“Hey, Mikey.”
Sweet Jesus, there was someone in the car with him.
“We never gonna get there unless you stop dreaming your life away, Mikey.”
“What?” He’d heard the guy perfectly. He touched the knob on the dash and turned the heat down as he eased off the brake. His wife was up the ramp before he reached the stop sign.
The moron in the back repeated his piece of sarcasm.
It had cut close to the bone. “I heard you the first time,” Mike said with a certain amount of viciousness, but he mumbled.
The man leaned forward saying, “What?” When Dean or Brando mumbled, no one said, What?
Mike lifted his head to throw his voice behind him. “What kind of opportunities you got out in Lakeview at night?”
His wife must have taken the girls out to eat. It was funny how the people who’d come back didn’t seem to like staying home. The few restaurants open were more crowded than ever, as though everyone wanted to see who had dared to return, bump shoulders with them. He wondered where his son was. Talk about attitude.
“Whew, Mikey,” the guy was saying, “you really don’t want to go to Lakeview, do you?”
“I don’t care about going to Lakeview. I just asked you a question.”
“Okay, okay...” He started to say something else, but Mike broke in.
“Look. My name isn’t Mikey.” He pointed at the license. “Michael, see? Or Mike.”
“Okay, Michael it is.” He deepened his voice. “A little touchy, huh, Michael?” The dramatic tone was followed by a high-pitched, strangled chuckle way back in his throat. The guy was his own best audience. “Did you know that woman in the car back there or something?”
Mike’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and made contact, a split second when all his anger, his attitude slipped away, gone through the looking glass, and left him slumped in the front seat of his taxi.
“My wife.” Out before he could stop it, as if he had no will left. He gave a short laugh.
“What’s the matter? She not talking to you?”
“Not much.” He nosed the taxi into the curve that took them toward Lakeview. “Not these days.”
“You mean, since the storm?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So the storm’s your fault?” That high strangled laugh again.
“No. Come on — everyone’s on edge since the storm.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You’re not from here.” Mike looked in the rearview to see if the guy was shaking his head or something, some indication he’d heard him, but he was gazing out the side window. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Jersey.”
“Just down here to make a buck, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Boy, it burned Mike up. Some of us sees it, some of us don’t. That kind of arrogance, the guy was probably gouging the money out of people. Riding around in cabs, going to the casino — money to burn.
Mike exited the interstate and drove slowly along West End Boulevard. It looked as though most of the debris had been bulldozed out of the street since he’d last come through here, but if he went too fast he might drive into one of those crater-sized potholes the storm had left all over the city, as if it had blown out the asphalt with its explosive winds, the same way it bombed through houses and tore huge trees whole out of the ground. You could bust a tire if you missed one of those holes in the dark, do some serious damage to your car.
Mr. Sees-it was still looking through the window into a night so dark the skeletons of houses loomed like blackened ghosts. Mike jumped in his seat as a mountainous mass appeared ahead on his left in what had been the half-block-wide green space between West End and Pontchartrain boulevards. Once he was up on it, his headlights revealed a giant mound of debris. The green space, which Mike knew was now black even in the daylight from the toxic water, had become a dumping ground. He’d heard on the radio that the amount of debris already collected in the city was a year’s worth of garbage in Manhattan. The landfills couldn’t take any more.
Mike jumped again; his eyes had drifted from the road and caught the edge of a rift in the concrete. Sees-it said, “You sure you know where you’re going? I can’t see a fucking thing.”
“Yeah, I know where I am. Filmore’s just up there.”
The man faced forward now, sitting up so he could clutch the back of the front seat. His nerves had got him. He was nuts to want to come out here at night. Mike had heard the looters came out after dark. Like cockroaches. They crawled through places most humans wouldn’t go, searching out anything that might turn a dollar. They stripped the plumbing, the light fixtures, the copper flashing, chimney covers, eating a house down to the bare bones. Who knew what kind of opportunity this cockroach in the back of his cab could find at night. Mike should have said no. To hell with the extra buck. He rubbed his hand over his face. Christ — couldn’t he think about anything other than money?
“Here’s Filmore.” He made a right turn and slowed the taxi to the speed of a gimpy pedestrian. “Where to?”
“Uh, General Diaz, General Haig, Argonne. One of those.”
“If you’d told me that to begin with, I could have gone straight to Canal Boulevard.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s your money.”
Roach Man scooted to the edge of the seat, his antennae tuned. “They’re in a service alley behind one of the houses they’re gutting.”
They crossed Canal Boulevard. Mike stopped at the General Diaz alley, but it was a dead end in the dark. The guy mumbled something that sounded like, “Motherfucking spics.”
“What?”
“You think we’d see a lantern in all this pitch black.”
Mike rolled past the intersection of Filmore and Marshal Foch. Just before Argonne, they saw a soft glimmer of light, presumably from a lantern, a quarter-block down the alley.
The guy opened the cab door. “I’ll be fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. If it’s gonna take any longer, I’ll come let you know.” Outside, he stood for a moment to zip up his cheap windbreaker. His new white sneakers shone in the dark. Even with the windows up, Mike could hear the crunch as he walked down the alley, the poisonous wasteland dried to a crisp in the drought since the hurricane.