“But you’d think you could go out every now and then.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that—”
“You don’t know what I should do, and you don’t know nothin’ about me or her. I wasn’t sayin’ nothin’ bad about my wife. Got that?” He raps the dashboard.
“I get it,” I say, and I want to ask him to please not be mad at me. I open my eyes wide and blink and blink.
“Well, I know where you was goin’ with it. It’s okay. I understan’. But you don’t know us. She was an angel when I met her and she still is. She was sick and I helped her. Doctor Donaldson.” He gives another soldier’s salute, fingers stiff and straight, then tosses the filter, all that’s left of his cigarette, outside. “I go home after work, nowadays,” he says. “Which is all fine, if you think about it, ‘cause I get to see her more. Plus, we keep plenty of beer in the fridge.”
We reach an intersection near an industrial construction site. “It ain’t that one,” he says. “Take a right.” I turn into the suburbs. After a few blocks, I see it. Three houses are being built in a cul-de-sac as an addition to an established neighborhood. Red clay, soon to be topped with sod, surrounds the two-story structures.
“I’m at the second house,” he points.
It could be any one of the town’s middle-class developments, each house modeled from one of three basic designs and plotted in a simple type A, type B, type C-and-repeat pattern, with one or two façade variations. Brick here, siding there, yellow shutters on one, black on the other. Lawns like putting greens, flat-topped hedges, and no trees other than one or two saplings planted out front in a circle of pink bricks. Jake wants to buy a house one day and would take me to these neighborhoods to windowshop. He’d pause at the ones with tall doors, white pillars, and impossibly round shrubs, and I told him once I wanted an old house with roots growing up through the basement and slanted floors and a jungle for a back yard. “Back yard jungles have spiders,” he said, “and you hate spiders as much as I do. Besides. Do you know how much it would cost to repair a cracked foundation?” And he was right. We agreed to meet in the middle, between a museum and a shack, between a sparse, manicured garden and an acre overrun by ivy and weeds.
“Here’s good,” Donny says and hands me a twenty. “Keep it.”
“It’s only thirteen.”
“Don’t want the tip?” He takes the bill from me and pulls a ten and three ones from his wallet and winks, puts it in my palm. “A lesson for next time. I’m sure I’ll be seein’ you,” he says. “Smile more. It’s a beautiful life.” He slams the door and walks into the clay and I notice for the first time how short he is.
I’m wrestling with the shift lever to slide it into ‘reverse’ when he comes back to the car and leans into my window, one hand resting on the roof.
“You off at six?”
“Yes.”
“Whyn’t you come on back at five-thirty,” he says.
________
A berry of some kind, dried and brown, falls from a branch hanging over the hood of the cab, plank, and rolls off and lands in tall grass. It’s quiet here, minus the birds. Two of them splash in a puddle in a dip in the dirt road, the first turnoff from the two-lane highway out of town. A cluster of trees, blossoming green, shades the path with narrow veins and almost hides my cab parked at a slant on the shoulder, half on the path and half in the ditch. If a police car should come by, I’ll say I was sleepy and couldn’t drive without a nap. The smoke is going away, the last bit of the first half burning to ash in the ashtray.
“Mia, girl—you hear me?”
Usually, from this far out, Shellie can’t reach me. I consider not answering. Charlie disappears for hours at a time, and we all know he’s just pretending to be out of range.
The mic won’t be wedged off of its dashboard clip. I lean forward until my lips touch the black holes and press the button and say, “Yes.”
“You ‘bout ready to clear?”
I look at my watch. It’s been twenty minutes since I left Donny. “Almost. He’s checking on a ride. He might want me to come back for him.”
“Well,” she says, “if he takes much longer you tell him to call back, or start chargin’ him. I need you to go to 124 Lincoln.”
“I’m way out.”
“I don’t got no one else,” she says. “Tell me when you’re on the road.”
I lean back in the chair and close my eyes. Ten minutes to be hypnotized by blowing grass that sounds like rain, to lose myself in the words of a teenager singing about lost love and life choices, her voice too thin for such a subject.
