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Chancey meows from his food
dish and I feed him before turning on the TV. The screen fills with
tracer fire blazing over a city in shades of black and green, and a
newsman wheezes into his microphone from inside a gas mask. “A
serene, quiet day, to start,” he says, “. . .but then, these brave
men and women, stoic and professional, closed in on the city. As
night fell on the soldiers, the action intensified something
fierce, Janie and Tom, with multiple calls for protective and
chemical gear. It was a race to the bunker, and, quite literally,
it was a race for our lives.” He promises nonstop, twenty-four
seven coverage and says, optimistically, that this is just the
beginning.

“Stay safe, Joe,” says
Janie.

“Seven more killed in the
city of—” says Tom, before the station breaks for a commercial
advertising heartburn medication.

Jake and I bought a lot of
alcohol a week before he left to make sure we drank until we were
good and drunk, but we were tired the night we tried and fell
asleep halfway into the second glass, head-to-feet on the couch.
The next morning Jake said, “We’re a poor excuse for a young
couple.”

I should sleep, but I find
orange juice in the refrigerator and smell it and check for mold
before mixing two parts vodka with one part juice. I drink it, and
many more like it, in front of the TV.

________

March 23

Jake,

How am I?

I try noit to lookg at youir
pictures. Becaus, what if I jinx thingfs? When all you have is
picctures, it starts top feel likje you’re looking at relics or
dead relatives, you kwno?

I smell yoru shirt sometimes, but
not foten. Ofetn. Often. What if I sujck it all out? It’s the one
with the blue stripe anad th

laksdiojanfajgnoiglkjsdf

MARCH 24, MONDAY

Floor heaters warm the
smoke-filled, bedroom-sized cabstand at the bottom of the Dunlop
Street hill, and the air is thick and stale, trapped by plastic
sheeting covering the windows. The door stays closed to keep in
Puddin’ and the dramatic lines of an eighties show bounce off
grime-coated walls.

I cover my nose with my
sweater cuff, pretending it’s for warmth, and eye the remote
control sitting by Shellie’s phone.

“It was a long damn night,”
says Lenny, a night driver. “Day’ll be worse.” He counts money from
one rolled bundle and pulls a separate wad from another pocket. He
strips off a few bills and adds them to his fare pile. “Damn
crackheads’ll make me broke. They can all get AIDS, every one of
‘em.”

“We must find the size nine
shoe,” urges a TV detective.

Paula sets her cigarette in
the ashtray and cleans her glasses with her T-shirt. “They get
AIDS, they’ll just give you AIDS.”

“Paula, whyn’t you—listen
here, Shellie. Don’t be lettin’ ‘em in here no more to sell their
shit.” Hay sticks to the bottom of Lenny’s right sneaker and a
condom box squares his shirt pocket. He takes it out and pretends
to look for something on top of the file cabinet while tucking the
box behind a stack of adult magazines, checking the window when
headlights glow outside. Everyone but Paula pretends not to notice.
“You get caught with one o’ them whores and Georgia’ll kick your
ass and take those kids,” she says.

“I ain’t goin’ to get
caught, woman. Whyn’t you mind your own damn business and worry
about that kid of yours and how she’s goin’ to find out who her
baby’s daddy is.”

Shellie picks up the remote
control, turns up the volume, and sets it back down. It’s closer,
now. Just at the edge of the table.

It wouldn’t kill her to
watch the news for ten minutes.

“Oh, we know who he is,”
Paula says, “and he’ll pay up. Believe me.”

“Prob’ly will, poor
bastard.”

“Bastard is right.” Her
voice is smoke-scratched. She takes a drag from her cigarette and
exhales over the table toward Shellie. Behind her on the bulletin
board, yellowed edges curled since Shellie’s return after her
angioplasty, hangs the notice ordering all smoking to be done
outside. “How you doin’, Shellie? How’s your heart?”

