Ross yawned as the phone rang.
He let out a silent swear and sighed.
“Here we go again.”
He was halfway home after leaving one emergency call, one of several that evening and now was about to respond to another. It was one in the morning. He was dog-tired after a long day at work, followed by the after-hours calls that came in at the most unexpected moments.
There was no choice. He would respond. In his deep sedated state where the caffeine failed to awaken him, he would go. As he got older, his sensitivity toward stimulants like caffeine made him anxious, made his heart skip beats. He had it checked. It frightened him, but his doctor didn’t seem too worried.
“If you would like we can run some tests,” the doctor once said. Ross didn’t like being poked and prodded, and like so many crusty characters that bore the scars of their life’s work of physical labor, he would just put it off and hoped it would go away.
When driving on these late night jaunts, he tried to keep himself awake by gliding through the AM radio dial. The pursuit was part intrigue, part humor, and part suspended belief. He knew the world was tilting toward an inevitable cultural black hole; what did those on the fringe think about it? And what made him agree with them now more than ever? At this late hour of 1 a.m., even Alex Jones reruns were off the air. He landed on some show about the aliens’ involvement in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Ross laughed and heckled the radio when he heard a caller explain to the host how the event happened because Kennedy was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and she was an interdimensional time traveler who was entangled in said love affair and her overlords from some far-flung galaxy were not pleased.
“Dang!” Ross declared. “It was the CIA, already. Get over it!”
Then the call came as he was exiting the 321, getting on the 58, perhaps the loneliest stretch of road he had ever driven at one in the morning. But he was heading north toward home. Heading north toward home always gave him and his on-call buddies a sweet, almost unnoticed dose of endorphins. There was also an oscillation of fear, too, like a dark shadowy figure hiding behind the seat, waiting to wrap its arms around you. It was the fear that you would almost arrive home and some cosmic collision would occur, the dark spirit would wrap its shadowy arms around you and the phone would ring.
Ross was one of several employees at the local natural gas utility who “pulled call,” as they called it. As soon as the day clock punched at 4 p.m., the on-call employee was the first line of defense when the after-hours calls came in. All. Night. Long. Call ended at 8 a.m. the following morning. The overtime was good, but Ross, getting older and sorer, learned the benefits didn’t outweigh the physical toll.
What kind of calls did he get, you might ask? People took their labradoodle out to take a crap and smelled gas near their gas meter. They called. Old couples, defying the penetrating effects of age, walked hard into a headwind and the pungent odor of the chemical mercaptan swirled past them, the additive that gives the naturally odorless gas its smell. They called.
These fellas responded to people smelling gas, whether the leaks existed or not.
On rare, dark occasions, there were scary stories of a mother rocking a newborn, smelling the rotten odor and having the intuitive wherewithal to make a call and have a technician come inspect. The gas line feeding the dryer from the former tenants was not capped. Her husband had to move the dryer earlier that day because he needed to inspect the vent leading outside the home. It was a requirement of the home inspection, a futile attempt at lowering the poor family’s insurance costs. The valve was bumped and tiny yet potentially deadly amounts of gas slowly began to creep into the home, hovering up to the ceilings like a ghost, but much more frightening and real, seeking exits, clogging ceiling corners and spreading ever downward like an invisible blob.
The boys running to the leaks worked hard to prevent any of these incidents from turning into tragedies.
Ross’s call came and the lady at the answering service told him he needed to report to an area that was about as far away as you could get before you just said, “Dammit, I’m driving this thing straight off a bridge and into the bay.”
But like so many times before, he answered the call.
“Yes ma’am,” he answered, his voice forlorn and his soul bruised.
“I know darlin’; it’s been a long day. You hang in there, sweetie,” she told him in a Southern accent that could have been just as at home at a local diner as at the answering service.
All the “Sweeties” and “Darlin’s” perked up Ross and made him feel about 10 years younger.
Ross, a complicated man, never married. Years earlier, he made a move with one of the answering call ladies, Stella. She tortured him for months with her mysterious, lusty voice, the “baby’s” and “darlin’s” and “if you need anything, I’ll be here all night.” “If you get tired and need someone to talk to, call me, sweetie.”
Little did Ross know — or care to know — all of the calls at the answering service were recorded and the recordings were sent to his company’s service supervisor to review for quality assurance.
One day, Glynn, the service supervisor for the gas company played Solitaire on his computer while mindlessly listening through the previous night’s calls, occasionally fast forwarding the tape to see if he stumbled upon anything interesting.
The call came from Stella, and her dejected love interest answered.
“How, how’s it going?” He asked, stuttering, as if he was afraid she would actually answer him.
“Good honey, how are you?”
Stella did sound lovely over the phone.
“Oh, you know, fine as frog hair.”
“Frog hair?,” Ross thought quietly, blushing so red his face glowed in the dark cab of the truck. “You idiot. Seriously, that was the best you could come up with?”
Glynn yanked his feet off the desk where they were perched during his game of Solitaire.
“Frog hair? You idiot, Ross,” Glynn said, laughing out loud, as he listened to the tape.
He turned the volume up so loud it could be heard throughout the building.
“Hey Charlie, come get a load of this. I caught a spot with Ross trying to flirt with one of them on-call girls.”
Charlie entered Glynn’s office, which sat just outside the gas company call center. It was a slow morning. A crowd gathered to listen and build stories that would further bruise Ross’s, poor, dejected soul.
