The Ninth Nightmare

Clay Market on Clay Street, shouting about the Polacks, and how the Polacks were the enemies of the black folks. ‘Never used to be so much goddamned sausage around, not till the Polacks took over!’

Exhausted, bruised, his mind fogged by pain suppressants, Lincoln fell asleep.

NINE Call to Arms

In his previous life, John Dauphin had been a restaurant inspector down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was a job that probably would have killed him before he was fifty. Unlike many of his fellow inspectors, he judged restaurants not only on their ambience and their standards of hygiene and the quality of their cooking, but on how generously they could pile up his plate.

Of course he always expected his pepper-jack shrimp at Boutin’s to be crisp and crunchy and spicy on the outside and firm and white and sweet on the inside, but he also expected to be given more than a measly five shrimp per portion. As far as John was concerned, a chef might cook equally as well as Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse but that didn’t entitle him to be a tight-ass.

John had lost his restaurant-inspecting job after some political jiggery-pokery in the East Baton Rouge catering community, apart from reaching the point where he tipped the bathroom scales at 289 pounds, and his BMI was only two more cheeseburgers away from fifty. Last year, with little else to do, he had driven over two thousand seven hundred miles north-east to attend the funeral of his old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III in Presque Isle, Maine, but on the way back his beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis had given up on him, dropping its engine on the highway like a cow giving birth, and ever since then he had been trying to earn enough money to limp home to Baton Rouge.

He had chosen taxi-driving as a means of making a living because it meant that he could sit down all day, and eat and drink whenever he felt like it, and he also got to meet a never-ending variety of people. Most of his passengers were quirky and interesting, although some of them were dull beyond all human endurance, especially the business types he picked up at the airport, who sat in the back texting the whole time, or talking on their cellphones. John always thought, can’t you stop communicating for twenty minutes out of your life, and just look around and breathe the exhaust fumes? OK, Cleveland is a world-class dump, but it does have some redeeming features, like the Cleveland Grays Armory building, which pre-dates the Civil War, and the West Side Market, and the Lake View cemetery, where John D. Rockefeller was planted, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The job he detested the most was cleaning out his cab at the end of his shift. Apart from the usual contributions of chewing gum and used Trojans and folded paper napkins filled with spat-out chicken-skin, he had also found an expensive red alligator purse filled with lumpy beige vomit, an upper set of false teeth, a long-dead turtle in a Burger King box, and a white angora scarf that its owner had obviously used to wipe his rear end.

It never surprised him, how disgusting people could be. Before he had taken up taxi-driving, he had already known that people were disgusting, because he had worked in the restaurant trade. What did surprise him, endlessly, was how they never seemed to think straight. Instead of saying, “Pardon me, driver, I really need a leak, would you mind pulling over?” they would rather pee into their open briefcase, and walk into the airport with it dripping behind them.

Another reason he detested cleaning out his cab was because the space was so confined and he was so generously built. He had to force his way in through the rear doors and bend down to look underneath the seats, in case anybody had dropped anything valuable or revolting, and this always made him feel as if he were free diving in ninety fathoms under water and he was just about to run out of oxygen.

Today the back of his taxi was reasonably clean, except for a gristly piece of half-chewed sausage that somebody had forced into the ashtray in the armrest. He switched on his Vac’n’Go and gave the seats a quick once-over, and he was about to do the same for the carpets when he saw something sparkling underneath the front passenger seat. He rolled up his left sleeve and pushed his arm into the space beneath the seat, and after two minutes of grunting and scrabbling he managed to hook out whatever it was.

He gripped the door handle and hauled himself, panting, on to his feet. It was a gloomy morning here on Gooding Avenue, in Glenville — so gloomy that he could hardly make out what the sparkly thing was. He squinted at it more closely, and then he realized it was an earring — one of the hoopy, loopy earrings that Rhodajane Berry had been wearing. It was made up of three overlapping gold crescents, each of them studded with zircons. The long curved wire that went through her pierced ear-lobe had bent askew, and that was probably why it had fallen off.

He turned the earring over and over. It was a sign, he was sure of it. He even sniffed it, and it still smelled of Boss Intense.

John believed in signs. He didn’t believe that you could see Jesus in the scorch patterns on a slice of burned toast, or that three knocks on the door meant that somebody had died; but he did believe that some things were meant to be, and that if people couldn’t find a way to get together, or didn’t realize that they ought to be together, the natural world would conspire to make sure that they did, like the rabbits and bluebirds in a Disney picture.

He looked around. Gooding Avenue was a short, flat suburban street with small brick-and-clapboard houses set well back from the road. The clouds hung over it like dark gray quilts. There was no other living being in sight apart from a brindled dog trotting from one house to the next, sniffing at the trash cans. If John hadn’t been able to hear the traffic from East 105th Street and Lakeview Road, he would have thought that the world had come to an end.

‘If this isn’t a sign,’ he told himself, ‘then I’m due for a hefty tax rebate.’

He went into the pale-green-painted house where he rented an upstairs room at the back. His landlady Mrs Gizmo had gone shopping, or to one of her bridge mornings. Her real name was Ada Weiss, but John had called her Mrs Gizmo right from the start. Ada Weiss = A Device = Gizmo.

His room was small and brown and plain, with a sloping ceiling on the right-hand side. He had only one poster on the wall, a hand-colored picture of the ferry landing at Baton Rouge, sometime in the 1890s. He had carried it around with him for so long that it was falling apart at the folds. His bedcovers were all scrumpled up and his trash basket was crammed with empty take-out boxes. He always had to have a late-night sub from Quizno’s, usually honey bourbon chicken, so that he didn’t wake up at three in the morning feeling ravenous.

He pulled off his brown leather windbreaker and wrestled his way out of his raspberry-colored polo shirt. In his closet he found a pale blue button-down shirt that didn’t look too creased, and his tan linen coat. There was a three-inch split in the back of his coat, but if he made sure that he always kept his face toward whoever he was talking to, then nobody would notice.

He washed his teeth and brushed up his thinning dyed-black pompadour and splashed his cheeks with American Crew aftershave. Then he grimaced at his face in the mirror over the washbasin and said, ‘Mister Eee-resistible, that’s you!’

He knocked on the door of Room 309 and waited. There was no reply at first but he was sure that he could hear voices inside, and they didn’t sound like some daytime television show. He knocked again, and then cleared his throat loudly. Still no reply.

Eventually he pressed his ear against the door. He could hear a woman talking, and he was pretty certain it was Rhodajane; he would recognize the drawn-out vowels of that Brunstucky accent anywhere. The other voice was so soft and growly that it was impossible for John to make out what he was saying, but it was definitely a man.

Oh well, he thought. Maybe the sign wasn’t telling me what I thought it was telling me. Or maybe I just got my timing wrong. I should go eat, and come back later.

He had just started walking back along the corridor, however, when the door opened and he heard Rhodajane whistle and call out, ‘Taxi!’

He stopped as abruptly as if he had been hit on the back of the head by a flying baseball, and slowly turned around. He hoped that she hadn’t seen the split in the back of his coat. She was standing in the open doorway with her arms folded so that her breasts were pressed so tightly together that he couldn’t have slipped a credit card