Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  “Well.” I say, “This city, learning it so you can go out and drive a cab and make money, is more of a lifetime thing than some ‘sudden enthusiasm.’ ”

  “ ‘A couple of hours with a map, then two days of driving around, systematically,’ that’s what he told me,” he says. “Vinnie studied a map one night, then drove around to associate visual landmarks with the street names, and after that he had it all. I believe him. I’ve been in that cab. He doesn’t keep a map in there; he has a better one in his head.”

  We’re both alone with our thoughts. The miles pass.

  “On the way up,” I say, “you said that Landreau must be running from something.”

  He nods.

  “Any idea what he’s running from?” I ask.

  He turns to me, shakes his head, once. “We’re all running, in our own way. Running from something, running toward something.”

  “Everybody?” I ask. “You think?”

  “Well, some people aren’t running. They’re standing still.”

  “Standing still? They’re not running from anything?”

  “They’re hiding,” he says.

  I look at him.

  “ ‘Fight or flight,’ ” he says. “It’s been in the gene pool since before the beginning.”

  I think about this. “So, if you’re running you may be running away from something or running toward something, but if you’re standing still you’re hiding. Is that it? Is everybody who is standing still hiding?”

  “Well, not everybody,” he says.

  “The rest of them, what are they doing?” I ask.

  “They’re not doing anything,” he says, “not a damned thing.”

  I look over at him. Waiting for the rest of it.

  “The ones who are standing still and aren’t hiding, they’re dead.”

  Yeah, I think. I ask myself the question: Which one are you?

  I answer my own question: Which one am I not?

  CHAPTER 33

  Vinnie Amatucci

  Hyde Park

  Sunday, January 19

  I’ve been staying up ridiculously late the last few nights, doing absolutely nothing but staring at the TV, flipping through some old magazines, smoking some weed. My real agenda was to get more depressed. The hand still ached, but it was steady, with not as much throbbing as before, not as many sharp pains when I bumped the cast into something. It was almost worse like this, because for long stretches of time I almost forget about it, and then when I crashed it into something I would get surprised and pissed off all over again.

  I had a little breakfast and a lot of coffee and laid around reading the Sunday Tribune, the words going into my eyes and out of my head, with no traction at all. At around two o’clock I caught myself reading an article in the Sunday magazine that I had already read at ten o’clock in the morning, and threw the paper down in disgust, accompanied by a fit of wild fucking cursing.

  I was pissed at myself, because this was all I had been able to make of my stupid life. I was a first-rate cabdriver and a second-rate piano player. In other words, nobody. I was about to turn thirty, far away from home, with no friends but the guys in the band, still without the goddamned dissertation done. I had nowhere to go and no big shiny degree to fall back on.

  I was pissed at Landreau for showing me just how second-rate I was. I was pissed at Paul for believing in how good I might be.

  I was even pissed at Akiko because she was madly in love. Not that I envied her Laura—Laura was the most beautiful, sexy, exotic woman I had even met, and she scared the shit out of me. I was pissed at Akiko because she faced it, straight ahead, and she held on.

  I was pissed at the thought that the guy that got away would come back, or that they’d send someone else. I was hunkered down, dug in, making time pass.

  There’s a time to be constructive, and a time to lay back and lick your wounds. I was licking my wounds.

  And the rest of the day passed that way, in a blur. I took the pipe back out of the drawer, even turned on a football game on the tube, the play-offs. I got a little buzzed, I lay on the couch, I watched the hours roll by.

  Waiting it out, whatever it was.

  That night, in my sleep, she came to me.

  I was in my apartment, in bed, knocked out on Percocet—I had been saving them for sleep, to quiet the throbbing that started in my hand and migrated to my chest. It was two in the morning, maybe three, when the covers were slowly pulled back and she slid into my bed. Her body was warm and she smelled like vanilla. The lights were out and the shades were drawn. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could picture her perfectly.

