By the end of the first week back at the hardware store Trey Hammer and his mother had fallen into a routine. Get up. Have coffee. Take a quick look through the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch to make sure the apocalypse hadn’t started, and then climb into Trey’s truck for the short drive to the store.
It felt like they’d been doing it for months, but it had only been seven days.
At breakfast on Thursday Debra Lynn filled Trey in on her phone call from Rusty on his way out of Oklahoma City after his short stay at the Double Fountain Campground.
“Your dad sounded kinda choked up. It wasn’t like him.”
“How long do you think he’ll be gone?” Trey asked. He had wanted to pose the question several times earlier, but let it go. The time seemed right to go ahead and ask.
“Could be another week. Could be Christmas,” she said. “Hard to say. I’ve never seen him quite like this before. I can’t get a good read on it.”
After they both climbed into the truck to head to the store Trey turned to his mother and said, “Grace Louise called last night. We got an offer on the house. Full asking. Have to be out in 30 days.”
Debra Lynn looked at him and couldn’t tell if the news was a godsend or a warning.
“You surprised it happened so quick?”
“It’s unexpected. Nothing sells that fast in Brownwood. We were expecting it to take a lot longer.” He took a sip of coffee from the plastic mug he’d filled up with hot Folgers before they left. “I take it as a sign that everything is just as it was meant to be.”
“You can stay with us as long as you need to. All of you. We’ve got the room.”
“Appreciate it. I’m going to start looking for a place as soon as the dust settles at the store. We don’t want to put you out.”
There was a long silence as they both thought about all the different implications of Trey and his family actually moving back home.
It was really happening.
After he pulled up into the spot beside the store where he always parked, Trey turned to his mother and said, “We’re going to have to do it. No matter how long it’s going to take. I think we should get started today.”
He was talking about the galvanized metal Quonset hut out behind the store, across the alley.
Rusty had originally bought the property out of spite. Mayor Goodman wanted it to set up campaign headquarters for his first run for office, back when it was a joke rather than a threat to the future. Rusty wanted to be sure that stench wouldn’t drift over from the alley to the store and scare off business. He paid cash for it before Goodman could do anything to stop the transaction and then started storing back stock, old displays, out-of-season inventory, and any number of things he ended up with for one reason or another.
Once the mayor surprised everyone, including himself, by winning that first election, he did everything he could to condemn the old building in hopes of then buying it for a song from the city, just out of spite. But back then he hadn’t corrupted enough of the other city council members to bend to his will. And soon after, there was so much other graft and corruption to focus on that the storage building behind the hardware store seemed like small potatoes.
There were parts of the building that hadn’t seen daylight in a decade and a half. Stacks of boxes and pallets that had taken up residence and had no intention of giving up the real estate they occupied.
Debra Lynn hadn’t even ventured into the building in a half dozen years, the sight of it overwhelming her. Trey figured the time was ripe to clean the place out before his father got back from his sabbatical so there would be no arguments over what to get rid of.
She put on her gloves, a face mask, and the best attitude she could muster and stepped into the dark structure. She took a deep breath and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of mouse droppings, wet paper, and questionable decisions. She looked at Trey, took off her gloves, and turned around.
“I just can’t. I’ll send out Colt to give you a hand. Someone’s got to man the register.”
Trey figured it was probably just as well.
Colt came out with a hand truck and the two of them went about moving pallets of fertilizer, cow manure, and mulch that had recently been delivered. No question it was all good inventory, it just needed to be stocked where people could actually see it when they came looking for it.
There were big heavy unmarked cartons that looked like they hadn’t moved in years. Trey was able to tear back the corner of one of them to reveal snow shovels. Boxes and boxes of snow shovels that had been purchased before the pandemic. In Fort Stockton, Texas.
Trey looked at Colt and then back at the boxes.
“Maybe he was expressing his feelings about global warming,” Trey noted. “He has strong opinions.”
It took the better part of an hour to move the snow shovels far enough out of the way to get to the barbed wire.
Pallets of barbed wire stacked in an Eiffel Tower of sharp rust.
“How long’s the roof been leaking?” Trey inquired.
