The Gas Station After a Long Absence
At the end of November, there was a smell that rushed through the dry Texas wind and hit me all at once.
The sharp reek of diesel exhaust, the hot, burning odor of tires scalded by the road, and the sweat of working men.
“······!”
When I stepped out of the taxi, I was a little taken aback by how different the gas station looked from before.
In the past, the entrance road off the highway had been so quiet that all you ever heard was the chirring of crickets.
Now it was packed tight with the engines of huge trucks.
Peterbilts, Kenworths, Macks······ trailers coated in dust were lined up in a long queue from the station entrance all the way to the shoulder of the highway.
Near the number 2 pump, I saw a familiar back as it handled a fuel nozzle and talked with the truckers.
Lee Seonggeun, my father.
Instead of his old jumper, he was wearing a Lee's Gas & Service work uniform stained dark with grease.
My father stood with his shoulders squared and shouted at a truck driver.
“Hey, Jack! You’re headed all the way to California? Did you check the tire pressure? Don’t go blowing out on me like last time!”
“Don’t you worry, Mister Lee! Fill ’er up!”
The trucker, perched high above the ground in his cab, gave a thumbs-up out the window.
I tossed my bag down by the office door and rolled up my sleeves.
Then I walked over to my father and took the nozzle out of his hand.
“Father, I’ll do it. Go inside the office and have some water.”
“Son! When did you get here!”
My father turned to me, eyes going wide.
“Hey now, you brat! You’ll ruin your clothes. Go on in. You’ve been studying hard, haven’t you? You need to rest.”
“You need a strong body to study, too. Besides, I’m the son of a gas station owner. I can do this with my eyes closed.”
“Well, would you look at you······”
With a helpless grunt, Father pointed to the other side.
“Then take a look at pump number 3 over there. A Kenworth just rolled in. The fellow’s got a short fuse, so get him handled fast.”
“Understood.”
I nodded and ran toward pump number 3.
Whoosh—
With a hiss of air brakes, the cab door of a massive red Kenworth swung open.
A bearded trucker with the build of a bear leaped down.
While I opened the fuel cap and fitted the nozzle, the trucker looked me over from head to toe.
“Well I’ll be! So you’re that boy?”
“Excuse me? You know me?”
The trucker laughed heartily and clapped a hand on my shoulder.
I rocked sideways, but he paid it no mind and shouted even louder.
“The genius born in Garden Queens! That genius son who got into Harvard all on his own! The little treasure Mr. Lee keeps bragging on till he’s blue in the face!”
At that booming voice, the other truckers pumping gas around us one by one turned their heads.
“What’s this? That legendary son is here?”
“Let me get a look at him. Well I’ll be, he’s handsome as sin. Looks just like his mama.”
“He’s got more heft than I expected. You play rugby at Harvard or something?”
Three or four burly men crowded around me.
I looked at Father in a panic.
Father cleared his throat loudly, then chased them off like he was shooing pigeons out of a park.
“Ahem! Are you here to pump gas or gossip? Don’t you have places to be?”
The bearded trucker winked at me and said,
“Kid, your old man here spent the five minutes he was filling my tank last time talking about your acceptance letter a hundred times over. Didn’t even care that the cars behind me were honking their heads off.”
“You old coot! I give you a break on the gas and you go talking nonsense like that? From today on, you’re paying one dollar a gallon! Understand?”
“Gah! Boss, that’s harsh! But hell, it’s still a whole lot cheaper than anywhere else, ain’t it? Ha ha ha!”
The truckers burst out laughing, and Father and I laughed along with them.
For the first time, it really felt like I was home.
* * *
Ten o’clock at night.
The last truck had gone, and the lights at the station were turned off.
Rattle—clack!
Father, having pulled down the shutter, grabbed a flashlight.
“Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
I followed Father toward the storage shed in the backyard.
Even in the dark, I could tell.
The silhouette of the building was much larger than it had been before.
They had expanded it by adding sandwich panels, and around it stood a two-meter iron fence topped with barbed wire.
Signs reading HIGH VOLTAGE! KEEP OUT! were posted all along the fence.
Father pulled a heavy keyring from his pocket and unlocked the triple padlock.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
When he opened the iron door and we stepped inside, a wave of heat stabbed at my nose.
Father flipped the switch on the distribution panel, and the halogen lights hanging from the ceiling came on one after another.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The inside of the shed had been transformed into something like a machine from a steampunk world made real.
“Wow.”
I could only stare in admiration.
A silver distillation tower rose up as if it would touch the ceiling.
Its surface had been carefully wrapped in aluminum foil insulation, and beneath it, red, blue, and yellow pipes twisted together in a complex tangle.
Needles on pressure gauges mounted here and there were twitching restlessly.
A low, humming vibration traveled up through the soles of my feet.
It was the sound of crude oil being pumped up from underground and flowing through the pipes.
Father tapped the hot surface of the distillation tower with a gloved knuckle.
“Your mother, me, and your uncle all worked day and night on this. Pretty good, huh? We even built a machine that pumps the crude up automatically.”
“Where did you get this giant furnace? Buying one new would cost thousands.”
“This? It used to be equipment for melting asphalt at highway repair sites. A construction company that lost a federal roadworks bid was dumping its gear for pennies, so I grabbed it right away. Cost me only three hundred bucks. Ha ha ha—”
“What about the centrifuge over there? It’s much better than the one we used before.”
“That was originally used at a wastewater treatment plant. The plant got shut down for environmental violations, so it was scrapped. Your uncle heard about it somehow, drove a truck over, and hauled it back.”
“What about the noise? Can’t people hear it outside?”
