scratches and dents than anyone could count. The back bumper was completely missing, stripped off after some soccer mom in an SUV rear-ended him at a light and peeled out before he’d even realized what happened. Still, the car ran. Despite how miserable the motor sounded every time he turned the key, it always got him to work.
The store itself was surprisingly clean, mainly due to Henry. There wasn’t much to do at 2 a.m. besides mopping, so Henry didn’t mind doing it once a night. Most people hated this job, and hated getting stuck on the grave shift even more. They did everything to dodge it and often no-showed when required to come in for a grave. Henry was supposed to have another employee with him, but most nights, it was just him. He didn’t mind that.
That was why he liked his job. The grave shift was quiet. Henry didn’t have a manager watching over his shoulder. He would read a paperback thriller or flick the cracked screen of his old phone to pass the time. A few people came in and went out. He would pick up and mop around 2 a.m. Morning shift would stumble in around 4:05. Henry would grab a cup of soda, get back into his old sedan, and drive back to his apartment before the sun came up. It was a routine, and Henry had come to like it.
Most of Henry’s conversations were with the demographic that came into a convenience store between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. As such, he had become an amateur surveyor of these understudied populations.
There were midnight travellers who came in because they had nowhere else to get gas or chips at this time. They could be shifty, checking over shoulders, hoods up despite what the sign on the door said. Henry didn’t mind. Usually, the suspicious behavior had to do with them being part of the largest subset of the group: high-as-a-kite stoners. Henry would ring up their chips and send them on their way as they mumbled their thanks before disappearing into the night.
Then there was the Night-Lifers. They came from the clubs downtown, drunk and delirious from a wild weekend. Unlike the midnight travellers, they never came alone. There was always a gaggle of them, wired up by substances and each other’s company. They were loud, young, clumsy, and uninhibited. They were Henry’s least favorite group. The drink often made them let slip thoughts they would have otherwise internalized. Thoughts such as what a loser Henry must be for getting stuck behind that counter every weekend instead of joining them in their revelry. But he had no college money to squander on cover and overpriced drinks. He would ring up their organic coconut water and gas station roller dogs, sending them on their way to live forever and party till the end of days.
It was the third category that Henry dealt with the most. The ones that stayed the longest inside of the convenience store, mainly because they had nowhere else to stay: the overpass people. They were the closest thing Henry had to regular customers. They would stop in to use the bathroom. Some to relieve themselves and keep the few dregs of dignity that a harsh life still afforded them. Some to shoot dope into their collapsed veins. Over time, Henry got a sense of who belonged to which group, but a lot overlapped into both. On hot summer nights, some of them would buy a soda and loiter in the air conditioning as long as they could. On cold winter nights, some of them would buy coffee and loiter in the warm building as long as they could. Sometimes they sat outside on the curb, just needing a place they wouldn’t be shuffled away from.
Henry rarely had trouble. Big trouble at least. Some doped up in the bathrooms, a couple of arguments had gotten ugly, but for the most part, things were to the level that Henry just had to reach for the phone for the troublemakers to find somewhere else to go.
A lot of it was Henry himself. The overpass people mostly got along with him for two main reasons: he didn’t try to get rid of them if they weren’t causing trouble, and he listened. When a man buying a small coffee spent forty-five minutes at the register explaining how he was John F. Kennedy’s long-lost son, Henry just listened. Maybe it was because there wasn’t anything else to really do on the grave shift. Maybe Henry was just the kind of guy who had the patience for that kind of thing. Whatever it was, Henry had become a frequent stop for those who had no one to listen.
They would tell him how they had been mistreated in life. How they did or did not deserve their lot. Sometimes they told him directly and honestly, but more often it was through a rambling stream-of-consciousness that Henry had come to expect. Over time, he had gotten better at decrypting some of the truth from the stories, but it was still a fog. They were neither facts nor deceptions, but a tapestry of complications that is all human life. Henry would just nod and listen.
Some were the addicts who were lying to themselves more than they were lying to him. Some had always been on the brink, and when their mother died, or the welfare stopped coming, or the military discharged them, it was the final straw that made it all spiral out of control. Some had fallen and ended up underneath the overpass and now lacked whatever it was that a person needed inside to get back on their feet. Some never had it in the first place, others had been drained of their last drop and had nothing left.
The ones that Henry found the most interesting were what he called the prophets. They often spent the longest at the counter, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, never making complete sense. All the prophets had heard from God. They had all been specially selected for a divine mission that each of them was singularly qualified for. The revelation varied. Often it was about politics, or banks, or current events as interpreted through a mind that viewed reality through a cracked lens. Not completely shattered but prismed, refracted. They were not completely unintelligible ramblings—that was a different category. These rather seemed to latch on to something, whether a celebrity, politician, or conspiracy, and receive divine instruction about it. “On May 11, 1997, when I was in Sacramento, God Almighty called me and carried me into LAX airport, where He said: ‘You, Gary, are the Divinely Appointed Person mentioned with the Stick Of Joseph in his hand in Ezekiel Chapter 37…’”
But Two-Pack was different. Henry called him that because the guy always had two backpacks on, with one across his chest. He was like the other prophets in the way that he would predict the future, in the way that he had heard from the voice of God, in the way that others were crazy, but he was the real thing.
