fifty ways to leave

They don’t run those kinds of cabs any more; they look different now. But you’d never see him behind the wheel of a Ford Crown Victoria. The driver is still the same – same junkie look, same thin face that catches the light funny through the window. It’s only her who’s different.

The cold rain is beading on the hood, and the illuminated sign still says come inside,

Ten years out of the life, five years sober. She can’t even get stoned any more; the smell gives her girlfriend a headache. Sensible shoes, a high school degree, a bank account with a little money in it — boiling lentils on a commune in Vermont, taking typing lessons in Jersey City. She’s been everywhere. Her pantyhose make her legs itch, and her scalp hurts in the cold. Last night she’d rolled and pinned her hair in fat Velcro curlers, but today in the rain the whole mass of it is falling flat. Leaning in to look through the driver’s side window, a tidy snake of hair works its way out of its pin and wilts down against the nape of her neck.

(Her mother always liked her hair straight, with a fucking barrette in it.)

It’s him; the same collared shirt and the same pinched intensity, not ugly but not really good-looking either. Once she might have done him for free, but not now. She can feel his eyes on her, the memory of how he’d seen her naked back, told her to put her shirt back on and listen. Sometimes Iris still feels naked.

“I didn’t think you’d come out here,” Iris says.

“I drive all kinds of places, ma’am. I drive anywhere, I don’t care.”

“Well, that’s great.”

Ducking down, slipping inside, like punching a hole in time — out there she’s twenty-two, hard, tired, and chilled to the bone. In here she’s a kid again. Her dress sticks to her legs; her hand lingers on the door, but there’s no real chance she’ll swing it open and get out. When she slides over toward the driver’s side her resumé scatters across the backseat: scarred vinyl, welted with cigarette burns and crossed with tape.

The smell of it is the smell of him — smoke, sex, fear, blood — but it’s the smell of the city too, the smell of food and trash. It’s familiar as an old song: greatest hits of ‘76.

She hasn’t gone into the city in a very long time.

It’s cold enough in the cab that she can see her breath, colder than on the street. In the mirror, Travis’ eyes are black and urgent, all pupil, and his face is hard and white. Nothing about it is right. The engine breathes, and the windshield wipers knock. Iris hugs her purse against her stomach to keep from shivering. The driver must notice because he chides her:

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you you’re going to catch a cold like that? Without even a jacket on? It’s December out there. Where’s your coat?”

“I don’t have one,” Iris tells him, truthfully. “I’m staying at a friend’s house.”

The address is all the way in Queens. He doesn’t bat an eye. She watches patiently to see if he will breathe.

It’s late; she’d left her coat behind, her borrowed coat with red braid trim and holes in both pockets. She’d fucked around from office to office and from floor to floor, smiled and cringed until she couldn’t take it anymore, all those men and their eyes, all those women and their fresh clean faces — then went and was sick in the ladies’ room. They hadn’t even asked for her goddamn resumé. It was like they knew.

(What are your qualifications, Miss Steensma?)

At the next light, the driver passes back his coat. It’s stiff canvas, heavy with something in the pockets she can feel without seeing and knows – a cheap flask or one of those flat glass bottles with the screw-on top, or something metal with a screwed-on Bakelite grip. The patch says King Kong Company and it smells like aspirin and cigarettes, like grease, like white sugar. It smells like salvation.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Put it on. I’d feel a lot better knowing you had it on.”

“And what happens when I get out again, huh? Do I give it back?”

“You just keep it. I’ll get another. I don’t want you to catch a cold.”

Grand gesture, huh? Like he thinks she’ll keep it; like he thinks she needs it. Aspirin and cigarettes.

The ride is uneasy in the dark, too-smooth, too quiet in between the steady knocking of the windshield wipers. What she’d do for a cigarette — she’s trying all the cassette tapes and library books and the pack in her purse is only a paper shroud. Instead, she drums her stub fingernails on the paneling.

She’s riding with a dead man now. He totaled her entire life and now he’s dead, her knight in shining armor. Maybe he shot up the wrong gangsters, the second time around, or he never got out of the hospital bed they put him in — the bed where they showed him to her, gray as ashes and full of tubes, full of wires. Peaceful, like he was sleeping. Maybe he didn’t make it. Her father sitting at the red kitchen table, writing out a letter to that nice young man — they never got anything back, not even a return to sender.

“You know, Travis, you never came down to Pittsburgh to see us — you broke my mother’s heart, she bought new towels and everything, she wrote you a letter. I thought you got shot. Didn’t you?”

Iris tries to keep the edge out of her voice, the anger that men call hysteria sometimes.

“It’s not so bad. I got shot before. Just a little sore, that’s all.”

“But you were really shot.”

Travis is watching her, not watching the road. His tone is placid. He’d have fit right in there with mom and dad — their earnest assurances and their cheap gratitude, Wednesday night Mass and apple pie. He should have been their son, their son-in-law. That’s where he belongs.

The whole thing is unreal in its very familiarity: the cars, the lights, the rain on the glass. The numbers flick past on the meter, the signs go by in the street. All this shit and Iris is a girl again, impatient in the world of men. All this was supposed to be a world away.

Travis saved her, Travis ruined her. But Travis is dead, to begin with. She wears the memory of him like her father wears his scapular. He turned her little ten-dollar room into a crime scene — and she traded magazines and bloodstains and fleas for a fold-away bed in a cold basement, for Sears catalogs and health class and a hundred thousand pairs of eyes watching her to tell where she’d been. She’d have run away again, if not for the certainty that if she did, Travis would bring her right back again.

Iris takes his jacket across her lap and rocks forward.

“You know, I missed you sometimes. I wrote you letters too — really nice ones. I wasn’t angry at you.”

She’d missed Sport too, but she can’t tell him that. The two of them got turned around in her head for years — love and pity. Sport is dead, too. Travis is silent.

“Somebody told me you…”

(Somebody told me you were dead, man.)

She might as well be talking to a brick wall — to an empty cab. Travis’ eyes in the mirror are hard and stupid, like a deer on the highway. He doesn’t understand.

“If you’re dead, why can’t you just give up and be dead? Why are you stopping? Why did you stop?”

“This is where you get out, isn’t it? This is where your friend lives.”

He doesn’t ask her to pay; she’s so wound up that she’s stiffed him. The second her shoes hit the pavement she’s swiveling to double-check the street sign – all of these houses look the same, and maybe he’s brought her to some empty place, maybe he’s got something else horrible to show her. Fear closes around her like a fist, that old fear again, and squeezes. But she can’t just let him go —

The heavy door closes behind her without complaint. She stands there on the curb in the streetlight feeling like a Pennsylvania rube, digging in her purse for a crumpled bill, but when she finds one there’s no cab and there’s no driver to give it to. She’s left with the jacket over her arm.

Iris stuffs her hand deep into the pocket of the coat, past the glass bottle, past the spindled matches and worn-out strips of white tape. The smell of sweat is on the collar and it’s the smell of him, the memory of his regard.

The cold rain’s stopped. She’s standing in the dark on an empty street, holding an empty coat.