by Julie Smith
Mike decided to turn the taxi around so he’d be pointed back toward the interstate. The quicker he could get out of here the better. His lights picked up the sheetrock dust surrounding several houses as he made a wide circle at the intersection. The dust coated Argonne; a lot of house gutting going on back here. He could smell the dust in the air. He didn’t know if it meant people were trying to come back or trying to crowbar the money out of the insurance companies’ tight fists. The latest word was they wouldn’t pay off unless the house was gutted. What people were being put through, like puppets on a string.
Mike parked at the mouth of the alley but left the engine running for the heat. He could make out the top edge of the carport where the light came from; he could see that it leaned sharply, but he didn’t notice anyone or any shadows, only a halo of light illuminating a small area of the alley.
Mike didn’t like the finger of fear running up his spine. He had a bad feeling sitting out here in a dark ghost town with lots of good hiding places. He needed to be alert, to hear the slightest sound in the dark. He cut the engine, cracked his window open enough to hear a different quality of silence than that in the car, and pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck. Somehow his passenger was up to no good, maybe the whole bunch of them, whoever it was that found cover in the shambles of other people’s houses. Guilt rose in him like bile that he would have a payday, likely a good one, from this opportunist.
The guilt stole into his awareness. If it wasn’t guilt about not making enough money, it was guilt about taking it from the wrong people, guilt about the way he made it. How did the straight-A Jesuit student, the kid with so much promise, end up driving a taxi at night? He rubbed his hand over his face, something he did so often now it was like a tic. The worst thing about driving the taxi, it gave him too much time to think. He wished he had a button on the side of his head he could turn to the OFF position.
Behind him came a sharp crack that sounded like a pistol shot. His body jumped with enough force that he hit his head on the ceiling of the cab. He whipped around. Another crack and the limb of a dying camphor tree fell to the ground inches away from his rear bumper. He slumped into his seat, limp, wasted. As if he could stop his racing heart, he pressed his hand against his chest. He glanced down the empty alley, checked his watch. It had been fifteen minutes. Where was this guy? His heart wouldn’t slow down; his throat was tight. Christ, he thought he was going to die.
Mike was afraid of death. He thought about it a lot and wondered if other people did. No one ever talked about it much, but then neither did he. Stories he’d heard about people dying for a few minutes before being pulled back into life—the white light, the feeling of peace, of someone, God, beckoning from the light-filled tunnel—he wanted to buy it. The nuns at Holy Cross, even the sometimes cynical Jesuits, had assured him there was an afterlife. But Mike feared death would be painful and messy and final. He would die and there would be nothing. When he was a boy, he would look into the sky, stare deeply into the heavens, his mind traveling into an infinity of nothing as long as he could stand it, before panic set in and he returned to earth. He could never keep going to find out if anything might be there to make him believe; his heart would begin to pound unnaturally and he would think he might die.
Had the nuns put this fear of death in him with their talk of eternal damnation? Wasn’t he supposed to have developed a fear of God, not of nothingness? Had the Jesuits used subliminal messages in the religion classes? Had it been the Sunday trips to the cemetery, rain or shine, to visit the dead, his morose grandmother pulling him along by the hand, telling him to keep up? Or could it have been his father’s stories about the war, about watching men die, about saving men whose bodies were already dead from paralyzing wounds?
Mike would go to bed sometimes thinking about how he might die. His father’s talk of heroism, the great terribleness of war, and the glory of it all would swarm in his head. “No guts, no glory,” he liked to say, speaking about it the way Mike later heard men talk about their college football days, as though life beyond could never live up to such thrilling times. He tried to imagine a natural death, in his sleep, but all that did was make him try not to close his eyes.
Mike pulled up a short laugh. Here he sat, waiting for a man who might be dangerous, in an area people referred to as looking war-ravaged, surrounded by streets named after generals and world war heroes and scenes of battle. His father’s description of the fighting in the Argonne Forest was the most vivid—the guts and the glory.