The main thing about Two-Pack that was different was that he seemed so unhappy about it all.
“How’s it goin?” Henry asked Two-Pack one night.
“Not great,” Two-Pack said. “I spent today telling people that God was going to punish this city with a great earthquake unless they stopped.”
“Stopped what?”
“Stop selling people for spare change! Stop raping children! Stop putting people out of their homes!” His voice was raspy but animated, a sign that he’d been yelling himself hoarse all day. “No one cares! No one cares enough to do anything but put stickers on their fancy cars! I’ve seen it! Three times and a fourth! God is not blind! He sees us completely!”
“Hm,” Henry said. It was what he said to all the prophets.
“I know you think I’m crazy.” Two-Pack looked tired. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy. But please, we’ve got to change things! It’s awful. There are new people under the bridge every day. They can’t afford to live in their homes. There are girls, children, who have horrible things happen to them. Please, no one will listen!”
Henry glanced out the window towards the overpass. Two-Pack wasn’t wrong that it was starting to get crowded over there. At least he got that right.
“$3.24,” Henry said. Two-Pack took his lemon-lime soda and pocketed the grimy coins that Henry handed back to him with the receipt.
“Why won’t they listen?” Two-Pack looked exhausted, Henry thought. It was a strange thing to think about an overpass person. None of them looked lively or refreshed. But Two-Pack always had this forlorn, defeated look on his face. The other prophets, aside from random bursts of anger, seemed undeterred by the lack of positive reception to their message. Two-Pack was different that way. He looked worn down.
It was another Saturday night or maybe Sunday morning; Henry was too busy to watch the clock. There was a big music festival downtown. The whole city had swelled with people and activity. Henry’s quiet routine was interrupted by the increase in traffic. Worse, they were all Night-Lifers. Musical acts would wrap up, clubs would close, and they would spew forth a wave of humanity, a portion of which would stumble into the convenience store.
The Night-Lifers were all the more wired, more unrestrained. Like locusts in season, they would swarm this city for two weeks. Great for the economy, the mayor said every year. Great for business, the station’s owner said every year. But for Henry, his coworkers, and everybody else, it was a feverish nightmare to endure.
While a lot were from out of town, plenty were locals. They would walk the streets they usually drove through with the windows rolled up. They took the festival as a chance to cut loose, live their best lives, and feel something. So, when they staggered into the convenience store feeling the excitement, club drugs, shared experience, and alcohol, Henry would have the mop on stand-by.
That night, Two-Pack had made a mistake. God apparently hadn’t warned him to stay out of the convenience store until sunrise. Two-Pack came in during a lull, too groggy to remember what time of year it was. While he was scrounging together the pennies for his usual soda, there was a muffled commotion outside, the sound of multiple voices all talking, laughing, and shouting over one another.
Henry braced himself. Two-Pack turned around just in time to watch as a dozen festival-goers crashed through the front door, pouring into the store. They clawed at the chips and snack cakes, they ransacked the fridges for rehydration solutions, they shouted at Henry if he had any vaping pods behind the counter. It was chaos. Two-Pack looked like an animal in a snare. He was too overwhelmed to count his precious change, too overwhelmed to slip out the door, so he just stood there as the wave of sweat and burnt-out glow sticks crashed down on him.
One inebriated man next to the energy drinks leaned over to his companion. His words were supposed to be a whisper, but he had lost any sense of volume, and his voice carried across the entire store.
“Hey, it’s that crazy guy.”
On instinct, Two-Pack turned to look at them.
“Oh sh—” They collapsed into snickers, amused they’d been overheard. Two-Pack just stood there.
Another man staggered up to the counter, his arm slung over the shoulders of a dazed woman. “Hey man, lemme get that for ya,” he slurred as he barged Two-Pack away from his soda. The woman threw an armful of snacks onto the counter alongside the lemon-lime.
“Awe, you’re so sweet,” she said as the man riffled through his pockets for his credit card. Henry was in the middle of scanning the items when he heard a voice over by Two-Pack.
“Sims?”
Henry saw Two-Pack out of the corner of his eye, frozen in place. Another one of the Night-Lifers was in front of him, and he looked like he was staring at a ghost. Henry had never seen someone go from drunk to sober so fast.
“Sims, man, is that you?” It was hard to hear over the din of the others.
“Yeah,” Two-Pack said. The other man looked aghast.
“I haven’t seen you since...” he trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
“Yeah,” Two-Pack said.
“You doing okay?” There was genuine concern in his tone.
“I mean...” Two-Pack trailed off this time.
“Listen, man, if you need help, I know a place where my uncle works. They help—”
“I’m not finished.”
“What?”
“I’m not finished. I’ve got to stay here. God told me.”
“... Okay... if you change your mind...”
Spying an opening, Two-Pack made a break for the door. Doing everything in his power to avoid brushing up against any of the revellers, he burst from the front of the store. Out the window, Henry saw him break into a run as he headed for the overpass.