Over the radio Shellie says, “The weatherman just came on my tellie and said there’s a tornado watch. Be careful. I’ll tell you if it gets to a warnin’. Mia, you clear, yet?”
I reach out and press the button. “No.”
“Well, give it another minute and then come back in. Lincoln’s still waitin’.”
The sky lasts forever. Fast-moving clouds slide by and wind snaps in the window and I wonder what it would be like to be taken by a tornado, where I would land, if it might drop me on a different plane, somewhere more colorful. The breeze is warm and shadows slide across the windshield like snakes, the movements as unpredictable as my future with Jake, here and gone, and Jake is like the shadow, the snake, a crease in my life, a long, shiny, snake climbing his tree above the dirt whipping up from the base of the trunk and spraying against the windshield.
“Mia. I need you, girl. You clear?”
The rain comes, heavy drops pounding the roof, dripping on my thigh through the crack in the windshield. I lower the visor to catch the water and tug the mic from the base.
“Yes,” I say. “Clear. Thirteen dollars.”
“One twenty-four Lincoln,” she says. “Hurry so we don’t lose him.”
By three o’clock, the storm threat has passed and calls have slowed and I can stop for lunch. I pull into the lot of a diner across the street from the river and the song I was listening is replaced by the day’s news.
Fighting in a province earlier today—Jake’s evening—included an air strike. The woman says in her even and lulling voice that there were eleven U.S. casualties.
I listen for more, but she’s on to approval ratings and then the goings-on in China. This, the only station airing news, and it also happens to be the only station on the radio that cares what’s going on in any country anywhere in the world that has nothing to do with America and this goddamn war in Iraq and she’s talking about China. I cram my thumb into the buttons, one through five, but it’s all rock and country.
“What’ll it be?” Her apron brushes the table and she waits with no pen, no notepad.
They have a TV in the corner, but it’s not on. “Can you turn on your TV?”
“Sorry, hon. Broken. Get you anything to eat?”
“Do you have a radio, or…?”
“Sorry.”
I look out at the car. “Just—just eggs, I guess.”
“Omelet? Scrambled? Fried? We have lots of omelets on the menu, with—”
“I don’t know. Fried? I don’t know.”
“Over easy, over hard, sunny-side up?”
“An egg is an egg, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it? I just want an egg or a piece of bacon. A slice of cheese.” She opens her mouth and I say, “Sorry. Just eggs. And toast. With some different jellies.”
“How d’you want—”
“Over medium, please.” And sleep, please, a long black sleep and hold the dreams.
When she walks away, her reflection in the glass is transposed over the passing cars on the street and the slow-moving river behind the trees on the bank. Jake took me there, to the Scenic Walk—a quarter-mile, pink cobblestone path along the river—when I first moved to town. “See?” he said. “It’s not all franchise restaurants and pawnshops.”
There’s not much of the side of town L.D. Cab caters to that I haven’t come to know uncomfortably well. Juniper runs into Go
lf Club runs into Crossland runs into Lily. Mike, the divorced events director for the downtown museum, lives on Juniper, and he spends the night with a tired twenty-something woman in her run-down apartment on Golf Club. She uses L.D.’s for a ride to Crossland, where she buys drugs from a man who calls at a quarter to seven every morning for a ride to work at the car wash on Lily.
Now and then, I’ve found myself looking for hints of the town’s inner loveliness.
The waitress sets a blue plate in front of me and uncooked egg white oozes onto the chipped porcelain. Cold pats of butter top each toast triangle and a small bowl holds a pile of square, plastic jelly packets, all grape.
