Driving Shades, Part 4 (Part 1 click here)

What happens next is another scene from the movie.

I’m stalking around the house, sloshing gas. I soak the porch, the sides, I head back toward the cab. I pause halfway to swing around, fire up one of the flares with a Bic. The white magnesium glow makes a lazy arc in the night. Then a clatter from the porch, followed by a massive whomp, and it’s done.

Some things are just flat out mysterious. Shades are so much weirder than you’d ever imagine. They don’t share each other’s world any more than they share yours or mine. Like, if I had a shade in my cab and we passed another shade, they wouldn’t even look at each other. Or if they did, they wouldn’t care, because every shade is the single lone citizen of an infinitely huge universe, population one. Some of the shades I drove, I had known them in life. They had known me. They knew my sister, too, but do you think there was a hint of recognition? Not one of them ever showed the slightest recognition of me. And Sis, not a mention. Weird, right?

But even weirder is this: since the fire, I haven’t seen one shade. Not one. How do you explain that?

The Clarion said this town had never seen a such a fire. I believe it, because I got a full dose of it before I left. You wouldn’t think a rickety old Victorian could burn like that, but it was throwing up fireballs like a dying planet. People always rush to the scene. I heard the streets coming alive, but nobody saw those first minutes—the blinding white fireball, the pyro show that blew up in its wake. Nobody but me. The house was drowning in fire. I heard one last blast as I drove away. It ripped through what was left of the decrepit framing, then came nothing.

I once heard a fatal car crash, and the sudden silence that followed it––no bird sounds, no insect noises, no traffic––as we waited for the horror of the world to surge back. You always wonder who was driving, what the hurry was, and what it means that they’ll never get wherever it was they thought they were going. It was like that, hanging suspended in the silence after that last crash. And then the world came back, like in reverse, and there was a lot of freaked out chatter from Gabe, cars were starting up, lights popping on in houses. The old air raid siren cranked up, that unholy wail that never sounds unless something has gone really wrong.

Mom and Dad were awake in their room when I came in. I could hear whispering, speculating, as they tried to figure out what the hell had just happened out there. They didn’t notice me on the stairs, so I was able to slip by and get to my room. It was dark, a good dark, a comforting, protective dark. I didn’t turn on the lights. I just fell on my bed and was unconscious almost before I hit the sheets.

Next day, I was up at noon after the best night’s sleep ever. By then, the whole town knew I’d done it. Somebody saw my cab, and there were other clues. I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to get away with something. I was about to turn myself in when a local cop, Hunter, a guy I went to high school with, played basketball with, drove up in his cruiser to talk to me. He was in uniform, but he made sure I knew it was for the record only.

“Okay, then,” he said, after a few softball questions. He slapped his knees and got up to go. “We’re done.”

“That’s it?”

He looked hard into my eyes and nodded.

Outside the house, halfway back to the cruiser, he turned back toward me, and raised a fist. “Hang in there, buddy, you hear?”

Hang in there, buddy.

So I wasn’t going to be led off in an orange suit. The earth didn’t rip open. I wasn’t carried off in a UFO. Nobody in town stopped talking to me. If anything, folks have been friendlier since the fire than before. Father Mackey stopped by the house and gave me a big grin as if I’d done a good thing. Maybe I had. But if it was such a good thing, why was it I didn’t feel so good?

Nowadays, I drive past the site all the time, and don’t feel a thing. I hear it’s going to be a Stop ‘n’ Shop, but nothing’s happened yet. Once, before they leveled it and laid on the gravel, I even got out of the cab and took a walk through the ashes and cinders. The remains. I was trying to see the whole thing again in my mind, but nothing came up. A blank screen. I sat down on a black chunk of concrete let my mind drift into the way things might have been. I pretended I saw Sis standing in those ruins, reaching out to me with hot little tears of relief running down her face. The ruins would be gone soon and it would be just a patch of emptiness. If this story was a Hollywood movie, it would be over. Maybe one last scene where the guy and girl patch it up and decide to love each other forever. He’d pull out a ring. She’d say, “It’s beautiful,” and cry. Let’s pretend that’s the way it would be. Let’s pretend I gave Sis what she needed. Let’s pretend I don’t know why the months have dragged on without a trace of her. Let’s pretend I’m going to see her tonight, tomorrow night. I mean, who’s to say? I’m still young. There’s a lot of water left to flow under my bridge. It could happen someday. Let’s pretend it will.

