Before the train started moving, a big lummoxy kid came along to take the seats across the aisle. About nine feet tall, with a big square head covered by wavy blond hair, he was probably twenty years old, and was dressed in huge clunky hiking boots, white tube socks, khaki shorts—his knees were enormous and knobby and covered with fuzz, like the rest of him—a T-shirt with some kind of stupid philosophical statement on it, a red headband, and a monster backpack looming higher than his head.
Tom watched with contemptuous interest as the kid undid all the straps that released the backpack, which then took up two seats all by itself. Glancing at Tom with the self-assurance of somebody who doesn’t know anything yet, the kid said, “Watch my bag?”
“Sure,” Tom said.
The kid went thumping away down the aisle, knees working like hand puppets, and Tom watched him go, then rose to give the backpack a quick efficient frisk. He transferred the two hundred dollars cash and the six hundred dollars in traveler’s checks and the illustrated Kama Sutra to his own black leather bag (which he never asked anyone to watch), but left the kid his dirty socks and the rest of his shit. Settled in his own four seats again, he got out his paperback of W. R. Burnett’s Dark Hazard and settled down.
A few minutes later the idiot came back, carrying a sandwich and a can of beer, and said, “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Tom told him, and went back to his book, and a few minutes later the train jerked forward.
Tom read while the train worked its way through the tunnels beneath midtown Manhattan, and he kept on reading when the train emerged into uptown and became an elevated and stopped at 125th Street, where nobody got on or off. Slum scenery became industrial scenery became, very gradually, countryside scenery, and Tom kept reading. He’d never been really big for nature.
It was nearly two hours, and Tom had almost finished the book—it wasn’t going to be a happy ending, he could see it coming—when at last the conductor’s voice came over the sound system, crying out, “Rhinecliff! Rhinecliff!”
Good. Tom put his book away, shut his bag—two straps and buckles, no zippers—and got to his feet. The schmuck across the aisle gave him a half salute and said, “Have a nice day.”
“Yeah, I will.”
Tom started away, but a devilish urge made him turn back and say, “You, too.” The kid’s fatuous grin was still all over his face as the train stopped and Tom found his exit.
“My Mom knows what you look like,” Stan Murch had assured him back in New York. “Besides, she’s probably the only lady cabdriver there, and the only one all the way from Dudson Center.”
“I’m not worried,” Tom had said, and there she was, no doubt about it, short and chunky, in a cloth cap and zipper jacket and corduroy pants, leaning with arms folded against a green and white car with its name on the door: TOWN TAXI.
She was shaking her head when Tom saw her, apparently arguing with another detrainer who’d wanted to hire her cab. As Tom approached, the frustrated customer raised his voice to say, “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a taxi?”
“No,” Murch’s Mom told him. “I’m a Duane Hansen statue.”
Tom interposed himself between the statue and the detrainer, saying quietly, “Here I am.”
Murch’s Mom, as promised, did recognize him. “Fine,” she said. “Get in.” And she turned to open the driver’s door.
“Hey!” cried the non-customer as Tom opened the rear door. “I was here first!”
“Pay no attention to him,” Murch’s Mom said.
Of course not. Tom shrugged and started to get into the cab, but the non-customer crowded forward, pushing an attaché case ahead of himself into the space of the open door, blocking Tom’s way, continuing to yell and carry on. So Tom looked at him.
He wasn’t sure what it was exactly about this face of his, but usually when there was some sort of unnecessary trouble, if he just looked at the person making the disturbance, that was almost always enough to take care of the problem. What might be in his eyes or the set of his features to make it work that way Tom didn’t really know, nor did he really care; it did the job, that’s all.
And it did the job this time, too. Tom looked at the non-customer and the man stopped yelling. Then he blinked. Then he looked worried. Then he kind of pulled his jaw back in, trying to hide it behind his Adam’s apple. Then he got the attaché case out of Tom’s way. Then Tom got into the cab.
They were on the wrong side of the Hudson River here, the train tracks running up along its eastern bank, giving occasional beautiful views and vistas that could just as well be from before the European incursion into this continent, not that Tom had noticed, or cared. The Thruway, and the Vilburgtown Reservoir, and drowned Putkin’s Corners, and all the Dudsons living and dead, were over across the river in the main part of New York State.
It happens there’s a bridge across the Hudson right there at Rhinecliff. Steering across it, Murch’s Mom glanced in the rearview mirror at Tom, who had removed his book from his bag and was reading it. “Have a good ride up?” she asked.
Tom looked up from his book, catching Mom’s eye in the mirror. Marking his place in the book with his finger, he said, “Yeah, I did. And the weather’s nice this time of year. And I’m not hungry yet, thanks. And I haven’t been keeping up with the sports teams much lately. And I have no political opinions at all.” Lowering his eyes, he opened his book and went back to reading.
Murch’s Mom took a deep breath, but then held it awhile. With little white spots on her cheeks, she concentrated on the road ahead, looking for somebody to try to cut her off.
Nobody did, though, and Mom fumed in frustration for several minutes until, across the river and onto the Thruway, she saw out ahead of herself a car from Brooklyn, and all her rage transferred itself to that innocent vehicle. Why would anybody come here from Brooklyn, from home, if they didn’t have to?
The reason Mom knew that maroon 1975 Ford LTD was from Brooklyn was the license plate: 271 KVQ. The first letter in New York plates gives the county: Kings, in this case, which is Brooklyn. (Queens is Queens, and there’s no Jacks.)
The driver of the offending vehicle, a curly-haired young guy, was going along minding his own business when all of a sudden this Town Taxi came swooping out of nowhere, cut him off with micromillimeters to spare, and fishtailed away as though giving him the finger with its tailpipe. Apart from slamming on his brakes, clutching the wheel hard with both hands, and staring wide-eyed, he made no satisfactory reply to this opening remark, so Mom dawdled in the left lane until the other car had nearly caught up, then shot across the lanes again, shaving the distance from the Ford’s front bumper even closer than before. There! That’s for nothing! Now do something!
That was when the cold unemotional voice came from the cab’s backseat: “If that guy’s bothering you, I could take him out.”
Which brought Mom to her senses. “What guy?” she demanded, and floored the accelerator, taking everybody out of danger. Half an hour later, with no further incidents, she steered the cab up onto the driveway beside her new home and braked to a stop just shy of the chain-link fence. “This is it,” she announced.
Tom had finished Dark Hazard about eight miles back, and had spent the time since just sitting there, looking at the back of Mom’s head. (He knew this area, knew what it looked like, wasn’t curious about any changes that might have taken place around here of late, and sure wasn’t likely to be keeping an eye out for old friends.) Now he looked out at the house and said, “Fine. Looks pretty big.”