First National in Custer. T-shirt riding
up his back and toes barely touching the cement, he listened to the big V-8’s erratic turn, adjusted the carburetor, listened
again as the engine smoothed out and settled down.
“Mikey, get tha’ sonabitchin’ Olds finished. We got three more to go yet.” His father was staggering around, whiskey flask
buried deep in the back pocket of gray-striped coveralls.
Outside at the pumps his mother was filling the tank of a grain truck and wiping her forehead with the back of her arm. July
27, 4 P.M. at Tillman’s Texaco, a world of heavy smells and flaking paint in fading greens and peeling whites. Roar of traffic on Route
16 out in front; tourists with suitcases lashed to car tops, on their way to see the faces of Rushmore.
Straightening up, Michael removed the protective cloth from the Olds’ fender and slammed the hood. He backed the car out of
the service bay and parked it off to one side, stood there for a moment, wiping his hands on a cloth. A Lakota Sioux in rundown
cowboy boots, short and sweating into his pockmarks, waited by the roadside for someone or something or some other time better
than the one in which he lived.
Michael went to the pop cooler and pulled a Coke from where it lay buried in ice and water. He held the bottle against one
cheek, then the other. Stuck it up inside his shirt and laid it against his chest, shuddered once as cold met hot. No rain
for weeks, dust devils moving down the roadsides.
“Damnit, Mikey…”
His father’s voice slurred and reverberated from inside the station. He put the unopened Coke back in the cooler.
Michael slid into another car and pulled it into the service bay. His mother’s handwriting was on the work order, “lube &
oil.” The Chevy lifted on the rack with a whirring sigh, and he unscrewed the oil plug on lawyer Dengen’s Bel-Air. While the
used oil drained into a bucket he looked out at Route 16. One good road is enough, that’s what he was thinking.
He walked over to the Vincent Black Shadow parked in the rear of the station, touched the handlebars. His father had taken
in the big English motorcycle as payment for a repair bill and said it was Michael’s to keep if he’d fix it up and learn how
to maintain it. He did and owned it, spiritually and physically, from that moment on. One good road— the Shadow could take
him down that road if he learned all there was to know about valves and turning wheels and routes out of here. Michael was
already practicing at night, running the Shadow at high speeds through the Black Hills even though he wasn’t legally old enough
to drive.
On winter nights when the Shadow waited for spring to come again, there was the jumpshot arching through the lights of small-town
gymnasiums. People took notice of Ellis Tillman’s boy, said he might be good enough to play college ball. When he scored fifty-three
points against Deadwood his senior year, they were sure of it.
At pajama parties the high school girls giggled and talked about boys. They said Michael Tillman had sad brown eyes, lonely
eyes, and grease on his hands that wouldn’t come off. They said he was shy but had cute muscles and looked good in his basketball
uniform. They said he had a nice smile when he showed it, but he’d probably end up running his father’s gas station and never
would get the grease off his hands. Sometimes he’d take one of them to a movie in Rapid City, but mostly he kept to himself.
He worked at the station and fished the trout in summer, practiced his jumpshot in the city park until it became a thing of
magic. The Shadow, the jumpshot, algebra and Euclid’s geometry—they were all of the same elegant cloth, universes contained
within themselves, and he was good at them. He wasn’t quite so good with girls or rooms full of people or English classes
where poetry was discussed until it didn’t exist.
Rooms full of people he didn’t
Christopher Knight, Alan Butler