The Gas Thief
The camera was Katie’s idea, but the fear was all mine.
I sat at my kitchen table at four in the morning, holding my phone with both hands like it might slip away from me, watching a grainy black-and-white video of a man creeping up my driveway.
He moved slow. Careful. He looked back over his shoulder twice.
Then he knelt down beside my truck, pulled a hose out of his jacket, and fed it into my gas tank like he’d done it a hundred times before.
Because he had.
I watched him suck on that hose, spit, and start filling a red plastic can. The whole thing took him maybe four minutes. When the can was full, he stood up, screwed the cap back on my tank nice and neat so I wouldn’t notice, and walked back across the lawn to his own house.
I knew that walk. I’d seen it a thousand times.
It was Clark.
My neighbor.
I put the phone down and just sat there in the dark. My coffee had gone cold. My hands were shaking, and I told myself it was the cold, but it wasn’t.
I’m seventy years old. I’ve buried my wife. I’ve buried both my parents and most of my friends. I’ve had my heart broken more times than I can count, and I thought by now nothing could surprise me.
I was wrong.
Let me back up, because you need to understand a few things first.
My name is Frank. I live alone in a small house at the end of Maple Court, a quiet little street in a quiet little suburb where nothing ever happens. Or at least that’s what I used to think.
My wife Ellen and I bought this house forty-one years ago. We raised our son here. We fought here and made up here and grew old here. She passed three years ago, in the spring, and the house has felt too big ever since. I keep the thermostat where she liked it. I still sleep on my side of the bed. Some habits don’t die just because the person does.
And then there’s the truck.
It’s a 1994 Ford pickup, faded blue, with a dent in the tailgate and a crack running across the corner of the windshield. It doesn’t look like much. I know that. People see it in the driveway and probably think it belongs to a man who can’t afford anything better.
But that truck and I have history.
Ellen and I bought it together back when our son was still in high school. We drove it to the lake every summer. We hauled lumber in it when we built the back deck. We drove it to the hospital the night Ellen’s mother had her stroke, and we drove it home from the funeral three days later, not saying a word the whole way.
When Ellen got sick at the end, I’d take her for drives in that truck because it was the only thing that still made her smile. She’d roll the window down and put her hand out in the wind like a teenager.
“This old thing,” she’d say, patting the dashboard. “It’ll outlive us both, Frank.”
She was half right.
So no, it’s not just a truck. When you get to be my age, the things you own start carrying the people you’ve lost. That truck is full of Ellen. Every scratch on it is a memory.
That’s why, when the gas started disappearing, it bothered me more than it should have.
It started on a Tuesday.
I remember because Tuesday is when I fill the tank. I’m a man of routine — you get that way when you live alone. I filled it up all the way at the Shell station on Hollis, forty-one dollars and change, and I drove home.
The next day I drove out to help my friend Walt fix a fence. Walt lives about ten minutes away and he’s got bad knees, so I go over now and then to do the things he can’t. We fixed the fence, drank two beers, complained about our backs, and I drove home.
That was Wednesday.
Then I didn’t go anywhere. Thursday, Friday, Saturday — I stayed home. I mowed the lawn. I read. I watched some baseball. Normal days.
Sunday morning I got in the truck to drive to church, and I glanced at the gas gauge out of habit.
It was sitting just under half.