Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  But I was too tired to explain to him why not. There’s a train too, I said feebly. A train goes every day.

  The trains are presently on strike, he said.

  I had no answer for that. It was not known to me, whether or not the trains were on strike.

  A woman’s face appeared at the passenger window. She tapped on the glass with fake-jeweled fingernails. My fare waved at the running meter and shooed her away before I could intervene.

  Forget the train, he said to me. Forget the airport. It has to be now, while I’ve got the Amplitude. The once-drowned man closed his eyes in burdened patience. Why are you trying to throw away a lucrative fare? You have kids to pick up?

  No.

  You got a man who’s going to give you some trouble if you don’t come home in time to make him breakfast?

  I knew the sensible answer to this was yes. I told him no.

  I make you nervous, that it?

  No, I said, and this was a half-truth. My mother drove cabs. She kept a gun bulldog-clipped under the driver’s seat. This in a country where people were less in the habit of shooting each other.

  My fare shook his head. You don’t think I’m good for it, he said. Listen, I believe in good faith. I live in accordance with those words—In. Good. Faith—but I appreciate that not everyone can afford to operate on the same principles. Hard times breed hard feelings. Tell me, how many miles is it, here to there?

  I said I guessed it as three fifty.

  The man fished a bill clip from an inside pocket of the shabby jacket. Three fifty, he repeated. So as a show of good faith, I am going to advance you for two hundred miles. That’s about what I have on my person. In five hours the banks will open, and we’ll settle up for the rest. Plus the same again for your return, word of honor.

  The banks. What’s wrong with an ATM?

  A what?

  You don’t have a bank card? Plastic?

  He gave me a wounded look. The world doesn’t run on plastic, he said. It runs on paper. Paper and gasoline. He riffled all the larger bills out of his wallet, folded them over, and held them out.

  I opened the bills, counted through them. He twisted the cap off a seltzer and put the bottle to his lips, taking a deep, doleful swallow as if to dissociate with my visible lack of good faith. Canada was at best four and a half hours beyond my designated radius, and Silas would not have been happy about his cab going so far without him. And I would not have wanted to ask Silas in the first place, because he would have said absolutely no, or else he’d have taken the ride over himself (all the long jobs were his, the fares to JFK and such). I was supposed to have the cab back in his driveway by quarter of three the coming afternoon. Clean, topped up with gas, with his take already calculated. Silas was not a man of faith as far as I knew, but there was a miniature bearded saint suction-cupped to the dashboard. Old plastic turned the color of a bad tooth. I wasn’t sure which saint it was meant to be. It was possible Silas had simply chosen one in his own likeness, in an attempt to spook me honest.

  What I’m saying is: I suppose I must have needed the money. Of course I needed the money. People who do not need money do not drive cabs, no matter what they’ll tell you. More than likely I’d already spent the money, in one way or another, and now owed it to telephone and electricity companies, to banks and pawnbrokers and landlords.

  I folded up the bills and tucked them away.

  I’ll stop into a brick-and-mortar for the rest, he promised again. Soon as they open, first thing. That’s just what I have right now on my person, excepting some smalls and coinage for food. But you can hold on to my license and passport as collateral, if you like. There’s even my birth certificate here somewhere, he said, hunting through the suitcase, then his pockets.

  He offered all this with an expression of guilelessness, his face open as a baby’s. In all good faith, I am sure, that I would wave this gesture away. As if there was anything to stop him recovering these after my body had been ditched.

  My passport is not in my birth name, as you will likely observe, he said, and as such it is additionally precious to me.

  Here it is, I thought. The booklet he’d produced looked very crisp, freshly minted.

  Where has it been, I asked. I mean, what stamps does it have?

  He took the document back and flipped through it. Charles de Gaulle, he read. Heathrow. Harmless places.

  But you should rough it up a little bit. It looks untraveled. In my opinion.

  He held the passport out the window and tipped a little seltzer on it, shook it in the wind.

