The Same Man Asked Me for Directions Twice, Word for Word

I know how this sounds. I've told it out loud exactly three times, and all three times I watched the person's face do the same thing around the part with the cameras. So let me get ahead of that. The DVR at the store overwrote itself on a 21-day loop. By the time I understood what I was looking at, the footage was sixteen days old. I had five days to show somebody and I didn't, and the reasons I didn't are stupid and human and I'll get to them. If that makes the whole thing worthless to you, fine. I'd probably feel the same way reading it. I'm writing it down anyway because I'm thirty-eight now and I've noticed the memory doing what memories do, smoothing things, and I want a version on the record from before it goes completely smooth.

In 2016 I was twenty-seven and I worked the overnight register at a Fuel Mart on Route 2 in inland Maine, outside a little place I'm going to call Harmon Falls because the town doesn't need people driving out there over this. It's the kind of town that's really just a Y in the road with a church, a body shop, and us. The store sat by itself on the highway about two miles east of the actual town, which mattered for the kind of traffic we got. Nights it was long-haul guys, nurses coming off shift at the hospital in Skowhegan, drunks trying to buy beer after one, and loggers. A lot of loggers. If you've never lived along Route 2 you don't know how early those guys start. They'd be at my counter at five in the morning fully awake, boots already dusty somehow, buying Gatorade and Marlboros and those awful pre-wrapped muffins, and they'd been up long enough that five a.m. was practically their lunch.

I worked ten at night to six in the morning, five nights a week, sometimes six when Rick could talk me into it. Rick Thibodeau owned the place. He owned two others, one in Palmyra and one up toward Dover, and he ran all three like a man bailing a boat, whichever leak was squirting hardest got the attention. I'll say more about Rick and the ice machine later because it's part of how I ended up watching the footage in the first place, but the short version of Rick is: decent guy, deeply cheap, and if a piece of equipment could be kept alive with a part off eBay and a Saturday, that's what happened to it.

The reason I was on nights was money. Days paid the same but nights were dead enough that I could sit behind the counter with a notebook and do math, and the math I was doing was for the diesel tech program at the community college in Bangor. Two years, and with tools and fees and everything I'd budgeted about eleven grand beyond what aid would cover, and I was at fifty-two hundred that July. I kept the number written in pencil inside the back cover of a Grossman's notebook and I updated it every payday, and I'm telling you this partly so you know who I was then, a guy with a pencil number, not a guy looking for a story. Nobody scrubbing gas station security footage at 4 a.m. on his day off is doing it for fun. I was doing it because Rick wanted the shoplifting thing documented for the insurance, and I was the only one who knew which nights to look at. Again, I'll get there.

The store itself you've been in a hundred times even if you've never been to Maine. Six pump positions, four that worked reliably. Two coolers of beer, one of soda and energy drinks, a wall of cigarettes behind the counter with the count sheet clipped to the shelf. Lottery machine to my left, scratch ticket dispenser bolted to the counter, coffee station against the front windows with a four-burner Bunn that was older than me. The routine ran the shift more than I did. Elevens, you top off the coffee and face the coolers. Midnight, the beer cutoff argument, if there was going to be one, happened then, and about one weekend a month somebody would take it personally. Two a.m. was the coffee dump. Company rule said dump and rebrew every two hours, Rick's rule said every four, my rule was two o'clock sharp because the smell of four-hour coffee cooking down on a burner is a smell I can still produce in my head on command. Two to three I did the cigarette count and the cooler pull-forwards. Three to four was the dead hour, genuinely nothing, the highway making that sound an empty highway makes, which is not silence, it's more like a room holding its breath between cars. Denny's Oakhurst truck backed in at 4:40 give or take five minutes, and Denny was the first human conversation of the back half of the night, and then the loggers hit at five like a tide, and then it was gray out, and then it was six and I drove home with the windows down to stay awake.