“Still tickin’.” She holds
up a fare sheet. “Lenny, you only gave me seventy-seven, but on
your sheet, here, I got eighty-seven. Now, I can figure it again,
but I already done it three—”

He digs in his front pocket
and pulls out a ten. “Got stuck in my change pocket.”

“M-hm. Try that again and
Lionel’ll get his foot stuck in your you-know-what.”

Paula says, “Shellie, you’re
so polite, the way you talk. Come on. Say ‘ass’ for me.”

“I don’t want to say ‘ass,’
or I’d have said ‘ass’,” she says.

“Mia’s sittin’ over there thinkin’
we’re crazy,” says Paula. “She ain’t been around long enough yet to
get used to us. Ain’t that right, Mia? She’s used to those college
kids. Look at her all curled up on the couch. Girl, I know you
gotta be on crack, you’re so skinny. I can hardly see you in that
couch. It swallows you up. Look at her, Shellie.”

Lenny drops in a chair and
throws his feet up on the table. “
She
ain’t on crack.”

Shellie winks at me. “You on
crack, Mia?”

I have kept quiet because talking
makes the sick feeling worse, but I say, “Do you mind if we watch
the news?”

Shellie glances up at the TV, then
at me, and says, “Well, I s’pose not, but this is almost over. Can
you wait?”

A call comes in and she points at me
and says, “48 Maple.” I look at the TV. A villain topples over a
balcony railing after being punched in the shoulder and Shellie
says, “I know’d he was gonna get caught. He stepped in all them
tomaters.”

“It’s
tuh-may-
toes
,
Shellie. Damn.”

“Tomaters. That’s how I say
it.”

I start to reach for the
remote. Just two minu—

“Forty-eight Maple, Mia,”
Shellie says again, and Charlie—another day driver—says, “Did y’all
hear about the Apache that went down this morning? It was just up
there, up by Pembroke.”

thank you thank you just
Pembroke Jake’s not in Pembroke

“Some kind of trainin’ or
somethin’. No one knows what happened.”

They look at me the way
people look at the sun.

Charlie plays with a book of
matches. “I don’t envy anyone over there, or anyone who’s got
someone over there, know what I mean? Too many of them boys don’t
come back.”

I grab the cab keys from
where Lenny left them on the table and gather my travel mug and
fare-sheet clipboard. I pass between them, shoving Puddin’ back
with my foot to open the door.

The air smells like snow and
soil, and the sky is near black with smears of clouds. A plump moon
whitens the treetops and glimmers in the spiderweb crack on the
window of car number seven, my car during the day, Lenny’s at
night. I climb in and step on hay—there’s hay on the passenger-side
mat, too—and turn on the radio and travel through the stations.
Music, music, music, news!—but, it’s local. Music. Flip to AM and
there’s nothing. I punch the buttons and the ashtray falls open and
sitting there inside, a fat, half-smoked joint.

It’s been years, but I
haven’t forgotten. Sweet, sweet apathy. Random, fading
tangents.

Peace.

I pull it from the ashtray
and hold it to my nostrils and close my eyes. It smells like
nineteen, like the summer before my sophomore year in college. I
would smoke in my living room and walk to the river and lie on my
back under the sun. Grass poked through my hair and, behind me,
bicycle wheels ticked past and the hum of distant conversations
came and—

There’s a loud rap on my
window and Lenny’s face is in the glass. “Gimme that.”

I jump. The window doesn’t
work with the car off, so I open the door a crack.

“What the hell are you
sniffin’ it for?” he says. “You never seen a joint?”

“Is that what this is?” I
knock a hand against the window and the half joint breaks into two
white stubs, one falling to the floor of the cab, the other
dropping on damp gravel.

Lenny says, “Aw, hell, Mia.
That’s just great.”

“Oops.”

He takes off his baseball
cap and tugs at his hair and puts the cap back on. “You’re lucky I
got more,” he says, and I say, “Or what?” but he ignores me and
slams my car door and goes back into the cabstand. I pick up the
half from the car floor, open the door to get the half from the
ground, and put them both in the ashtray before pulling out of the
lot. I drive under the tree canopy leading away from the cabstand.
In the rearview mirror shine the taillights of Lenny’s wife’s
Cadillac parking in the spot I left, his children’s heads
silhouetted in the back seat.