________
“Is there any way to avoid—you list’nin’?—to avoid, for just one day of our lives, wishin’ we were the bleached blonde, forty-somethin’ drunk livin’ in a basement apartment? Now, I don’t want to be no woman, don’t get me wrong, but this one lives under me and she don’t leave ‘til noon, and when she does she comes back ‘bout ten minutes later carryin’ some kind of bottle in a brown bag, the top all wrapped ‘round the neck, like she’d been twistin’ it the whole way home.” A new fare, he sits in the back but leans forward between the two front seats, his left hand trapping a single strand of my hair while he grips my seat. His right hand, cigarette between two fingers, is slung over the back of the passenger-side headrest. “I mean, what would our responsibilities really be then, aside from tryin’ not to get beat up? Her boyfriend kicks her ‘round, some, sure—you would, too—but ‘side from that, what? We’d eat mac and cheese, drink gin, and take naps ‘til it gets dark, and the next day we’d start all over again.” Ash falls on the seat and he says “Sorry” and leans over to swipe it to the floor.
“I’ll get it later.”
“I mean,” he says, “look at me. I work at a damn grocery store. Worked there for years, probably since before you were born, and long as I can remember this fat man comes through once every three days buyin’ the same thing every damn time. TV dinners, chicken with mashed potatoes and a brownie for dessert. Four seventy-five, four seventy-five, four seventy-five. ‘Jesus,’ I said to myself when he come through today, ‘don’t this guy eat nothin’ else?’ Four seventy-five, four seventy-five. Liked t’ drive me crazy. And then there it was. A sack of potatoes. ‘Thank God,’ I said to myself. ‘Potatoes!’” He laughs and lights a new cigarette with the dying butt of the other. “I got to deal with this man every three damn days with his stacks of chicken dinners, and that woman downstairs don’t have to do nothin’ but get drunk. That’d be the life,” he says. “Wonder where she gets her money? The boyfriend don’t do nothin’ that I know of, so they must get their money from the state. Damn beggars. Got to get off the booze and get a damn paycheck. Y’hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Worked hard my whole life,” he says. “Raised my three boys when my wife left me and never got help from no one, never complained. Got no reason to complain. I love my boys and took good care of ‘em.” His fingers curl, uncurl. “Damn good care. They’re grown, now. Gone.” He slides back in his seat and stares out the window.
I don’t know what to say, so I ask him if he likes any particular kind of music. “Naw, it don’t matter,” he says, and I turn it to a country station. He moves his mouth with the words to a song I’ve never heard.
When I get him home, it’s ten past five and afternoon traffic slows the drive to the construction site. At a red light I take the second white stub from the ashtray, twist the end tight, and when the signal turns green I lower the windows and light it.
The construction site looks vacant when I get there, so I park and—having given up on getting anymore news—sit back and change the radio station to something less dead-dog saaaaad. Scattered footprints flatten the patch of clay, such reddy-orange clay and so bright under my headlights, and what was this morning a popsicle-stick construction is evolving, growing. A toddler of a house. Sheets like corkboard fill the gaps between beams and I can see the makings of the cul-de-sac’s pattern: B, A, C, this one. I press the horn, forgetting it’s broken, then open the window and yell, “Cab!” It’s so dark out there.
I flip down the visor and turn on the roof light and check my hair in the mirror. Messy from the wind, and mascara blurs the skin under my eyes. I lick my finger and rub at the smear and tuck my hair behind my ears, but there is no difference. My face is pale, skim-milky, and the gray under my eyes won’t be wiped away. Whatever prettiness he saw earlier is gone, long long gone, covered by hours and street grime. I scrub harder, until the skin turns red, then slap up the visor and watch the trailer and lock my doors, because who knows what lurks out there at the edges? I open the window again, scream “Cab!” and close it again and wait. The trailer door opens and a hand emerges from the darkness, one finger held up. Wait. I slide down the window again. “I have to go,” I yell, my voice frantic instead of strong, and he steps-one, steps-two down the stairs with his free hand clutching the railing, then staggers to the car with a beer can, his boots dragging through the clay.
He gets in and slams the door, slurps his beer. He smells, not like smoke but like the inside of a smoke-filled lung, like skin saturated with the straight nicotine of one hundred cigarettes, and when he turns toward me his head lolls like a baby’s. “Hi, beautiful,” he says, and his breath carries vomit.