  Of course I had my doubts. But by this stage I had already spent the money, at least in my mind. And I had already made peace with Silas, also in my mind. A full week’s takings in six hours. Twelve hours if you counted the way back, but I’d do those hours with the radio up and maybe a bottle of Fernet Branca for mouthwash, and the small luxury of my own thoughts.

  All right, I said. Which crossing?

  The Falls. Over the Rainbow Bridge.

  It sounds like dying, I said, keying the ignition.

  Hear hear, he said.

  Once we got onto the 90, the once-drowned man let out a long breath I wasn’t aware he’d been holding. He rubbed his palms into eyes leaded by decades of bad sleep. Then he rolled down the window and breathed some more.

  This is fine air, isn’t it? And this is a nice, nice thing you’re doing for me, he said. You want to know the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in I don’t know how long? The dentist told me I have an uncomplicated mouth. And he didn’t even mean that stuff wasn’t going wrong in there, just that whatever was wrong was fairly garden-variety stuff. That’s the nicest thing in I don’t know how long. And however uncomplicated it was, it still hurt like all hell, let me tell you. Makes me tired. What about you, what’re you tired of?

  And I knew well enough that it was just anxious talk, conversational caulk, but there was so much highway between here and Canada, and while I hoped he’d eventually drop off into sleep and stay dropped off for most of it, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give him a real answer. I wanted easy feelings for the waking hours. We were only just past the bedroom communities to the bedroom communities—I don’t know if there’s a better name for those, but they make me uneasy. So I said, This. These places make me tired.

  These places, he said, looking out the window at the corrugated cement noise barriers. These places don’t even exist.

  I kept thinking on it, what else tired me. Fares offering me drugs instead of money. Fares offering me sex instead of money. Fares acting like fares instead of people, making me think of people as fares. Fares who asked me to drive them way out to those box-store outlets and had me wait in the parking lot while they bought build-it-yourself bunk beds and four-gallon jugs of fake syrup. Speaking in gallons, that tired me too. Ounces and yards and miles. The entire imperial system. Fares trying to guess where I was from and guessing wrong, always. Sometimes I said yes to places I’d never set a foot in, just so I didn’t have to listen to a stranger tell me what they thought they knew about my actual home country—another thing that caused my mind to drift into the growlers.

  Did I say these things aloud? I suppose I must have, because a little farther along the once-drowned man surprised me by guessing my home correctly. No one ever had before. I didn’t spring to either confirm or deny, and he didn’t try to tell me what he knew about the place. But the air in the cab felt slightly charged after this, as though he’d said Rumpelstiltskin.

  You don’t have much of an accent, he said.

  I wouldn’t know, I said.

  I have forgotten the language in which my parents spoke to me as a child, he said. The language in which I learned to count, and tell time. How is this possible? When I have sufficiency in so many other languages now.

  He reached forward to touch the saint on the dashboard, but did not touch. You’re Catholic, he said.

  It isn’t mine, I told him.

  As for myself, I have
had the Catholic beaten into and beaten out of me at various intervals. I’m a nullifidian now. You’ve heard of Kateri Tekakwitha?

  Somewhere, I said.

  There was a sign just now, he said. Some way up ahead we’ll pass her shrine. Patron of exiles, of émigrés. Lily of the Mohawks. Know what her first miracle was? Turning smooth and white after death. They’ll try and canonize you just for that. They’ll make a smooth white marble statue of you and set it out alone in the forest. Sounds lonely, does it not? I visited her once. Birds had come and nested on her breast. Here, he said, patting his shirt pocket. Like a sacred heart made of mud and sticks and regurgitated bird stuff. Blessed Kateri. I bet those birds were migratory.

  The émigré has many saints, I wanted to say, but I was afraid he’d want the list.

  Katherine, he went on, reading from my ID card. Katherine with a K. That a popular name where you’re from?

  I shrugged. It’s popular here. It’s always dangling there, in the ready-made souvenirs, fridge magnets and so on.

