I'll Get You For This

  A PACKARD sedan swished to a standstill before one of the air towers. I glanced through the office window to satisfy myself that Bones, the negro help, was on the job. He was there all right. I watched him fussing around the car, gave him full marks for his enthusiasm, returned to work.

  I still got a big bang out of seeing a customer arrive although I had now been running the service station for three months. It was a good buy, and after spending money on it, I had already doubled the business the previous owner had got out of it.

  Clair had been startled when I had told her I intended to buy a service station. She thought I was planning to get a job with a big company in New York. So I was, but after that 'phone call from Lois Spence I had changed my mind.

  I guessed Lois had found out that I had reservations for an air passage to New York, and would follow me there. I decided to duck out of sight. If I had been on my own I'd have waited for them, but Clair complicated things. I couldn't be with her every minute of the day, and they wouldn't have had much difficulty in handling her if they ever caught up with her.

  So I cancelled the air passage, told Clair I wanted to go into the motor business, and pulled out of Paradise Palms in the Buick for a long haul to California.

  I found what I was looking for on the Carmel-San Simeon Highway, within easy reach of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was a small, bright well-kept station, and the owner was only giving up through ill-health.

  It had four pumps, ten thousand gallons of storage, oil lube tanks, two air and water towers, and a good bit of waste land for extra buildings. The thing that really decided us was the house that went with the business. It was only a few yards from the service station, and it had a nice little garden. The house itself was cute, and Clair fell for it the moment she saw it. I fell for it too because she would be close to me all the time, and until I was sure we had lost Lois and Bat that was the way I wanted it.

  I began to make alterations to the service station as soon as we moved in. I had it painted red and white. Even the pavements of the driveways were divided into red and white squares. I had a big sign hoisted on the roof which read: THE SQUARE SERVICE STATION.

  Clair nearly died laughing when she saw the sign, but I knew it was the kind of thing that pulled in suckers.

  I added two more air and water towers. Mechanics put in a new type of hydraulic hoist and a complete high-pressure greasing outfit. Near the rest-room building, startling under its new coat of paint and shining inside with added luxuries, was erected a steel shed to house car-washing and polishing equipment.

  I hired Bones and a couple of youths to help, and business went ahead with a bang.

  One of the youths, Bradley, was a pretty smart mechanic, and I knew most things about the inside of a car. We didn't reckon to take on any big repair jobs, but we could handle the day-today adjustments that came in; but once we did handle three cars that got involved in a smash.

  All day long cars kept coming in, and I was on the jump from six in the morning to seven at night. I fixed up a night shift as I found I was turning away business by closing down at seven. I got an old man and a youth to handle the night trade, which wasn't heavy, but kept coming, three or four cars an hour.

  I had just finished checking the accounts and I found I'd cleared nine hundred dollars after three months' work. I ran over to the house to let Clair know we weren't broke yet.

  I found her in the kitchen, a cook-book in her hand, a puzzled expression in her eyes.

  She found the job of being a housewife tougher than I found my new job. She had started off with little or no knowledge of how to run a house, how to cook, but she wouldn't hire a help. She said she wanted to learn to be useful, and it was time she knew how to cook anyway. I didn't dissuade her, reckoning that after a while she'd get tired of it and throw in her hand. But she didn't. For the first two or three weeks we ate some pretty awful meals. I have a cast-iron stomach so I didn't complain, and after a while the meals got better; now they were pretty good, and improving all the time.

  She kept the house like a new pin, and I finally persuaded her to let one of the youths do the rough work, but the rest of it she continued to do herself.

  Hi, honey," I said, breezing into the kitchen. "I've just audited the books. We're nine hundred

bucks to the good: that's clear profit, and we don't owe a cent."

She turned, laid down the cook-book, laughed at me.

  "I believe you're really crazy about your old gas station," she said. "And after all those threats about not settling down."

  I put my arm round her. "I've been too busy to realize that this is settling down. I've never worked so hard in my life. I had the idea that when a guy settled down, he parked his fanny, and let moss grow over him. I guess I was wrong."

  "Don't say fanny," she reproved. "It's vulgar."