The tic, his hand down his face. The war Mike remembered most was the one he hadn’t gone to and that his father had never seen. Vietnam. When he got drafted, his father, not a man big on physical affection, had hugged him and regarded him with the utmost seriousness and pride. His son was going off to experience what he had experienced, even if it was a different kind of war. There would still be valor and Mike would be one of the proud who fought for his country.
Two weeks before he was to leave for Fort Polk, Mike’s right foot swelled to twice its size. Tests were run, the diagnosis was gout, not so common in such a young man, the doctor said. He hobbled to the recruiting office downtown in the Customs building where he expected a delay in his orders. Instead he walked out with a 4-F.
His relief was so overwhelming that he went straight to a nearby French Quarter bar, where at 9:30 in the morning he drank one beer fast and the second one slowly and counted his blessings with every sip. It had nothing to do with whether he thought the Vietnam War was right or wrong. He hadn’t been a particularly idealistic young man. For six weeks, since the draft notice, he’d been nearly sick with fear that he was going to die.
He went home and told his father the news, keeping his face and tone emotionless. His father briefly laid his hand on Mike’s shoulder, but said nothing.
Thirty-five years later, Mike sat in the taxi he drove six nights a week, rehashing the scene from his own private war. His father’s hand seemed to have left a permanent mark of shame. He wanted to believe that the gesture had been one of sympathy and even some relief, but he believed that his father knew his son was a coward. He’d never since had an attack of gout.
Mike hoped his own son never had to face a draft or go to war. With the war in Iraq and the world so unstable, he worried about it a lot. His wife told him he dwelled on morbid thoughts. His priest told him that older parents were often more fearful for their children. He told Mike not to let fear control him. But he couldn’t tell him how. The world was a hotbed of fear. It thrived everywhere, like the mold and the cockroaches.
A man’s cry jerked Mike back into the night. He looked into the alley as the guy was shoved from under the carport. He tried to break his fall but his arm twisted under him and he cried out again as the side of his face and shoulder hit the hard rough surface left by the flood.
Four men rushed into the alley, all shouting in Spanish. One kicked the guy, whose ass was still up in the air, onto his back. He raised his arms weakly as if to ward off what he knew was coming. They were all over him—no more shouting, only the sounds of the punches against his body.
As soon as it started, Mike swung the cab door open. He rushed into the alley. “Hey,” he called, “hey, stop that!”
At the sound of his own voice, he hesitated.
“Hey!” he yelled again, and began moving forward. “Hey!”
He had their attention. The flurry of blows stopped and the four of them turned toward him.
“Let him go!” He went another couple of steps.
The guy tried to raise himself on an elbow. One of the men shoved him down.
“Mikey.” The guy sounded far away.
Mike took another step and stood his ground. “Let him go. Now!” No one made a move. “Comprende?” Mike yelled at them.
One of the men stood and Mike saw that he held something close against his thigh. He thought it was a gun. He froze. The man lifted his hand, and enough light from the carport caught it that Mik
e saw the blade clearly. Holding the knife at waist level, the man came toward him. He spoke hard, rapid Spanish and gestured with his free hand. He was telling Mike to go, no doubt about it, and when he thrust the knife forward and picked up his speed, Mike turned and ran back to the cab. He vaguely heard the guy on the ground calling, “Mikey, Mikey,” so far away now. Mike gunned the engine. The car slid a little on the dusty street and covered four blocks before a thought crossed his mind. He slammed on the brakes at Canal Boulevard.
His heart was pounding, his throat almost closed. He stared at the cab’s radio, not a blip from it all night. It went in and out; his cell phone was useless. He was alone, completely alone, an entirely new way of being alone, and he made a choice.
He took a deep breath as he stepped out of the taxi. He went around to the trunk. Wrapped in old rags, the gun sat deep in the wheel well beside the spare. Mike unwrapped it, put the rags back in the wheel well, and replaced the cover. He got in the taxi and drove to the Argonne alley.
