When I first saw you standing there I was sure you were him.”
#The last taxi driver by lee durkee plus#
I should tell him it’s two bucks a mile outside city limits, plus two bucks for each additional stop, but instead I start telling him about my friend Earl. “Pays the same,” I say, my way of letting him know I’m not taking him there for free. I can’t remember the street but I can point you there.”
You mind taking me out to 243? I know this other girl. Opposite Earl gets back into the cab lugging a pilfered six-pack of High Life to add to his floorboard collection. This guy is like Earl’s prison twin-Rich Earl, Poor Earl-the Earl who owns nothing and has lost a few teeth in Parchman. He looks like a discarded version of my friend Earl, who hustles golf for fun. At what moment do you stop being a taxi driver and start being a getaway driver? But I don’t leave, not yet. I sit there thinking, Well, I didn’t see that coming, and once again I find myself wondering what makes an accomplice an accomplice. Finally, after glancing back at me, he wanders into the garage, pokes around in there, and then opens the side door and disappears into the house. Leaving his beers on the floorboard, he rings the bell and waits, combs his hair back with his fingers, then knocks and waits some more. “Man, can you wait here a minute? I’m just gonna look-see inside.” The one catalpa tree is either blighted or a late bloomer. The lawn is that bright-green ryegrass with brown jigsaw pieces where somebody sprayed ant poison. Somebody has stolen the garage door, and a plastic wave of kid junk is cresting into the driveway. Our destination turns out to be a beater house. I laugh and tell him, “I know guys drive ninety.” “Seventy hours? Man, that sounds kinda dangerous.” I mean, as long as I put in my seventy a week, I do.” “Damn,” my fare says, as the Lincoln bottoms out on a speed bump. It has a suburban facade fronting the grim rows of public housing.
I’ve never used an Uber and don’t understand how that works, but my hope is that when they come into town next month-it’s not just a rumor anymore-they’ll shun the projects the same way all the other cab companies in town do.īethune Woods is one of our nicer projects. As I do this I’m wondering if Uber will steal all my rides from the projects. It’s a late spring midafternoon but already feels like summer as I drive under the Fordice Bridge past campus. These projects are arranged like black moons around a white planet, and it’s my job to ferry kitchen workers into the city square or wherever it is they work, a twenty-dollar bookend on a job that pays them maybe nine bucks an hour. We hit the four-lane and head east toward the largest of the five projects, which I didn’t know existed before I started driving a cab. She’s probably been married and divorced twice.” “Man, I don’t even know her number been so long. “Maybe you should call her first?” I suggest, looking into the rearview. We’re at the Mobil station near West Gentry Loop waiting to pull into traffic. “Man, is she gonna be surprised to see me,” he adds. He’s carrying a twelve-pack of Bud Light when he slides into the back of my Town Car and tells me he’s just been released from Parchman and then gives me the name of some street in the Bethune Woods Project, says it’s an old girlfriend’s house.
This one’s a handsome white dude-mid-thirties, a few missing teeth, a few prison tats-who’s in a fantastic mood. They never tell you what they were in for-only that they just got out. The novel, which tells the story of a cab company in Northern Mississippi, was published last month by Tin House Books.
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