“I know I shouldn’t have given those girls a free ride,” I said. “I know it’s a violation of PUC regulations to a haul a fare when the meter isn’t running. I know you’re going to have to report this incident to the top brass, and that they will take a dim view of my action. And I know that my desire to help out a couple of kids will be considered irrelevant by the insurance company and they will probably insist that you suspend me from driving until this case is resolved. So rather than going through all the rigmarole of having you call me into the office again and giving me the bad news, why don’t we just do this? I wasn’t going to work for another week anyway, so why don’t I voluntarily put myself on suspension for the next six days. I will then come in on Monday morning at seven A.M. and if the case hasn’t been resolved, you can officially suspend me.”
Hogan raised his chin and said, “I’m glad you see it that way, Murph.”
“Well … I figure there’s not much difference between being suspended and pretending to be suspended, since they both involve not working.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry I had to do this to myself,” I said, “but my hands are tied.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I’ll go downstairs now and turn my key in to Rollo, and then
I’ll get started on not working,” I said.
He nodded.
We left it at that. Everything that could have been said hadn’t been said. Everything else would be said on Monday morning, when I intended to drive to the motor as usual and walk into the on-call room as if everything was copacetic, and then find myself trudging up the stairwell of eternity to hear the bad news handed down from the top brass and the insurance company and … and maybe even the Bureau of Missing Persons.
I went downstairs and entered the on-call room. A couple of old pros were standing in line at the cage waiting to pick up their keys. I took my place at the end of the line. When I got up to the window, Rollo still looked like Victor Buono, which was the only good thing I could say for him. I returned his self-satisfied smile with one of my own. I didn’t say anything to him. Everything that Rollo and I had to say to each other had been said years ago, although we still said things like, “Hello.” Even though I was mimicking his smile, my smile had nothing to do with Rollo. My smile was self-directed. It was the smile of supreme irony, for this was the first time in my life that I had fired myself.
I knew the chances were good that I would never be coming back to work at Rocky Cab. The top brass were probably tired of hearing my name, and the insurance company … well … their computer was probably tired of processing my punch-card. Plus, I had been seen by Duncan and Argyle once too often.
Strike three, pal.
I’m out.
But I figured as long as I had the smile, there was no point in wasting it. That’s why I tossed it Rollo’s way. There was a good chance it might baffle him. But even if he saw through it, the fact that I had gone to the trouble to baffle him might ruin the rest of his day.
Now you know the dark truth about me. When it comes to smiling, I can be a real bastard.
I gave him my key and trip-sheet and walked out of the room. I crossed the parking lot, climbed into my heap, and aimed the hood ornament at Capitol Hill. My ’64 Chevy actually does have a hood ornament. It looks like a chrome-plated naked lady with wings being fired out of a cannon.
Before I got home I stopped off at a Burger King on Colfax. I didn’t feel like cooking that day. The clerk behind the cash register asked if I wanted a soft drink. I said no. But what I didn’t tell him was that I had plenty of sodas in my refrigerator at home. They’re included in what I had loosely referred to as my “budget” when Duncan and Argyle were interviewing me about the missing girls.
I know what you’re thinking. How could I have lied to Duncan and Argyle about the pot smoking and finding the love beads? The answer is simple: I’m only human.
Let me explain:
I felt that the pot smoking and finding the love beads in my backseat had no actual bearing on what had become of the girls. The smoking of the pot hadn’t made them disappear, and the appearance of the love beads hadn’t made them disappear. Consequently, why bring it up? Why mention it? Why tell the detectives that I had given two teenage girls permission to smoke pot while I was illegally driving them to a rock concert? The information couldn’t possibly have helped the police find the girls. How could it?
That was what I kept asking myself over and over as I drove home on that pleasant afternoon in Denver, the Queen City of the West, the Mile-Hi City, the Home of the Championship Broncos.
How could it?
How could pot and love beads help anybody find anything?
I was pulling into the parking lot behind my apartment when the answer came to me.
