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“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 Golf 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.