Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  It was almost midnight when I got there, so I figured that since there were not going to be any fares to be found on the streets, I’d try the lot and see what developed. I had heat, I had music. I wouldn’t even mind some rest, I remember thinking at the time.

  Which is what I guess I got.

  Now that I was awake, I kept the wipers on intermittent and tried to clear the cobwebs from my head. I was still in the fourth row, but we had all bunched up in anticipation.

  The Fat Man’s cabs are something special. He has three of them. One of them he drives, when he’s in the mood, and no one else touches it, ever. The second he leases to two guys, twelve-hour shifts each. The third, the one I’m in, is eight-hour shifts, three of us plus a floater. I’m the usual day guy, but I do some graveyard shifts, like tonight. All three taxis are old Marathon International Cabs, the old Yellow/ Checker type, the big, bulbous beasts they stopped making almost twenty-five years ago. They’ve got to have a million miles on each of them, easy. They get about twelve miles to the gallon, but they go through anything, and they never quit. And when other drivers see these old beasts bearing down on them, riding way up high, let me tell you: they get the fuck out of the way.

  They’re huge inside, even with the bulletproof partition, which he’s had motorized so you can actually roll it down and out of the way. Great heat, great visibility, new paint. The Fat Man keeps them in mint condition and people get a kick out of riding in them—like a blast from the past. They’re a lot more distinctive than what the big cab companies mostly use today, which is those stupid Chevvies or the rear-wheel-drive Ford Crown Vic’s, the same ones they use as cop cars, except without the big police engine and without the decent suspension.

  The Fat Man has juiced these up a bit, too. Double overhead cam multi-port V-8s, tuned suspensions, a little extra turbo boost, fat new Pirellis, glove-leather interiors, bitching CD / cassette eight-speaker stereo with a sub woofer under the seat; not at all the way they were delivered. And outside, not a nick or a dent or a scratch anywhere. “You be putting a fucking dent in my fucking cab, I be putting a fucking dent in your fucking head!” is what he tells his drivers when they come aboard. And he means it.

  I looked around. There was a stirring around up front. I flipped on the parking lights, flicked the wipers again, moved up a row. Now three rows to go. Time for a systems check.

  Cash money? Check.

  Trip ticket? Check.

  Cigarettes? Let me see…Check.

  Weed? Where did I put the weed?…Fumbling around here…Ah-Ha. In my kit bag, tucked between the front seats, where it’s supposed to be. Take the pipe out, tuck it back in the kit bag. The canister’s in there already. OK. Check.

  No wonder I was floating through the deep vastness of outer space.

  It would be nice, I think, to get a fare back to town, then work the hotels and the clubs and the hospitals the rest of the night, downtown, where the roads will be plowed and the people will be awake, doing something, going someplace. Well, some of the people. There are no radios in the Fat Man’s cabs, no dispatcher sitting someplace warm, pouring money into your ear.

  I asked the Fat Man about this once, early on. He gave me his standard-issue Marine Corps stare, and asked, “How much you have to pay the dispatcher at Yellow, when you was there, get you some calls?”

  “The bribe? The kickback? The baksheesh? La mordita?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that.”

  “Ten, fifteen a week,” I said.

  “That get you all the best calls? All them long, good rides?”

  “Well, no, not really…”

  “How much you ’spect you gotta pay to get them sweet rides?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe twenty-five? Thirty?”

  “That all?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Forty? Fifty? You tell me.”

  He looked away, coughed. “Sixty?” he asked. “Seventy, eighty?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the point?”

  “ ‘What’s the point?’ ” he asked, mimicking me. “Point is, you don’t know. I could be keeping my hand out, and you could keep filling it up, until you be giving me more to get you the good rides than you be making on them good rides. You need somebody telling you where to go, what to do? Go back to Yellow. You be working for me? You on your own.”

  The lights ahead of me flicked on. Up to the second row, I jammed my hat on my head, grabbed the brush and scraper, and hopped outside to scrape off the snow again so at least it looked like I could see where I was going. Some of your customers will appreciate gestures like this, and tip accordingly. Some won’t care in the least; you never know. I even cleaned off the roof and the hood and the trunk. I was Mr. Thorough.

  I was giving the rear window a final swipe when I heard a loud bang, and the sound of breaking glass. I dove for the ground. I heard it again, on my left, and flinched again, edging under the rear bumper. I looked up, combing the snow out of my beard. Drivers were throwing bottles at a Dumpster twenty feet behind me. I saw another one, a pint of Smirnoff, sail through the snow and miss the edge of the Dumpster, splintering against its side.

  I was panting; my eyes were wide. The whole scene of the guy getting killed at the club flooded back in precise detail: the shattering of the glass, the bullet hole in his head, the cold wind on the back of my neck, the EMTs, the cops, the chaos. My pulse was pounding loudly in my ears.

  Deep breaths, Vince, I told myself. Get a grip.

  There was another set of honks, and the cabs around me revved up. I brushed myself off and jumped back in the cab. I closed the door, clicked on the belt, and my row pulled up to the front. We started revving our engines in time with our heartbeats. I had a long pull of water and popped two Certs. Then the starter waved us on to Terminal B, handing each of us a ticket to a fresh encounter, a new mystery.