I don’t pretend things so much anymore, but for a while, I was pretending all the time. One time I even pretended Sis wasn’t my sister, and we were making out, but that was just too weird. I stopped and never did that again. The smart part of my brain knows that pretending is a dead end. If you have to pretend, there are good reasons why it’s never going to happen, so you shouldn’t be wasting your time. I do have some basic good sense at times.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Lazarus, the guy from the Bible who Jesus brought back from the dead. What’s life like for you after you’ve been dead for a while? You rejoin the living, you’re back in the world again, but how can life ever be like it was? I’d ask a shade if I ever saw one anymore––I haven’t had a shade in my cab since the fire. Something happened. But anyway, that would be pointless because I wouldn’t get an answer. You can’t have a real conversation with a shade. Even if you could, what would it be worth? No offense, but to a shade, the question wouldn’t even make sense.

What it’s like to be alive again? Shades aren’t even alive, so how would they know? Sis had come back, not like Lazarus. As much as I loved her in those moments, I knew what I was seeing wasn’t my sister. That thing in the back seat of my cab was something else, maybe even something in my own head, I don’t know. Truth is, much as it hurts to say this, every second she was riding in the backseat of my cab, the real Sis was rotting in a box under six feet of graveyard dirt. There’s no way back from that. She’s dead, no future, forever and ever dead.

A couple of months ago, I started dating a girl, Joanne, a classmate. She’s one of the so-called night-angels who called in a request for me once, but unlike the others, she came back for more. I don’t remember her from school. She’s a sweet girl, practical, a librarian. Real smart, but romantic, kind of naïve. She’s easy on me. She told me one time she loved me—she’d always loved me, she said, just like she was saying she loved chocolate.

One time she said to me, kind of joking, “Sometimes I wonder if you really do live in this world like everybody else, or are you some kind of weird tourist.”

She seems to sense I’ve got one foot in this world and the other in another one. Sometimes, when she looks at me in a warm, admiring way, I want to ask her who she thinks it is she sees? Or what? It’s a fair question. I want to say, “Joanne, I have to tell you something. There’s a huge number of things I could never, ever share with you because they’re things that, if I ever told, you’d run screaming down the street.” But of course I don’t. In the long run, I guess we probably don’t have a chance, but she makes me feel good when I’m with her, and there are even some days when I think we could make a life out of it. Is that love?

For a while, I figured if I was going to have a girlfriend, I’d better inch my expectations for life up the scale a little. Before Joanne, every morning I’d looked at myself in the mirror and say, no future, no future, no future… Do that enough and you start to realize something: it’s bullshit. Alive is alive. Dead is dead. Day after day you prove it’s bullshit. New days dawn and there you are, saying the same stupid words to yourself, when in fact, if you’re alive, there’s always a future. Sometimes it just has to wait while you’re otherwise engaged.

Gabe asked me the other day if I was okay with some day shift, and the idea didn’t seem half bad. Nights have gotten pretty bleak, anyway. I haven’t seen a shade in more than three months—not one. I said, “Sure, I can try it.” Something in Gabe’s face relaxed and he clapped me on the shoulder with one of his big hands. It’s moments like that, thinking about driving the day shift and Joanne at home with meal for me, where life seems to be moving again, slowly, very slowly, in a more-or-less forward direction. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, that’s big.

Then comes one of those murky, slow nights, moonless, full of fog, and I’m back cruising the Ridge Road again. Something just gets hold of me, and I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m out there again, in the dark and the fog, hoping maybe I’ll catch sight of her in my headlights, her little shoulders pumping up and down as she strides up the rise. And the the pain rises up into my chest, that hopeless ache, and I want to stop the cab and walk out into some field, fall face down in the grass and never get up. Here I am, straddling the other world again, a living shade who can’t get over his dead sister. I scan the road ahead and she’s just over the next hill, around the next curve, and I’ll pull up slowly beside her and pop the door like I always used to. My lips saying “Eloise…” over and over, and I’m thinking that this time, maybe, just maybe, because it’s all past now, maybe this time she’ll be like she was before, all perky and beautiful, laughing at me, teasing me. And we’ll be free. She’ll lean forward, hanging on the seat, like she did one time, and give me a kiss on the neck and we can take a ride somewhere else now, somewhere nice. Just a ride. Maybe out to the shore to watch the sun come up. Then back to Mom and Dad’s. Ice cream. Home.