The four men in the alley all turned when Mike drove up. He didn’t see his passenger. He killed the engine and pocketed the keys as he got out of the cab. He held the gun pointed at the men. As he walked toward them, he asked where the other man was. He got close enough to see that the men were standing around a pool of blood that had soaked into the crust covering the alley.
“What did you do to him?” he demanded.
They were mute, staring at him, maybe afraid of his gun, maybe not. He could see their hands, empty, no knife showing.
“Where’s the man?” Mike repeated.
“El hombre,” one of them said.
“That’s right, el hombre. Dónde está el hombre?”
They all shrugged. One of them said something in Spanish Mike didn’t understand.
“Do you speak English? Doesn’t anyone speak English? Habla inglés?”
They stood there.
“Come on,” Mike said, “You have to know something. Did he walk away? Did you kill him?” He thought a moment. “Muerto? Hombre muerto?”
This got them very agitated. They spoke among themselves, too fast for Mike to understand anything other than a word here and there—hombre, casa, pistola.
“Hey!” Mike waved the gun and took a step toward them, but he didn’t want to get so close that they could jump him. They stopped talking and looked at him. He looked back. Hard. He didn’t know what to do. If he stared them down, maybe they’d think he was dangerous, not desperate.
What seemed like a long time went by. Mike finally said, “If you killed him, I’ll kill you.” He hadn’t known what he was going to say, but in that moment he thought he had it in him to shoot every one of them.
The tallest one spread his hands. “No,” he said, “we don’t kill him.”
“Then where is he?” The man dropped his hands. Anger began to rise in Mike. “You speak enough English to know the word ‘kill.’ How about this? You don’t tell where he is, I’ll kill you.”
The Mexican spread his hands again, his gesture of supplication. “Not so much English.”
“Bullshit! Where did he go, you creeps?” With his free hand he pointed down the alley. “That way?” None of them looked. “That way?” The opposite direction. “That way?” He pointed at the house. “La casa?”
“Sí.” The tall man nodded vigorously, “La casa.”
“Buncha dumb Mexicans,” Mike muttered.
He started toward the house, moving sideways so he could see them. On his way, he picked up a Coleman lantern that sat on an ice chest and walked around a high wood fence that leaned on the carport.
The back door of the house had been removed. When Mike held up the lantern, he could see straight through the gutted downstairs and out the front door, which stood wide open. The house wasn’t large, and a quick walk through the lower floor did not reveal a body or his passenger bleeding to death from a stab wound.
The stairway was by the far wall near the front door. As Mike looked at it, he knew he’d been duped, sent into the house on a fool’s errand. He tore through the house as he felt for his car keys. He arrived in the alley in time to see the last Mexican pull his foot into the cab and close the door. The vehicle roared off and Mike ran down the alley to Filmore Street. It was already a block away, but he stood in the middle of the street and shot twice at it. It fishtailed and he thought he’d hit it, but if anything, it moved away faster.
He pulled his keys out of his pocket and pressed the red alarm button, knowing it wouldn’t work. The remote needed a new battery.
Mike stuck the gun in the back of his pants and walked back to the house in a silence more oppressive than the blackness of the night. He retrieved the lantern, glad for the warmth of its light and the slight hissing sound it made.
The Mexicans had cleared out the carport. The ice chest was gone and not a tool or piece of clothing was left, only a few rags hanging on the Page fence that separated it from the carport next door. Mike stood there, the lantern at his side, as if gathering his energy for the long walk ahead.
His whole body jerked when he heard the rustling in the weeds across the alley.
“Mikey, hey, Mikey.” His fare emerged from behind a dead shrub and limped across to the carport. Mike held up the lantern expecting to see him covered with blood. Instead, he saw sheetrock dust and dirt, maybe a smear of blood on his dark blue jacket, and the evidence of hiding in a weed patch. He held one arm tight against his rib cage. “I was over on Argonne when I heard the shooting. I knew you’d come back, Mikey, I knew you’d come back with the gun.” He grinned.