I'm laying all this out because everything that happened, happened against that grid. I didn't wear a watch. I didn't need one. If you asked me what time something happened on a shift I could tell you within ten minutes by what my hands had been doing. That's the thing I'd ask you to keep in mind whenever you feel like I'm being too exact about times. I wasn't checking a clock. I was the clock.

The other thing to establish is June. June was my dog, a shepherd-and-something mix, about fifty pounds, seven years old that summer. My girlfriend Danielle had taken the apartment in Bangor in June (the month, I heard it too, the dog was named three years before the move so it's a coincidence I've been explaining ever since), and she was living up there getting settled into the new job before I theoretically followed her, and the plan had holes in it we were both politely not looking at. Point is the apartment was empty all night and June had started chewing molding, so I began bringing her to work. This was against about four separate policies and I knew it. Rick never worked nights and the cameras were, as established, on a 21-day loop that nobody ever watched. I kept a folded moving blanket for her behind the counter, back by the cigarette cartons, and she'd sleep there the whole shift except when Denny came, because Denny kept dog biscuits in the truck for every dog on his route, and she knew the sound of his lift gate the way I knew the coffee timer. I'm admitting the dog up front because she's in this story and I'm not going to pretend she was allowed to be.

So. July of 2016. I want to say the first night was Tuesday the 12th, and I'll flag right now that I've gone back and forth on this, because I also remember Denny being on vacation that week, and Denny took his vacation the week after the Fourth, which would make it the 5th or the 6th. I've argued with myself about it for years and the honest answer is I don't know, it was one of those two weeks, it was hot, and it was the night after Danielle called me from Bangor to tell me the second bedroom was going to be her sister's for a while, which is its own story that goes nowhere except where you think it goes.

It was around 2:40 in the morning, because the coffee was fresh, I'd done the dump at two and the burners were still ticking as they heated, and I was maybe a third of the way through the cigarette count. The door chime went off. We had one of those two-tone electronic chimes, and I'd worked there long enough that the chime didn't even reach the front of my brain anymore, it just filed itself. Chime, footsteps, cooler door, that's a soda. Chime, straight to the counter, that's smokes or lottery. This one was chime and then nothing. No footsteps I registered. And when I came around the end of the cigarette shelf with the count sheet still in my hand there was a man standing at my counter, square in front of the register, hands at his sides, and I did the little jump you do, and I laughed at myself, and he did not react to any of it.

He was tall but not remarkably tall, six foot maybe, and he wore a long canvas coat, the waxed kind, like a duster or one of those Australian drover coats, brown going to no-color at the seams. In July. It had been ninety-one that afternoon and it was still north of seventy in the store at 2:40 with the AC straining, and this man was buttoned into a coat that went past his knees. That alone wasn't a red flag, and I want to be fair about this. You work an overnight register on a highway long enough and you stop making rules about what people wear. I'd sold cigarettes to a man in a bathrobe and swim fins. Heat or no heat, a guy in a big coat at night mostly means a guy who lives outside, or a guy who's cold all the time because of something medical, or a guy about to put forty dollars of merchandise inside the coat. So my first thought, honestly, was shoplifter, and I did the thing you do, which is come to the register smiling with your eyes doing inventory.

Nothing about the coat bulged. His hands were at his sides and he was wearing gloves. Thin ones, leather or something like leather, the color of a grocery bag. And look, gloves in summer is the same category as the coat, circulation problems, eczema, guys who handle chemicals, I'd seen it. I noticed it and filed it. What I couldn't file was the way he was standing, which I have tried to describe three times out loud and always end up doing the same gesture, kind of flattening my hand in the air. He was standing the way a piece of furniture stands. Not stiff. Stiff is a thing bodies do, stiff means muscles holding. This was more like he had been placed there and the placing had been done well. People at a counter at 2:40 a.m. sway. They shift their weight, they look at the scratch tickets, they take out their phone, they do something with their face. He was just concluded, if that makes sense. Finished arriving in a way people aren't.

