Call Me a Cab

21

Kansas. Now I know what flat is.

Of course, that was just as well, because we had to make up lost time. When we left the diner after our late lunch it was nearly four o’clock, and we’d so far done less than two hundred miles on the day. I was determined to reach five hundred before we quit, so it was a good thing most of the road in front of us would be straight and flat. Which it was; I seemed to be driving across a dining room table not yet set for dinner. I kept feeling like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if a giant hand had all at once reached down out of the sky, picked us up cab and all, and moved us to another part of the gameboard.

Katharine and I were friends once more. She sat up front, and our conversation was all inconsequential; past vacation experiences, college days, the lack of variety in the world around us. Her relief was so great at not having to make the Great Decision today after all that I doubt she gave Barry more than a passing thought for the rest of the afternoon; I know she didn’t mention him. Between our idle chit-chats I at times brooded on our conversation in the diner, making some small effort to understand myself but not much getting anywhere.

Reversing our sidetrip to the airport initially meant dropping south on Interstate 635, taking a toll bridge across the Missouri River, and playing bumper-cars with the beginnings of rush-hour traffic down Route 70, which here had become the Kansas Turnpike; a toll road. Between Kansas City, where we got on, and Topeka, where we got off fifty miles later, it cost us just over a dollar.

Topeka is considerably smaller than Kansas City, but by now it was also considerably closer to five o’clock, and even though it was Saturday, traffic was as clogged as a nose in hay-fever time. Frustration was beginning to get to me; even though one of the first things you learn as a cabdriver is that in most situations — careless pedestrians excepted — your horn is absolutely useless, I actually found myself, on Route 70 in mid-Topeka, while ambling along beside the equally slow (but opposite-directioned) Kansas River, leaning on my horn.

With Topeka at last behind us, we could begin to make some time, troubled now only by the ever-present threat of Highway Patrols and that huge gold sun gradually setting just past the tip of my nose. The road was dull and flat and straight, the traffic finally thinning, the sun so glaring it was impossible to see anything, the afternoon air dry and hot, and I slowly thickened into an automaton role; the robot at the wheel. It’s the worst kind of driving, really, the most endlessly monotonous and therefore eventually dangerous. Katharine napped, the orange sun giving her smooth face a veneer of stage makeup, and I told myself stories, counted red cars, brooded about my sexist tendencies, and even turned on the radio a while. I could get no commercial stations, of course, but I did listen to the pilot’s half of a conversation with the control tower at something apparently called Philip Billard Airport; I can’t begin to guess where that might be. Switching from channel to channel I picked up other stray fragments of conversation, but never enough to make sense of it.

Dreary driving. The sun just hung there, dead ahead, getting bigger and refusing to sink. I did seventy-five, I did eighty, I even crept to eighty-five once or twice though the cab didn’t like it, and with that sun in my eyes neither did I. Katharine awoke and was logy and cranky, not wanting to talk, not finding it possible to get comfortable in the front seat with both the meter and my license-mount in her knee-space. Perspiration pearled her upper lip and made her hair dank around her ears. “I can’t stand this,” she said, and climbed over to the back seat. In the mirror I could see her trying to go back to sleep and failing. Then she sat up and morosely watched the roadside; she looked very sorry to be here. As were we all.

Miles and miles and miles. Paxico, Manhattan (one of God’s bad jokes), Junction City, Moonlight (now there’s a town name), Abilene, Selina, Lincoln, Black Wolf, Dorrance, Bunker Hill (they’re kidding), Homer, Victoria, Catharine. “There’s your town,” I said.

“They spelled it wrong.” So much for high spirits.

The bottom of the sun trembled above the horizon but wouldn’t touch it. My ribs were sore, my right knee was sore. My cheeks ached from squinting so long. The gas station and motel signs thrust high in the air on their stalk legs at every exit were only black silhouettes in the orange glare, their cleverly plotted colors and lettering and designs all obliterated by that infernal sun.

We were approaching an exit. From the back seat the cranky voice came: “It’s after eight o’clock.”

I looked at the speedometer; less than four hundred fifty miles on the day. “We got a late start,” I said. “I’m trying to make up lost time.”

“Tom,” she said, and her voice trembled, “we have to get out of this car.”

“Right,” I said, and swerved, took the exit.