Call Me a Cab

28

The towtruck driver wasn’t the same person I’d talked to on the phone, I knew that the instant I saw him, with his skinny body and his small oval head and his big mouth full of huge mismatched teeth. And it was confirmed an instant later when he spoke, in a high-pitched nasal voice, saying, “You the fella with the taxi?”

“That’s right, Jerry,” I said. He was wearing one of those dark green workshirts with your name in red script in a white oval on your left breast. His said Jerry.

Jerry pointed at the cab; the only yellow Checker taxicab in the state, probably, and certainly the only one in sight. “This it?”

“Sure is,” I said. Was his partner going to be this smart? The fellow’d sounded sort of all right on the phone, but Jerry was increasing my sense of unease.

In any event, Jerry understood the workings of his own towtruck, and in less time than you could say “Jack Robinson” twice he’d hooked up, invited us into our cab for the journey, and we found ourselves sailing along through town with nothing in front of us but our own up-tilted hood; as though we were in some land-based variant of the motorboat.

“I’ve never traveled like this before,” Katharine said, looking out cheerfully at the rain-fresh sidewalks, waving to children who giggled and waved back. “It’s sort of fun.”

“I have,” I said. “And it’s never been fun before. Of course, the other times it’s always meant lost time and lost money.”

“It’s still lost time,” she said, with a sunny smile.

“You’re incorrigible,” I told her.

Smith’s Svce was a big sprawling concrete block building painted white and surrounded by blacktop. Gas pumps were in front, wheeled display racks filled with tires were to one side, and a lot of disreputable looking automobiles were parked here and there around the fringes. We stopped between the pumps and the building, Jerry yelled for us to get out, and out we climbed, down onto the blacktop, blinking in the sunlight and looking around.

While Jerry proceeded to back and fill and maneuver this way and that in order to run the Checker backwards through a big open garage door into the building, a small office door to the side opened and out came a burly-chested man with a thick black moustache and wearing a dark blue knit wool cap. This must be the man I’d spoken to on the phone, and the name in the oval on his workshirt was Ralph. Wanting to get on — or stay on — his good side, I approached with my hand out, saying, “Hi, Ralph, I’m Tom Fletcher, and this is—”

“Dave,” he said, and took my hand, and shook it. “Pleased to meet you.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“The name’s Dave,” he repeated. “Dave Smith. I’m the boss around here.”

“Katharine Scott,” Katharine said, smiling, and shook the man’s hand.

I couldn’t help it; I pointed at the name Ralph on that shirt. “But—” I said.

“Oh, this,” he said, and chuckled down at the lie on his chest. “I’m a gambler,” he explained. “They have these unclaimed freight sales every once in a while, you buy cartons contents unseen, you never know what you’ll come up with. Paid three dollars, got two gross of these shirts here. All the names in the world. You’re Tom, you say?”

“That’s right.”

“I got two Toms. You want ’em?”

“Thanks anyway,” I said.

“No charge,” he told me. “I got these shirts all over the place.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “But—” And I fumbled, not knowing how to refuse the offer without seeming unfriendly. But I’m not going to walk around wearing a shirt that says Tom. Maybe I could just take the damn shirts and say thank you and throw them away in California.

“That’s okay,” he said, letting me off the hook. “I understand. You wanna retain your anonymity, right?”

“I guess so,” I said, with a weak grin. His style was keeping me off balance.

Turning to Katharine, he said, “I don’t have any Katharines, you know, that’s one they missed. But I tell you what I do have. One of the smalls, won’t fit me or anybody else around here, it says ‘Ace.’ You wanna be Ace?”

“I’d love to be Ace,” Katharine said, and from the way she said it I knew she absolutely meant it.

“I’ll drag it out for you in a little while.” He looked over at the building, and the Checker was now inside. “First,” he said, “let’s go see what your trouble is.”

As we walked across the blacktop I said, “That other fella. Is his name Jerry?”

“What? Naw, his shirt’s named Jerry. He’s named George.”

“He answered to Jerry.” I was feeling obscurely taken advantage of.

“Maybe he thought you were talking to the shirt,” he said. “George is notoriously polite.”

Inside, Jerry/George was just finished unhooking the towtruck from the front of the Checker. Ralph/Dave said to him, “After you park that, George, take a look in that box of shirts, behind the fan belts, see can you find the one called Ace.”

“Okay, Dave,” George said, and drove the towtruck out while Dave opened the cab’s hood, pulled down a worklight on a retractable cable from the ceiling, hooked it on the hood so it shone down onto the engine, and then stood there brooding at the Checker’s innards like an archaeologist trying to read a cave painting.

