Roadside

[GT Jones]

Cecilia Delgado stood in the roadside gravel of bypass Highway 85, and waited for the next set of headlights to arrive. Underneath a borderline streetlamp she could see every part of her life. The exit to Gila Bend was just to her right, where the dark frontage road curved toward the highway. On her left, a two mile string of plastic fast food icons and gas station lights led to the entrance. The display outside the Gila Bend Credit Union turned to 11:08. (II:CE with the bulbs that still worked.) The alternating thermometer reading gave up a long time ago.

Cecilia looked forward mostly, where cars and semi trucks raced along Interstate 8, one-hundred miles of runway, past the petroglyph silhouettes of a fork, a gas pump, and a twin bed. Gila Bend attractions. That’s where the decisions were made.

It was a Sunday night when all the urban escapees returned from their conjugal visits, sunburned by the beaches of San Diego, loaded up on Zanex from a Tijuana pharmacia run, woken by vibrating shoulder lines, exhausted from the six hundred mile drive to anywhere worth visiting. And this late, this was the crowd that stretched it to the end. The length of the drive calculated, added to their departure time, subtracted from their alarm clock setting, determining the sum of just how much sleep they’d need to make it through work on Monday. They wouldn’t stop for long, if at all, most willing to gamble on that quarter tank of gas to get them the rest of the way to Phoenix. For the less adventurous, (or ones without AAA), their stop would be just long enough to fill up with a couple security gallons of gasoline, replace a skipped meal with drive-thru tacos, and take a piss by the side of the road. Cecilia would have to make her impression quickly.