Charlie quipped, “Don’t he know she’d have to borrow a set of teeth to bite into an apple?”
The conversation with Stella haplessly went on awhile, Ross digging deeper and deeper into the abyss of his amorous clumsiness.
Listening to the recording the following day, Glynn thought the chemistry between the two resembled methane combustion rather than any kind of budding affection.
“You sure are, baby.” Stella said, responding to Ross’s frog hair comment.
“How could that impress her?” Ross thought.
If Ross was dreaming, he no longer cared. His spirits soared. Even if the on-call truck careened off a bridge and into a lagoon, he was content dying this way. But then he did something that did not come naturally to him. And its consequences would not be good. He asked her a question.
“Stella, would you like to go out for dinner sometime?”
“Oh, honey, I can’t do that.”
Ross gulped and immediately wanted the nearest bridge to present itself.
“I’m married, sweetie.”
Ross didn’t respond for what must have seemed like a minute. A lot of distractions can fly by during a minute of steering a 1-ton utility pickup down the highway. Ross nearly hit a jogger during his mental fog. Yes, there are crazy people who jog at one in the morning. They’re usually the ones who call in those rogue gas leaks. He hit a large trash can, sending all its soiled contents flying through the air. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that had cameras but the jogger would surely play hopscotch with all the strewed trash and might of noticed the gas company logo on the back of the truck. Ross felt bad about the trash can and the mess left for someone to clean up.
Those thoughts evaporated as he thought about the great deep rejection from the married woman who made him feel like a champ and then immediately made him feel like the smallest human on the planet.
“OK, well I’m sorry to impose,” Ross said. “I would never, I mean, you know, ask you.”
“Honey, it’s OK, you’re a good boy. You hang in there,” she said, letting him down gently though he thought he felt an anvil tied around his neck.
“I need to go so I can focus on the road. It’s really rough out here tonight. I think a storm is blowing in.”
It was dry as a bone.
“OK, darlin’, have a good night. Hopefully you won’t hear from me anymore.”
Hopefully not, Ross thought.
He abruptly ended the call.
Back in the future, listening to the recording, the call center erupted with hateful laughter. Glynn made sure everyone who was in ear-shot heard Ross’s desperate attempt at romance.
Some of the ladies felt sorry for him.
“Poor baby,” they said.
Back in the present, a few years and miles away from that terrible interaction with Stella, Ross headed to his call.
The call center lady Maude called back with more details.
“They’re smelling gas by the meter,” said Maude, who sounded more like an audible ash tray than the sweet, lovely voice of Stella. Oh, Stella. All this time later and Ross was still not over her.
Ross once timidly asked one of the on-call ladies about Stella. He hadn’t heard her voice in a year or so and wondered if she still worked there.
“No, she left a little over a year ago,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “She got a divorce and moved to Alabama to live with her mama.”
“A divorce,” Ross thought. Suddenly a dagger of broken-heartedness shot through his heart. If only he had known, maybe he could have swooped in and rescued her from her sadness. Maybe they could of had that date. Or maybe she would have cussed him out for taking advantage of her broken marriage, using it to bandage his endless life of loneliness and solitude. Either way, it wasn’t in his nature to do so bold a thing.
Maude crackled through further details of the call.
“Yes ma’am,” Ross said, a little forlorn, wondering where the energy would come from to drive to this far-flung location, let-alone perform the necessary investigation required to eliminate potential danger.
Ross tore out toward the leak, punching in the coordinates in his GPS, so as not to have to think too much about his direction. He was determined to get to his destination in a timely manner. He was tired and worn out.
The call center would call him back at least twice more to get an ETA because the callers, relaxing in the rented heated hot tub at the bungalow by the beach, were somehow frustrated their service wasn’t delivered right away. They were they kinds of people who were accustomed to demand for free pizza if it wasn’t delivered within so many minutes. He would invariably tell Maude that if they wanted immediate help, they were welcomed to call 911 and have the local fire department arrive. He wasn’t allowed to call the customers directly. Perhaps they would be near the gas leak source and the phone call could cause a spark, an ignition, that would disrupt their vacation and perhaps kill a few people.
That rarely happened.
When Ross finally arrived to the address, he looked bleary-eyed toward his computer. What’s going on here, he thought. He looked at the map, the layout of the gas lines, and determined where to start his search. The homeowners were standing in the doorway. Why were these people in bathing suits at 2 in the morning, he thought. But he remembered they were on vacation and drunk and this was a completely new experience for them as they attempted to stagger through the oblique nonsense of their earlier call they had nearly forgotten about.
When he arrived he was met with rage from the man.
“Who are you?” the man yelled, but the wife, tangled up in a bikini meant for a woman half her size, told him to quiet down.
“It’s the gas man, remember?” she said, whacking him on the arm with the back of her hand.
Ross put the big, lumbering truck in park and turned on his flashing hazard lights so as to let the neighbors know this was serious and to get the hell away. He pulled out his equipment to sniff out the possible leak.
His work would continue on. Alone, in the cooling early morning, he worked. The air thickened with dew and the chirping cicadas went silent. He worked as if he world would end if he didn’t think smartly about the problem at hand. Thankfully, it was something simple. However, it’s never simple for the man risking it all in the middle of the night.
Especially for a man as lonely as Ross.
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
— Mark Twain
I love the way Adam writes! It captured my attention from beginning to end!