How could he know it? Mike himself didn’t know it. He wanted to knock the grin off him. He didn’t even know why he felt so hostile. “Your face is a mess,” he said.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t much to begin with.” He was grinning again.
“I thought they’d stabbed you.”
The guy frowned. “They had a knife?”
“I saw a knife.”
“Glad I didn’t see it.”
“Looks like you lost a lot of blood.” Mike walked over to the stain.
“My nose,” the guy said. “Bled like a son of a bitch. I think it scared them.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “They stopped kicking me.” He glanced down the alley where the cab had been. “So what, you leave the keys in the car?”
“Hot-wired.”
He laughed, a short one, and clutched his arm tighter against his side. “Fuckin’ spics. They can do anything.” He tilted his head and looked at Mike, amused. “What I don’t get—you had a gun on ’em, right?”
“I went in the house looking for you, moron.”
He did his high-pitched laugh, keeping it in his throat to avoid hurting his ribs, and the night air sent it out, a sound to make the worst scoundrel’s skin crawl. He grimaced when he forgot his hurt leg, doing a little hop on his good one.
“You’re a bucket of cheer for a guy who just got the crap beat out of him.”
He rubbed at an eye, as though drying it, but touched the open cut on his cheekbone and winced. “Yeah, well, Mikey, what you gonna do? I tried to talk them into staying, but they weren’t buying it this time.”
“This happened before?”
“No, I mean they been stranded out here since my truck broke down.”
“So they decide to beat you up tonight?”
“I was supposed to get the truck Friday. I went to the casino Thursday night, remember? Lost the repair money. They said they’d wait till today.”
“I don’t get it,” Mike said.
The man’s good humor seemed to be deteriorating. He said crossly, “I been at the casino all weekend and lost most of their pay, too. They’re illegals. What they gonna do but beat me up?”
They started walking.
A block later, the guy’s amusement recovered, he said, “Not only that, I been taking cabs all over the place. Fuckin’ expensive.”
“I guess you get off cheap tonight.”
“Fuckin�
�-A. I gotta walk home.” He tried to elbow Mike, but Mike moved away from him. “Don’t be a sour puss. Come on, find us a bar. Buy me a drink. The spics get to party in a hot taxi.”
The guy was strangled with laughter until they got to the intersection of Filmore and General Diaz.
After that they walked awhile in silence, until he added, “Look, Mikey, that was a real stand-up thing you did, come back to get me.”
“Sure.”
“No, I mean it. Four of them, one of you. Even if you had a gun. You didn’t know what kinda weapons they had. You saw a knife. Hell, they had crowbars, sledgehammers, all kinda stuff.”
“I never thought about it.”
“That’s what I mean. You come back for a guy you don’t know, some fare you picked up. You coulda just gone home. That’s real stand-up stuff.” He brushed his knuckles across Mike’s arm. “I appreciate it, man. I mean it.” He limped along, grunting every few steps with the effort.
It was true, he’d gone back without a thought for his own safety. He couldn’t just run away from a man getting kicked like that, who could have been killed. He would never have known whether the guy was dead or alive. His thoughts careened around his brain, and his emotions with them—afraid when he shouldn’t be, not afraid when there was good reason. Maybe he didn’t think right, not like other people. Maybe he’d gone back because the guy was a fare, no other reason than still hoping for a payday.
Christ, where was that button on the side of his head? He needed to turn it off.
“Yeah, I guess they could have killed you.”
“Nah,” the guy said, “I’m the meal ticket.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not much of a businessman, are you, Mikey?” The arrogance—Judas Priest, Mike wanted to kill the asshole. “I get the work, collect the money, they gut the houses, I pay them.”
“The way I read it, you’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
“Whatever you say, Mikey. You saved my life, okay? I’m telling you I appreciate it.”