“Well,” Colt replied, “I’ll be seventeen in August. I suspect it started leaking about two decades before I was born.”
It wasn’t so much inventory as it was a shrine to the end of the open prairie. Trey was hoping they could at least sell it for scrap, but wasn’t getting his hopes up.
It was nearly noon before they were able to relocate the pallets outside to the east side of the building to be picked up later by Earl over at Earl’s Salvage Yard and Formalwear. It wouldn’t have taken that long, but Debra Lynn made them both go over to the Pecos County Health Department for tetanus shots after the first pallet hit sunlight.
It was taxpayer-financed vaccinations and a couple cheeseburger baskets at the Dairy Twin before they got back to work.
They weren’t twenty minutes into the afternoon phase of the job when they came across the big wooden crate.
It was stored off to the side of the Quonset hut with a couple big blue tarps covering it. The tarps did nothing to discourage the mice, but they seemed to at least keep the rain off.
Trey could make out the colors peeking through the slats. Red, white, and blue.
“What in the hell…” Colt muttered.
They pried away several warped boards and finally exposed what was inside.
An enormous ESSO sign.
Even dusty and half-hidden in shadows it still looked magnificent.
The oval sign featured two translucent white panels outlined in blue with huge red embossed ESSO lettering floating proudly in the middle like something from a highway dream. A heavy metal frame joined the panels together, complete with mounting hooks welded to the top.
On the inside were fluorescent fixtures with old 120-volt wiring still attached.
Trey stepped backward trying to take in the scale of the thing.
“Good Lord.”
The sign measured nearly ninety inches wide and five feet tall. Eleven inches thick and heavy enough that the crate itself groaned every time they shifted it.
Colt whistled softly. “That thing weighs more than Mayor Goodman’s conscience.”
“That narrows it down to about a pound and a half.”
Debra Lynn wandered in after hearing the commotion and froze.
For a second she looked genuinely unsettled.
Then something flickered behind her eyes.
“Bixler,” she said quietly.
“Who?”
“Vernon Bixler. Your daddy mentioned something once about storing something for him.”
She rubbed her forehead trying to remember.
“He wired the exhaust fan in our master bathroom after I threatened murder charges over your father eating enchiladas three nights in a row. Rusty traded him storage instead of paying cash.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, shortly after I could finally use the bathroom after your father safely again, Vernon disappeared.”
Nobody in Fort Stockton had ever figured out exactly what happened to Vernon Bixler.
One day he was around town drinking coffee at Grounds for Divorce and talking about electrical harmonics like a man who’d sniffed too much solder.
The next day he was simply gone.
By sunset Trey and Colt had managed to wrestle the sign out of the crate and prop it upright against the inside wall of the Quonset hut.
That was when Colt found the switch.
The fluorescent tubes flickered once.
Buzzed.
Then came alive in cold blue-white light.
The entire building changed.
Trey froze.
The smell hit him first.
Old Spice.
His father’s exact aftershave from when Trey was a kid.
Suddenly he was eight years old again riding in Rusty’s old Ford with the vent windows cracked open and George Strait playing softly through static while they hauled lumber outside Sanderson.
The memory hit so hard Trey had to steady himself against the wall.
Across town at nearly the exact same moment Lucinda stopped pouring coffee at Grounds for Divorce and stared out the window.
A memory had rushed over her so vividly it stole her breath.
A white ’62 Bel Air coupe.
Summer heat.
A boy named Raymond Keller drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while she leaned against him at the Sonic outside Odessa before he shipped off to Louisiana for refinery work.
She hadn’t thought about Raymond in twenty years.
At Rex Hall Drug, Rex Hall suddenly remembered details surrounding the death of a patient in 1983. Details that had never quite sat right.
The dosage.
The bruising.
The husband who acted too relieved.
By nightfall half the town was talking.
Within three days people were gathering behind Rusty Hammer Hardware every evening hoping the sign would come on again.
And every time it did, somebody remembered something.
Not always good things.
Hairless B29 sat beneath it one evening and quietly cried after remembering the sound of his mother singing in the kitchen while frying Spam during the summer of 1958.
Mayor Goodman remembered his first campaign speech and threw up behind the Quonset hut.
