He came over to the couch, sat beside her, held her hand.
“Johnny, how did you do it?”
“Hmmm?”
“The Wheel. How could you do that?”
“It was a streak, that's all,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Everybody has a streak once in a while. Like at the race track or playing blackjack or just matching dimes.”
“No,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I don't think everybody does have a streak once in a while. It was almost uncanny. It… scared me a little.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
Johnny sighed. “Once in a while I get feelings, that's all. For as long as I can remember, since I was just a little kid. And I've always been good at finding things people have lost. Like that little Lisa Schumann at school. You know the girl I mean?”
“Little, sad, mousy Lisa?” She smiled. “I know her. She's wandering in clouds of perplexity through my business grammar course.
“She lost her class ring,” Johnny said, “and came to me in tears about it. I asked her if she'd checked the back corners of the top shelf in her locker. Just a guess. But it was there.”
“And you've always been able to do that?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Hardly ever. “The smile slipped a little. “But it was strong tonight, Sarah. I had that Wheel… “He closed his fists softly and looked at them, now frowning. “I had it right here. And it had the strangest goddam associations for me.”
“Like what?”
“Rubber,” he said slowly. “Burning rubber. And cold. And ice. Black ice. Those things were in the back of my mind. God knows why. And a bad feeling. Like to beware.”
She looked at him closely, saying nothing, and his face slowly cleared.
“But it's gone now, whatever it was. Nothing probably.”
“It was five hundred dollars worth of good luck, anyway,” she said. Johnny laughed and nodded. He didn't talk anymore and she drowsed, glad to have him there. She came back to wakefulness when headlights from outside splashed across the wall. His cab.
“I'll call,” he said, and kissed her face gently. “You sure you don't want me to hang around?”
Suddenly she did, but she shook her head “Call me,” she said.
“Period three,” he promised. He went to the door.
“Johnny?”
He turned back.
“I love you, Johnny,” she said, and his face lit up like a lamp.
He blew a kiss. “Feel better,” he said, “and we'll talk.”
She nodded, but it was four-and-a-half years before she talked to Johnny Smith again.
“Do you mind if I sit up front?” Johnny asked the cab driver.
“Nope. Just don't bump your knee on the meter. It's delicate.”
Johnny slid his long legs under the meter with some effort and slammed the door. The cabbie, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a paunch, dropped his flag and the cab cruised up Flagg Street.
“Where to?”
“Cleaves Mills,” Johnny said. “Main Street. I'll show you where.”
“I got to ask you for fare-and-a-half,” the cabbie said. “I don't like to, but I got to come back empty from there.”
Johnny's hand closed absently over the lump of bills in his pants pocket. He tried to remember if he had ever had so much money on him at one time before. Once. He had bought a two-year-old Chevy for twelve hundred dollars. On a whim, he had asked for cash at the savings bank, just to see what all that cash looked like. It hadn't been all that wonderful, but the surprise on the car dealer's face when Johnny pumped twelve one hundred dollar bills into his hand had been wonderful to behold. But this lump of money didn't make him feel good at all, just vaguely uncomfortable, and his mother's axiom recurred to him: Found money brings bad luck.
“Fare-and-a-half's okay,” he told the cabbie.
“Just as long's we understand each other,” the cabbie said more expansively. “I got over so quick on account of I had a call at the Riverside and nobody there would own up when I got over there.”
“That so?” Johnny asked without much interest. Dark houses flashed by outside. He had won five hundred dollars, and nothing remotely like it had ever happened to him before. That phantom smell of rubber burning… the sense of partially reliving something that had happened to him when he was very small… and that feeling of bad luck coming to balance off the good was still with him.
“Yeah, these drunks call and then they change their minds,” the cabbie said. “Damn drunks, I hate em. They call and decide what the hell, they'll have a few more beers. Or they drink up the fare while they're waitin and when I come in and yell “Who wants the cab?” they don't want to own up.
“Yeah,” Johnny said. On their left the Penobscot River flowed by, dark and oily. Then Sarah getting sick and saying she loved him on top of everything else. Probably just caught her in a weak moment, but God! If she had meant it I He had been gone on her almost since the first date.
That was the luck of the evening, not beating that Wheel. But it was the Wheel his mind kept coming back to, worrying at it. In the dark he could still see it revolving, and in his ears he could hear the slowing ticka-ticka-ticka of the marker bumping over the pins like something heard in an uneasy dream. Found money brings bad luck.
The cabbie turned off onto Route 6, now well-launched into his own monologue.
“So I says, “Blow it outcha you-know-where.” I mean, the kid is a smart-aleck, right? I don't have to take a load of horseshit like that from anyone, including my own boy. I been drivin this cab twenty-six years. I been held up six times. I been in fender-benders without number, although I never had a major crash, for which I thank Mary Mother of Jesus and Saint Christopher and God the Father Almighty, know what I mean? And every week, no matter how thin that week was, I put five bucks away for his college. Ever since he was nothin but a pip squeak suckin a bottle. And what for? So he can come home one fine day and tell me the president of the United States is a pig. Hot damn! The kid probably thinks I'm a pig, although he knows if he ever said it I'd rearrange his teeth for him. So that's today's young generation for you. So I says, “Blow it outcha-you-know. where. "”
“Yeah,” Johnny said. Now woods were floating by. Carson's Bog was on the left. They were seven miles from Cleaves Mills, give or take. The meter kicked over another dime.
One thin dime, one tenth of a dollar. Hey-hey-hey.
“What's your game, might I ask?” the cabbie said.
“I teach high school in Cleaves.”
“Oh, yeah? So you know what I mean. What the hell's wrong with these kids, anyway?”
Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine. A guy named Lyndon Johnson sold it to them. So they went to this other guy, see, and they said, “Jesus, mister, I'm sick as hell. “And this other guy, his name was Nixon, he said, “I know how to fix that,
Have a few more hot dogs. “And that's what's wrong with the youth of America.
“I don't know,” Johnny said.
“You plan all your life and you do what you can,” the cabbie said, and now there was honest bewilderment in his voice, a bewilderment which would not last much longer because the cabbie was embarked upon the last minute of his life. And Johnny, who didn't know that, felt a real pity for the man, a sympathy for his inability to understand.
Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin goin on.
“You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his asshole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don't…”
“Look out!” Johnny yelled.
The cabbie had half-turned to face him, his pudgy American Legionnaire's face earnest and angry and miserable in the dashlights and in the sudden glow of oncoming headlights. Now he snapped forward again, but too late.
“Jeeesus… -,
There were two cars, one on each side of the white line. They had been dragging, side by side, coming up over the hill, a Mustang and a Dodge Charger. Johnny could hear the revved-up whine of their engines. The Charger was boring straight down at them. It never tried to get out of the way and the cabbie froze at the wheel.