Exact change only
Sounds like a pig slurping on an overripe watermelon, but it’s just Damien. His snoring gives me a start and I grip the steering wheel hard. The car swerves to the left and I pull us quickly back to the right, just in time before we would have hit an oncoming semi-truck. Damien is wide awake now. He glowers at me as if I was some wild animal in a zoo. I shake my head and laugh.
“What, we’re still alive aren’t we?”
“Barely.” He says huskily and leans back into his seat. A few miles further down the road and he’s asleep again.
The landscape hasn’t changed. There are still long stretches of wild land without trees. Shrubs are growing like fluffy bugs on a rotting fruit. No houses, people or animals anywhere in sight and since that last truck we almost hit, we haven’t seen any cars besides our own on the road. Not even insects are hitting the windshield. It’s as if we are driving in a vacuum, or entered another dimension, like a video game that hasn’t been fully designed yet.
I lower my speed to roll down the window and smell the air. It smells crisp, slightly cooler and not at all empty. It smells like summer wind, dry soil and raw freedom.
But then another fainter smell hits my nose: glowing embers, smoking wood, and burning steak. I crane my neck to see if I can make out any fires, or smoke anywhere close by: nothing. A road branches off to the right, a dirt road, partially covered with gravel. I slow down and take the turn. I follow the road. Gravel spits to the bottom of the car. I think for sure Damien will wake up now, but he stays asleep.
His hair is so red and sticks to his temples. His skin is pale and a couple of new sunspots have appeared on his nose and cheeks. He looks like Peter Pan as a Bachelor.
The road comes to a sudden end in the middle of nowhere. Shrubs and bushes grow on a flat expanse of land stretching out as far as the eye can see, and only bookended on the east and northwest by a ridge of craggy, unamused mountains.
At the end of the road appears something: a figure behind a thing. I slow down and keep going. I creep up to the strange figure and the thing I can’t make sense of. At last closing in, I come to a stop. I stare at the view in front of me.
A red-faced short-statured man with wild black hair and sharp eyes is flipping burger patties and sausages on a grill. He’s working behind a makeshift food cart with giant wheels, which look like they were taken off a motorcycle. He notices me and nods. He piles up toasted buns and bread which he smothers in a thick layer of ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard.
Part of me is terrified, wondering if I landed in some type of twilight zone, but another part of me is dead curious, and that part of me wins. So I get out and slam the door shut. Best to be loud and announce my presence, plus I need Damien to be of sound mind in case I need backup. Damien wakes up and sits up straight. He looks around to get a better view of the situation, but it doesn’t help that we’re in the middle of nowhere and there is a man flipping burgers and hamburgers as if his life depended on it.
The burger-flipping red-faced lunatic motions me to step up to a line. I see now that he has drawn a line in the sand that funnels toward his cart. He’s pretty serious about it because he growls at me, or at least it sounds like a growl when he tells me to step back in line. He’s sweating profusely and wiping his brow with the back of his hand. Behind him is a cooler stacked on top of another cooler. I look around to see if I can figure out how he got here, but there is no car or vehicle in sight as far as I can tell.
Damien gets out of the car and joins me. I can feel his mind going a million miles an hour, but he’s not saying a word. He leans over to me and whispers in my ear.
“Am I still asleep?”
I shake my head, but I’m feeling uncertain myself because this seems surreal. The burger flipper looks at me straight in the eye and then past me, as if he was evaluating the situation.
“Are you going to order something or what?” He asks and slaps a hot dog in between two buns, wraps it in aluminum foil.
“You’re holding up the line.” He mumbles and frowns at me as I step up. I stare at him, and then turn to look behind me. Nothing, just empty land as far as the eye can see.
He narrows his eyes, hostile now, and I wonder if he has a gun or perhaps a knife stacked somewhere out of view but close enough to reach for in case of emergency. He might consider this an emergency, a rude customer. The smell of cooked meat makes my mouth water and I lean closer to sniff in spite of my trepidation. A hand comes out of nowhere and shushes me away.
“Heyo, no freebies, you pay for what you want. So what will it be?”
“Uhm, one hotdog please.” I mumble obediently. Damien cranes his neck, hiding behind me like a scared kitten.
The guy opens his hand as if he was expecting something. Of course, money, I think and turn to Damien. Damien looks at me, and then at the guy. I can feel the guy getting real antsy now and it irks me. He starts mumbling intelligibly to himself, or to someone with him, but I don’t see anyone else.
“Do you have any cash with you?” I ask. Damien shakes his head.
I reach into my pockets to see if I have any forgotten bills. Surprisingly, after producing three hair bands, a piece of melted candy inside a sorry looking wrapper, and a balled up receipt, I find a crinkled bill. I unfurl it half-heartedly, not doing a stellar job at it on account of being nervous while being stared down by a weird stranger, and hold it out for the guy. He looks at it and takes the bill with the tips of his fingers, as if he was holding a dirty rag. I don’t even look to see what type of bill it is. As it turns out, it’s a hundred dollar bill, just my luck. When do I ever have a hundred dollar bill just stashed in my pocket?
The guy glares at me. He seems angry; his eyebrows are bunched together like in a unibrow like a white male Frida Kahlo. He balls the bill back into a ball and tosses it back to me as if it was some kind of game. He growls again, at least it sounds like he’s growling, but I think he’s saying something. I turn to Damien to see if he understood, but that makes the guy even madder.
“I think he doesn’t have change.” Damien mumbles and shuffles around, kicking the sand into a small pile between his feet as if that could help us.
“Exact change only.” The guy says in a raspy voice, clearly straining to enunciate. He points to a handwritten sign plastered on the side of the cart.
Damien huffs. He looks hungry now, and I also feel my stomach turning. Our last meal was this morning, and I think even the guy can hear my stomach growling from over there. Maybe that’s why I think he sounds like he’s growling, because he’s a figment of my imagination borne out of my hungry stomach’s subconscious…
“If you aren’t buying then get out of my line!” He yells. We glare at him in disbelief. He pulls out a gun, an ancient Winchester, and I’m not even sure that thing still works and it probably won’t be quite deadly for anything but a rabbit, but still.
“That old thing supposed to scare us?” Damien scoffs. Oh now he finds his voice, I think and give him my most annihilating look over the shoulder as we head for the safety of the car. We climb into our seats and drive back in reverse until the guy becomes a tiny ant on the horizon.
“Exact change only?” I ask and turn to Damien. He looks at me, shrugs and pulls out two five dollar bills and a ten. I stop the car and in the distance we see the ant moving. It’s coming toward us and turning into a person, a short, angry person. He fires the gun just above the windshield and I push down the accelerator. The car jumps back and we pull onto the main road. We speed away as the Winchester’s barrel points at us from the distance.
My stomach growls as I glance at the five and ten dollar bills.
“Do you think we should go back?” I ask. Damien shrugs.
“How much was it?” I ask. “He never even said. There was no sign…”
At that precise moment a bullet flies above our heads and hits a lonely, half-burnt down dwarf fir tree standing near the road. The bullet’s impact rips into the dry, loose bark with such ferocity that it pushes out the other side, cutting the tree in half and its needled crown flops over to the ground.
“Guess that answers your question.” Damien murmurs as we drive on into the sunset.
