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So they wait, two deep at most pumps, some in their cars with their dirty feet up on the dashboard and Pringles cans riding shotgun, others standing in the soupy warmth with hungry kids and
empty gas cans and white-winged bugs dancing toward the lamplights.
Tick.
Tock.
And you think, having come from still-safe Florida, where waiting five minutes for gas is a headache, that these red-eyed refugees from wiped-out places such as Slidell, La., and Pass
Christian, Miss., will be mad or depressed or at least a little frustrated.
Jimmy Dale Crawford?
He's been here since he ran out of gas at 2. That's 10 sticky hours at the BP.
And he's smiling?
``Thank God for blessing us and for getting us this far,'' he says. ``We're alive, man. Lots of people ain't.''
Most other places, tonight is an ordinary Wednesday, but in the parking lot of this BP outside Mobile, Ala., three days away from an awful hurricane, it's more like a church service.
Smiles.
Faith.
Laughter.
God bless yous.
``We were like, man, we lost our house,'' Crawford says, ``but then we started looking around and some people, lots of people, they lost their families. We good, thank God.''
In a Deep South town where the mens' room wall at the local Bruno's grocery store offers the Internet address of the Aryan Nation, a white woman in a still-running minivan sets a 12-
pack of Diet Coke and Pringles on the curb next to an out-of-
gas black woman and her family.
``I feel so awful for you,'' says Pam Leaver, who arrived with her husband, John, a few minutes before. ``I just don't know what to do.''
A kid in cutoffs and flip-
flops pulls up in a Toyota pickup. He has gas and clean clothes and shiny brown hair down to his shoulders.
His gas station tithe?
``I'd gladly give up my beach house to save some poor family from Mississippi or Louisiana,'' he offers. He looks like he means it.
Crawford, whose barbershop Cut 'N Up is flooded, thanks him kindly and tells him about Jesus.
``Right now, what it's about is unconditional giving,'' he says.
The kid nods.
The Special Hurricane Edition of the Spanish Fort Sun screams ``Colossal Katrina'' from the honor box by the door.
``Yeah,'' Terria Crawford tells a new friend, ``Katrina sounds like a black girl.''
She laughs.
``And she angry.''
The mood, like any good church service, bounces from high to low, though, for these folks stuck in the unfamiliar.
One minute, jokes flow. The next, they're talking about Ocean City, Miss. running out of body bags.
``I hope to God there's not as many people dead as they're saying,'' Terria Crawford says.
Here comes a muddy Ford Excursion with Louisiana plates. Inside are five East-
bound people from the same neighborhood in Slidell, La., outside New Orleans. They pour out like a procession of the faithful, headed for the bathroom.
Out climbs Felix Colosino, with a gold cross around his neck. His house is flooded.
Out climbs Jimmy Wallace, with a rosary but no ride the rest of the way to his brother's place in Tallahassee.
Out climbs a man who says he talked God into leaving his house intact as the water rose and the wind tore at his roof.
``I'm not a preacher, I'm not a priest, I don't even go to church that much,'' says Colosino, who was driving his neighbors away from their ruin. ``But it's got to be a test of faith. What
else could it be?''
And this test?
Colosino, nearing the end of this midnight Mass, points toward something somewhere beyond those BP lamplights and the stars blinking in the inky black above.
``It's not the end of the world,'' he says. ``He's given us a chance to start over.''