He said, and I'm going to reproduce this as close as I can because I heard it twice and the second time is welded into me, he said: "Good evening. I hope you may assist. I am looking for the Tarbox Road, that is past the second bridge. Is it far to there."

Flat on the question. Not a question mark, just the shape of a question laid down flat. And the English was, I used to say broken, but broken is wrong, broken implies pieces missing. Everything was there. It was more like assembled by somebody working from very good instructions. "I hope you may assist." Nobody says that. A phrasebook says that. And "the Tarbox Road," with the "the," which, okay, here's a wrinkle, because old-timers in Maine actually do that, they'll say "the Tarbox road" meaning the road that goes to the Tarbox place, that's real, my grandmother said "the Bog road" her whole life. So the "the" alone would've been fine, would've almost been local. It was the local thing inside the phrasebook thing that made my scalp move. Like finding one real bird in a box of decoys.

I said sure, Tarbox Road, and I gave him the directions, which I could do in my sleep because half my job was directions. West on 2 about three miles, you cross the river once in town, that's your first bridge, then the little cement bridge over what's basically a crick, and Tarbox Road is your next left after that, dirt for the first stretch, there's a sign but it's bent. Takes seven, eight minutes. He listened without moving. I mean without moving anything. And when I finished he waited. That's the other thing. There was a pause before everything he said, the same length of pause, and it wasn't a thinking pause. When people pause to think their eyes go somewhere, up, sideways, anywhere. His stayed on me, and the pause was just, I keep wanting to say it was the same size every time. Like a spacer. Then he said, "That is very useful. The second bridge, and then the left. I thank you," and each piece of it landed at the same interval, ta, ta, ta, like a man laying bricks.

I asked him if he was meeting somebody out there, which was me making conversation the way you do at that hour, and also me fishing a little, because Tarbox Road at three in the morning is nothing. It's a town road that runs maybe four miles between Route 2 and the Denbow Road, hay fields at the highway end, then woods, five or six houses total, a gravel pit that hadn't been active since I was in high school. There is no destination on Tarbox Road. If you're going there you live there, and if you live there you don't need directions, and I knew everybody who lived there by their gas habits if nothing else.

He did the pause. Same size. Then he said, "There is a property. We are concerned with the boundaries of it." Which, again, taken alone, fine. Surveyor. Weird hours for a surveyor, but I'd rung up well drillers at 3 a.m. and route salesmen and one time a guy who inspected cell towers rappelling off them in the dark, allegedly. People have jobs you've never heard of. Surveyor went in the file and the file closed and I felt better, and that's a pattern you're going to see me repeat in this story, me finding the file that lets the thing close, because the alternative to filing things, on a highway at night, alone, is not sustainable.

He didn't buy anything. That also wasn't unusual, people came in for directions all night long, that's what a lit building on a dark highway is for. He said the thank-you, did a turn that I want to describe honestly even though it's the kind of detail people roll their eyes at: he turned all at once. Shoulders, hips, feet, one piece. You try it. Your body doesn't want to do it, you have to think about it, it's a dance move basically. He did it the way a lazy Susan does it. And he walked out, and the chime did its two tones, and I watched him cross the lot toward a sedan parked out at the edge of the light, dark color, never got the plate, never even thought about the plate, why would I, and June, and I didn't clock this until later, June was awake on her blanket with her head up, growling. Low, steady, almost below hearing, the growl she saved for thunder that hadn't arrived yet. And she was doing it facing the coffee station. Away from the counter, away from the door, away from the parking lot. Her nose was pointed at the Bunn machine like it owed her money, and the man was forty feet the other direction, and I remember saying something to her like, wrong way, dummy, and she didn't stop until his headlights swung out of the lot, and the second they did she sighed and went back to sleep, and I stood there with the count sheet in my hand listening to fresh coffee tick on the burner.

