Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

The thing to do, I thought, as I noticed the tall man in the long wool overcoat exiting the Miss Albany Diner, was to go to Athens, no matter what my lawyer advised, and find out for myself.

THURSDAY, MIDDAY, I OPTED for the scenic route north from Stormville and followed the Hudson River for seventy stop-and-go miles. I made it to Athens about an hour and a half later. Athens, with its run-down wood-framed buildings and sleepy sidewalks, was the sort of small town Fran might have described, once upon a time, as quaint. I, on the other hand, might have called it a dump.

One main artery ran through the center of the downtown-a road that paralleled the Hudson River, which ran wide and dark under the gray cloud cover. Judging by the proximity of the river, I guessed that Athens had been built inside the flood plain, which may have made it a constant source of anxiety for some of its residents, especially when you considered how many American towns had been wiped out by floods during the past few warm, wet winters. Whatever the case, the town was made up of dozens of two- and three-story asphalt-clad houses and buildings that occupied both sides of Main Street. An occasional coffee shop or hardware store was interspersed amongst the residences. Cars and pickup trucks parked on the diagonal against the curb, the hoods and bumpers pressed up against parking meters with red flags clearly flying, as if the police had simply given up collecting revenues from parking violations.

I took it slowly, driving through the town at ten to fifteen miles per hour, and kept a watchful eye out for Vasquez on the off chance that he might be reckless enough to be walking the streets, maybe taking in a little sightseeing, despite the fact that there were no sights to be seen. I knew that finding Vasquez on the street like a common citizen would have been next to impossible. But then, I had no other plan in mind but to cruise the streets and find what I could find until something turned up.

I took three separate trips up and down the main drag, doing my best to get a good look through the wide, square-shaped picture windows of the eating establishments. I gazed at the faces of the passersby. Sad looking people in blue jeans and T-shirts, mostly, who returned my stares with squinty-eyed suspicion.

After a while, I decided to turn off onto another side street that ran parallel to the Hudson River. But the effort was futile. That was when I decided to pull into the Sunoco station at the northern edge of town. When all else fails, my father used to say, stop at a gas station, ask for directions.

This wasn’t the new-style gas station with islands of computerized, self-service pumps, shiny aluminum paneling, and colorful neon. This was an old station, the kind I remembered as a kid, with revolving black-and-white numerical displays on the pump faces as opposed to computerized readouts with accompanying robotic voices that say thank you when you’ve finished feeding them your plastic money.

The station itself was something my father and grandfather might have built decades ago. Squat and square-shaped, the flat-roofed building had been constructed from cinder blocks covered with a coating of yellow plaster that, over the years, had faded to off-white from too many summer suns. Outside the picture window was an oversized tin placard shaped like a Coke bottle. The long thermometer embedded in the center of the bottle read eighty-seven degrees-a record, I guessed, for this early in May, although I could have been wrong.

The decor on the inside of the station was hardly an improvement. Fran would have called it a charming time capsule. A relic from an era gone by. I would have called it a dive and Fran would have said that I had little appreciation for what could easily pass as art deco. One thing was certain: the place smelled like gasoline and motor oil. Not a bad smell really. But then, it wasn’t a good smell either. Just a heavy industrial odor that tickled my sinuses.

A calendar was tacked to the wood paneling behind a metal desk and it featured a full-color photo of a bleach blonde in a red string bikini and high heels. In her right hand she held a torque wrench, in her left a long rubber hose, while a banner draped like a bandolier around her waist and shoulder read Snap-On-Tools .

On the desk sat a black rotary-style phone next to an adding machine and a mound of little yellow credit slips. A radio on a metal shelf gave the play-by-play of a noontime Yankees game.

Big Daddy, hero of the ‘96 World Series, was at bat.

The guy seated behind the metal desk was asleep, with his feet up on top of the credit slips. He wore a button-down shirt with a football-shaped emblem glued to the left chest pocket, the name Henry sewn into it in red curlicue letters against a white background. Henry had thick black hair that looked like it had been soaked in a grease pit.

I slammed the door closed.

It took little less than a split second for Henry to sit up straight, feet back on the floor. He began counting receipts, but then he got a hold of himself and raised his head to take a good, slow look at me. Once it registered that I wasn’t the big boss, he took a breath, tossed the yellow receipts back onto the counter, and sat far back in the swivel chair, looking more relieved than exhausted.

I gave him my best stranded-stranger smile.

But Henry’s expression never wavered.

“What?” he said.

Big Daddy took a swing and missed. Strike one. A hum from the crowd at Yankee Stadium.

“Hi there,” I said, raising my voice a full octave. “Jeez, I’m passing through on my way to Montreal and, jeez, I was wondering if you might recommend a hotel where a tired guy could spend the night.” I stretched my arms, let go with a fake yawn.

Henry squinted, sat up straight, and leaned up against his desk.

“Haven’t I seen you before?”

I imagined Big Daddy knocking the dirt out of his cleats with the heavy, wide bottom of his Louisville Slugger.

I brought my right hand to my face, rubbed the stubble of my day-old beard.

“I can’t see how,” I said. But then I glanced over Hank’s shoulder into a corner of the room that contained a newspaper vending machine nestled between a glass-topped peanut dispenser on one side and candy dispenser on the other. Like everything else in the gas station, the dispensers were relics. You had to slip a quarter into the slot and turn the silver-plated knob 360 degrees to release a handful of junk that had probably been stored for more than a decade in the clear glass containers. As for the newspaper vending machine it housed the Poughkeepsie Standard.

“Warden Indicted!” read the headline, and just a for a split second I felt like I was reading about a total stranger. But the headline was accompanied by a photograph taken a decade ago. I had lost some hair since then. So recognition for Henry may not have been that instantaneous. But just to be safe, I looked to the floor and turned the collar up on my charcoal-colored blazer.

Big Daddy swung and missed. Two down.

“Yeah,” Henry said, bringing his right hand up and rubbing his chin so that a few of the yellow credit receipts floated down to the floor. “You look real familiar to me.”

Big Daddy set up one last time to the commotion in the stadium.

I took a quick glance through an open interior door that led into the garage. The far wall inside the garage was covered with dozens of mufflers that hung from an overhead ceiling-mounted rack. I turned back to the attendant. “You ever hear of Midas Muffler, Henry?”

When he nodded, a thick strand of greasy hair fell down onto his forehead.

“The commercial where the customer looks into the camera like this.” I made a stern, tight face. “And then he says, ‘I’m not going to pay a lot for this muffler!’ “