The End

“Driving Shades, Part 3 (Part 1 click here)”

The house had been a vacant wreck for years. I guess it had been a mansion, somebody’s rich-ass home, but in the light of day, it had the look of a crack house. At night, you could tell nobody lived in it. There was an unreal darkness behind its windows. What you’d call ordinary dark had been replaced by something so dark it sucked the night right into itself.

We pulled up to the place and I thought I saw a single flicker of light in one of the upstairs windows. It flared up––a flashlight, or a match––then the window went dark again.

“Did you see that?” I said

“See what?”

“I don’t know about this place, Sis. What’re you gonna do here, anyway?”

“None of your business.”

I looked hard at her face in the rear view mirror, a pale oval hanging in the dark. It showed me nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “But––how about letting me just go in with you?”

“No.”

“Just for a second–”

“No.”

Something icy went shimmering down the back of my neck. I was never a timid guy, but I know fear when I feel it, just like I know hot and cold. Some people say there’s fear and then there’s terror. I don’t know the difference, but this wasn’t just fear. This was like in a horror movie, when you know something’s about to happen, you just don’t know what or when. I wanted so bad just to floor the accelerator and get her the hell out of there. But I did nothing. Like I said, you do not want to tangle with my sister. I had long ago stopped trying to. There were even times when I was sure she was about to clock me. As fucked up as it might have seemed, she made me feel there was no way I could deny her. So I let her go.

They said she died in the kind of pain you could never imagine. I had to identify her body. Burns, cuts, and that pretty face so punched in you didn’t know where to find her eyes, her nose, her mouth. I wonder if Father Mackey ever had to look at a something like that. If you wonder why I can’t put much enthusiasm behind being alive, you could start there. Something happened to me that night. I don’t understand it. I’m a logical guy and I know it doesn’t make sense, but the fact is, that night I died, too, along with anything in the living world that ever meant anything to me.

They never cracked the case, never had a prayer. I asked her once: “Who did it to you?” and, of course, I got nothing. It was like I’d never even said it. I tried again, and added, “You know, whoever took your life, Sis, they got mine too.” What the hell did I expect? Shades never respond to remarks like that, even if they understand them, and why should Sis have been any different?

The first time I picked her up. I had no idea who she was. All I saw was a girl in my headlights, marching down the Ridge Road toward town. A shade, I figured. Shades will usually stop and swing around to wait, casually, like they called you and here you are. Not this girl. She kept walking, so I slowed the cab to her speed and nosed it up beside her. We went a hundred years or so like that till she swung her head sharply toward me and I saw her face. It was Sis, all fierce and gorgeous as always. One thing, when I saw it, chilled the blood in my veins: her face wasn’t bright enough.

“Want a ride, Eloise?” I said, motioning toward the back seat with a jerk of my head.

She stood there, blank, waiting until I had sense enough to pop open the rear door, then she stepped in without a sound.

We rode a few minutes in silence. That’s what they do at first: no greeting, no small talk, nothing. When she spoke, it was only to give me directions. “Start slowing down. Pull over here,” and so on, in a dry, faraway voice that sounded like somebody had installed it in her chest. She didn’t have to tell me. I knew where we were going.

Past the tracks and the grain elevator, we turned sharply and hugged the service road until I could see the house, dark, blacker than black against the night. Sis never once spoke. When I snuck a peek at her in the rear view mirror, her eyes looked back at me like huge dark holes in space.

We slowed to a stop in front of the house. She sat for a minute, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she was out of the cab and jogging up the walk.