  I could only hope that my own encounter would be uniquely interested in the deep and profound mysteries of life…especially of life back in the direction of downtown.

  CHAPTER 6

  Vinnie Amatucci

  In the Fat Man’s Cab

  Friday, January 10

  The fare who got in wasn’t sure he wanted to get in and wasn’t sure he wanted to be a fare. He was a good-looking guy, maybe mid-forties, around six feet, a thinner-than-medium build, trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. He got in the cab carrying one bag, a funny-shaped kind of carry-on, with a zippered bottom to it.

  “Chicago…” he kept muttering, “Chicago…”

  I didn’t drop the flag right away—I was thinking that this guy was going to bug out and I’d have to eat the fare. Whenever that happens there’s paperwork. Lots of paperwork.

  “Where to, sir?” I asked.

  He still didn’t look up, his two hands tented over his mouth and nose, his index fingers massaging his nose. The guy seemed to be way down deep. His eyes were fixed on some middle distance, staring.

  I’ve had people before who didn’t want to go where they have to be going—wives heading to the county lockup to visit, older folks heading to the hospital for just one more test—and this one had all the signs.

  The starter came up—we were holding up the line by now—and waved me forward a little. I rolled up, hit the switches and brought both left-side windows down. He came over to the left side and leaned down. Skinny tall black guy, skinny little company jacket—freezing his ass off, his shoulders hunched against the wind.

  “What’s the problem, man?” he asked.

  “The problem,” the fare says, pulling his hands away from his face but not changing his posture, “is that I’m in Chicago, stuck in a snowstorm, and I don’t want to be in Chicago, stuck in a snowstorm, and I’m being somewhat petulant about it.”

  Surprise, surprise; he was actually lucid. No tone, no edge to it, just self-observant. Maybe a level or two removed from current sensory reality.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  “You don’t got n
o choice,” the starter said back. “Airports ’re shut down, both a them, shut down all day tomorrow, too. Talking ice storm. Same with the trains, not going nowhere, accident down in Indiana. If there’s someplace else you need to get to, hunh-unh, not gonna happen. You stuck here. Let’s make it painless, aw’ight?”

  The fare didn’t budge. The starter leaned down and inside a little, breathing our warm stale air. “You got the cash for this here transaction?” he asked. This was a courtesy he was doing for me, and I appreciated it, because I never ask. It’s one of my more noble failings.

  The fare looked up, reached into his front left pocket, pulled out a gold money clip, showing a couple of hundreds and some smaller bills. His eyes tracked the roll and then rotated up to look at the starter.

  The starter leaned back, took a step forward and leaned into my window. “Let’s expedite this here shit, aw’ight?” and slapped the side of the cab as he walked back, blowing his whistle.

  “Sorry to put you through this,” the fare said, “is there a hotel near here?”

  “Well, not one you’d want to stay in unless you want to pay by the hour…if you know what I’m saying. You’d probably do better downtown. Where are you trying to get to?”

  He jumped right in, but took it in another direction. “What about O’Hare? What hotels are out there?”

  “That’s good thinking. You can get to almost anywhere from O’Hare. Midway here is mostly short hops to second-tier cities …” Good move, Vince, you just implied he just flew in from some shit hole. “Of course, all the good hotels up there have Midway vans, every hour or so, if you need to get back here.”

  Go ahead, make it worse.

  “Is there a Marriott?” he asked.

  “There are two, actually. I’ll take you to the better one, near the airport. I know that one pretty well—we play there all the time. As a matter of fact, we’re playing there tomorrow night.”

  He locked onto my eyes in the rearview mirror for a full second, the first time we had really seen each other. There was something there, no, there was a lot there, but I had no context to help it make sense.

  “OK,” he said, “Let’s do it,” and sat back into the seat.

  I hit the button, craned my neck around, nudged the gas pedal and we were out into the traffic and the slush, heading toward the Cermak Road exit about half a mile away. The snow had piled up since I had arrived. I turned up the wipers and cranked up the heat.

  I usually let the fare know my intentions up front, and to let them have a say in which route to take. Hey—if you’ve got a preference or a plan, it’s better you tell me now than after we get there. If I want to go back roads and you want to go Tri-State, and I just heard on the box that the Tri-State is all fucked up, I’m going to tell you. But it is your nickel.

  “Here’s the plan, and if you have a different preference, let me know, OK?”

  I made a point of pausing here, looking back in the rearview. He looked up.

  “We’ll head a mile or two north to the Stevenson, take that west to the Tri-State, head north to DesPlaines Road, then about two miles east to the Marriott. There are more direct routes, but it’s getting sloppy out there, and I think we’d do better to stick to the highways.”

  “Sounds sensible,” he said, and off we went.

