NEXT IN LINE

He saw thousands of faces every day. One right after the other, unrelenting, from the beginning of his shift to the end, from six in the morning to two in the afternoon. It was a monotonous, thankless job, taking up tolls for forty hours every week, but Zac made it through each day by conceding that someone had to do it. As his older brothers were fond of saying, not everyone could be brain surgeons or rocket scientists or rock stars. The world needed people to collect tolls for highway construction, or to scrub the piss stains off of toilet seats, or to bag and carry out Kroger private-label groceries for elderly shoppers. It was an honest living, at least, and it paid his bills and kept the landlord off his back… well, some of the time. 

He leaned forward, forcing a friendly smile onto his face as a bright yellow Wrangler lurched up. The teenage girl at the wheel eyed him, snapping her gum loudly before asking how much she owed. He suppressed the urge to roll his eyes – he would never understand how someone could miss the six yellow signs that lined this side of the interstate at each mile marker, boldly announcing TOLL PLAZA, X MILES AHEAD, $2.00. And yet he faced that same moronic question day in and day out, at least once every shift, if not more. Of all the operators, he held the current record – on a blistering summer day three years back, he’d had to answer that question a throat-strangling fifteen times. His coworkers still gave him shit about it. 

“Two dollars,” Zac said flatly, watching as the girl rummaged through her crocheted handbag. She finally came up with a motley crew of currency – one crumpled, torn dollar bill, nine nickels, three sticky dimes, and a quarter with an old piece of gum wrapper stuck to it. He sighed heavily as he counted through it, wondering how much longer he had to go until his break – how much longer until he could get out his smokes and suck a couple down; relax his fraying nerves.

“It’s all I got,” she announced, noting his mild disgust at the money. She tossed her hair back, challenging him with her eyes. “Sorry.”

“No problem. Have a good day,” he replied with fake cheer, dumping the change into the sorting machine. He smoothed out the dollar and added it to the drawer, watching as the green ‘GO’ light illuminated, allowing her to move on. Her Jeep jerked and bucked – she must have been driving a stick shift, he mused – and she finally screeched off, leaving behind the acrid smell of burning rubber. Typical. 

It was funny, he thought, how cars suited their owners’ personalities. Like the disheveled young woman who rolled through well past eight that morning, scrambling to put on her lipstick as soon as her dirty, dinged-up Corolla slowed to a stop. The older businessman in his sparkling Lexus LX, cell phone glued between his shoulder and ear, ready to pay the toll as he drove up, his arm stretched out the window with a pair of crisp dollar bills in his hand. The frazzled mother with a pair of screaming towheaded twins in the backseat, the engine of her decade-old Plymouth rumbling and whining but still plowing on.

He wanted to know more about each driver – he spent the long, lonely days wondering about these ‘customers’ of his; wondering where they were off to, who they went home to every evening, and what brought them to this long, straight section of Interstate 44. Envious of their travels, no matter how mundane – in his opinion, going anywhere was an adventure, considering that he remained trapped in a six-by-six plexiglass cell for eight hours out of each day.  

A large, hulking Econoline was the next in line, and he plastered the pleasant smile on his face again when he made eye contact with the driver – a middle-aged man, with thin graying hair and pocked skin on his cheeks, a result, Zac figured, of childhood chicken pox. 

“Hello,” the man rasped, his voice strained and weak. In his right hand was a still-lit cigarette, lightly smoking from the end.  

“Hello,” Zac said neutrally. He watched, mesmerized, as the man brought the thin stick up to his lips, inhaling deeply. The man immediately coughed, the thick, hacking sound wracking his thin frame, and then cleared his throat several times. Zac furrowed his brow. Suddenly, the thought of a smoke break wasn’t quite so appealing anymore…  

“How much?” the man finally managed to ask. 

Zac sneaked a glance at his watch, inwardly groaning. It was going to be a hell of a long day. 

***** 

One of the worst things about his job – apart from the tedium, shitty pay, and abhorrent lack of intellectual stimulation – was the commute. Zac lived fifteen minutes west of the toll plaza, and getting to work in the morning was generally not a problem. Just a quick entry onto I-44, and it was smooth sailing until he arrived. In the afternoon, however, his drive time increased considerably. Since he only worked on one side of the interstate – the eastbound lanes – he was unable to simply backtrack and retrace his route, like most normal nine-to-fivers. Instead, he was forced to keep driving east after he punched out his timecard, miles and miles further from home, adding a good twenty minutes on to the commute. He always breathed a sigh of relief when he came upon Exit 125, his about-face point. He’d get off the ramp, turn left, and get right back on and head for home. It was only when he began the westward leg that he truly felt his workday was over. 