If the girls possessed pot, maybe Duncan and Argyle could find out who they had gotten it from and pick up a lead from there. Also, the cops could conceivably pick up a lead from the person who had sold them the love beads. By the time I got up to my crow’s nest and entered the kitchen, I saw myself pulling a nickel in Cañon City. I don’t know the legal terminology but “withholding evidence” catches the gist. And “lying to law-enforcement personnel” is as good a layman’s term as any.
So when I said, “I’m only human,” I was really just saying I got scared. When I had gone to work on the previous Friday, I had expected it to be like any other Friday. But by the time the shift was over I had violated every moral law in the universe.
I walked into the living room and removed the cash from my shirt pocket and stuffed it into my copy of Finnegans Wake, then I carried my briefcase into my bedroom and put it into the closet, where I always put my briefcase during spring break. I don’t like to see the briefcase when I’m on vacation because it makes me think of work. And I was especially sensitive to the fear of thinking about work that day because it would have made me think about looking for a job after my cab license was revoked.
The last time I had looked for work on purpose I ended up delivering flowers. That was when I was suspected of murdering that homeless man. I had also worked as a Santa Claus on two separate occasions, but I never got paid for those gigs.
At any rate, God only knew what kind of trumped-up charges I would be facing during the coming days. Two girls were missing and I was the last person known to have seen them alive. On top of that, when I was being interviewed by the police, I may or may not have appeared to be giving evasive answers to their questions. It was difficult to judge how I had looked to Duncan and Argyle. It would be nice if the police were required by law to give you a mirror along with your Miranda rights so you could see how you looked when you answered their questions, and thus be able to make the proper facial adjustments in order to enhance your appearance of innocence.
That seems not unreasonable to me.
I went back into the kitchen and started to grab a soda, but since this was the first day of spring break my hand grabbed a beer. Then I picked up the commercial hamburger and went into the living room and flopped down in my easy chair. I lethargically chewed my burger and stared at the blank face of my TV. I couldn’t bring myself to turn it on. I didn’t want to look at the two Gilligan girls: Mary Ann and Ginger. It would have made me feel guilty. I started to think that if I had been a castaway on the island, I probably would have ended up getting Mary Ann and Ginger hooked on skag. I would have made Gilligan himself look like the Professor.
Then I started thinking that the Professor probably knew how to make skag. As far as I could tell, he could do anything that could be done by any person who held lots of college degrees: biology, botany, astrophysics, etc. He was like Doc Savage. When I was a teenager I read the paperback reprints of the Doc Savage magazines from the 1930s. Doc Savage was sort of like the Green Hornet or the Shadow, a non-superpower hero. He was built like Hercules and knew everything there was to know about every branch of science. My dream was to grow up to be just like him. Unfortunately, I didn’t own barbells when I was a kid and I hated homework, so I missed my goal by a million miles.
After I finished the hamburger I carried the wrapper into the kitchen and took pleasure in the act of tossing the waxed paper into the trashcan rather than doing a dish. But it was a fleeting pleasure. It was over in an instant. I grabbed another beer from the fridge and walked back into the living room and flopped down in my easy chair.
Spring break had begun at last—although technically this was the third day of spring break because Saturday is the normal first day. By Monday I’ve usually worked myself into such a state of indolence that I’ve got a beach towel spread out on the floor and I’m reading a paperback while listening to a recording of Pachelbel’s Canon in D With Ocean Sounds. I play it when Gilligan’s Island isn’t on. It makes me think of Tahiti, or a Tahiti-like island in the South Pacific where I had once hoped I would end up. Aside from being built like Doc Savage, another one of my youthful dreams was to be a novelist living on a desert island. Without belaboring the obvious, at the age of forty-five, I had ended up a million miles from everywhere.
Nevertheless, spring break was that time of the month when I always tried to follow through on my perpetual vow of getting started on a new novel. I didn’t have to drive a cab for another six days, I had cleared the decks of all chores and responsibilities, and I was ready to start hammering the keys.
This is the dream of all cab drivers, or at least all novelists—I’m not sure what the distinction is.