The shriek of the front door tripped open a gush of memories and some bad stuff oozed out, stuff I hadn’t let myself see in a year. I saw her again, battered and ruined, the way she’d been that night, rolled out on a pallet, the bruises, the cuts, but what sickened me was the totality. On that table, I was seeing the destruction of someone who had been my sister, the death of every part of her rolled into this one pitiful mass that made me want to sit down in the floor before I fell down. I was sweating, trembling, and I knew I was going to be sick. Her face, that beautiful face…

The driver’s side window was open, thank God, because I had to lean out of it to wretch without making a mess of the cab. I don’t know how long it took but it seemed like my guts were exploding up out of my stomach.

I sat for a while, breathing hard, waiting, until it occurred to me there was nothing to wait for. She’d gone in. Shades, when you leave them off, you don’t see them again, probably ever. I figured I might as well just get back to work, but that wasn’t about to happen: I was through for the night. I drove straight out to the Turnpike Plaza, a place where nobody knows you and nothing is ever personal, and sat staring into a bowl of soup until I was ready to head back to the garage.

Most shades, like I said, you only see them that one time. You let them off, they merge into the shadow of a tree or drift around the corner of a house and…gone. But once didn’t do it for Sis. Whatever her need was, she needed it again and again. You can get used to anything, they say, and it’s true. After a while, driving her to that house got to be almost routine. I would always see her along the same stretch of the Ridge Road. “Hey, Eloise, want a ride?” We’d drive in without talking. I’d drop her in front of the house. She’d march straight up the walk, disappear inside, and that was it, until the next time. And the time after that, and the time after that…

In this dream I keep having, I’m looking up at the house, the black windows, at the trace of light flickering up in one of them. I’m feeling the same sick horror as I did that night, but there’s another element: in the dream I think it hasn’t happened yet. And I have this desperate urge to just drive on past without stopping. I want to drive home. Feed Sis a hot meal. Take her out for an ice cream with Mom and Dad. But of course, even in my dream I know that’s not the way it’s going to play out.

How many times did I drive her to that place? No idea. It was like an addiction. I was doing it. It was upspeakable, and I didn’t want to stop. It’s that simple. I wouldn’t let myself think about anything that might pull me out of it. I mean, here I was able to see her again. What was the harm? For those few minutes, it felt like I was almost helping her live again. Then something happened that should have should have been a warning sign. This one night I checked in to work at the garage. I shot the shit with Gabe for a few minutes like always, felt just fine. Then I went to get into my cab, and I couldn’t make my hand open the door. No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work.

Gabe noticed me standing there like an idiot. “Having a problem?” he said.

“No, no problem. I just…can’t open the door is all.”

He stopped what he was doing and took a long look at me. “That’s a problem, buddy. You better go home, get some sleep. Okay?”

I went home, but I couldn’t sleep, so I lay in the dark in my room, in my clothes, listening to Mom and Dad argue about taxes or something. Things were happening inside my head. I got up and paced. Through my bedroom window, I saw the only world I had ever really known, my backyard, gray in the moonlight. Everything was out there, the poplars, the maple that Dad had planted for Mom on their first anniversary, the jungle gym, all gone to rust, that had once belonged to me, then Sis. It was all the same as it ever had been, that green rectangle, our little world. But something caught my eye. Behind the maple, Sis was looking up at me, not moving, just looking.

Later, I was trying to sleep, and it seemed like my room had gotten huge and strange, like the universe. I could see very clearly it had a thousand million moving parts that somehow all meshed together, and I was a tiny gear in this very large, very cruel machine that I didn’t understand, and it was making me do things I couldn’t resist, over and over. A huge sadness broke over me at the thought that this was all I had, it was my life. Was this God’s plan for me, if there was a God? That I should go on delivering my sister up to be beaten to death, over and over forever? That had to be wrong. Otherwise I might’ve stepped in and thrown a rake in the machine. I could have warned her. But how do you warn somebody they’re about to die when they’re already dead? When I think about that one, my head hurts so bad I have to stop. Am I stupid? Maybe the answer’s obvious, right? But if it’s so fucking obvious why can’t I can’t I just deal with it and move on?

