Last Taxi Driver (eBook)

STINK BOMBS

Pardon my French, as my fares like to say, but you’d be freaking amazed by the smells that enter my taxicab. The numerous funks, farts, fumes, burps, breaths, bombs, and auras – odors that defy description – my least favorite among them being the putrid, seaweedy stench of frat-boy spit cups. Under the driver’s seat of my Town Car I keep a fat bottle of Ozium and a thin bottle of Aloha Febreze. I have a pine-scented Bigfoot air freshener dangling amiably from my rearview below a Shakespeare-mint freshener modeled on the NPG’s Chandos portrait. Above Shakespeare hovers a Lazarian-style flying saucer with wintergreen-spiced Zeta Reticulans spying out its portholes. Also scattered around my cab is a pawnshop display of those baubled air fresheners advertised in checkout aisles to last a week in your vehicle, which translates into a day in the life of a Mississippi All Saints Taxi cabdriver.

I’m parked at the town square facing the Oasis Diner and thinking about Opposite Earl, about how maybe we all have a worthless or wealthy doppelgänger, and maybe that’s how the world evens itself out and makes life on earth fair. Is it possible that Rich Earl and Poor Earl are somehow the same being who has been divided into two or two hundred people? I’m always trying to come up with theories that make life fair, though of course it isn’t. If there’s one thing this job driving twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts seven days a week has taught me, it’s that life ain’t fair.

Pretty soon I catch myself talking out loud again – something that’s been happening a lot lately, even with fares in the car – so I shut my mouth and shrug at the car camera. Whoever told you life was fair, kid? That question comes to me via my dead father’s gruff-drunk voice. My father loved asking me that. Every time I complained about anything, I got hit with that question. And now, forty years later, parked in a cab I don’t own waiting for my next dispatch, it seems to me as if men are driven crazy by this notion of fairness. Maybe for women it’s obvious early on that life isn’t fair, but men cling to the idea of fairness. We murder and go to prison and hang ourselves over it. Little boys especially worship fairness.

It’s 5:00 PM now and I’ve only got one hour of unfairness left on my shift. Even this late in the day, the long black hood of the Town Car is simmering like asphalt. Although it might appear I’ve started reading a paperback, in truth I’m zoning out and letting the letters crawl around the page when a text message bings in from Horace, my supervisor, telling me to fetch a fellow driver – this guy Zeke – and take him to the garage we use out on Ross Barnett Road.

Only All Saints uses text messages to dispatch. Every other company in town – and there’s about ten of us, all ragtag – still uses the traditional radio, but Stella, a devout Catholic who started All Saints thirty years ago after receiving a Fátima-like vision from God, became paranoid that other companies were stealing our rides, so now we use messages, which means we’re constantly text-weaving in traffic.

Before fetching Zeke, I swing by my place to use the head. My house is one of those bungalows that were once servant quarters. A bunch of frat boys live in the big house in front of me. They’ve got Confederate flags in their windows, and they’re always parking in my slot or blocking the driveway with the giant SUVs daddy bought them for making straight Cs in some seg-ed prep school.

Much to my nonsurprise I find my girlfriend Miko asleep on the bed – that’s pretty much all she does these days. She suffers from depression, a soul-sucking condition that renders me equally lifeless whenever I’m around her. She’s a poet, or used to be, and a good one, so I suppose she’s entitled to a certain amount of ennui, but it’s getting absurd. Sometimes I suspect it’s her lethargy that allows her to remain so beautiful, seemingly as young as ever, while I by contrast age in time-lapse fashion. I desperately need to get Miko out of my house and out of my life – her suicidal thoughts permeate my dreams at night – but she’s broke and helpless and I’m all she’s got in the world.

I tiptoe past the bed into the bathroom. The toilet, which needs cleaning, is situated next to a window also in need of cleaning. While standing there peeing, I automatically start searching for the three-legged doe that haunts my backyard ravine. Her name is Maya and she’s about six months old and there’s nothing graceful to her gait, but she owns a great dignity and I am her champion. In the mornings she stares at my windows until I come outside and throw my breakfast strawberries at her. I’ve counted as many as fourteen deer in my backyard and almost that many groundhogs. When the grass is tall I get red foxes. My cat Bandit stalks them all or pretends to.

