“Listen, umm—” she said, and leaned forward to look at the license mounted in front of the glove compartment. She wanted my name. “Thomas,” she said. “Listen, Thomas, I’m serious. I told Barry I’d make up my mind by the time I got to Los Angeles, and I promised him I’d leave today, but I just can’t do it in five hours. How long would it take to drive there? Five or six days?”
I was reluctant to be in this conversation at all. “Probably,” I said.
Her expression became almost dreamy. “Away from all distractions,” she said. “Away from the office, just driving, plenty of time to think. By the time we got there I’d know, I’d be sure of myself.”
It was time to bring her down from the clouds, so she could catch her plane. “It’d be goddam expensive,” I said.
“How much?”
“You want me to find out?”
“Yes, please.”
So I switched on the two-way radio. We belong to one of the radio-dispatch outfits — Speediphone Cabs — but unless a fare leaves me in some outlandish backwater I prefer to cruise and find my customers on the street. The kind of people who phone for a cab instead of going outside and hailing one usually live in outlandish backwaters themselves, where there aren’t any cabs to hail. In any event, the radio had been off, but now I switched it on, and immediately the cab filled with the harsh voice of Hilda The Dispatcher: “...to Madison and 35th. One-eight.”
Pressing the button on its side, I spoke into my mike, giving my call number: “Two-seven.”
“One-eight,” Hilda insisted, that being the guy she’d decided to talk to next.
Phooey. “Two-seven!” I said, more forcefully.
“One-eight!” she said, much more forcefully.
So I tried tact. “I’ll be one-eight if you want me to be one-eight, Hilda,” I said, “but I’m really two-seven.”
“Tom? Get off, I’m trying to talk to one-eight.”
“But I’m ready to talk now.”
Hilda’s sigh came across the airwaves like static. “All right, Tom,” she said. “What is it?”
“I got an out of town, she wants a price.”
“Where to?”
“Los Angeles,” I said.
There was a little silence, and then Hilda said, “One-eight!”
“Listen, Hilda,” I said, “this is on the level.”
“A cab to Los Angeles?” She remained dubious, for which I could hardly blame her.
“That’s right,” I said. “The customer’s in the cab, she wants a price.”
“Jesus,” Hilda said. “Shut up, one-eight, I got a problem. Tom? I’ll get back to you.”
“Right,” I said, cradled the microphone, and turned the receiver volume down to where I could barely hear it.
The passenger said, “Shouldn’t we head the other way now?”
Were we really going to Los Angeles? So far everything was still on the meter, so it didn’t matter where we went. “Sure,” I said.
We were at that moment arriving at the junction of the Van Wyck and the Belt Parkway, just before the airport, and we did a sweep-around of rare and singular beauty, hardly slowing down at all. I took the second Parkway exit (northbound), looping down and to the right away from the Van Wyck like a fighter plane peeling off in a World War Two movie, then swept around onto the Belt, ran under the Van Wyck, took the next exit curving up and to the right, came out onto the Van Wyck in the opposite direction, and laid out toward Manhattan.
The passenger was very excited. She kept looking out the rear window, as though to see the plane she wasn’t catching, and she kept saying things like, “It’s the only way. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I can be sure of myself. Barry will understand.” That last part was said with a little less excitement and conviction, but she quickly rallied and repeated some of the other sentences some more.
It was perhaps eight minutes before the intermittent tiny squawking of the radio squawked my call number, and then I turned up the receiver volume, grabbed the mike, and said, “Right here.”
“Four thousand dollars,” Hilda said. “Plus your expenses.” Her tone of voice said, There. Now leave me alone with all this nonsense.
I looked in the rearview mirror. “Did you hear it?”
“Four thousand dollars.” She’d heard it, all right; she was pale and worried. “I have that much,” she said, more to herself than me. “In my savings account, for income tax. I could stall, just pay the interest—” She frowned and chewed her lower lip, working it out, while I drove not too rapidly westward. Then all at once she sat up straighter, her expression full of determination, and said, “Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s worth it,” she said. “For peace of mind, the rest of my life? It’s cheap. The IRS can wait.”
“Okay.” Into the mike I said, “She says it’s a go. Tell my father, will you?”
“Cash, or certified check,” Hilda said.
“That’s fine,” the passenger said. “We’ll just stop by my bank, and we’ll be on our way.”
2
Well, of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. Back in Manhattan we stopped at her bank for the certified check made out to Harry Fletcher (my father), which I mailed to my parents’ house in Queens, and then we drove downtown to my apartment on East 17th Street. The passenger waited in the cab while I threw some clothing and a toothbrush into my old canvas bag with all the zippers — given me by my parents when I went away to college — and then I sat down at the dinette table to compose a note to Rita.
About Rita. She was the closest thing I had to an actual girlfriend at that time. She worked for a magazine company on the West Side, and sometimes she’d come downtown and stay with me for a couple of days. She had her own key, some of her clothing and cosmetics lived here, and if she made a long-distance call she always paid up when I got my next bill. “You only want me for my body,” I told her once, when she dropped in unannounced and I woke up to find her crawling to bed with me. “Bragging or complaining?” she asked, and I said, “What if I had somebody else here?” She said, “Then I’d tiptoe out again.” It wasn’t what you could call an intense relationship.
As demonstrated by the note: “Am taking a fare out of town, will be gone a couple weeks, phone you when I get back. Better smell the yogurt before you eat it.”
Outside, I put my bag on the front seat and said, “Well, Ms. Scott—” (I knew her name now, Katharine Scott, from the check) “—you still game?”
“Definitely,” she said.
“Fine,” I said, and took the FDR Drive and the Harlem River Drive up to the George Washington Bridge. All the way up, Ms. Scott sat in the back seat with that alert, scrubbed, determined, brave, optimistic look of someone who’s just made an absolutely right resolution, and hasn’t broken it yet.
Across the bridge into New Jersey, and I followed the signs for Interstate 80, lining out due west into what would have been the setting sun if it wasn’t still morning. Switching on my radio one last time, I said, “Two-seven. Two-seven. Two-seven.”
“Tom? Is that you?” There was a lot of static in the air. “I can barely hear you.”
“We’re on our way, Hilda,” I said, speaking loud and clear. “The certified check is in the mail, and we just crossed the George Washington Bridge.”
“Good luck,” she said, through the buzz of static.
“Thanks. See you in a couple weeks.”
She said something I couldn’t make out, with all the static. I yelled, “What?”
“Your father says don’t wreck his cab!”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tell him don’t worry.”