Burning Time

75

The sky was clouding over, the air was fragrant with cherry blossoms when Jason charged out of his building, turned right, and ran thirty yards to Riverside Drive.

“Damn.” There wasn’t a taxi in sight.

His forehead was beaded with sweat. From here at this hour, Queens was about forty-five minutes away. He hesitated, considering his options, then turned and sprinted across Eighty-fourth Street to West End Avenue. There, he caught sight of a battered taxi heading uptown. He hailed it.

“Hoyt Avenue, in Queens,” he sputtered, getting in and slamming the door.

The taxi was so old there wasn’t a handle on the inside. Its driver, a large black man with dreadlocks, silently made a U-turn and drove down West End.

“Go across at Eighty-first Street. It’s fastest.”

“You telling me how to do my job?”

“I’m in a hurry.” Jason gulped at the air, trying to catch his breath. God, the taxi smelled terrible.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, mon.” The driver turned across Eighty-first Street, anyway, and headed into the park.

On Second Avenue, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge traffic was backed up to Sixty-eighth Street. With six or seven body-jolting jerks, the ancient taxi inched forward, advancing only a half a block with every light. Jason checked the driver’s license. Shit. He was a trainee.

Jerk-stop, jerk-stop, jerk-stop. It was crazy-making. Jason looked frantically around for another taxi. He didn’t see one in the sea of cars and vans on the five-lane avenue, all trying to merge left into the two-lane bridge entrance at Fifty-ninth Street.

The driver put a Rasta tape in his boom box and punched the play button. “Get Up, Stand Up.” Bob Marley sang out from beyond the grave.

Jason clenched and unclenched his fists in fury as he watched the minute hand on the clock in the dashboard, clicking up the minutes in rhythm with the music and the rapidly mounting charge on the meter.