But a monkey wrench had been tossed into my plans. Thanks to my obsession with perfection, I had already lost two days of writing time, meaning the weekend. I hadn’t written anything on Saturday or Sunday because working a short-shift on Monday kept intruding on my thoughts, making it difficult to think up a book. This is the fear of all cab novelists—intrusive thoughts.
When it comes to thinking up a book, your brain must be completely empty, like a recently purchased fishbowl waiting to be filled with sand and colorful rocks and water and goldfish. They don’t necessarily have to be goldfish, but you hardly ever see fishbowls that don’t have goldfish. Sometimes you do see fishbowls that have little brown fish that aren’t very pretty but are interesting in other ways, at least to people who find aquatic creatures interesting.
I once knew a guy in college who owned a piranha. It lived in a rectangular aquarium. I didn’t know what he fed it, and I didn’t want to know. I also knew a guy who owned a big turtle that sat underwater at the bottom of an aquarium and never seemed to come up for air. I used to worry about that turtle. My friend told me that the turtle didn’t need to come up for air very often. He explained the physiology of turtles, but I didn’t pay much attention. I once asked him if the turtle ever got thirsty. My friend said it was doubtful since the creature lived underwater. But it seemed to me that once in a while the turtle might open his mouth and take a quick gulp. I really did worry about that turtle. When I was ten years old my Maw bought me a small turtle at the five-and-dime. It lasted a week.
Now here it was Monday, and for all practical purposes I had lost another day of potential writing time. Tuesday would be my first full day of cleared decks to get to work on a book. This gave me only six days to write, rather than the usual nine, and the thought depressed me. Three days wasted, all because I had tried to make up for the twenty dollars I had given to the girls. If I hadn’t given them the twenty I would have been able to start writing a new novel on Saturday, which meant I would now be three days into a book, which meant I could have written at least three thousand words. Whenever I write novels I try to write a minimum of one thousand words a day, although if I get hot I can write one chapter per day, which is another dream of novelists—a chapter a day. Novelists have a lot of dreams. I realized that if I had written a chapter a day for the past three days,
I would be starting on Chapter 4 tomorrow. This thought depressed me even further. I felt like I was chasing a caboose.
But I knew the solution to the problem. Sit down and start hammering. That’s what I did back in college. That’s what I did when I worked at Dyna-Plex. That’s how you start novels, and ultimately complete them. It had been a long time since I had completed a novel. I’ve started more novels than I have completed. Then it suddenly occurred to me that if I added up all the starts, they would probably equal a dozen full-length novels in terms of word count. I wondered if I could link a bunch of starts together, and change all the main characters into one main character. Maybe I could cobble together a single novel from all the bits and pieces. Maybe I could make an avant garde novel out of the extraneous material scattered in my steamer trunk.
I began to feel a surge of the old excitement.
Then I realized that if I did manage to tape a novel together, I would still have to retype the entire thing in order to have a clean manuscript to submit to a publisher. And if I was going to do all that typing, I might as well think up a new plot.
It was too much to dwell upon. I’d had a bad Monday, and next Monday I would be going to Rocky Cab to see whether or not I would continue going to Rocky Cab. My time would probably be better spent reading the want-ads. All of a sudden the next six days began to seem more like fake days than real days. I began to feel like I was truly suspended—not from cab driving but “in time.” I felt that time had literally stopped and the clock wouldn’t start ticking again until Monday morning.
Under normal circumstances this would have seemed like a pretty good deal, since the whole point of spring break is to step outside of reality for nine days, which is like stepping outside of time. But now it gave me an unpleasant feeling.
Suddenly I wanted the clock to start ticking again.
But I knew the clock would start ticking only after I walked into Rocky Cab to find out whether I had a job.
The clock would start ticking only after I found out whether Duncan and Argyle had made progress in their missing-persons case.
The clock would start ticking only after I found out what had become of the two girls.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my trip outside of reality if bad news was waiting for me at the end of the track.
That’s when I finally admitted to myself that I had been thinking about Janet and Vicky ever since I had walked out of Hogan’s office. I’ll be honest. I have a hard time admitting things to myself. But when I do, look out brother.
That’s when the clock started ticking again.