The car doesn’t make a sound as it begins to decelerate. It’s two in the morning and ‘Interstate’ doesn’t exactly mean much in Wyoming at that hour. There are no cars on the horizon, no glow from beyond the the hills in either direction. The digital fuel gauge reads 1/8th of a tank, though the rental is clearly out of gas. My fingers fumble at the hazard lights. The conclusion is so foregone that I can’t even summon the energy to curse as the car slows onto the shoulder. Trekking a half mile to the south, I crest the top of the hill that separates the dead automobile from the great, black expanse of the landscape beyond. The road is empty enough that I can safely walk up the middle of the highway as I try to find the nearest mile marker. Post 38. My ragged road map puts my little life raft some 30 miles from Cheyenne and an almost equal distance from Chugwater, a tiny municipality mired in straits dire enough to compel its management to offer near-free land to anyone who would move there. For the price of the wrecker and five gallons of gas, I could just buy a lot in the forsaken town and stay there. Hertz be damned, they can come get their little lying machine if they want it back.
Popping the hatchback on the car, I sit down and face toward empty lanes of traffic. My boots flash on and off, heeled against the asphalt as the tail lights flicker their little jig. The sky is deep, clear enough to see through to the bottom, those tiny specs of stars that fill the gaps between the brighter, more visible ones that the city is accustomed to. Every few seconds a slice of light like a scalpel cuts through the dark sky. A meteor shower is well underway. I smile at the second edge of the sword; I would have driven right under it or slept right through it or otherwise seen it and promised myself that I’d watch it next year when it came around again.
I call the tow, ask for gas and sit back for the show, full well expecting not to see the wrecker ’til the light of dawn. It’s a 30 minute drive to Cheyenne, but getting someone out of bed and motivated to make the journey is the kind of convenience that knows its boundaries.
An hour passes. Then another. The only people to stop pull up in a Towncar, artists on their way to Denver. The passenger’s name is latin, though I can’t quite recall. TIno or Tito or Rodrigo or Esteban. Dominican, I presume. But I don’t ask. He opens the cooler between him and the woman driving, pulling out a beer to compliment the one that he’s holding in his other hand. He offers it to me through the open window as we collectively come to the conclusion that there’s not much they can do to help me. I turn down the beer, afraid to undo the truck stop coffee that’s sustained me to this point. We don’t have a hose to siphon any of their gas and there’s no space in their car to take me into town. It’s packed to the hilt with boxes and trinkets, a cooler full of beer, and the two gypsy-souled people mad enough to stop. I tell them there’s a tow headed for me, which, as if summoned by the words, arrives on cue.
The Domincans pull away as an unkept man hops down, standing on the fuel tank under the door of the wrecker. He’s already flipped the PTO. The hydraulics angle the flatbed down towards the car. I yell up to him that I only called for gas. He quietly curses, thinks it over, and offers to tow me to town for the same price. There’s no gas can in his truck, the details of my initial call apparently caught up in the cogs of the graveyard shift at the tow company. Within minutes, he’s got the car up on the flatbed, chained into place and we’re off, jogging through Wyoming’s pre-dawn toward the nearest filling station. The shape of the mountains to the west come through in purples and blues, the deepest shadows still black as the man tells me about the races in Cheyenne, how the owner of the track is too cheap to do basic upkeep to the place. It’s costing the track good racers, people won’t pay entrance fees to put their cars on a piece-of-shit track, spectators won’t pay ticket fees to watch those that will. It’s a spiral that builds its own negative momentum until the nobody cares to come to Wyoming anymore. There’s another track a couple hours east in Nebraska and, out there, the owner is a man who sees the longview, who knows what it takes to bring in good drivers. The people will always follow the good ones.