“Where did this come from?” I demanded. I was standing at the bar.
Harold looked at me with naked fear in his eyes. I was wedged between the two ladies. There was no one else in the bar.
“Oh,” he said. “Your napkin. I forgot.”
He plucked a paper napkin off a stack near a beer spigot. I grabbed the napkin and tossed it to the floor. “This five-dollar bill, where did it come from?”
“The cash register,” he said.
The women leaned away from me in opposite directions.
I held the bill up for Harold to see. “This! Where did you get this?”
He raised his right hand and pointed at the cash register. I realized that I had actually found a way to shut Harold up, the last thing on earth I wanted right then.
“Are we in your way?” one of the women said.
I lowered the bill and edged out from between the women. I moved around to one side and held the fiver up again.
“Harold, this five-dollar bill, did a customer give it to you?”
He nodded. “Customers are the only people who give me money.”
I knew the feeling. “What I meant to say was, did you get this fiver from a customer today?”
He looked down at it. “I must have. Customers are the only …” “What did he look like?”
“Who?”
“The man who gave you this five-dollar bill! Did he look like Bozo the Clown?”
The women started giggling.
“I’m sorry, Murph,” Harold said nervously. “If you want, I can call
Sweeney.”
“Call Sweeney, doll-face,” one of the women said.
“Yeah, call Sweeney,” the other said. “Get him out of bed.” The word “Sweeney” worked its magic on me. I calmed down.
If I had been drunk, it would have scared me.
I raised my empty hand palm-outward, and shook my head no. “I’m sorry, Harold. I didn’t mean to make you call Sweeney. In fact, it would be best if you didn’t mention to Sweeney that I was in here this morning. It’s just that I gave this five-dollar bill to a customer last night and here it is again,” I lied. “I recognize it. See this handwriting? It’s the same bill that I gave to a fare, and I was so surprised to see it again that I thought I was having one of those experiences you read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The fare was a guy older than me. Bristly hair. Unshaven. He wore a mismatched coat and pants. Actually he looked more like Emmett Kelly than Bozo. I was just wondering if he was in here this morning.”
Harold nodded.
“What?” I said. “What’s that nod? What do you mean?”
“I know the guy,” Harold said. “He did come in here this morning.”
“Trowbridge!” I said. I meant to say “Trowbridge?” with a question mark, only it came out with an exclamation point. I was losing control.
“I don’t know his name,” Harold said. “He comes in here every once in awhile. He came in about nine. He was waiting outside for me to open the door. I think he’s a drunkard.”
“Call Trowbridge,” a woman said.
I looked at the words on the bill. “Does he always write things on money?”
Harold shrugged. “I don’t know.”
God I hated Harold. What kind of bartender doesn’t know who gives him what? But then I remembered that Harold was a recent graduate of bartending school. He hadn’t been around long enough to acquire the financial acumen second nature to bartenders, cab drivers, and IRS agents. We know exactly who gives us what, especially IRS agents.
Nevertheless, he had answered my question. He had also answered a question I hadn’t even asked, one that had been haunting me ever since the first ride I had given to Trowbridge. Was Trowbridge passing judgment on me? No. Apparently he was doing it to everybody.
I smiled at Harold. “Crazy, huh? I give a guy a five-dollar bill, and the next day I get it back. It makes you wonder if capitalism isn’t just a shell game.”
Harold grinned, but it was sickly. He had seen me drunk before, but he had never seen me bemused. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “This Ripley deal calls for a celebration. I hardly ever have strange things happen to me, so why don’t I buy a drink for everybody in the bar?”
Fortunately there were only two ladies in the bar. They each asked for a shot of Johnnie Walker Red. The bill came to five dollars. Crazy, huh?
I pulled a different fiver from my billfold, imitating a normal person. I examined it before handing it over. Abe was mum.
“I gotta be taking off,” I said.
“Stick around, kiddo,” one of the women said.
“I would,” I said, “but I think I’m still on duty.”
“What are you, a cop?”
“Worse—I’m a cab driver.”
“I didn’t know cab drivers are allowed to drink beer on duty,” she said.
“Call Ripley,” her friend said.
“I’m not actually driving,” I said. “My taxicab burned up this morning.”
“Burned up!?” Harold said with two punctuation marks.
Sometimes I don’t know which I hate worse, Harold or my mouth. I resigned myself to the fact that Sweeney would get the lowdown by the end of Happy Hour. Sweeney was a lot like my Maw, except me ol’ Mither gave up bartending a few years after she got married.
I left the tavern. I had an agonizing decision to make. The only way I could get back to the motor was to take a #15 bus, or else go to a hotel and take a Rocky Cab. Hobson’s Choice: death or humiliation. I chose death. I walked over to Colfax and climbed onto the first 15 that rolled up to the curb.