True fact: nothing lasts forever. If you wind up a spring as tight as it will go, and you keep winding, it will snap. Every time I left Sis at that house, the spring tightened just a little bit, until one night, the last night I ever saw her, it went. I felt it go, like when a footbridge snaps across a gorge. Imagine a world of black and white firing up in the colors you think of when someone says “hellfire”—that was me on that night. Something awful in me wanted to light up the world.

That night, Sis did something I’d never seen a shade do. As she walked toward the house through the weeds and the broken glass, I saw her stumble. She glanced back, over her shoulder—just a second’s hesitation––and I saw her eyes. They were the eyes I had seen the night she stood in the backyard, looking up at me, the eyes of young girl, suddenly knowing in full how dead she was. I felt my throat begin to swell and my lips started to bobble. Something was happening to me that I didn’t understand. There I was sitting in my cab, in the dark, in the silence of the night, in the mess of my pathetic life, snuffling and choking like a sick baby. I dropped my face into my hands and rocked silently, until my sleeves wet with tears. Then all of a sudden it was like someone threw a switch. I stopped blubbering. I got out of the car and stood rigid, waiting, like a prisoner waits in front of his cell for whatever was coming next. I had no idea what I was about to do.

“Driving Shades, Part 2 (Part 1 click here)”

Driving for a living made sense, too, after a while. I always loved to drive. Still do. Put me behind that wheel and I’m back in school, tooling around in my old Catalina, top down, stereo up. Hey, born to be wild! Anybody want a ride? Living, dead, whatever. Even my crazy little sister used to get free rides out of me after school or weekends when I should’ve been studying or hanging out. She was like–”take me here, take me there”–such a pain in the ass, but so cute about it how could I mind? She always sat in the back seat. It was a little game we played. She was “Eloise.” I was her chauffer. I drove her to Rainbow soccer, Brownies. And when she started growing up, I’d drive her by certain boys’ houses where there were parties going on. I didn’t care.

The way I thought about it, Sis was in her teens, so where she went was her business. We were that kind of family: everybody left everybody else alone. A few times I helped her sneak her out to the late movies, even dropped her off places I knew she shouldn’t be, houses with a reputation, sketchy places where she wouldn’t tell me who was inside. There was one house in particular that gave me the creeps, and I told her so. She just laughed.

“Oh, it’s funny?” I said, “Well, guess what? Maybe I’ll just keep driving. If you really want to get off here––”

Before I could finish she’d jacked open the door and thrown herself into the road. We were doing about 30, but she couldn’t care less. I looked back just in time to see her disappear into the house.

You couldn’t say no to that girl.

Sis got the looks in the family, which is saying something because the one thing my family is known for––the only thing––is above-average looks. Mom and Dad were “Best Looking” in their class. I’ve seen old photos of them and I guess it was true. Some girls thought I was halfway decent, but Sis was in a different league from all of us. I’d watch her in the rear view mirror sometimes just to enjoy the sight of her, the lips she kept pressed tight to hide their fullness, the curls she jammed down inside her cap. But God help you if you gave her a compliment! She didn’t want to hear it.

She’d been a sunny, bright little kid. Couldn’t wait to grow up, like most little girls, but when the time came, becoming pretty, growing into her body, all those things she had looked forward to, they just pissed her off. Anything cute about her, she’d long ago figured how to hide it inside some Goth freakiness. She’d dress up only if the occasion didn’t give her any choice, like a prom, but she hated every second of it. She’d put the dress on like she was bandaging a wound. Then she’d come down the stairs, cursing to herself, when she looked so feakin’ good the sight of her would stop your heart.

The Goth stuff—I don’t know, I could tell she was going through something, but I figured she’d outgrow it. I remember one time how Dad took me aside and told me, “I think you ought to know this: your sister has an illness.” But I just thought it was a fad. It wouldn’t be long before she was dating some guy and that would be the end of it. She just had to give herself half a chance.

Sometimes I still feel that way, even with what went down: that all the time, something was leaching into her like poison. Whatever it was changed her whole personality so she wasn’t herself anymore. She’d say hateful things to Mom for no reason. She had a special thing about Dad. She’d turn these looks on him like he was Hitler or somebody. One night she hissed something at him when they passed in the kitchen, and he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him.