Here's the first thing a skeptic can have for free. In my memory I can see his boots. Black, high, laced, with a squared-off toe, wrong for summer like everything else. And I've stood behind that counter a thousand times and you cannot see anybody's feet from the register, the counter's got a full front panel, candy racks on the end. For me to have seen his boots I'd have had to lean over the counter or see him walking in, and I told you the truth, I never saw him walk in. So where'd the boots come from. I don't know. Either I saw him leave and my memory moved the boots to the beginning, or I invented them whole. I know the boots are in there wrong, is my point, and I'm telling you about it, and I'd ask for a little credit for that when we get to the parts I'm sure of.

The rest of that shift was normal. I finished the count, did the pull-forwards, the loggers rolled in at five, Big Paul Cyr bought his two coffees, one for him and one that rode in the cupholder for his brother who never came in, and I went home and slept badly, but I slept badly all that summer, that was the Danielle situation, not the coat situation. I told exactly one person about the guy, which was Sherry, who worked two-to-ten and overlapped me at shift change. I told it as a funny thing. Weird dude in a duster asking after Tarbox Road at quarter of three, phrasebook English, gloves in July. Sherry had worked gas stations since the eighties and she just said, and I remember this because it turned out to be the closest anybody came all summer to being right, she said something like, "Was it the guy who doesn't blink? He's been in before." And I said I hadn't noticed whether he blinked, and she said if I hadn't noticed then it wasn't him, because with that guy it's the first thing you notice, and the conversation went on to the ice machine and I forgot about the blinking thing for two days. Until I had reason to check.

Because two nights later he came back. And before I get into the second visit I have to do some housekeeping, because three other things were going on at the store that July and all three of them are load-bearing for how the rest of this went, even though none of them turn out to be anything. If you want the pure creepy stuff you can skim, but I'd rather you didn't, because the boring stuff is where I lived. The boring stuff is what I mean when I say I wasn't primed for this.

Thing one, the shoplifting. We had a crew of teenagers that summer, three or sometimes four of them, who'd figured out the physics of a two-cooler store with one overnight guy. Two of them come to the counter and take forever with a complicated transaction, gas money in dimes, a lottery question, while the third drifts the far aisle and loads a backpack. Beer at first, then they got bolder and it was whole boxes of Slim Jims, phone chargers, once an entire countertop display of 5-hour Energy, which, I hope it worked. I knew roughly who they were. One of them I was pretty sure was a Denbow kid, which complicated things town-politics-wise, and I'd told Rick, and Rick's response was pure Rick: don't confront anybody, don't call the county on minors over Slim Jims, keep a list of dates and times, and we'll pull the footage and do it properly for the insurance. Keep a list of dates and times. Remember that, because that list is the only reason this story has evidence in it, or had, or almost had.

Thing two, the ice machine. The store had a Leer ice merchandiser out front, the big white box, and its compressor died the last week of June, and the correct move was a new unit and Rick instead bought a used compressor off a guy in Corinna, and the used compressor was the wrong size, and his brother-in-law fitted it anyway with, I swear, a wooden shim involved somewhere, and from about July 1 that machine ran twenty hours a day trying to hold temperature and it made a sound. A hum with a click riding on it, and every forty minutes or so a shudder you could feel through the slab. I'm dwelling on the machine for two reasons. One, all summer, any time something felt strange in that store at night, the first thing I learned to do was ask myself whether it was just the machine, because a big compressor cycling under bad load does genuinely strange things, it makes the windows buzz at certain pitches, it put a vibration in the floor you'd lose track of, and once in August I would've sworn on my mother somebody was standing in the beer cooler and it was ice sloughing off the evaporator plate. That machine gaslit me all summer and I knew it. Two, the machine matters because of a specific thing near the end, and I want it established early that it was ALWAYS running. It never stopped. Hold that.