Nobody asked questions.
Then Angus Hopper showed up.
He stood beneath the glowing sign one night with his thumbs hooked into his jeans and stared at the wiring.
“This ain’t normal electricity,” he muttered.
“That sentence alone concerns me,” Trey replied.
Angus explained Vernon Bixler had once worked around missile telemetry systems before coming back to Fort Stockton and taking a job out at The Facility.
“At some point Vernon got convinced electricity could hold onto emotional residue,” Angus said. “Said memories weren’t entirely in people. Thought places soaked ’em up too.”
“That sounds insane.”
Angus shrugged. “Most things worth remembering do.”
They eventually discovered buried cable running beneath the alley behind the Quonset hut.
Ancient government-grade wiring.
Nobody officially admitted where it went.
Which meant everybody in town immediately knew it had something to do with Cold War nonsense.
Mayor Goodman smelled opportunity faster than Rusty smelled enchiladas.
Within forty-eight hours he announced the First Annual Fort Stockton Memory Festival.
Food trucks.
Live music.
Historic tours.
Commemorative gold mugs.
A sponsorship proposal involving Bluebonnet Loan & Trust and something called “Emotional Heritage Tourism.”
The entire thing collapsed spectacularly.
The extension cords overloaded by dusk.
A funnel cake trailer lost power.
The mariachi band from El Paso got stranded when their bus overheated outside Marfa.
One terrified tourist remembered his ex-wife and locked himself inside the Dairy Twin restroom for an hour.
Meanwhile the sign glowed brighter than ever.
And people began seeing things they weren’t prepared for.
Lucinda remembered the exact moment she chose safety over love.
Rex Hall became increasingly convinced one of his former customers had been murdered.
Debra Lynn sat alone beneath the sign late one evening and suddenly remembered Rusty crying quietly in the garage after Trey moved away to Brownwood.
She had never known.
Not everybody walked away comforted.
Some left shaken.
Others came back night after night like gamblers chasing one more pull on a slot machine.
Then came the final evening.
A thunderstorm rolled over Fort Stockton just after sunset.
Lightning flickered across the horizon while the sign buzzed softly behind the hardware store.
People gathered anyway.
Trey stood beside the glowing oval watching moths bounce against the warm translucent panels.
Then the sign changed.
Not brighter.
Sadder.
The fluorescent hum deepened until it almost sounded like breathing.
And there beneath the sign Trey suddenly saw his father.
Not literally.
But close enough to hurt.
Rusty standing younger beside the old hardware store. Laughing. Building something. Believing time would slow down if he just stayed busy enough.
Trey realized then the sign wasn’t replaying memories.
It was replaying longing.
The moments people wished had lasted longer.
The storm finally knocked out power across half of Fort Stockton.
The sign went dark.
And stayed dark.
No matter what anybody tried afterward, it never illuminated again.
Mayor Goodman attempted to buy it for the city, but Debra Lynn refused.
Lucinda claimed maybe that was for the best.
“Folks can drown in nostalgia just as easy as whiskey,” she said while topping off coffee cups one morning.
Debra Lynn told Rusty all about what had happened one night late. She had showered and crawled into bed to call him. Rusty was at a KOA campground somewhere in Kansas. They talked about their day. And Trey and his family moving back to town and finding a house close by. And the sign. They both wished the other was beside them in bed.
Debra Lynn wanted to ask him to come home. But she didn’t. She wanted it to be when he was ready, not when she insisted.
Rusty hoped she would ask. It would be a sign. Not big, like the ESSO sign, but a hint.
They hung up and each drifted off to sleep.
Out on Dickinson Boulevard in front of the store, headlights drifted past.
There was still so much of the old storage building to go through.
The Dairy Twin fryer hissed in the distance.
And from somewhere nearby came the faint smell of Old Spice and hot summer pavement, hanging in the air just long enough to make Trey wonder if maybe the sign wasn’t entirely finished after all.
2 responses to “SIGN LANGUAGE”
What Ajax said, Cap. Really good.
Captain, I don’t mean to get all teary-eyed, and limp-wristed, but that was good – really good. Congrats!