“Okay, young lady–” he said. But she yanked her arm back before he could finish. She stood at the kitchen door and kept her eyes on him in a weirdly accusing way, as if she knew something terrible about him, and wanted him to know she knew it.

Dad, who never raises his voice, ever, made a noise in his throat like I’d never heard before.

Then he whispered, “Go on. Just get out. Whore.”

She kept looking at him, like she wasn’t going anywhere. Then something seemed to snatch her into the night. The door slammed and she was gone.

“She’ll be back, Dad,” I said, after a minute. “She doesn’t have any place to go.”

“I don’t care. I’m finished with her,” Dad said, in a tough whisper. He was breathing hard and his eyes were all bugged out like they get when something really scares him. Mom stared at him like she was demented, then turned and ran up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

I had the feeling they were seeing something I couldn’t see, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to get into it with them. I’ve never been big on uncovering secrets. I usually just let them stand. I don’t know, maybe I could’ve helped her deal with it, whatever it was. Hindsight’s always perfect, but back then, all I saw was a little girl struggling to keep her innocence. Nothing darker than that. Kind of a Pollyanna view, yeah, but I was convinced that was the right way to see her. It had to be the way she saw herself, only for some reason, she didn’t want to let go.

That it might have been something else, something so powerful none of us could have stopped it…well, that was the farthest thing from my mind.

The only time I see Sis these days is in a dream I have almost every night. She’s talking to me, like out of a video screen, and her voice tells me it’s okay, but her eyes are too dark to see into. Sometimes she’s with me, walking beside me, and the wind is blowing around us. I’m trying to tell her it’s not over, it doesn’t have to be, if maybe we could just turn everything around and go back. She looks at me and the look says everything. Back? She doesn’t even know what that means. But I keep trying until I realize I’m talking to an image in my mind somewhere. She’s not here; I’m talking to a dead girl, and if you’re dead, there’s no “back,” in your world. Then I’m awake, and it was a dream. Just a dream.

One thing about shades: they look totally normal. Almost. You’ve probably seen one without knowing it. The only difference is, they’re a little bit paler than they ought to be. I’ve never come across a shade in daylight, but if I did, my guess is that, even on the beach at high noon, they’d look like they were in moonlight. Another thing that gives them away is the eyes—black pools. You might think they’re looking at you, but it’s just for show. Those eyes aren’t seeing anything, at least not what you think they’d see. Shades never blink, never look down or glance around the room. When they move––slow or fast, it doesn’t matter––there’s a spooky kind of dignity that sets them apart. They’re focused. They’re on a mission.

If I’d thought there was a rat’s ass chance Father Mackey would get it, I would have asked him, what’s the big deal about being alive anyway? After all, we’re only here for a flicker, long enough to learn how little the world cares about us, then we’re dead. A world that hates us is the way Sis put it, but I wouldn’t go that far. To me, the world doesn’t care enough to hate. Sis started saying these things the year she got sick, the year it all ended.

“What does it even matter that we were ever here?” she’d say at dinner. “We’re just going to get snuffed out like you’d step on a roach.”

Mom and Dad just stared at her, wagging their heads. Sometimes Dad would lose it and tell her to get out. Sometimes Mom would get up and leave the table. Sometimes Sis wouldn’t be home for a while, and nobody would say a word about it.

I never called her “sick.” It was just the word Mom came up with. Then Dad started using it, and then I followed along. It became her label. Sick, like she had cancer or something.

But truthfully, it was that she just went from bright to dark, started evolving backwards, from a butterfly into a spider. She’d been hanging out with guys since she was 12, and the guys she picked—I could never figure it out. She could have had the coolest boyfriend in town but instead, God knows why, she hung with the Goths. Creeps––I didn’t even know their names, but she let one asshole after another have her, and every one of them tore off a piece, a piece of my sister. And I couldn’t do a damned thing.