So there I was, standing in front of the door to the on-call room at Rocky Cab, just as I had been standing there almost two hours earlier. I felt like Dennis Weaver in that episode of The Twilight Zone where he kept waking up in jail after being executed over and over again. I wondered if that was his first dramatic role after Gunsmoke. I once saw Dennis Weaver being interviewed on TV—he was building a house out of recycled tires. Crazy, huh?
I shoved the door open and walked inside. I was now prepared to face the music. A few cabbies were milling about the room. Nobody paid any attention to me. I walked up to the cage where Rollo was eating a donut. He stopped in mid-chew and stared at me. “Murph!” he said.
“I’ve come back,” I said humbly.
I braced myself to endure an avalanche of malicious condescension— I had earned it, and Rollo was a pro.
“We heard your cab burned up,” he said. “You’ve still got four hours left on your lease. Do you want another taxi?”
“What?” I said.
“Four-oh-nine is available,” he said.
“What?”
“Chuck Ferguson is off sick today. You can use his cab.”
“What?”
“He asked us to assign it to anyone who wants to use it.”
“What?”
“Do you feel all right, Murph?”
“What?”
It went on like this for a while longer. I won’t bore you with any more whats. Rollo handed me a trip-sheet and the key to 409, Chuck Ferguson’s hack. Chuck is an old pro. He’s been driving almost twenty years. He owns the cab.
I had never seen Rollo like this before though. His attitude was all wrong. He should have been heaping malicious condescension on my head and taking enormous pleasure in my misfortune, but he seemed merely fascinated by it. But maybe that’s the same thing.
“Does Hogan know my cab burned up?” I said.
“Yeah,” Rollo said.
That’s all he said. It was as if the burning of a taxicab meant nothing to these people.
I walked out of the on-call room in a daze. I wandered through the dirt lot where all the taxis were parked, found 409, and climbed in. I sat behind the steering wheel staring at the Rocky Mountains in the distance. It was like that scene in The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield said that every time he crossed a road he felt like he was disappearing. I felt like I had just crossed a road.
It was only then that the impact of losing my old friend of fourteen years finally hit me. I would never see poor ol’ #127 again. I would like to say that I wept, but I kept thinking about those exploding tires. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! It sort of made me laugh.
I started 409 and headed out. I had rarely driven any other taxi than 127. It happened occasionally, as when my hack was in for repairs, but I almost always got assigned another company cab. No frills, in other words. But a driver-owned taxi is a study in frills. Witness the Christmas-tree odor-eater dangling from 409’s rear-view mirror. And that’s just for starters. The front and back seats weren’t upholstered in your standard fake Naugahyde plastic covers that got damn cold in the wintertime—409 had corduroy. The steering wheel had an elastic terrycloth cover, and the floor mats weren’t made in Detroit—my guess was mail-order. And of course the headliner wasn’t your standard vinyl, it was a soft fabric, lemon-lime tinted in keeping with the Christmas motif. I kept reaching up and touching it. And the AM radio? AM hell, Ferguson had AM/FM, plus tape deck, plus stereo speakers installed in the rear window. I felt like I was driving a bachelor pad. But enough of descriptive prose. You probably had your fill of that in high school. I know I did. The point is that a driver-owned taxi is classier in every way than a company car—cleaner, fancier, cushier, and more pleasant smelling. Ferguson’s privately owned taxicab served to remind me of what a pile of junk I had been driving around for the past fourteen years. I began to resent it.
But then I told myself that form is less important than content, whether you’re talking English literature or urban transportation. The purpose of a taxicab is people moving, pure and simple. Who needs all these bells and whistles? They’re not going to increase the number of trips you get from hotels. They’re not going to add to the number of calls that come over the radio. Professionalism, that’s what puts money into a cabbie’s pocket. The difference between 127 and 409 was the difference between a dragster and a French poodle! By God, if Daniel Boone was a cabbie he would have driven 127!
Yeah, that’s what I told myself. But who was I kidding? I would rather read William Faulkner than Mickey Spillane. I loved 409 with all its frills and knickknacks and dangly things. I started thinking wild thoughts about buying a cab of my own and fixing it up like Caesar’s palace. The Vegas Caesar, not the Rome one. But again, who was I kidding? Why would I buy a taxi? Hacking wasn’t my life. My life was writing novels. But maybe they’re the same thing.
I headed downtown. Ferguson’s Folly had a full tank of gas. This made me feel rich, even though I would have to top it off before I turned it in. As Milton Friedman insists, there is no such thing as a free anything. As I drove, I kept my itchy fingers away from the AM/FM radio. I tuned in the Rocky dispatcher and began listening for bells. In the days to come I was going to work the downtown beat exclusively with the microphone clutched in my right hand, waiting, always waiting, for one bell in particular. For one familiar address. For one familiar name: Trowbridge.
He would be waiting outside.