The sliding glass doors of the arrivals terminal whirred open and a young woman tottered out on impossibly high heels. Francis watched her through the freshly washed windshield of his cab. She paused for a moment and fiddled with her BlackBerry, and then smiled as she turned towards the taxi stand. Francis glanced at his rear view mirror. He groaned when he saw there were no other cabs behind him.
“For crying out loud,” he muttered as he shoved his half-eaten lunch back into the lunchbox on the passenger seat and sucked the potato chip salt off the yellowed ends of his moustache. He could see that he’d been driving his cab longer than his prospective passenger had been living. Her bright white suit and oversized sunglasses were irritating. Nobody dressed like that in Thunder Bay.
The woman bent over and placed her hand on the open passenger window.
“Hi, there,” she said, smiling.
Francis eyed the finger prints she was leaving on the car door and stabbed at his Slurpee with his straw.
She said, “Can you take me downtown?”
“S’pose so,” Francis said.
She opened the back door and tossed in her huge purse and flopped down beside it. Francis cringed as she slammed the door shut. Then she just sat there, smiling expectantly at him.
“So?” Francis said.
The woman ran her fingers through her blonde hair. She said, “So!”
Francis said, “So are you gonna tell me where we’re goin’?”
“Oh, right,” she laughed, and shook her head. “It’s downtown, but, um…” She extracted her BlackBerry from her pocket and poked at it with her thumb.
Francis sighed.
“Right,” she said. “Here we go. Eighty-six Cumberland Street South.” She looked up at him and furrowed her brow. “Do you know where that is?”
Francis rolled his eyes. “Yah, I know where it is.” He watched her face in his mirror and said, “Port Arthur.”
“N-no,” she said, checking her BlackBerry. “It’s in Thunder Bay.”
“You’re going to Nishnawbe-Aski Legal Services.”
“Yes, that’s right!” she exclaimed, amazed.
“I got this, ma’am,” said Francis. “Just relax.”
“Fantastic.” She sat back in her seat and grinned out her window at the trees.
“That’s quite the paint job you’ve got,” she said.
Francis didn’t feel like talking to her about it, so he pulled the cab away from the curb in silence. He’d bought his used ’94 Caprice 9C1 a few years back from a guy who refurbished them for the police. The body was white, but the hood, doors, and trunk had to be repainted. He’d done them in Neptune Green. Same colour as his old man’s prized possession, a ’55 Chevy Bel Air that was still in mint condition in Francis’s garage. The family heirloom. Had his dad lived to see it, he would have gotten a real kick out the Caprice’s paint job. This woman wouldn’t know the first thing about any of that.
“I can’t believe how clean the air smells here,” she said, indifferent to Francis’ silence.
Francis rolled his eyes.
“I mean really,” she said. “In Toronto, if you can breathe there at all, you regret it immediately.”
Francis turned onto the highway. “Yeah, well, welcome to Thunder Bay.” He was being sarcastic, but she seemed touched by the sentiment.
“Thanks!” she said.
They drove in silence for a little while. The woman looked every which way, as if there was something to see besides grass and trees.
She said, “So, have you lived here long?”
“Yup. And my parents before me, and my grandparents before them.”
“Huh,” she said, nodding. “I take it you like it here, then.”
“I guess so.”
She said, “Well, it sure smells good.”
“Mm-hm,” Francis said, he watched her face in his rear view mirror. “Used to be a beautiful place till the Indians took over.”
The woman’s smile stiffened. Francis smirked and sipped his Slurpee. He had her pegged.
“That’s right,” said Francis. He turned down the talk radio so he didn’t have to shout over it. “I got nothing against Indigenous, or First Nations, or whatever they want to be called these days,” he said.
“You could just ask which band they’re—”
“Well, maybe they should make up their minds,” he snapped. “Don’t get me wrong,” Francis continued. “There’s some that’s good people. Like ones who got pride in their culture, and their homes and whatnot. But all’s the drunk ones do is wreck the scenery.”
Francis paused, but the woman said nothing.
They were driving down a rural highway that passed momentarily through an old subdivision. Francis glanced in his rear view mirror and saw that the woman was chewing her bottom lip and frowning out the window.
“You’ll see. They’re all over the place downtown.”
The woman’s lips worked to shape the words that failed her. Francis craned his neck to see what she was looking at.
He saw old Bobby Hamilton at the top of the steep incline that was his front lawn. Sweat and grass darkened the front of his CNR baseball cap. He wore a white undershirt that strained to contain his belly, and balanced on the top of his belly, wedged between his breasts, though it wasn’t yet noon, he cradled a Labatt 50 protected by a Styrofoam cozy. His pale, spindly legs protruded from his walking shorts and terminated in black dress socks and orthopedic shoes. Bobby had decided years ago that his heart couldn’t take the walk up and down that steep front yard of his with the weight of his lawn mower, so he’d tied a length of bright yellow rope to the mower’s handle and now stood stationary at the top of his hill, easing the mower down by slowly letting out the coils of rope that lay at his feet. His shoulders and chest were bright pink with sunburn. Bobby spotted Francis’s cab and raised his beer cozy in a wobbly salute.
“Shit,” Francis muttered as he looked back at the road.