Today I spot Maya and her dangling stump half hidden in kudzu. It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself while staring at a three-legged deer. My guess is she got hit by a car, but it’s possible a dog got after her or some drunk frat boy shot her leg off for fun. Or maybe she was born that way. As I stare at the hobbled doe – her Bambi spots are gone now – I try to perceive her without attraction or aversion, like the Buddha advised, to somehow absorb her dignity without fixating on the ugliness of her stump or the direness of her fate. I’ve started rereading Miko’s books about Buddhism lately in an attempt to stop myself from flipping everybody off. So far it’s not helping. If anything, I’m getting worse.

On the way outside, I stop to study Miko and try to decide if she’s faking sleep, but how can you tell? Her back is to me and she’s naked and her long black hair is spilled across her thin shoulders onto the mattress. Back in my cab I head toward Choctaw Drive to fetch Zeke. I’m still thinking about life being fair. I’m thinking the only way earth could be considered fair is if we agreed to come down here on our own volition, like it’s a video game we stupidly decided to play. Either that or earth’s some kind of reform school and we did something terrible to get sent here.

Zeke, the driver I’m picking up, is about forty years old and sometimes takes his daughter out with him at night. His daughter is ten and must help considerably with tips. And his daughter is about the only reason you’d tip Zeke, who looks like a redheaded version of the Unabomber and wears bright superhero tee shirts that coalesce over his beer belly like poured oil.

I pull into Choctaw Ridge Apartments to take him to the garage. The driveway is lined with overflowing dumpsters that turkey buzzards are orbiting high above. The moment Zeke enters my cab his stench stun-guns me. It’s like being electrocuted by cat piss. Tears start running down my cheeks. After a minute of suffering I manage to clear my throat, swallow painfully, and ask Zeke what got fixed on his van. Getting anything repaired by Stella requires a prolonged lobbying process, one or two near-death experiences, and a few screamed threats to quit.

‘Brakes,’ Zeke grunts.

‘Brakes? No way. I’ve been begging brakes for months, man, and I been driving for Stella a lot longer than you have. Listen to these things.’

I hit the pedal, which goes to the floor and shudders obligingly. ‘Front and back,’ I say proudly.

‘Tough tit, man. Hey, you really from Vermont?’

The area code on my cell is still 802, which inspires a lot of redneck repartee.

‘Nah, I just raised a kid up there. Eighteen years, man. Eighteen fucking winters. It damn near killed me. I’m from south Mississippi originally. Hattiesburg.’

‘You’re from Tough City?’

‘Yeah, but I never knew they called it that till I moved here.’

‘You sure don’t talk like you’re from there. You been crying or something?’

‘No,’ I reply, trying to shelter him from the truth about his body odor. ‘It’s just, you know, allergies.’

Zeke keeps staring at me in a peculiar way. As he does this, his eyes twinkle with what seems at first to be a Kris Kringle merriment. It’s the beard and John Lennon glasses that create this illusion, but it isn’t merriment, I suddenly realize, it’s menace. Or maybe it’s the twinkle of insanity, of secret diatribes and homespun bombs. Why the hell did this freak get brakes instead of me? All the day-shift guys think Stella favors the night shift. I am resisting the urge to phone her up right now and give her a piece of my mind. In my imagination I quit grandiloquently every day – I am the Cicero of quitting – but in real life I don’t quit because I desperately need the job. I have two grand to my name plus a shabby condo in Vermont nobody wants to buy. I’m mid-fifties and worried sick about the future. Retirement? As far as I can tell this Town Car is my retirement.

‘Enjoy your brakes,’ I say petulantly as we shudder-squeal to a stop at Jim Warren Automotive. The last time the Town Car got an oil change here somebody stole the jack out of the trunk, and I still haven’t talked Stella into getting me a new one.

No jack, no horn, no brakes. It’s not fair.

Zeke opens the door and then points to my gaggle of air fresheners and asks, ‘That Bigfoot?’

‘Yeah. It’s pine-scented.’

‘I saw him once,’ he says and gets out and slams the door without even telling me about it.

‘Yeah? – did y’all like murder cats together?’ I shout once he’s out of earshot.

Then I reach under the seat and go Rooster Cogburn on the Lincoln: the Ozium in one hand, Febreze in the other. His poor...