“You okay?” The pale cabbie levels his gaze at Kevin, an edge of irritation in his voice.
“Yeah.” Kevin reaches for the door again. Up ahead Joy Luck stands her duffle on end and shares a smile with the shuttle driver, a bull-chested Hispanic with his uniform shirt tucked into bulging bicycle shorts. He slings the duffle up into the shuttle, and Joy Luck pauses at the door, one long leg bent on the bottom step. She twists her hair one-handed off the back of her neck, just like Lynda used to. Oh Lynda, Lynda, Lynda, thinks Kevin, where are you now?
“Meter’s running, sir,” says the cabbie. “We comin’ or goin’?”
“Go,” says Kevin. He lunges for the door and slams it. Joy Luck is swallowed by the shuttle as the cab hauls away from the curb.
Kevin’s more aware of the noises a car makes when he’s not driving: the crepitation of tread against pavement, the throaty roar of acceleration, the galloping slap—thump-thump, thump-thump—of tires over the joints in the road.
“Where we headed?” The cabbie watches Kevin in the rearview mirror. The AC vents are whooshing; the dispatch radio spits unintelligibly; voices on the car radio mutter in an unidentifiable language, something rapid-fire and vehement. The meter ticks relentlessly, and the dull red numbers already register $2.75. Pasted across the dash is a SEMPER FI bumper sticker in scarlet and gold; a small medallion, silver and black, dangles from the rearview, twisting in the breeze of the AC. Kevin finds one end of the seat belt and digs for the other in the crack of the seat. It’s not too late to go back, he’s thinking, it’s not too late to get on the shuttle with Joy Luck, or even to offer her a ride in his cab, anywhere she wants to go, his treat. She’s hooked him somehow and she’s holding the other end of the line, and any second now all the slack will be played out and he’ll be yanked like a tuna right out of the cab. Then he snags the blunt end of the belt and claws it two-fingered out of the seat, and the cab shoots out of the echoing cavern of the underpass into the light. Even behind the tinted windows of the taxi, Kevin squints against the Texas glare. Thump-thump, thump-thump go the tires. The line tugging at his heart tautens and snaps. Too late.
“Downtown,” says Kevin, yanking on both ends of the belt until they connect. “One Longhorn Place.” Three twenty-five, and they haven’t even left the airport yet. Together Kevin and the cabbie ride in a Lumina-shaped bubble of dank air-conditioning, the air tainted with the farting of the dispatch radio and their own mild, mutual ill will. Kevin notes the cabbie’s dirty white hair combed straight back over a sun-reddened bald spot, his raggedly trimmed beard, his long-boned arms, his big-knuckled hands on the wheel. He wears a faded Hawaiian shirt that hangs off his shoulders as if off a wire hanger. Kevin pulls out his sunglasses.
“Street address?” says the cabbie.
Kevin grunts and reaches into his jacket for his notebook; he sets the sunglasses on the seat. The details of his interview are buried in the middle, of course, and he hunts past grocery lists; Stella’s cell number; instructions on how to jump a battery; Stella’s e-mail; prices for a new battery; directions to a brunch in Dexter; a list of chick-lit authors Stella wants him to read, none of whom he’s ever heard of; a Michigan license number for a red Toyota pickup, he can’t remember why; Stella’s cell number again, this time in her own hand; a list of cities where he’d be willing to live, none of which is Austin.
“Ummm,” he says, stalling, “is there a Congress Street?”
“Congress Avenue?” Kevin can hear the smirk in the cabbie’s voice. “I reckon I can find that.”
Kevin gets right away that asking for Congress Avenue is like asking for Times Square or Picadilly Circus. He lowers the notebook for his first proper look at Texas, a rolling, yellowish savannah under a cloudless sky. Miles and miles of Texas. The sky really is bigger here, though it isn’t the deep cerulean you see in Michigan this time of year; even this early in the morning it’s bleached like an old blue sheet left out in the sun. There’s too much light for the sky to soak up and it glitters everywhere, off the cars in long-term parking, off the light standards bent at the neck over the roadway, off the pavement itself.
“You from up north, right?”
“Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, thinking the name may not mean anything this side of the Mississippi, “Michigan.”
“Go Blue,” drawls the cabbie. “You here for a meeting, right? Just for the day?”
“Job interview.” The dangling rearview medallion twists this way. It’s a pair of nestled black-and-white spermatozoa, yin and yang.
“My next guess. No luggage, that’s how I can tell.”
What are you, Sherlock Holmes? Kevin nearly says, mouthy as a New Yorker, but his midwestern reticence buttons his lip. A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The midwesterner’s credo: keep it to yourself.
“What’s the job?” says the cabbie. “Don’t mind my asking.”
Kevin never knows what to do with his hands in a taxi — fold them in his lap? Cross his arms? — and he lays them flat on the seat to either side. Thus he rediscovers his sunglasses, and he puts them on. The bleaching glare becomes a warm, amber, sunset glow. WELCOME TO AUSTIN reads a sign, silver sans serif against limestone.
“I’m not sure,” he says. Another midwesternism — someone asks you a question, it’s impolite not to answer, even if you don’t have one.
“Oh yeah?” Guy’s watching him again in the rearview. “Kind of a mystery job, or what?”
“Well, no, the job’s not a mystery,” says Kevin, at once eager to explain and hating the eagerness in his voice. “It’s an editing job, they’re looking for an editor.”
“Oh yeah,” says the cabbie, knowingly. “Like a proofreader, that kind of deal?”
“Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.” He hates the defensiveness in his voice, too, but the cabbie’s touched a sore spot. For the last twenty years, Kevin’s made his living as an editor at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, the last eight as the Pubs Program’s executive editor, and even now, after all those years and all the monographs he’s acquired, edited, designed, copyedited, proofread, and marketed, he still has a hard time getting anyone to understand that editing is a profession and that he is a professional. Too often, when Kevin has been introduced as an editor at the university, he’s had to append so many qualifications that it sounds like he’s backpedaling. No, he doesn’t work for the U of M Press. No, he’s not an academic himself. No, he has no background in Asian studies — or any interest either, though he’d never say that. No, he doesn’t speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. No, he’s never been west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And no, he has no final say over what the Pubs Program publishes — that rests with the publications committee, the publications director, and the center director, all of them academics in Asian studies, and all of them as amiable and collegial as scorpions.
“Oh sure,” the cabbie’s saying. “You gotta find the books and read ’em and all that stuff, right?” They’re on an access road now and the ride is rougher, the tires thumping arrhythmically over potholes and cracks. They pass a low, mean, flat-roofed building called Club Vaquero, whose sign features a silhouette of a big-assed, big-titted woman with a wild mane of hair. It’s the same sort of business he sees around Detroit Metro, but here the light’s sharper and dustier, the bold colors of the sign both brighter and bleached somehow. Here, in this steeply angled light, even shade is for rent, Kevin notices, as they pass a private long-term parking lot where travelers can leave their cars under enormous blue canvas pavilions.