“Yo, why’s he runnin?” One of the patrons shouted to nobody in particular. Someone else started dialing on their phone. Henry looked down to see the dirty coins Two-Pack had left on the counter.
The guy that was talking to him stood there stunned for a minute. Finally, he brought his own collection of chips to the counter. Henry started scanning the barcodes before his curiosity got the better of him.
“You know him?” he asked the patron.
The guy was staring out the window. He snapped back to Henry. “Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”
“Really?” This was the first time Henry had a chance to hear about the past lives of an overpass person from an outsider.
“Yeah.” The guy was picking up that Henry was genuinely interested. “He was a programmer at my startup. He was totally normal until one day, he just started ranting about God and how we were going to be punished. He started living on the street, I think as a kinda protest. Eventually, he lost his job, and I haven’t seen him...” The guy trailed off. “Does he come in here a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he still... ya know?”
“Yeah.”
It was nearly a month before Henry saw Two-Pack again. The store was its usual quiet self. The tidal wave of energy that came with the festival had washed back out and things were back to the normal warm spring nights that led into summer.
“Haven’t been around?” Henry asked as Two-Pack, or Sims, handed him the lemon-lime.
“I got picked up. Put back in the state hospital.”
“Oh.” Henry had heard enough recounting from multiple people to know that was not a good thing.
“They put me on some new meds. I thought it was helping.”
“Yeah?”
He looked even more defeated than usual.
“Yeah, I felt good. Felt kinda normal. No visions, no voices. I was thinking maybe I could get better. Maybe get my old job back, ya know? Maybe it was just the crazy, ya know? And with the meds, I could function. That’s what the doctor said.” Sims rubbed his face with frustrated vigor. Henry could see tears starting to form in his eyes.
“Then I had this dream. I was still on the meds, and I was having dreams. And God was telling me I needed to tell everyone, tell everyone that He’s going to punish this city. With fire, and an earthquake, and firestorms. And He showed me what it would look like. And He said I had to tell everyone to leave if they wanted to live.”
Tears were coming down Sims’s face. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
“And I told God I don’t want to! I don’t want to live under a bridge and tell people their sins and shout at people on the street and feel all this awfulness. I don’t want to tell them they’ll be hurt. I don’t want to be a prophet!”
Henry ripped a paper towel from the roll behind the counter and handed it quietly to the sobbing man. He didn’t know what to say.
Finally, after several minutes, Sims stopped weeping. “Henry.” Sims had read his name tag. There was a firmness back in his voice. “Henry, you need to leave.” He looked him dead in the eye. “There’s disaster coming. I have to stay. I have to stay and warn everyone. Try and convince someone, anyone, that they need to leave.”
“Sure,” Henry said.
“I’m serious. Please. It’s happening soon. Really soon. Just leave town for a while.” Sims pressed his hands together in a pleading gesture. “Please. He wants everyone to be spared.” With that, he grabbed his soda and limped out into the night.
The morning crew left him hanging. Finally, someone rolled in at 4:55 a.m. and Henry could go home. He grabbed a cup of lemon-lime from the fountain before climbing into his car. It was far past his bedtime, and he could barely keep his eyes open as the old sedan’s suspension squeaked over cracked potholes to his apartment. He kept turning over Sims in his sleep-deprived mind. The look in his puffy eyes.
He could see the dilapidated roofs of his apartment complex approaching. Henry flicked on his blinker as the concrete entryway drew near. He got into the turning lane. He could see the faded green paint on his front door from here, welcoming him, inviting him to come inside and flop onto the mattress he had lying on his bedroom floor.
And then he didn’t.
He just watched the apartments pass him by as he rolled down the road. Henry didn’t know why, but he got onto a nearly empty highway that headed out towards the hills overlooking town.
It wasn’t because he believed Sims, or believed in divine judgment, or even really believed in God. He just couldn’t get the image out of his mind of Sims begging him, tears still on his cheeks. This guy, tormented by this supposedly divine mission, so miserable. Henry thought about what the guy that night had said: that Sims used to be a programmer. It was the kind of job Henry’s own mom wished he’d gone to college for. Sims seemed lucid enough to know he used to be that. He hadn’t always lived under an overpass and shouted at people on street corners. It was like he didn’t think he had a choice.
As Henry’s sedan struggled up the steep road that led out of the city limits, he could see the first rays of sunrise streaking across the sky. He didn’t believe that Sims was a prophet, but he felt that in some way all the suffering and misery, even if it was false, deserved something. At the top of the hill, he pulled off to the side of the road at a scenic lookout. It was a weekday and no one else was there. He parked his wheezing car, grabbed the soda, and got out. He took a sip from the cup before setting it on a guardrail post. Henry leaned against the weathered metal railing as he looked out over the city. The sun was just coming up from the east, illuminating the skyline in a way Henry had never seen before.
Maybe this was all stupid. Maybe his tired brain had made a decision that had just wasted his sleep and gas money. But it didn’t matter to Henry. Sims had accidentally given him a great view. And Henry felt like, after all the guy had been through, he somehow deserved to have someone listen to him, even if he didn’t believe him.
Henry looked down at the flat soda cup. Ripples were starting to form.
