Attendant Circumstance

The Uplands Petro-Canada gas station was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Outside was a sign in large letters, channeling the smoke-free environment that the national air carrier is so proud to provide. Free air... Inside were always two things you would never find—fresh food and courtesy.

Expiration dates on rows of off-brand junk food chips and cookies and pickled curiosities had gone missing, erased years before in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. Lottery tickets, the surtax on desperation, a tariff on people who were bad at math, smiled up from the glass case beside the till. An adjacent pantry pack of Slim Jims held a thirtieth of the lethal dose of sodium nitrite.

Lou Rothman was not the world’s most ill-mannered attendant, but he was in the running. Lou was always running—swiping credit cards, answering the phone, restocking the shelves and the walk-in cooler, rotating the frozen drink machines, mopping the floors, scraping the mold off the ice bucket bottoms, emptying the rat traps, and filling the dumpster, every aspect of which accounted for his hostile disposition.

Perhaps it was the smell that made him surly, that lingering pungent chemical cocktail of cigarettes and coffee and high-fructose corn syrup and ammonia and gastric acid and insect corpses. It was strongest right after the rain when it seemed to come from deep underground, wafting up through thin fissures in the asphalt.

For all we know, it was the steady mechanical hum of the flickering fluorescent lights or the random pockets of cold and warm air following him around inside the convenience store that infected his mood. Or the deleted security tapes or the strange noises that came through the walls in the middle of the night. Or maybe it was because the days were getting shorter, the nights coming earlier and staying later, and the winter weather turning colder. It mattered little. Every commuter needed gas and free air and water. Nobody ever complained about the aesthetics.

Rothman’s temperament could have come from his consistent consumption of beef jerky and peanuts and Red Bull and Colts cigars. He used to sneak off to the restroom for a quick smoke but, because he was always running, and because he kept the toilets locked and the cash register open, Lou left his small cigar tips lit and planted in his face. He tried to ignore the constant warnings from his boss and the Harbour City fire marshal that, in his proximity to the gas pumps, he had become his own improvised explosive device. And he tried to ignore the customers.

On the day in question, Lou tried to ignore an irritating cough from a financial advisor named Rudolf Jaksch von Wartenhorst, the gulping noises from a Home Hardware employee, Ben Watt, a dizzy notary public, Benedict Adamantiades, and the yellow eyes and red rash of a Central American teak farm owner, Phil LeBoit. He found it more difficult to disregard the attentions of librarian June Cleaver, restaurant supervisor Caroline Savage, motel chambermaid Erna Petri, legal secretary Janet Leigh, cinema concessionaire Paulette Ehrlich, bridal gallery owner Maria Callas, practical nurse Margaret Houlihan, and BC lottery commission ticket vendor Bente Affleck.

Petro-Canada is an acronym for Pierre Elliott Trudeau Rips Off Canada. Its most famous employee before Lou Rothman was Dick Assman, a Regina attendant who had been a guest on David Letterman. Petro-Canada’s principal business activity involved digging up vast amounts of solar energy buried beneath the pristine Alberta landscape, to suffocate humanity to death with toxic fumes. In their proactivity, catering to autonomous self-driving vehicles, the company executive planned to inscribe braille on all the pumps.

Petro-Canada had 1500 service stations across this great nation. Lou had hired himself from the one with the two signs in the front window. Help wanted and Self-service.

He had seen almost everything in his five years as a gas station attendant. He had seen unleaded gasoline come in and the lead go away. But he didn’t see it coming back, the day that an estranged husband gunned down his wife and the mother of his five children from behind, as she was refuelling her minivan at pump number two. All he saw was her 13-year-old daughter in the passenger seat, screaming.

His testimony to the RCMP was polite and soft-spoken.

“Son of a bitch never even got out of his car.” Lou said.