Orange streetlights pass over the hood, the windshield, Donny’s hand. His fingers tap his thigh to the music on the radio. His other hand holds his beer against his stomach and the aluminum makes hollow popping sounds under clenching fingers. “Good day,” he says. “It was a good day. Sheathin’ today, trusses tomorrow.” He looks at me. “The roof.”
I nod and smile. “Right.” I turn up the radio.
“You’re very pretty,” he yells, and “very” and “pretty” run together to sound like “vurpurdy.” His head falls on a shoulder and he watches me.
“Thank you,” I yell.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Sure, I do,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Nah. You don’t mean it. You—hey, you wanna turn that down?”
I turn it down.
“Hurt your ears, that way, music so loud you can’t hear yourself talk or nothin’. What I was sayin’ was, you said—what was…? Yeah. You said ‘thank you, oh thank you, mister Donaldson,’ like you—you looked at me and saw…you didn’t look at me, but I saw your face, and you didn’t mean it. You said it like you’re a robot, or like you think I want to have sex with you just ‘cause I say you’re pretty.”
“Like a robot?” But that is what I think when they’re drunk, when they slur Gee, honey, you must make a lotta tips, or You sure are a bitch, ain’t you’ It’s what I think when they won’t just sit there and look straight out the window.
“A robot,” he says. “No emotions.” He pounds his chest. “You say thank you but you mean Fuck you, you old man, you pervert. Sure, I’m old. Older than you, seen stuff you’ll never see. But not old, not an old person. So what if I say you’re pretty?” He tips his can into his mouth, but it’s empty. He sets it on the floor and holds it between his feet. “You’re beautiful. What’s wrong with sayin’ that? It don’t mean I want to take you home, don’t even mean I like you. Everyone has beauty.” He presses his palm to his chest. “There’s beautiful people all over. It don’t mean Donny’s sayin’ ‘Fuck me’.”
“Okay. I get it.”
“It don’t mean I think you’re more beautiful than no one else. I knew this ugly woman once—no joke, she was damn ugly—but she was still the most beautiful person I ever met. Ever. You ain’t got nothin’ on her.” He shakes his head and picks up his can again, tries to drink from it, and puts it back between his feet. “Stop at that gas station there so I can get some beer.” He slides his window up and down. “If I’m to put up with this bullshit I need some beer.”
“What bullsh—”
He pounds the armrest. “You don’t know what I seen, don
’t know what kind of man I am, but you sit there and think I’m tryin’ to get you into my bed, just a kid. What’re you, twenty?”
“Twenty-six.” I pull in and park by the door.
“Don’t know nothin’. Don’t know me or what I seen and you think you can judge me. I’m old enough to be your daughter.” He picks up his can and gets out of the car, and on his way inside drops it in the trash.
I check the dashboard clock—five fifty-two—and pick up the mic. “Shellie.”
“Yes, little miss Mia?”
“We stopped at a gas station, so it’ll be few more minutes.”
“Okey-dokey. Dollar for the stop. Tell me when you get your gas.”
Donny’s house is on the way to the cabstand, so I drive over to the pumps and stand by the trunk while the tank fills, hands in my pockets to keep warm. The night air is a strange mix of cool and muggy. Inside, the gas station looks inviting, warm and alive under bright white fluorescents. A girl in short sleeves mops the back of the store near the coolers, behind the bright reds and blues of chip bags and cracker boxes and sacks of candy. She steps aside for Donny and he lifts his six-pack in a thank-you, carries it to the front and stands in line behind
Jake
it has to be Jake same height same uniform jesus oh god there he is it looks just like him
a man in BDUs, just some man. One who hasn’t left, yet, or who’s come back, for whatever reason. He pushes open the door while stuffing a chew tin in his pocket and the door swings closed behind him. He stops to put on his hat and nods at me and smiles. I turn away and pretend to check the dollar amount on the pump and lean, not entirely steady, against the car and touch my face, hot. Sweat stings my hair follicles. If my heart keeps doing this I’ll have an attack and fall dead at the Yancy Street BP and no one will know but Donny—Donny and L.D.’s, because Lenny will come looking for the car. Jake is my only emergency contact—that needs changing—so no one will know who to call and my body—
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