“Ten-one, good buddy,” said the voice. “Give us more volume.” Simultaneously, he was dropping back, pulling into my lane behind me.
“Okay,” I said, speaking more loudly. “How’s this?”
“Ten-four. And hello to the seatcover.”
I frowned at the Mercury now in my rearview mirror. “Beg pardon?”
“The beaver,” he said.
I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about. “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”
“Nice to eyeball you,” he said. “I’m Screaming Eagle. What’s your handle?”
Handle; nickname. “Umm, the Yellow Cabby,” I said.
“You’re from the dirty side, huh?”
Was I? It’s true the cab wasn’t the cleanest vehicle on the road, but was that a fit topic for conversation? “I guess so,” I said.
“Where you headed?”
“California.”
“Shaky side,” he commented.
“If you say so.”
“Ten-nine?”
That was a question, obviously, but what question was it? “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.
“We’ve got a ten-one, good buddy. We may have to back out.”
“Well, you’d know best.” Ahead was an exit; we’d been planning to stop for lunch soon anyway, and I was more than ready to say goodbye to my new friend. “This is our exit,” I told him.
“Ten-four, good buddy. All the good numbers.”
“Uh huh.”
I was slowing for the exit. This madman passed me, waving still with his cheery smile. His voice came one last time from the radio: “Don’t feed the bears.”
“Oh, I won’t,” I promised, and rolled around the curving exit ramp.
Katharine said, “What was that all about?”
“You know just as much as I do.” Putting my mike back on its hook, I stopped at the red blinker and studied the sign across the way, giving town names and directions and distances. The nearest town was apparently one mile to the left, so that’s the way I turned.
Katharine said, “That was fascinating. Do you mind if I fool with the radio? Maybe we could pick up some more conversations.”
“You liked that conversation? Go ahead.”
“Well, maybe we’ll find somebody who speaks English.”
I drove on into town while Katharine fiddled with the radio. I wanted a laundromat first, so I turned where a sign pointed to ‘Town Center,’ finding myself on a curving blacktop road in a well-to-do residential neighborhood; large new houses with attached garages set well back from the road on both sides. Katharine was picking up static, stray bits of broadcasting voices, but nothing particularly coherent or interesting. We drove along, rather slowly, and then I became aware of something odd happening in my rearview mirror. I peered more closely, then double-checked in my outside mirror, and said, “Omigosh. Katharine, turn it off.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Look behind us.”
She did. “Are we doing that?”
“The radio,” I said.
Down the road behind us, every remote-control garage door was going crazy: o-pen-and-close-and-o-pen-and-close-ando-pen-and-close-and—
“Turn it off, Katharine!”
“I don’t know how! Which switch?”
So I turned it off myself, then looked back to see all those garage doors finishing whichever part of the cycle they’d been on. At last they all stopped, but not exactly as before; some that had been closed were now open, and some that had been open were now closed. And from the houses baffled people were emerging, looking at their garages and at one another and at the sky.
Katharine was laughing. I said, “Don’t laugh, this is serious. We may have started a new religion.”
26
There was not only a laundromat open on Sunday, it was full. We waited five minutes or so until two machines became free, then loaded them up; whites in this one, colored in that one. There’s a strange comic intimacy when your laundry shares a washing machine with her laundry; ‘comic’ because you can’t make the slightest reference to it without feeling like a fool.
While our laundry soaked and swirled, we had lunch in an Ice Cream Parlor, an absolutely straightforward honest-to-God Ice Cream Parlor, complete with the marble counter and the booths with the tall dark-wood seatbacks and the slow-moving ceiling fans. And not some tarted-up imitation, full of fake nostalgia and tacky with-itness, named something like Banana Splitsville; this was Thrughauser’s Ice Cream Parlor, and it was the real thing. At two booths in the back some 1947 teenagers were discussing cars, dates and high school. The old gent behind the counter was everybody’s gray-moustached uncle. And the lady in the black dress and white apron who took our orders was stout, motherly, and cheerful.
Great hamburgers, with relish. Great coffee. And ice cream for dessert, also great. “Maybe we can buy a house and stay forever,” I said.
“What I’m afraid of,” Katharine said, “is we’ll still be here when the town sinks beneath the surface, and you know it won’t rise again for a hundred years.”
“There are worse fates.”
Back at the laundromat, our wash was ready for the dryer. We cajoled the machine with many dimes, then went away to feed gas to the cab. What we found was a gas station with a connecting car wash. “It’s laundry day, right?” I said, and sent the cab through the car wash. Katharine got a road map from the gas station office, and stood in the sunshine perusing it. The cab came out the other end of the car wash gleaming and glistening, looking happier than I’d ever seen it. Taxicabs too need a vacation from the city.
One of the kids with the chamois cloths said to me, “Man, that’s cool. You got this fixed up exactly like the real thing.”
“I’ve even got a meter,” I pointed out.
“I saw that. Terrific, man.”
“Thanks.”
Katharine and I got back into the cab, headed out to the street, and one of those clouds that had been walking around the sky all day paused directly overhead to dump eleven million gallons of rain on us. “God damn son of a bitch,” I said. “I should have known better than get it washed.”
We parked as close to the laundromat as we could get, and made a dash through the rain. The laundry wasn’t dry yet — neither were we, anymore — so we sat to wait on two of the mismatched chrome tube chairs with which all laundromats are fitted out. Katharine still had the road map with her, and she said, “Tom, I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of super-highways.”
“Your little chunk wasn’t so bad.”
“But that was only eight miles, and there won’t be any more of those.” Opening the road map, she said, “Now, Route 70 angles way north from here, and goes up through Denver. But what if we took one of these other roads and just went straight west?”
“You’re talking about the Rocky Mountains there.”
“Well, these are still ordinary roads. It’s not exactly like taking a Conestoga wagon into the wilderness.”
“Also,” I said, “it’s raining.”
“No, it isn’t.”
I turned to look out the window, and damn if the sun wasn’t shining again.