  Cermak was a mess, only one lane open each way instead of the usual three. We were poking along in deep ruts, skidding whenever we hit a cross-rut. This kind of driving is like cross-country skiing: you can’t really stop or go on command, but if you work at it you can control the sliding. It also helps to have a good car, and the Fat Man has made these as solid as possible—great tires, plenty of pull when you want it, brakes that, if you really want to stop, you can kick and they’ll catch. I even heard a rumor that the Fat Man’s own Marathon was a custom four-wheel-drive job, with a tranny lifted from an Audi Quattro.

  The fare was looking out the window, his face close to the glass.

  “Does this Marriott have the shuttle buses you mentioned?” he asked.

  “Yup, to both airports—O’Hare every fifteen minutes and Midway every hour. They have all the amenities—decent restaurant, room service, indoor/outdoor pool. Cable, HBO, nice lounge. The other one is a Marriott Residence Inn, and you…you didn’t look like you were ready to take up residence…”

  He looked up at this, a wry grin creasing his face, just a tease of a smile, but something, finally. His left arm was still around that funny case. Either it’s the world’s worst-designed hidden-bottom case, totally obvious, or it’s designed for something special, I thought. He turned away from the window and glanced at the case, his hand lingering on it.

  Without looking up he said, “You said you ‘play there’? ‘Play there all the time’?”

  “Oh,” I said, “Oh, yeah. I’m with a band that has a regular gig there, on Fridays, every second or third one, like tomorrow, in fact, from nine ’til midnight.”

  “You’re ‘with the band’? What do you play?” he asked.

  “I play piano, and I’m like their manager, their agent,” I stumbled.

  “ ‘Like their manager, their agent’…?” he echoed.

  “I was one of the original members, about four years ago,” I said. “It started as a bunch of U. of C. students just having a good time. Man, some of the early gigs we had…”

  “ ‘U. of C.’?” he echoed, again.

  “University of Chicago,” I spelled out. “We had a six-piece band, jazz, Dixieland, standards, that kind of thing. I played piano. Sorry, I already said that. We had a trombone player who had the time-sense of a Tourette’s patient, a clarinet player who played in the key of H, a bass player who thought he should be playing lead and everyone else should be playing ‘under’ him, a drummer who, when he took a solo, sounded like someone kicking a drum kit down two flights of stairs, and this trumpet player who we found totally out of the blue and who had never played anything like this before in his life.”

  Vince, I said to myself, you’re babbling. Take a fucking breath.

  “What was this band called?” he asked.

  “Man, we had a lot of names, ‘South Side Strutters,’ “Chicago Dixie Kings,’ ‘Hyde Park Ramblers’—for an extra ten bucks you could call us anything you wanted. Lately, we seem to be called ‘New Bottles.’ ”

  “…?” He didn’t even have to ask, just a twist of the head.

  “For a while our trumpet player was calling it ‘Old Wine, New Bottles.’ You know, like playing the standards, but maybe in a different way.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Yeah, it was. I’m too young to be talking about ‘way back when,’ but we had a blast. Man, some of the gigs we played—” I reminisced.

  We had pulled over the top of a ridge, and down below there was a car half-flipped in the median, an SUV, a Stupid Useless Vehicle, and people were stomping their brakes as they tried to get an eyeful, swerving side to side, their red taillights leaving trails like tracers in the night. I found a slot to the right of the pack and rode quietly around it. I found a clearing in the flow and quietly surged to fill it, then eased back, safely ahead of the fishtailing gawkers.

  That’s what real driving is all about: anticipation, timing, rhythm.

  “So anyway,” I continued, droning on in spite of myself. “We had a great time and then people started to leave and graduate and shit. We learned a lot of new stuff that all the new people brought with them. I’m not talking formal arrangements or anything. By this point everybody in the band could sight-read, but pretty soon, nobody would need to. People brought in their own styles, their own approaches. We started getting better gigs, better money. We evolved almost chronologically, that’s the tautological logic of it, and pretty soon it was classics and swing and even three months or so of some Western swing—we found a sax player who thought he was a Texas fiddler—and then, of course, bop, the new thing, fusion, whatever.

  “Now here we are, four years into it, we’re all i
n the fucking union, and the only original ones still with the band are me and the trumpet player, and man has he changed some in that time. I mean, not who he is, I don’t think that’ll ever change, but what he can play is just in a different league. The rest of the guys have evolved around him. We’ve got a pretty tight, mellow group, maybe one more piece needed to complete the puzzle, but that’s just the critic in me.”

  A typical Vinnie conversation—all poured out in a big one-sided rush and no one’s paying attention.

  “Like I said, I manage the band and act as their manager. I record most of the gigs and do the telephone thing with the clubs and the radio stations and the free papers like the Reader,” I continued. I added one of my stock lines, “I’m having almost as much fun doing that part of it. Suits my entrepreneurial nature,” I added with a flourish.

  I paused. Our exit was upon us. I hit the directionals, nudged right, and eased around a big slow curve and up to a red light.

  “Well, it sounds like—”

  “We’re about two miles away, at this point,” I said. “A straight shot.”

  He nodded.

  I paused just a little too long. “Hey, sorry. I must have been on autopilot. You were saying something, all I caught was ‘it sounds like…’ ”

  “It sounds like you’re having an interesting experience of the music business,” he said, and with that comment, cryptic as it was, it was over.