It had been there since before I was born, and it had intrigued me for as long as I could remember. The enormous old oil tank was built on the bank of the river and it looked over water, over the highway, and directly into my bedroom. And I do mean looked. It was all black, but the front had been painted to resemble a face with one eye open, the other closed in a perpetual wink. There was no nose, but its red lips formed a subtle smile. Simple, but striking.

         I had always wanted to see it up close, but my father had no interest in doing such a thing.

         “What tank?” he asked me, sounding impatient and irritated, as if I’d asked him about something I’d just imagined. He pulled the power knob on the Sony Trinitron. There was a high-pitched tone, barely audible and yet piercing all the same, and then the black screen turned gray.

         “The one with the face. On the river. I can see it from my window.”

         He adjusted the rabbit-ear antennas atop the fake wood shell of the television. The image on the screen became clearer, and I could see he was trying to watch a baseball game. The Yankees were playing the White Sox.

         “Oh,” he mumbled, “that tank.” He drank the last sip of his Genesee Cream Ale, then set the green can down on the floor and stomped it flat. He picked it up and tossed it into the kitchen, where there were at least five other empty cans that had suffered a similar fate. He sat down on his recliner, which was upholstered in a woven fabric the color of mustard and that made your bare skin itch when you touched it. “No, I’m not taking you there. It’s an old derelict refinery. Men used to work there until there was some kind of,” he trailed off because whoever was at bat had just hit a long fly ball. He squinted as he tried to follow the ball through fresh waves of interference. The left fielder stepped back onto the warning track and caught it. “Goddamnit.”

         He pulled a fresh, full can of beer from a cardboard box which sat atop the old side table next to his chair and ripped off the pull tab.

“Some kind of what?” I asked him.

“Some kind of what what?”

“You said it was a refinery until there was some kind of…but you didn’t finish.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he’d forgotten what it was we’d been talking about less than one minute earlier. “A fire or something.” He took a swig of beer and lost himself in the Trinitron.

My mother died when I was still a baby. The doctors had no idea why. The birth had gone fine, and she didn’t have any sort of health problems. I was only a week old when it happened. My father told me she was just sitting there nursing me one evening, and then she went tense and tried to say something, but she couldn’t get the words out. Then, he said, she fainted, woke up for a moment, and then passed out again. He drove her to the hospital, where she died less than an hour later. I never got the feeling my father blamed me; not really. But it certainly seemed like he resented that it was her and not me or, for that matter, him.

We didn’t talk much. We ate TV dinners most nights. On others, tuna. Straight from the can.

My father was an electrician. Somedays, he had no calls and he would sit in that yellow recliner all day long, drinking Genesee, crushing every empty can underfoot. Other days, he’d be gone from morning until after I was already in bed. On those evenings, I would take my TV dinner or can of tuna up to my small bedroom with its creaking floorboards and the frightening fracture that split the plaster halfway up the wall and continued on into the ceiling. I would sit in the old wooden chair in front of my window and stare out over the other small houses with weathered roofs, out over the highway that was choked with cars, beyond the river that was thick with industrial waste, old tires, and grocery carts. And all dinner long, she would smile and wink at me, as if we shared some secret joke. I didn’t watch TV. I watched her. And she watched me. And we watched each other until I would feel drowsy and go to sleep, only to be woken late in the night by the uneven idling of my father’s Ford Maverick below my window.

There were also times when he would disappear overnight, and I wouldn’t see him until the following evening. He never told me where he’d been, and I never asked. I assumed that perhaps he had a girlfriend. But it was impossible to imagine him caring about anyone other than whoever happened to be pitching for The Yankees. When I tried to imagine where he’d gone off to for so many days at a time, I could only imagine him all alone in some motel somewhere, sitting at the foot of the bed, a can of Genesee in his hand, crushed empty beer cans on the filthy carpeted floor, and a baseball game on the television. I didn’t begrudge him for wanting to get away. I would have done the same if I could.

And one evening, when I was fifteen years old, I did.

  The evening had started out just the same as most others. It was after six o’clock, and my father wasn’t home yet. I got hungry, so I made myself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and took them up to my room.

Ate them in front of my window so I could look out at that old oil tank. The light was getting low, and the window was grimy on account of it having never been washed in my lifetime. So I opened it up to get a clearer view.

The cold, autumn air came rushing in.

“Now I can see you better,” I said. And of course, I wasn’t really talking to her, but I also wasn’t talking to myself.

“You can see much better if you come closer,” she said.