Mom and Dad were way over their heads. I remember overhearing Dad once tell Mom they ought to ask Father Mackey about exorcism—and I laughed out loud. I’d learned a few things about building self-confidence from my coaches, and I thought I had some answers. I dropped something on her one day that still makes me cringe. “Sis, if you want to feel better about everything, try respecting yourself a little more.” I have no idea where that clunker came from. Seriously, it would make even a Catholic youth leader blush. But I remember how she laughed at me, like she was laughing down from a great height at her poor dumb retarded jackass of a big brother.

It didn’t stop me. I’d give her little spiels about dangerous guys, or STDs, and I’d check her reaction by looking in the rear view mirror. I might as well have been a Martian speaking ancient Greek. One time somebody she was hanging out with left some bruises on her arms, closed one of her eyes. I figured I knew the guy and went looking for him. I’m not a tough guy, but I can be intimidating if I have to be, and I found him—a pimply kid with slicked back hair. I punched him twice then I stood over him and told him who I was and what this was about. I said a few things to ice his soul, but I could see it wasn’t working. Even lying on the ground in a pile of hurt, this kid had a weird mocking air about himself and a contempt for me that came from someplace I couldn’t reach.

“Want to kill me?” he said, with a smirk, as if he’d hacked into my mind. He knew I had nothing. I was out of moves.

I gave him another kick and left him on the ground. Sis didn’t speak to me for a month.

After that, she was on her own. She wanted to be treated like an adult, fine, I would let her have that. I backed off. From then on, when she wanted to go somewhere, I’d take her, but no more motivational speeches. I would drop her where she needed to be, nothing more. That’s how it was the night she died.

“Driving Shades”

I guess it’s weird, driving a cab all night, but what else is there to do in this town at 4 in the morning? My TV’s busted. I used to read, but I can’t concentrate anymore and there’s nothing worth reading anyhow. So I drive.

I’ve been with Bay State three years, going on four, long enough so when I call myself a cabbie, you don’t see me shrugging it off. At some point, you cross a line and it’s real. You wake up one morning and you are this thing––and everybody knows it. All-State basketball, Eagle Scout, Catholic Youth and all the things you were, they don’t mean squat. Mom and Dad got that. They stopped bothering me about college or a professional job. I mean, not that they ever nagged me or anything—we’re not that kind of a family––but I’ve always known what they must have talked about back in the kitchen or late at night in bed: when’s he going to move the fuck out and we get our lives back.

One Sunday Dad and me were watching a Red Sox game and Mom drifted into the room. I could tell she was staring at me, but I kept my eyes on the TV. I knew something was coming. She picked up the remote and muted the commercial and the room got quiet all of a sudden. Nothing but a screen door whapping shut one yard over.

“Your dad and me,” she said––and stopped like she’d hit a wall. She sucked in a long breath, and her eyes opened wider. She shot a glance at Dad. “We… Dad and me, we want you to know that, with all you been through—“

“We been through,” Dad corrected her, in a whisper.

“We, that’s right…” Her face hardened a little, all except for her eyes, which were filling with tears. “That’s right. We. All of us…” She stopped again, shook her head from side to side, no sound coming out of her, and turned back to Dad, who cleared his throat, harrumph, hem-hem, and took over.

“You got a home here, son, is what Mom’s trying to say. Always, okay. No questions asked. Drive a cab, work at the bake shop, whatever, it don’t matter. We understand.” Now they were both looking at me. “We know what’s going on.”

Except they didn’t. They didn’t begin to know.

People around here remember me. They know how I used to be, and they like the memory, so they cut me some slack, bring me food on the job sometimes–a sandwich, bowl of soup, cup of coffee. Beyond that, they know it’s best to just leave me alone. They remember Sis. They remember what happened. Nobody forgets that.

Gabe, my dispatcher, gets a request every now and then specifically for me. When he puts on this certain tone, I can tell it’s a woman, maybe a girl I used to know. She doesn’t have anyplace to go, just wants to sit in my backseat while I drive her around in the dark, then take her home. Maybe she knew me in high school, had a crush on me or something, her husband’s on the road, that kind of thing. She’s alone, wants a little tenderness, a little talk. I try to be nice, but it’s never what she hoped for. I can sense the disappointment. She doesn’t say it, but I’ve let her down and I won’t see her again because she didn’t get whatever it was she really wanted.