  I was lying on my left side, with my mangled left hand stretched out in front of me, and when she slid under the covers, she backed up against me, in a spoon position. She pulled the covers up over the both of us, and backed in closer, fitting my forearm into the curve of her neck.

  She sighed a long sigh, and wiggled her perfect ass against me. Her skin felt like heated silk, smooth and pure and perfect.

  I was hard almost instantly but didn’t dare move an inch; I just lay there, breathing her scent, feeling the warmth at her core spread through me.

  She breathed deeply once, twice, and backed against me tighter. I was dying to push toward her, that primordial hump reflex pounding in my temples, but I lay as still as death, afraid to lose the moment. My right hand, my good hand, was resting on her hip, and I fought my desire to reach out and stroke her, to rub along her flank, to trace my fingertips down her leg. I could feel her calves slide against my shins, feel the hollows of her knees rub against my kneecaps, feel the arch of her spine tickling the hairs on my chest.

  It was pleasure, absolute pleasure; it was torture, sheer torture.

  Oh, God, Laura, I thought, Oh God.

  And with that the covers were flung back, she sat up in the bed, turned on the light, swung her legs over the side, and reached for her clothes.

  It wasn’t a dream at all. And it wasn’t Laura.

  “Akiko?” I asked. “Akiko? What are you doing here?”

  She was holding a black T-shirt in her hands, wrestling with it. She had it half inside-out, half outside-in. She twisted it twice more, then threw it down in disgust. She leaned forward, put her head in her hands, squeezed her short hair in her fists.

  “I don’t know, Vince, I wish I fucking knew, you know?”

  “I mean, how’d you get in here? I mean, I thought I—wasn’t the door locked?”

  She held her chin in her hands, her head down. “Cheap locks, Vince. Took me no more than twenty seconds, didn’t even leave a mark. You ought to get them replaced. Really.”

  “What happened? What is it? I was asleep,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “You called out her name—‘Oh, God, Laura. Oh God’—like that.”

  She was turned away from me, her shoulders bouncing up and down in a slow rhythm. I reached a hand out, my right one, and touched her back. Her skin was tight against her spine.

  “I was asleep, I was having a dream.”

  She half-turned, half-faced me. I caught a trace of a smirk; then she turned back away. “It’s cool, Vince. You’re right, you were only having a dream.” She muttered. “Maybe so was I. I have, like, no fucking idea what I was thinking…”

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around her, tried to quiet her. She began to shake and I kept my arms tight and my mouth shut. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say, and anything you could say would just make it worse. She kept rocking, but she wouldn’t let the tears come out, couldn’t give voice to the pain. So I held her until the quaking stopped and her shoulders relaxed and her breathing slowed to a regular rhythm. We slowly settled back into the spoon position we had started in.

  After a few minutes she half-turned toward me and said, “I’m sorry, Vince. I’m freaking out. I haven’t seen her since, well, since that night you were at my place, and I’m scared she’s dumped me. Run off. Gone back to men. Gone on to someone else, whatever.”r />
  “Let me see if I’m following this. You came here, broke in, to see if she had ‘gone on’ to me?”

  She shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess. Sort of.”

  “And you had to get naked and get into my bed to look really really closely?”

  She pulled her arm back and smacked me—right on my cast. She shook her hand back and forth. I shook my cast back and forth. We both howled. It took us a while to settle down.

  “So, does this mean there’s a side of you that I haven’t seen?” She didn’t even shrug this time. “I mean, do you have some kind of dark and sordid heterosexual past I don’t know about?”

  She looked up at me. “My feelings are all jumbled up. I wasn’t thinking, like, at all.”

  I hadn’t been thinking too clearly myself lately, so I was in no position to push the point. Some time passed. We let the implications trail out.

  “And besides,” she said, “I’ve been with men…a couple of times.”

  “You have? Really?”

  “When I was like, younger.”

  “And…?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “So,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “how do you want it?”

  “What?”