“Look at the walls. Egg-crate soundproofing, then fiberglass on top of that, layered two, three, four, five, six times over. The vents are run underground and connected out toward the woods.”
I reached out and touched the wall.
The soundproofing was soft but firm, fitted so tightly there was no gap anywhere.
“The security is perfect. The CIA could come by and never know.”
“I finished putting up the screening around the crude pit too. Even if someone took a satellite photo, it’d look like nothing more than a greenhouse complex. Just in case, I put a few real greenhouses around it. We grow succulents in bulk there. Makes it look like a farm.”
No wonder there were so many more pots of succulents sitting in the office counter area.
I had thought Mother had just taken up a bigger hobby.
Then I looked at my father’s hands.
Under the lights, his hands were exposed.
The calluses that had already been thick were now even thicker, like bark, and beneath his nails black grease had worked itself in like a tattoo that would never wash out.
I remembered being a child, being lifted high up at his side by those hands.
Those warm hands, huge and rough and scarred, always stained with grease so that an already dark complexion seemed somehow even darker.
Once, I had been ashamed of those hands.
When Father came to my school sports day and wore not a clean suit like the other fathers but a grease-stained work uniform, I would avoid my friends’ eyes.
But not anymore.
Father’s hands were black, but they were warm.
Like petroleum, burning itself up so it could keep other people warm.
If I didn’t want all of Father’s effort to go to waste, if I wanted to repay his will and his pride, then I needed a meticulous plan.
I decided to share the plan I had been thinking about with him.
“Father. I think it’s time we expand our distribution channels. You’ve been carrying too much on your own.”
“Mm. I was thinking the same thing. We keep this place as the base where crude is extracted and refined, and sell the gas somewhere else.”
“We need a lot more places selling fuel. And more employees, too.”
One gas station for one oil field was far too inefficient.
Considering the amount of oil we were pumping and the amount of fuel we were refining, we needed at least ten stations.
“Let’s turn this place into the crude drilling site, the refinery, and the storage tank facility. Then we supply crude to franchise stations. A franchise network.”
I pulled a map out from my coat and unfolded it.
On the taxi ride here, I had marked more than ten red circles and triangles around our station.
“The circles are gas stations that went to the bank and ended up at auction. The pumps, tanks, even the roof structures are all still there, so if we take them over as Turnkey properties, we can start operating right away.”
Turnkey meant you could acquire a place already ready to run the moment you turned the key.
In a recession like this, properties in that condition were everywhere.
Once you counted beyond the edges of Garden Queens, there were probably more than you could count.
“The triangles are places that are still hanging on but running at a loss. We don’t even need to buy those. If we offer to supply fuel at twenty percent below wholesale, they’ll line up on their own. Everyone’s trying to survive by saving every penny they can.”
From now on, we wouldn’t be selling directly to truckers. We’d be selling to gas station owners.
The hard labor that Father, Mother, and Uncle had been doing until now would be done by other station owners instead, voluntarily and happily.
Father stroked his chin.
“Do you think those people would take our fuel? The major oil companies would be watching them, too. And we don’t even have a brand.”
“They won’t have a choice. It’s twenty percent cheaper than wholesale. We won’t charge a franchise fee, and they won’t have to change their signs. They just use our fuel.”
“Hmm. True enough. Cheap is what matters. Besides, our crude costs us zero, so if need be, there’s no problem competing for even less than twenty percent below. It comes out of the ground.”
“Exactly. Minus transport and refining costs, it’s all pure profit.”
“If we do that, we won’t even need to explain where we’re getting our crude from. They can just buy cheap and sell at a reasonable price.”
“Right. And the cash flow gets spread across multiple places, so it’s harder for the IRS to trace.”
Father fell into thought for a moment, then pointed a finger to the edge of the map.
It was a triangular mark at a point near the end of Route 1.
“Then there’s someone I’d like to contact first.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Morgan. That old Black gentleman who runs Morgan Oil.”
Morgan Washington. I knew the name too.
“Ah, Grandpa Morgan? The one who used to visit our house all the time when I was little······”
“Yeah. Around the time your mother had just gotten pregnant with you.”
Father gave a bitter smile.
“The bank had already refused to extend our loan, and if we couldn’t pay the interest the next month, we were in deep trouble. That was when Mr. Morgan handed me an envelope. There was a thousand dollars in it. For those days, that was a huge amount of money.”
“······A thousand dollars?”
“Probably about half his entire net worth. When I said I’d write him an IOU, do you know what he told me? He said, ‘That’s money from an old man with nobody to leave it to, so don’t you worry about it.’”
I had always thought he was just a friendly old man who knew Father well, but I hadn’t known something like that had happened between them.
“I remember riding the rocking horse Grandpa Morgan made for me when I was little. How is he doing now?”
“He’s been having a rough time lately. A Texaco company-owned station opened right across from his place······ When I met him last month, he said he might as well close up and go to a nursing home.”
“Then why didn’t you help him sooner?”
“Of course I told him, you brat. I said I’d pay him back ten times over for that thousand dollars, and he got angry, saying I sounded like a loan shark······ I even offered to sell him fuel cheaper, but he said he wasn’t old enough yet to accept charity.”
“He sounds incredibly stubborn.”
“A man with a backbone straight as a board. But now the situation’s changed a little. A big franchise station opened right in front of him and took all his customers. No matter how long he holds out, there’s no way out of it.”
“Then Grandpa Morgan’s station is perfect. It’ll be our first partner. Debts should be repaid.”
“I was already thinking of going by for Thanksgiving anyway······ Let’s go right now.”
Father sprang to his feet.
When it came to repaying a debt of gratitude, there was no reason to hesitate, so I hurried after him.