Thing three was Danielle, and I'll keep this short because it's nobody's business, but the shape of it colors everything. She'd moved to Bangor for a job at the hospital, real job, benefits, the kind of thing you don't say no to in this part of the state, and the plan was I'd finish out the year, hit my tools number, and follow, and enroll, and the two halves of the plan would snap together like a trailer coupler. And all that July the phone calls were getting shorter and arriving earlier in the evening, which if you've been on either end of that you know what it means. Her sister moved into the second bedroom "for a while." I'm not going to narrate the rest of it. I'll just say that a man alone in a lit box on a dark highway from ten to six, whose girlfriend's calls now came at 8:15 sharp, is a man with a lot of unassigned attention. I know exactly what a debunker does with that sentence, because I've done it with that sentence, I've sat in my truck and told myself, you were lonely and sleep-deprived and your life was quietly coming apart, of course the wallpaper started moving. And here's my answer and it's the only answer I've got: the wallpaper didn't start moving. Everything I'm telling you stayed nailed down and boring except one man, on two nights, and one field. If my brain was manufacturing this stuff out of loneliness it had all summer and one venue and it produced exactly three scenes. That's a weirdly disciplined haunted brain. Make of it what you want.

Okay. Carl. Carl needs a real introduction because Carl is the only other person in this story who took it seriously, and also because Carl came with his own noise, and for a while I filed everything he said under that noise, which I regret.

Carl Ouellette was a retired game warden, fully retired by then, must've been seventy, and he had the insomnia old cops and old wardens get, and his wife had passed I think two years before, and the result was that Carl showed up at the store most nights somewhere between 1:30 and 3:00 for coffee and one of those shrink-wrapped whoopie pies, and he'd stand at the end of my counter for an hour. Not in the way. Wardens know how to stand somewhere for an hour. He'd read the paper he brought with him, and talk in bursts with long comfortable gaps, and pat June, who adored him, and around three he'd say "well" like a complete sentence and drive home. I want to be honest that Carl was also, that summer, a man with a bug in his ear, because he was in a boundary dispute with a guy from Massachusetts who'd bought the woodlot abutting Carl's back forty, and the guy had had it surveyed, and Carl swore the new pins were thirty feet onto his side of the old blazed line his father had cut. And this dispute ate Carl alive all summer. He had a folder. He'd bring the folder. I heard about iron pins versus stone piles, I heard about the 1958 deed calling for "the ash tree," singular, in a forest, I heard about adverse possession the way other people hear about their coworker's fantasy football team. It went, as far as I know, absolutely nowhere. Last I knew Carl and the Massachusetts guy were still lawyered up over a strip of poplar and mosquitoes worth maybe four hundred dollars. That's not the story. But I need you to know Carl had surveyors on the brain that summer, because when Carl is the one who eventually says the word "surveyors" to me, you're entitled to weigh that, and I want you weighing it with full information, because I did weigh it, and I still ended up where I ended up.

So, the second visit. Two nights after the first one, and this date I can anchor better because it was the night after the teenagers hit us for the 5-hour Energy display, which went on Rick's list as the 14th, so the second visit was the night of the 15th into the morning of the 16th. Unless the first visit was the week of the 5th, in which case the two-nights-later math breaks, and I acknowledge that, and I've decided to stop performing surgery on my own calendar in public. Two visits happened. They were two nights apart. The pair of them sits in the middle of July. That's what I've got.

Same time. And I don't mean also late at night, I mean the coffee was in the same state. I'd dumped at two, rebrewed, and the fresh pots were still ticking on the burners, which puts it in the same ten-minute window as the first visit, and I was on the cigarette count, and I'd bet you anything I was in the same physical posture when the chime went, half-crouched at the menthols with the sheet on my knee. Chime, and then no footsteps, and I came around the shelf and he was at the counter. Same coat. Same gloves. Same standing.

And he said, "Good evening. I hope you may assist. I am looking for the Tarbox Road, that is past the second bridge. Is it far to there."