  “Well, how do you want it? Straight-up missionary style, woman on top, doggy style? Should we start with a little foreplay, some oral perhaps—”

  She smacked me again, reached around and backhanded me in the head. Unfortunately, my head is at least as hard as the cast. We both howled again.

  “Does this mean you really don’t want me for myself?”

  She started to protest, but I cut her off.

  “No, I mean, here I thought you wanted me, and now I discover I was just supposed to be some transitional sex object, some tool …”

  “Come on, Vince,” she giggled. “Cut it out.”

  “God, I feel so, I don’t know, so used …”

  She chuckled again, but then she turned around, put her hand gently on my face. “Vince, you know I really love you. You’re a friend.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting, you’re only supposed to fuck people you really despise—”

  “Stop being sarcastic,” she said. “You know I love you like a brother.”

  “Geez,” I said, “you really know how to make a guy’s dick go soft.”

  She rolled her eyes, then moved her leg up against me. “Liar,” she said.

  I started to protest, but she cut me off. Then she rolled over onto her back, spread her legs, turned to me and said, “OK, go ahead. Let’s do it. Fuck me.”

  “Always the romantic,” I said.

  “No, really, go ahead. I can do this, really. I thought about it, kind of, on the way over. Might even be, uh, you know, interesting.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. But that wasn’t flattery.”

  I pushed her right leg closed and leaned up on my elbow. I leaned down and kissed her gently on the lips. Her eyelids fluttered three times. She tasted like vanilla, and honey. I leaned back, took a breath.

  “Look, Akiko, the one you really want is Laura, and, as you can tell, I’m not Laura. You and I, we could have a great time together, but at the end you’d still want Laura, and you’d feel bad for having me instead. Am I right?”

  She looked into my eyes, and saw I was telling the truth, at least the truth as I saw it. She squinted.

  “I mean,” I said, “don’t get me wrong. You’re a beautiful woman, plus of course smart and charming and intelligent and a great percussionist and ‘gee, that really looks great on you’ and all that…But you’re right, you’re my friend. Another time, different circumstances, I would make love to you as well as I know how, fuck you like I meant it, and I would mean it. And you’re right, it might be interesting. Very interesting. But right now?”

  There was that shrug again.

  “I do love you, Vince. Sorry I doubted you, suspected you, whatever.” She twisted toward me, her black eyes searching mine. And we had a moment there, a genuine moment.

  She smiled, rolled onto her knees, reached over, turned out the light, and curled back up against me. The room was cold, and she was warm, and I tucked the covers in around us. We sighed, and started to sink down in together. Mr. Dick was still standing at attention, and I shifted to try to get him out of the way. She reached behind herself, grabbed it, gave it one squeeze.

  “Hey. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t forget, I’ve seen it up close and, like, personal.”

  I nodded against the back of her neck.

  “Besides,” she said, “it’s kind of, like, flattering, you know?”

  And she giggled.

  Yeah, I guess, I thought. And with that we drifted off to a restless but gentle sleep. Still friends. More than ever. Even if one of us had a hard-on.

  CHAPTER 34

  Vinnie Amatucci

  In the Fat Man’s Cab

  Monday, January 20

  Akiko had disappeared sometime in the night, but her scent fluttered up from my bed as I flipped the quilt roughly into place. I slipped into the shower, got dressed, and wedged into my car. It was twenty-two degrees on the way to the cabstand to pick up the big black beast. The sun was a dim rumor in the sky, hidden behind a smear of altostratus clouds. I clicked open #691 and slid in.

  It was time to get back to work. Driving one-handed didn’t figure to be a problem—I do it all the time. I tossed my stuff in the front, started the engine, let the cab warm up enough to cut the frost on the windshield, and headed downtown. It was Monday, the Accountant’s day, so as I drove north I kept the NOT FOR HIRE sign lit up, and I got slightly lit up myself—just a couple of hits. As I stopped at a light on Michigan Avenue across from the Hilton, a citizen standing in front of the hotel tried to flag me down, to make me make a U-turn and pick him up. I pointed to the sign on the roof, and he gave me the finger.