Yeah, I’m a disappointment. At home, on the job, all over town, so what? Should I care? Maybe I should, but I don’t. What’s to care about? My pride, my reputation? Like, I didn’t live up to somebody’s standards? Don’t make me laugh.
There was a time when things mattered. If I reach back far enough, I can remember feeling happy because I’d had a good day. Or I was in love, or I’d hit a winning basket, or got a good grade. I also remember what it feels like to hurt inside so bad I wanted to kill myself. Those are the last feelings I remember having.

There was this guy on the basketball team, and I knew he’d been treated for depression, so I asked him about it one time. I asked him, “Say you were hurting inside so bad you want to kill yourself, what does that mean?”
We were out of the showers and dressing in front of our lockers, the last two guys. He was bent over, taking some time to rub his hair dry––an extra-long time it seemed to me. Then his head rose up slow, his eyes sad and hollow.

“You need somebody to talk to,” he said.

So I went to see Father Mackey. Not that I’m especially religious or anything, but I always kind of liked him. He’s a big guy, used to play football at B.C. and he still carries the extra weight, mostly as fat. He had a heart attack a few years back, but I don’t think he ever did anything to change his life. Underneath the Christian stuff, he really believes in blind fate.

It’s hard to remember what I was hoping for. Maybe that he’d have a direction for me, a path, one of those things. I couldn’t tell him the whole story, of course, but if I could just come close, maybe he’d figure out the rest. I took a deep breath and told him everything I could. He listened, nodding here and there, and when I was done, he looked at me for a long moment, like I had paralyzed him or something. Then he smiled big, like he had the answer, but I knew he didn’t. It was the smile coaches give you right before they tell you you’re not living up to your potential, and you’ve got to give a hundred percent of yourself two hundred percent of the time, go out there and fight. That kind of stuff.

He said I should pull myself together and try harder.

“We all know what you went through, you and your family,” he said. “But here you are sitting in my office today, lean and healthy. God put you on this earth for a reason, so I’d say get busy, find something that helps others and just do it.”
Just in case he had something particular in mind, I waiting.

“Okay, Father,” I said finally, looking down.

He reached over and pinched my elbow. “You feel that?”

“Sure.”

“You’re alive, son. Join the living. Commit yourself to being a living human being. It’s a privilege, you know.” He sat back, nodding, grinning at me, and held the grin until the corner of his mouth twitched. “Show God you care.”

“About?”

“About?” The grin was gone. His eyes toughened. “About being alive, son. This world is full of folks way worse off than you. They could use a little help.”

“Oh, yeah, I see.”

Father Mackey peeked at his watch and faked being surprised. “Holy cow, look at the time.” He rose up from his chair and thrust a hand out for me to shake. I took it, and he pulled me so close I could smell cigarette smoke on his breath.

“Show God you care,” he said again, the words beaming out of his big sunny face, and we were done.

I should have told him it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was more like…what did I care about?

I always thought caring was when you get a feeling in your throat like you’re about to lose it, laughing or crying, but you don’t know which. Nothing makes me feel that way anymore. I mean, I knew what he meant––we’re all alive on the planet, sharing this life, all these hordes of people running around being alive and sharing it, but that doesn’t do squat for me nowadays. I get very little out of that. Nothing at all, really. Does that mean I don’t care about “the living?” Maybe so.

What I couldn’t tell him was that back then, most of my fares were dead folks, and I cared a lot about them. “Shades,” I called them. They didn’t pay me but I treated them like fares anyway, and why not? Shades have places to go too, stuff to do, just like you and me, only things are a little harder for them. They don’t fly like in movies or ghost stories. They’re weak. They have very little spirit left, and it’s waning every second. If a shade couldn’t get a ride, how would he ever get where he’s going? To his old haunts, his special places–the house where he got his first kiss, the little green yard where he had his birthday parties, the broke-down chapel where his hopes burned so hot. So sure, I drove them. It was a way I could make a difference, something I could care about. I’d even say it was when I was driving a shade that I felt almost alive.

What a joke: ex-popular boy, everything to live for, he picks up dead folks at night to feel alive and show God he cares.

But it made perfect sense to me.

[Continued Tomorrow]