He leaned back in the seat as he drove, pressing the ‘cruise’ button and then letting his mind go on autopilot, as well. The familiar Oklahoma landscape rushed past him – fields and scattered trees; quaint vinyl-sided houses and dilapidated barns. But he didn’t notice – he took the same route, every day. Down the same fifteen miles of I-44, the same exit onto US127, the same left-hand turn onto Old River Road. He had to look at those trees and barns and houses every day, and he was sick of it. This part of Tulsa, the outskirts, seemed frozen in time, content to remain unchanged and untouched, unlike the more industrialized area closer to the epicenter. He’d always thought that would change – that eventually, someone would notice the potential in this flat, unused farmland, and new life and opportunity would spring up around him. He’d lived in the same cheap duplex for close to ten years now, waiting on that life raft.  

But the longer he waited, the more he began to realize – it wasn’t going to happen. Life wasn’t going to change. 

He pulled into his driveway at around ten til three – when leaving the plaza, it had taken him an additional ten minutes to get the engine of his ’92 Geo Prism roaring to life, a problem that was happening with alarming frequency lately. As he stepped out of the car, he shielded his eyes from the blazing sun, staring up at his second-floor home. The left shutter on the front window had come apart and was hanging haphazardly at an angle, waiting to fall to the ground. He kept meaning to fix that… 

He trudged up the outside stairs, the wooden steps creaking and cracking under his worn Nikes. The lock on his door was loose, so he jiggled and wrestled the key into it until he finally heard the satisfying click of the deadbolt retracting. With a sigh, he pushed the door open and stepped inside. 

The small foyer was dark; he generally kept all the mini-blinds in a permanent closed position both day and night, and so he flipped the switch on the wall. Weak light flooded the room. Over in the corner, he noticed a small blinking red light – his answering machine, filled with messages that he more than likely didn’t want to hear. He ignored it, walking straight past and to the refrigerator. Inside was a half-filled cardboard case of Milwaukee’s Best and little else, so he grabbed a can and popped the top, taking a long, leisurely drink. 

Zac wandered over to the couch, collapsing onto the fuzzy fabric, beer still in hand. He belched loudly, staring idly at the blank television screen, wondering what he would do with the rest of his afternoon. His girlfriend, Sarah, was at work, and would be bringing home Chinese take-out for dinner later in the evening; but until then, his day was empty. Just like every other afternoon when he came home from work. He often wondered why, with so much to do, so many little odd jobs around the house to attend to, he somehow never ‘found the time’ to do them.  

And so, instead of going to the grocery, or fixing his broken shutter, or calling back the bill collectors who left faux-friendly messages on his answering machine on a weekly basis, he closed his eyes and slept. And dreamed. 

***** 

“If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?” Sarah leaned back on the couch, asking yet another one of her Impossible Life Questions. In the two years they’d been together, Zac felt like he’d answered enough them to qualify for Philosophical Jeopardy. He grabbed another egg roll and stuffed it into his mouth, thinking.

“Well?” she asked again when he didn’t reply. She propped her feet up in his lap and shoveled several bites of sweet and sour chicken into her mouth. She gave him an expectant look as she waited for him to swallow his food. 

He rubbed his soft belly thoughtfully. The moo shoo pork he’d consumed earlier felt like it was expanding inside his stomach. “I dunno,” he finally said.  

“Zac,” she said, disgusted. “That takes all the fun out of it. You’ve got to think of somewhere.” 

“Well, gimme a minute!” he protested. “What about you? Where would you go?” 

Her dark eyes lit up with excitement, and there wasn’t a second of hesitation in her response. “Paris,” she said breathlessly. “Milan. Athens. London. All over Europe.” 

He wrinkled his nose. “Europe?” he said with disdain. Typical Sarah, he thought – always dreaming of places far, far out of reach. “Why?” 

“For everything! The shopping… the sites… I just want to see a different culture. And the languages!” she said. “Oh, I love to listen to people speak French…” 

“French?” Zac repeated. “Do they speak English over there? How would you find your way around if you can’t understand anything they’re saying?” 