  I cruised up Michigan, turned right at the Hancock and then left and left again, and as I rounded the corner, the Accountant was standing there, reading the paper, which he had neatly folded in half vertically and then into thirds horizontally, like people used to do on the subways when I was a kid in New York, so they wouldn’t take up too much of the communal space. Now they just sprawl out all over the place, and are less likely to read a newspaper than to deposit some bodily fluids on one. But not the Accountant, he’s old school. Just seeing this little gesture restored my faith, such as it is, in humanity, such as it is.

  I pulled up to the curb and popped the locks. He took a few seconds to finish whatever he was reading, then folded the paper, tucked it into his coat pocket, smiled and got in the cab.

  “Why, Vincent, it’s so good to see you this morning, prompt as usual,” he said.

  There was something else in his tone—a little weak in the upper overtones; something in his body language; a crease of worry on his forehead; a hunch of doubt in his shoulders—but I didn’t say a word, except, “Where to, your Lordship?”

  He settled himself in, unbuttoned his coat, placed his briefcase in his lap, took off his gloves and wrapped his hands around them, squeezing them a little too forcefully. Finally he looked up at me. His eyes bugged out, and he leaned forward.

  “What in God’s name happened to your hand?” he asked.

  “Uh, a little mishap,” I said.

  “Sticking your fingers where they don’t belong, eh?” he leered.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  He paused, gave me a serious look. “Can you drive?”

  “No, actually, I pushed the car up here from South Twentieth and State. Luckily, I can do that one-handed.”

  He guffawed his fake laugh, but still looked serious. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite,” I said. “You are in the competent hands—hand—of a trained professional.”

  He looked at me for a beat, he nodded, then his face looked away and turned darker.

  “Well, today it’s going to be a long day indeed. Serious errands, portentous tasks�
��”

  “ ‘And miles to go before I sleep,’ ” I quoted.

  With that, he looked at me, blankly. Not a Frost fan, evidently. “Well, not so many miles today, not so many…Sometimes it’s not the distance that counts but what you do at journey’s end…”

  I must have shown something on my face that looked to him like concern, because he piped right up: “But never fear, lad, you will be well-compensated, as is the custom of our little weekly tête-à-tête.”

  “Whatever is on the meter, sir,” I said. “Be assured that you will be driven in comfort and class, or at least as well as this classic carriage and my one good hand will allow.”

  Now we were falling into the old comfy repartee, and it eased him noticeably. He gave me his chin-thrust-out FDR look, called out “Onward, then!” and I punched in and off we went.

  I got all the way to a stoplight before I politely asked where the fuck we were going.

  The first stop was down on the South Side, down in the Nineties somewhere, off Cottage Grove, where we were the only white folks in sight—not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that there is—and we got there in less than twenty-five minutes. It was a storefront, a mix of Checks Cashed, Lottery, Grocery, Bakery, Beer and Wine, Premium Cigars, and Convenience. He was in and out in less than a minute. Then, unusually, we went still farther south, only about ten more blocks or so. This was an apartment building, semi-middle-class, and again, he was in and out in a flash. Then we headed up north, to the suburbs where the richer people hide from people who use check-cashing stores, first to an office building, then a fenced-in house. Again, in-and-outs, both of them, quick work. Then we started south again.

  On the way, he cajoled me into playing some license-plate poker. We went back and forth for a while with me getting hot on a six-spot with QCR—“Quite Chilling Really, Quilt-Clad Reprobate, Quaint Condom Replacement, Quirky Cub Reporter, Queer Clock Robber and Quince Cooking Recipes,” and him getting stumped on KJV, with only two references, and me picking it up on a challenge and adding “Killed Juvenile Victims” and “Kilt Just Vanished.”