  I told him that I hoped my name (in fact chosen from a display of souvenir fridge magnets) did not amount to his coincidence. It seemed the kind of flimsy coincidence that required a lot of drugs to prop it up. Amplified, he’d said earlier.

  What drugs are you amplified on? I asked. (Now that we had settled, I wanted to be sure I would not be turning back, forfeiting the whole deal if in two hours he saw a dead opossum and took it as a bad omen.)

  No drugs. Just off-brand quinapril, he said. For my heart.

  And what’s the matter with your heart?

  Nothing, he said defensively. It just runs a little fast. I’m just fast-hearted, that’s all.

  Perhaps he had no health insurance, and was going to go fall down on the mercy of a Canadian hospital. I’d often thought of doing so myself, in the event that I ever broke a leg or anything serious. I imagined how I might fake painlessness at the border, disowning my agony, concealing any gory evidence for as long as it took to convince the guard. But of course that was out of the question, even hypothetically.

  My heart, since you mention it, the once-drowned man was saying now. Matter of fact, I haven’t medicated it today. They tell you medication circulates better with a meal but everything I’ve eaten today has come from a vending machine. What about you—could you stomach something? We’ll be needing gas, soon anyway, I see. Are you thirsty, at least? I don’t want you running off the road with exhaustion. It’s on me. The check and the time, they’re both on me. He jogged whatever change was left in his suit pocket.

  It was still dark, a little after 4 a.m. when we pulled into a roadhouse mated to a gas station.

  The suitcase came inside with us. The little spruce stayed in the cab.

  We sat on adjacent sides of one of the Formica tables. I sipped coffee and watched the once-drowned man order a burger. I watched him dismantle the burger with a knife and fork.

  A knife and fork, I said.

  I hate smelling onion on my hands, he explained. Also, it is prudent to disassemble preassembled foods, to ensure there are no malicious surprises. I tell you this from experience. Aren’t you going to eat something? You left the meter on, didn’t you?

  Of course I had left the ticker on. I worshipped the ticker. (When we pulled in it had read $153 and change.) But I was trying, in these days I’m speaking of, not to worship the ticker quite so obviously. So I ordered buttered wheat toast and a side of scrambled eggs and a second cup of black coffee, while the once-drowned man told the story of how he had once drowned, in the Lower Niagara, on location for a movie that was never completed.

  Probably for the best, he said, that this particular movie was never made. Wasn’t very … au courant. Even for the times. Terrible casting, sketchy representations. Of which tribes, you might ask? I don’t think even the screenwriter himself knew.

  From the remaining scraps on his plate, the once-drowned man meticulously constructed a photogenic canapé. When he was done savoring this mouthful, he explained that one night he’d gone swimming after seven bad rounds of rummy and too many shots of rye, not reckoning on the current.

  It was a Canadian fisherman hauled me out. Up early for the coho.

  The once-drowned man laid down his knife and fork. He retrieved something crumpled from his pants pocket and smoothed it out on the table: a promotional flyer for a white-water rafting adventure. A man in a red sweatshirt stood on a rock in the middle of some rapids, directing just-in-frame rafts around his rock. All you had to do to be in the running was send in a bar code off a six-pack of Molson.

  And this guy in the picture is your guy?

  No. He sighed, folding the flyer away. It just got me to thinking of it. You must appreciate that serendipity is as much a state of awareness as it is one of synchronicity. I can give you the details, but they may not be deemed sufficient.

  The competition was closed now, I noticed, and in any case he hadn’t bought beer, only the seltzer.

  And the spruce, I asked of the spruce.

  It’s a gift.

  A gift.

  I never did have a chance to thank him, the once-drowned man said. But I reckon I could find him pretty quick if I really tried. He could keep the tree small if he wanted to. Or if he has a yard he could plant it in the yard, a life that could grow up tall in front of him. Feels amiss, anyhow, not to thank.

  Whether or not the man had a yard, it struck me as about the worst thing you could do to a person, reminding them that they were in some way responsible for you. I did not say this.