The woman was excited. “You know that guy?” she said.
“Yeah, I know him,” Francis mumbled.
“He’s hilarious!” she crowed as she turned in her seat to watch Bobby through the rear window.
“That ain’t nothin’.” Francis was annoyed. “Just Bobby being Bobby.” He tried to regain his momentum. “Listen, I got nothing against Toronto,” he said. “I just don’t like how they spend all our taxes on their roads and that damn duck in their harbour. Meanwhile, the Indians are saying we can’t even celebrate Canada 150 because—”
“Okay, look,” the woman said. She turned back around and met Francis’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Her face was solemn. “Why don’t you just drop me off here and I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“You want to walk?” Francis said.
“Sure. Enjoy the scenery.”
“There’s not much to see unless you like looking at drunk Indians.”
“It’s a nice day out,” she said. “You can let me out here.”
Francis shook his head. This woman’s refusal to take his bait was getting to him.
“Another problem,” he said with renewed enthusiasm, “is all them kids raised by single moms. They mess it up for everyone, you know. Single mothers.” He glanced at her in the rear view. She was scowling.
“Women just keep on having kids so’s they can get more welfare and child support and benefits. It’s true,” he said, catching her eye and nodding. “I hear them say it again and again right here in my cab. They have as many kids as they can so’s they don’t have to work, and men are left paying for it all, and I think they should all just—”
“Where do they get the sperm from?” the woman said.
Francis nearly drove off the road. “Wh–what now?”
“These calculating destroyers of worlds. Tell me—who ejaculates in them?” She’d gone pale and was clutching her bag to her chest.
“How the hell should I know, lady?” Francis said. “Jesus Murphy, I never—What do you—I just…” His train of thought abandoned him, so he adjusted his baseball cap.
“These women don’t just spontaneously fertilize themselves,” the woman said. “You are aware of that biological reality, are you not?”
“Look, simmer down!” He turned the talk radio back on to try and drown her out. The collar of his T-shirt felt tight.
“Let me out of the car,” the woman said.
Her voice was so quiet that Francis was tempted to act as though he hadn’t heard her.
“Let me out now!” The woman said it louder this time. A muscle at the side of her mouth twitched.
“You can’t walk from here,” Francis said. “You’re too far away from the—”
The woman shot forward in her seat so that her mouth was inches away from Francis’s ear. She smelled like the big pink flowers his wife always cut from the bushes beside the porch and stuffed into vases around the house until the place reminded him of a funeral parlour.
“Listen to me, fuckwit,” she said in a low voice.
Francis swallowed.
“You pull the cab over this second or I’ll make you sorry you ever set eyes on me.”
“Lady, let me tell you—I’m already sorry!”
“Have I made myself clear?” she said. She threw a twenty into the front seat. The meter was at twelve.
Francis pulled over more out of shock than obedience. He was afraid that if he looked at her, his bulging eyes would betray his surprise, so he kept his stunned gaze locked on the shoulder just beyond his front bumper. He had barely slowed down before the woman flung open her door.
“Whoa,” yelled Francis, as he slammed on the brakes. His Slurpee sloshed forward and his lunch box shot off the passenger seat and onto the floor. She slammed the door and was off, wobbling right down the gravel shoulder of Highway 61 in her high heels, her massive purse tucked up under one arm while the other pumped back and forth.
He pulled up beside her and hollered out the passenger window, “Hey! It’s too far to walk from here!”
She ignored him.
“Hey!” Francis tried one last time, but she refused to even look at him.
Francis reluctantly picked up speed and drove away. He shook his head and straightened his baseball cap as he eyed her diminishing figure in his rear view mirror. When she was just a speck on the horizon, he lifted his foot off the gas pedal. He was sure she’d change her mind and wave him back at the very last second. Francis was prepared to pick her up again, despite all the crazy stuff she’d said. He was a reasonable man. But the woman didn’t wave, and then she was gone, hidden by the horizon.
“Honestly,” said Francis as he pressed his foot back down on the gas. He swirled what was left of his Slurpee and thought about the things she’d said. Like sperm, as though it were just a word. In thirty-eight years of marriage, despite having had four boys and all of the awkward moments that came with trying to raise them up to be decent in a world that had continually disappointed Francis, his wife had never, ever had cause to utter the word sperm. He didn’t know what to make of it. The woman’s perfume lingered in the car, and he could still feel how her breath had tickled his neck when she’d hissed in his ear. Her voice, when she was angry, had been deeper and quieter than that of any woman he’d ever heard.
Francis slowed down, looked over his shoulder to check his blind spot, and then made a U-turn, palming the steering wheel and poking at his moustache with the tip of his tongue. He’d just drive back and see. If she’d cooled off, he could convince her to get back in his cab, and maybe they could have a good-natured debate. He smiled when he saw the woman’s solitary silhouette pop up on the horizon.
The woman, who had removed her heels and rolled the cuffs of suit jacket, glanced up from her BlackBerry and saw the cab had reappeared in the distance. She swore under her breath, tucked her phone into her pocket, and shoved her Blahniks into her purse. Then she squatted down at the side of the road and, with trembling, manicured hands, collected the largest chunks of gravel she could find.