She rolled her eyes, shoving the last bite into her mouth. “Plenty of Europeans speak English,” she said around a mouth full of chicken. “As a second language. Besides, that’s part of the fun! I took French in high school, but they say the only way to become fluent in a new language is to live where it’s spoken…” 

Zac shrugged. “Yeah. Not my thing, I guess.” 

“You’re no fun,” Sarah said. He didn’t reply, and after a moment, she prodded him again. “Well? Thought about where you’d go yet?” 

He stared at his empty plate. He’d put too much duck sauce on his spring rolls, and the dark liquid had pooled up in one corner of the Styrofoam dish. He looked up, finally, and smiled.  

“Maine,” he said.  

Sarah blinked. “Maine?” she repeated. “Seriously?” 

“Seriously.” 

She shook her head, the long dark strands of her hair brushing across her shoulders. “Why?” she asked, clearly baffled. “You thought Europe was lame, but you want to go to Maine?” 

“Why not?” he asked. “I’ve never been anywhere in New England.” He paused. “Or anywhere east of the Mississippi, for that matter…” 

“What in the world is there to do? Why not at least go to New York, or Boston? There’s so much to see there…” 

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Because. I want to see Maine. And the ocean. I bet it’s nice up there.” 

Sarah absorbed that thought, but finally smiled and laughed. “I guess so,” she said, unconvinced. With a theatrical sigh, she tossed her hair back. “Wishful thinking, anyway. It’s not like we’ll be going anywhere soon…” She closed her eyes. “Being an adult sucks, doesn’t it? Responsibility. Bills. Obligations. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like just to take off and go somewhere. Not worry about money or family or anything like that. I can remember, in high school, everyone telling me I could go anywhere, do anything, if I just put my mind to it. And I believed them.” She laughed shortly. “And now I’m a month away from thirty, and what am I doing? Still in school, trying to figure out where life is going. Answering phones for an insurance company.” She sighed. “I would have thought that by now, I’d be really doing something…” 

“Yeah,” he sighed, thinking of his plastic cell hell. Sitting on that stool for hours at a time, sweating profusely during the summer and freezing in the winter, dealing with idiots day in and day out… not to mention the unsavory way his hands smelled like ass at the end of each workday from touching all that dirty, crumpled money. He thought of his own hopes and aspirations from nearly a decade before – when he’d been a freshly minted home-schooled graduate, ready to tackle college or the work force or even Hollywood. It all seemed so long ago; and somehow, somewhere down the line, his ambitious plans for success had derailed. Hollywood hadn’t returned his calls, a love of cheap beer and dollar shots at Buster’s had suspended his collegiate career in the second semester, and a mean streak of laziness had prevented him from landing one of the cushier indoor jobs that most of his friends had. Instead, he’d found himself jumping from one blue-collar post to another, until he’d finally scored some job security with the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. 

“Yeah,” he repeated, feeling drowsy. “Me, too…” 

***** 

The sky was a bold, dark red early the next morning, as Zac began his mind-numbing trek to his equally mind-numbing job. The sun hadn’t completely risen, but he could see the faint, weak light peeking over the horizon, cutting through the clouds, washing the world with a cherry-stained hue. There was a storm coming, he knew – from some sort of nursery rhyme his mother used to sing to all her flaxen-haired children when they were little. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky at morning, sailor takes warning. It brought back memories of sitting on his back porch at dusk with his family, eating vanilla bean ice cream in cheap sugar cones and watching the sun drift slowly into the west.  

The interstate was sparse this time of morning, with only the occasional early-bird commuter driving past him, with their Starbucks grande coffee cups and bleary, tired eyes. He was the exception on this road, the only wired, wide-awake man for miles. He felt jittery; almost nervous, but couldn’t quite explain why. He’d woken up this morning, feeling a sense of purpose, with Sarah’s plaintively spoken words still in his head – wishful thinking… She had a point. What had happened to the spontaneity and unstructured thrills of life? Was there a cut-off point, perhaps somewhere in the late part of your third decade, where you simply settled for the hands you’d been dealt? Was he really going to live 40 hours of every week in a small clear box until retirement? Collecting mysteriously sticky quarters and half-shredded dollar bills, answering the same question over… and over… and over? 