I looked around my room, and then I stuck my head out the window and looked at the driveway and the little patch of dirt, thistle, and scrubby yellow dead grass that was supposed to be our front lawn. But there was no one there. I looked back up at that oil tank in the distance. “Was that you?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Come see me.” Her lips didn’t move when she spoke. Her voice was faraway and lonely. But she looked right at me, winking at me, as if to say, this is our secret.

 And so I pulled on my winter parka and stuffed my feet into my worn, too-snug sneakers. The stairs led directly into the small living room where my father, had he been home, would be sitting in his mustard-yellow recliner draining a can of Genesee and trying to discern a baseball game through waves of interference. But on this particular evening, the chair was empty.

Having no other idea of how to find her, I walked in a straight line. It took me through people’s driveways and backyards. Dogs barked. Lights came on. People shouted. I did not stop. I walked through thin patches of forest, where ferns and hellebores did their best to entangle my feet. And then I came to the concrete sound barrier. I pulled myself up and over and lowered myself onto the grassy embankment that sloped down to the highway below. From a distance, the traffic could sound a little like the seashore. Close, it was cacophonous—some motors sounded like buzzsaws while others sounded like the deep rumblings of a terrible war machine. But the tank was much closer now, and her smile seemed less subtle. I scrambled down the slope.

The sun had set, and the sky was indigo with silver clouds. I watched for headlights and when there was a break, I ran across the south bound lanes and stopped in the median. I crossed the northbound lanes in the next break unseen by every driver except one, who laid on his horn. The blaring horn dove downward in its pitch as the car sped by and off into the distance.

She smiled at me. Pleased. Proud. Only the river stood between us now.

There was a small concrete bridge downstream that looked like an old overpass. I jogged along the river, my breath forming plumes. The bridge was an old service road, long ago closed. The arm of a gate was set across the full width of a bride. It was secured by a length of heavy, corroded chain, which was itself secured with a large, rusted padlock. There was a NO TRESPASSING sign on it. All of this was enough to keep a vehicle out, but not a person. I slipped beneath the arm of the gate and onto the cracked asphalt surface of the bridge. I ran the length of it, the soles of my sneakers smacking the pavement, which sent echoes over the slow-moving moonlit water.

The road emptied into an abandoned complex of buildings with broken windows and doors torn off their hinges. But I saw no sign of fire—no charred ruins. Only desolation. Brick smokestacks were silhouetted against the blue-black sky. They leaned precariously to the east, as if they were trees that had grown with the direction of the prevailing winds.

I stood at the base of the tank. The ground was thick with tangles of weeds. I looked up into her face—her soft, subtle smile and her bright eyes. They stood out proudly in the darkness.

“I’m here,” I said and only then realized that I was so out of breath, I was panting.

“You’re here,” she said in a soothing voice. “Rest.”

I lowered myself down to the ground and rested my back against the front of the cold metal tank. When I looked straight ahead, I saw the river and the highway and, well beyond that, houses. I couldn’t pick out which one was mine, but I knew it was in there. I tilted my head back as far as my neck would allow and looked straight up above me. I could see her smiling, and it made me smile.

“I have watched over you your entire life,” she said. “But I don’t know your name.”

“James,” I said. “What about you?”

“I don’t have a name. But the people who worked here used to call me The Queen.”

“Why?”

“This place was The Queen Oil Refinery. They wanted to paint me as a queen. But no one was an artist. So instead they gave me two eyes and a smile. No crown. No scepter. Not even a nose. Still, they called me The Queen.”

“Well, I think it’s perfect.”

“Thank you, James.”

“What happened here? I heard there was a fire.”

“No fire. We just closed down.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“It is. But at least you get to have me all to yourself now,” she said.

“That’s true.”

I felt myself growing drowsy. Sitting there, in the dark bathed in moonlight and leaning against what felt like my oldest friend in the world, maybe even my protector, I felt as if I could drift away into a deep, long, lovely sleep. But I knew that if I did, it would open my eyes to a new day of bright sunshine and this night would be in the past forever.

“They’re going to pull me down, James.”

This jarred me awake. “What?” I asked her.

“They’re going to pull all of this down. They’ll level it all and put up something new.”

“They can’t pull you down!”

“Of course they can. I’m no good anymore. I’m empty. I’ve been empty for decades.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“Then what will I see when I look out my window?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“The day I look out my window and you are gone is the day I will find a new window to look out of,” I told her, and I resolved to keep my word.