George soon found the Ace shirt, which Katharine put on over her own blouse, leaving it unbuttoned, and in which she looked absolutely wonderful. I have often envied women the wider range of wearing apparel permitted them by society; there have been windy days, for instance, when there was nothing more rational for me to wear on my head than a scarf, but even if I’d gone ahead and worn one (I never have) I know I wouldn’t have looked wonderful in it, I’d simply have looked foolish. Katharine in her Ace shirt, though, looked so terrific I just wanted to stand there and gaze at her and smile, forever.

Well, almost forever. There is, in fact, nothing more boring in life than standing around on a concrete floor in some garage waiting for the mechanic to tell you what’s wrong and how much it’ll cost and how long it’ll take and a lot of other things you don’t really want to know, and a beautiful woman in a work-shirt named Ace can distract for only so long. Boredom which ends in enjoyment — waiting for a favorite TV program, for instance — is a lot more bearable than boredom which can only end badly. Katharine and I spent the next half hour walking around inside the garage, reading the wheel-alignment poster and the credit card information posters and the calendars and the oil filter poster and the ancient license plates nailed to the walls, and I was reduced to reading empty oil cans when at last Dave Smith came out from under the hood and said, “Tomorrow.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said.

“At the earliest,” he added.

Katharine joined us, saying, “It can’t be fixed today?”

“Sorry, Ace,” Dave said. “It’s the starter, all right, and we’ll never get us a new one on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning, I’ll call around, see what I can come up with. Even if we have to rebuild the old one here, we’ll still need parts, and there’s just no place to get them on a Sunday.”

Katharine and I glanced at one another and shook our heads, and then Katharine said to Dave, “Would you mind explaining things to my fiancé?”

Dave looked at me, and it did me a world of good to see him nonplused for once. I just smiled and said not a word.

Katharine went on, saying, “I’ll phone him now, all right?”

Dave didn’t nonplus for long; you could see him figuring he’d catch up sooner or later. “Sure, Ace,” he said. “I’ll talk to any old body. The payphone’s through there, in the office.”

Dave and I remained in the garage long enough for me to give him a two-sentence capsule of our situation. He nodded through it, then frowned at the door through which Katharine had just gone. “That’s funny,” he said. “She don’t seem the indecisive type. What’s wrong with the fella?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never met him.”

He gave me a keen look. “You aren’t an old friend or something.”

“No, I’m just the cabdriver. I’m not part of the story at all.”

He chuckled, with a knowing look, but before he could state his misconceptions and give me a chance to correct them the office door opened and Katharine appeared, somewhat nervous, saying, “Barry’s on the phone. His name is Barry.”

“His shirt is named Fred,” I said.

Dave grinned at me, and went into the office with Katharine. I stayed out by my fallen mount, looking with annoyance at the filthy innards under that raised hood. Katharine, of course, was pleased at anything that legitimately delayed our journey, but all I felt was irritated and upset. It was a strange reaction, really, since I was having just as good a time as Katharine and probably wanted the trip to end even less than she did, but that didn’t mean I wanted us to stop. In some ways, this journey was like riding a bicycle; moving forward, no matter how erratically, made it possible to maintain our balance, but who knew what sort of fall would follow if we came to a complete halt? Getting derailed this way — to mix my transportation metaphors — put our relationship into a new and unknown pattern, which I could live without. I was becoming involved emotionally with Katharine — uselessly, pointlessly, ridiculously involved — and I was only too aware of what was happening, but so long as we maintained our original purpose together, this steady if slow progress westward, I could keep things under control. Given a day off, who would I turn out to be?

When Dave and Katharine returned, she was looking a little rattled but very relieved, and Dave was smiling like a man who’d love nothing more than to sit down with me over a beer and have a good long chat about the meaning of what he’d just been through. I believe he wanted to wink at me, but he didn’t do it.

“Everything’s all right,” Katharine said. “Barry understands.”

“Barry’s a saint,” I said.

She gave me a sharp look, then hurried on: “Dave says he’ll drive us to the Holiday Inn.”

“It’s maybe a mile out,” Dave explained, gesturing in a direction, “by the interstate exit. It’s about the only place to stay in the general neighborhood.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Katharine told me.

We walked back out to the sunlight, and over toward the disreputable looking automobiles. “I’ll look for a new starter first thing in the morning,” he said, “and call you at the hotel.”