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where every listener's face changes, and it's also the part where I have the most sympathy for the skeptics, because people do repeat themselves. Old men told me the same joke every Friday for years. Foreigners working from a memorized script will run the script again, that's what a script is for. If a man with shaky English found a phrasing that worked on Tuesday, why wouldn't he deploy it again on Thursday. I know all that. I'd ask you to sit with the actual experience of it, though, which is not "a man repeated himself." It's that nothing had elapsed for him. When a person repeats a request two days later there's a layer on it, a little grease of acknowledgment, hey, me again, still hunting that road. Even a memorized script gets delivered into the room it's in. This had none of that. Same flat pitch. Same spacer pauses, and I was listening hard this time and I will tell you the pauses were the same length as each other and, as far as my nervous system could measure it, the same length as Tuesday's. It was the difference between a man saying a thing again and a thing being played again. The first one includes you. The second one doesn't need you there.

And this time I was checking the things Sherry had put in my head, and: I did not see him blink. I was looking. It's harder to confirm than you'd think, at that hour your own eyes are doing plenty of stuttering. All I'll claim is I watched his face the way you watch a pot you suspect isn't going to boil, and I never caught it. And the gloves. When I started the directions, west on 2, first bridge in town, he brought his hands up to the counter, first time I'd seen the hands do anything, and he set them flat on the mat, the way you'd set down two tools, and with his right hand he pinched the back of the left glove and tugged it snugger, the way anybody does with gloves, and I was looking straight down at his hands from two feet away under the register lights, which are the brightest lights in the store because of counterfeit bills. The glove leather creased when the hand flexed inside it. Fingers going flat, knuckles working. And the creases came up wrong. On the back of the middle finger the leather broke across four ridges. I need you to understand what I mean. Bend your own finger and look at it. Three knuckles, root to tip, three places to fold. The glove folded four times, evenly, like a drinking straw does, one two three four, on the middle finger and I think on the ring finger too, and then the hand relaxed flat and the leather went smooth and there was nothing to look at. Two seconds, maybe less. I kept giving directions. My mouth did the second bridge and the bent sign all on its own, I have no memory of deciding the words, and my whole conscious mind was two feet down and to the left going, count again. And I couldn't count again, because the hand was flat.

You'll say the leather was just cheap, creased in a previous life, folded funny. That's a real possibility and I'll hand it to you for free, gloves have their own history, leather remembers. I'd believe it in a heartbeat about a glove on a table. It's harder to believe about a crease that shows up under a live flexing hand, evenly spaced, two feet away under a counterfeit-check bulb, and how many hours of my life do you suppose I'd spent looking at exactly that patch of counter mat where people's hands go? Thousands. Hands on that mat were my job. Old hands, tattooed hands, hands missing pieces from mills and saws, hands shaking from a bad night. I'm a professional watcher of hands at close range and that hand had one more hinge in it than a hand has. There. That's the claim. It's small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and I've carried it ten years.

The coin thing happened at the end and it happened fast, so let me set it up. I kept a quarter on the register. Specifically an old Canadian quarter that wouldn't scan in the coin counter, and it lived next to the tape dispenser, and I fidgeted with it on the dead hours, walked it across my knuckles badly, that kind of thing. When he did his thank-you, "That is very useful. The second bridge, and then the left. I thank you," word for word, and I mean word for word, same bricks, same intervals, my hand was resting by the register and I had the quarter under two fingers without thinking about it, pure fidget, and as he did his lazy Susan turn my fingers came off the edge of it wrong and the quarter went off the counter on my side. Concrete floor with a rubber mat that ends about a foot short of the register stand. The quarter missed the mat. Hit concrete, that bright coin slap, and bounced.

He flinched before it hit.

I've drawn this on napkins for people. The flinch was small, a head-tick down and left, toward where the sound was going to be, and it happened while the quarter was in the air. Half a second early, give or take, and I know exactly what half a second of quarter-drop looks like from that counter height because I dropped that same quarter probably four hundred times that summer, it was practically the shift's hourglass. The tick came first. Then the slap. In that order. And the two of them together read exactly like sound and echo, except reversed, and the reversal was so clean that my brain genuinely tried to re-file the sequence in real time, and I could feel it trying, like when a word stops looking spelled right. He finished the turn, walked out, chime, crossed the lot into the dark past the pumps.