When I looked up at her, I saw that her smile was bigger and prouder than ever.

I awoke in the cold, gray light of dawn. There was a layer of frost on the weeds and grasses, giving the ground a silver sheen.

“Good morning,” I said, but there was no reply.

I stepped back and looked at her. In the morning light, I could see patches of flecking paint, which revealed rust beneath. It made her look as if she was covered in scabs or sores. Her black paint had faded. There were faint whitish streaks running down the length of her—stains and mineral deposits from years of rain and melting snow and ice. Her red lips had lost their luster, and had become burnt umber. She was weathered. She looked ill and old.

I put my hand on her cold, galvanized steel skin. “Goodbye,” I whispered.

The Queen said nothing in return.

“Goodbye,” I said again. The wind whistled through the empty buildings, and it made a ghostly sound from within her cavernous body.

The Queen just looked out over the frigid river, the cracked asphalt highway, and the colorless land beyond.

I was trudging along the shoulder of the highway, my body shivering away the cold, when a police car pulled over ahead of me. The officer, dressed in his blunt-black uniform, stepped out of the vehicle.

“You lost?”

“No.”

“Where you headed?”

“Home.”

“Where’s home?”

“That way,” I indicated with a lift of my chin in the general direction.

“Where you coming from?”

“That way,” I indicated with a movement of my head in the opposite direction.

“You’re not allowed to walk on the highway.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Right.”

“You got cars going seventy, eighty miles an hour. Not safe for pedestrians.”

“I understand.”

“Can I give you a lift?”

“Are you going to arrest me or something?”

“No, I’m not going to arrest you.”

“Okay,” I said.

I slid into the backseat, and he shut the door behind me. And as we pulled away, I stared straight ahead through the metal mesh that divided the back from the front, me from him, where I’d been from where I was going.

I thanked the officer for the ride and slipped inside before he could ask me anything else. My father’s Maverick was not in the driveway. Maybe he’d been home and had gone out already, but I had the distinct feeling he hadn’t come home at all. I was still cold, and very tired.

I climbed the steps and fell into bed, glancing out the window to be sure The Queen was still there, watching over me. And she was.

I awoke well into the afternoon, my body warm and rested. I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and sat down at the tiny Formica-topped table in the corner of the kitchen. The front door opened, and my father stepped in. He dropped a canvas tool belt on the floor and shrugged his heavy canvas jacket off. Then he looked up and he seemed startled to find me sitting there.

“What are you doing home? Shouldn’t you be at school?”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t feeling good. But I feel better now.”

“Oh,” he said. He walked past me and took a can of Genesee from the fridge.

“Where were you?” I asked him.

He froze right there, the refrigerator door still open. He was clearly surprised by the question.

“Where do you go?” I pressed him.

He cleared his throat and closed the fridge slowly and carefully. He opened his beer and tossed the pull tab onto the kitchen counter, where there would be many others later in the night. “What does it matter?” he asked me finally and not at all rhetorically.

I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed it slowly as I considered the question. “It doesn’t,” I allowed.

He took a long drink of beer.

“I spent the night at the old Queen Oil Refinery,” I told him.

He sat down at the table. “You did what?” He sounded surprised and maybe even concerned. It wasn’t a tone of voice I was used to.

“There wasn’t a fire there,” I told him.

“No?”

“No.”

“Huh,” he said, and he took a sip of beer.

“They’re tearing it all down, though,” I told him.

“Who told you that?”

I considered telling him that it was The Queen. But I knew he wouldn’t believe me.  “I just heard it. At school, I mean.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Well, I never heard anything about that. And, by the way,” he said, standing up, “there was a fire there. I mean, there had to be. Place like that doesn’t just shut down for no reason.”

“Okay,” I let him correct me. What did it matter to me if he wanted to believe something that wasn’t true?

He finished his beer then placed the can on the linoleum floor between the two of us. He lifted his right foot, which was clad in a heavy, scuffed workboot. He saw me watching him and held this pose as he asked me, “You want to do the honors?”

“No,” I told him.

Without another word, he brought his foot down on the empty Genesee can, crushing it into a thin green and silver disc. With a tired groan, he bent down and picked it up, examining it like he was assessing the quality of his work. A few drops of beer leaked from its ruptured aluminum skin, like golden blood. My father tossed the empty can onto the counter near the pull tab he’d torn from it only minutes earlier. It landed on its edge and, for a few moments, it rolled in a semicircular pattern.

Then, like all the others, it came to rest.