  What other movies? I asked instead.

  What do you mean, what other movies?

  Movies you made.

  I didn’t make the movies, he said. I made the horses.

  He obliged with a list of titles, but the names he gave meant nothing to me. In those days I often wished for a ready technology that allowed a person to instantly verify the grandiose claims of strangers, but that technology was still some years away. Our phones were just for phoning then, and it was safe to presume most people were full of smoke, but safer still not to call them on it.

  He excused himself to make a phone call to the friend no longer in the habit of answering the phone. I went out to fuel the cab. While we’d been inside eating, the ticker had tripped past $163 and gave me a benevolent little wink as I climbed back in.

  In a grass lot adjacent to the pumps, a circus was just waking up. A huddle of domestic and exotic beasts, wreathed in the steam of their own breath. This was in the days when circuses still had animals, for better or (mostly) worse, and these ones looked ghostly in the still-dark morning, the pale stonewash of donkey coats soaking up the last of the moon.

  My fare returned to the cab, suitcase in tow.

  Did they pick up? I asked.

  Would it hurt, he asked, just to sit a few minutes? Of course the meter …

  I turned the ignition to get some heat back. The once-drowned man rubbed his hands vigorously with a wad of moist towelettes, peering out into the dark, where a one-hump camel stood grooming her knobbly calf.

  I had been to a circus only once, when I was about eleven. Probably they had animals at that one too, but I don’t remember any. The only act I remember clearly is a woman being hooked by her shining black hair to a trapeze wire, then being lifted and swung around the tent. Right before her toes left the ground the tension elongated her eyes shockingly. Then she was up. She looked much younger in flight, her face pulled taut by the wire.

  Supreme face-lift, my mother leaned in to whisper. She sat beside me, at the back of the grandstand, rolling an unlit Alpine cigarette between her long fingers. She had only just come back to us, from wherever it was she had been, and was wearing a coat made of gray and white rabbits. Or possibly gray-and-white rabbits. This coat had deep, deep pockets I liked to sneak my hands into, even though all I ever found were disintegrating tissues and stray breath mints and ticket stubs from cinemas and dog tracks. It didn’t matter—I wasn’t fishing for any prize
s. I liked to just slide my hand in and leave it there. I wanted to be sure she wouldn’t vanish again, float right off, and she never liked to hold directly to my sticky paws.

  The circus woman’s legs cycled the air as she rose, as though pedaling an invisible bike, up and up. The wire hooked into her hair was operated by a couple of men, tucked away in the shadows of the big top. White open-necked peasant shirts, sleeves rolled up thick forearms. They were responsible for hoisting her up, hand over hand, swift and smooth. Nearer the top some mechanism released, and she began to twirl, was twirled in place, like a figure skater, fast enough to blur, her smile fixed rigid and her teeth bared. I wondered: if she were to let her expression falter the slightest bit, might her scalp just tear right off?

  How can she smile like that? I asked my mother. It must hurt so bad.

  It must hurt so bad, my mother repeated. Jesus. You want to know how a woman might still be able to smile while she’s being swung around by her hair? That’s a useful thing to know, kitten. How about we go ask her after they let her down? If you’re all right with learning something a little earlier than you’re meant to.

  She had left us because my father suffered from something she called “terminal cowardice,” complicated by chronic neediness, and I wanted to show that none of this cowardice or neediness had found its way into my blood. Of course it had.

  The ticker ticked over to $171. A boy in gold lamé tights came out of his caravan to brush down a pair of horses.

  Son pequeños caballos, said the once-drowned man. Got a bit of Mongolian in them, looks like. Bigger than Mongol ponies though. Mutts. I’ve always preferred working with mutts. People and animals both. Can be as stubborn and haughty as blue bloods, but they possess better instincts. I’ve thought about it, and I’d say it comes from living between identities. From always having to measure, here to there, this to that. What about you, Blessed Katherine-with-a-K, does that hold water? Here, lemme ask them.