He thought of his older brothers, briefly, recalling their slow surrender to complacency. Isaac, the oldest, was content to check out and bag groceries, so long as it raked in enough cash for his weekly purchases of Hot Pockets, Marlboros and “Two Buck Chuck” from the local liquor store. Taylor, the only custodial diva in Oklahoma – who still wore his pretty hair long and layered, who scrubbed the bathrooms of the boys’ dorm at OSU while kindling a weak, half-assed dream of rock stardom. Neither would admit it, but they’d both secretly given up. They had tried for some measure of greatness and felt that they’d failed, and were now resigned to finishing out life in their current roles. 

And, if the process was going in chronological order, Zac was next in line. 

He grabbed the Coke can from his cupholder, taking a deep drink of the lukewarm soda. He stared blankly at the gray, patchworked asphalt ahead, automatically steering around the potholes and cracks on the familiar stretch of road, as he did every morning. The toll plaza appeared over the horizon – bright, yellow, obnoxious. To his right, the short exit ramp for employees began to form, the white lines veering off towards the main centralized hut of this side of the plaza. Every day, he flicked his turn signal. Followed that veering path. Parked behind that hut. Put on his lime green ANSI traffic vest, a safety precaution he always found ridiculous, considering he was inside a box all day and not in the line of traffic. He hated that vest, the mesh always itched the skin around his neck… 

He kept his eyes straight ahead, his hands firmly locked in place on the steering wheel. His Geo remained straight and steady on the road. Maybe it was time for a change of pace. Maybe it was time to shake things up, to reverse the roles and become the toll-giver rather than the taker. To join the thousands of faceless drivers on their travels east. 

He reached into his pocket as he approached the line of booths, pulling out his wallet. He had exactly two singles in the fold, and he pulled them out, rolling his window down. He slowed to a stop behind a plain white Camry with an anti-abortion bumper sticker slapped on the back, and he knew exactly who was in it – a middle-aged married mother, probably on her way to drop her child off at daycare before going in to the office. She would open her change purse and carefully count out two dollars in coins, because she wouldn’t want to ‘waste’ her nice, crisp dollar bills. He hated those types, always backing up the line. 

The Camry drove off and he pulled up. Carl, one of Zac’s few friends at the plaza, was working this particular booth. “Hello,” Carl said absentmindedly, his eyes drooping, voice flat. Zac wondered if he’d smoked a few before starting his shift late last night – Carl was no stranger to working the graveyard shift while high. “Two dollars.” 

“Right here,” Zac said, holding his arm out of the window. Carl’s eyes widened when he noticed the man that went with the arm. 

“Zac?” he said in disbelief. “Dude, what are you doing? Don’t you work this morning?” 

“Well, I was supposed to,” Zac said. “But… I’m not going.” 

“Why?” Carl exclaimed. “What are you doing? Did something happen?” 

“No,” Zac said. “Well, yes. Yes and no. There’s something I have to do.”

“What? Have you told Mike? Is someone covering for you? Seriously, man, you know Mike doesn’t tolerate this sort of shit…” 

“I’m not worrying about it,” Zac said. “I just have something I have to do. Now…” he waved the bills in Carl’s face. “Here’s my toll. Let me through.” 

Carl merely shook his head, accepting the bills from Zac’s hand. “Alright, dude,” he said. “Go do your thing. Just don’t be surprised if you don’t have a job when you get back.”

Zac shrugged. “I won’t be.” He grinned maniacally at Carl, catching a brief glimpse of his reflection in his side mirror – the huge smile, dimpled cheeks, lit-up eyes. Despite that merry expression, part of him was terrified. He was unsure why he was taking this leap, especially with an empty wallet, unpaid bills and obligations sitting at home, and no game plan for the next step. But the larger part of him was exhilarated. He didn’t know if he would be next in line, if he would end up like his brothers – but the difference between them, he realized, was that he was going to try. He gave one last wave at Carl as the light turned green, pressing lightly on the gas.  

“Hey,” Carl shouted before he was out of earshot. “Where you going, anyway, you crazy bastard?” 

Zac stuck his head out of the window, letting the wind whip through his shaggy locks. Crazy? Maybe, but Sarah would have been proud of his sudden insanity, he was certain. She, of all people, would understand… 

“Maine,” he shouted back, and then before he could hear Carl’s reply, he retreated into his seat, facing forward and eastward yet again.

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