Forty-eight Maple is a
two-story house in the nicer part of the not-so-nice side of town,
so I don’t mind waiting on the street in the dark. Still, I lock my
doors.

A shadow appears on the
other side of the fogged glass and knocks on the passenger window.
I push the lever to “unlock.”

A man, late fifties, maybe, slides
in and closes the door. He wears faded jeans and a black T-shirt
with a hole in the neck seam. He smiles, says “Mornin’,” and I move
my knees left. Fares sit too close, so close I can smell their
breath and see the creases in their fingers and the yellow of their
nails. This one has clean fingernails, a little long, and the skin
on the back of his hand is like paper draped over his veins. I say
“Morning” back, and he says, “Mind if I smoke?”

“If you don’t mind opening
your window.”

He lights his cigarette.
“Smells like liquor, in here. You smell that?”

“No.” I hadn’t woken up with
time enough to shower.

He gives the address of a
construction site ten miles out. “I’m supposed to be there at
seven,” he says, and it’s six fifty-five. “Y’all usually get here
faster.”

“There was some confusion
with the shift change.”

“Charlie on a run, or
somethin’? He usually drives me.”

“I was up.”

He holds his cigarette close
to the window and exhales into the wind. “I’m Donny,” he says.
“Donaldson.”

“Donny, for
short?”

“Nope. Donald Donaldson.” He
salutes. “Doctor.”

“Mia,” I say, not curious. I
tilt the vents to blow the smoke toward his window.

“You coulda said you don’t
want me smokin’,” he says. “I can wait.” He takes a long final drag
and flicks his cigarette outside. “This’ll be a good job. I needed
it. Been out for a while ‘cause of my back, but it’s time to work
again. I was goin’ crazy sittin’ at home, you know? Got to spend
time with the wife, but I just had to get out an’ do somethin’. I
get stir crazy.”

The sun is in the rearview
mirror, a sliver of fire over the trees.

“I’ll finally be able to pay
to get my jeep fixed,” he says. “The wife’s car works, but she has
to use it, you know. If our schedules worked out better she’d drop
me off, but she don’t got to be at work ‘til nine, and she gets
home real late, sometimes. So she’s tired in the
mornin’.”

I say “Mm” and think about
where I’m dropping him off, try to remember if there are any
shrouded areas, secluded roads, empty lots to park in.

“Next week’s our four-year
anniversary,” he says and lights another cigarette. “Don’t feel
like it, though. Feels like we just got married. I love that woman
to death.” He holds his pack out to me.

“No, thanks.”

“She’s an angel. A beautiful
angel. She’s hangin’ in the hallway.” He laughs. “Her portrait, I
mean.
She
ain’t
hangin’ in the hallway.” His laughter fades. “You might be pretty,
but it ain’t goin’ to do you much good if you don’t got a sense of
humor.”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon you. You didn’t
laugh. It was a joke.” He slaps his knee. “You didn’t think it was
funny?”

“Sure it was
funny.”

“Most people laugh when they
think somethin’s funny. What’re you, havin’ a bad day already at—”
he looks at his watch, “ten ‘til seven?”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t get mad,” he says.
“I’m happy Donny. Donny Donaldson. Happy.” He smiles and his thick
mustache hangs over the corners of his mouth. His hair, graying
slightly and curling up over his ears and at the base of his neck,
is messy from the open window. Thick lenses magnify brown
eyes.

I ask, “How long did you
know her before you were married,” and open my own
window.

“Forever.” He waves a
knobbed hand in front of him. “Friends since we was kids, then
started seein’ each other some years back. Used to go out together,
you know, to the bars, but after we got married she liked to stay
home, didn’t want me goin’ out after work. I did for a bit, but it
got to be a hassle. I don’t want to fight with her. She’s my
life.”

“But you’d think you could
go out every now and then.”