A big fly with a metallic blue back crawled out of the old man's nostril and stood there, rubbing its hideous forelegs together.
Meers was out of his seat like a shot. He hurried five rows forward and collapsed into an empty seat. He was breathing hard. He couldn't work up any spit.
Later, he saw the stewardess put a blue blanket over the old man.
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Denver. DEN. Tonight, it made Chicago seem like Bermuda. The sky was hard and fuming as dry ice, and the color of a hollow-point bullet. Temperature a few degrees below zero, but add in the windchill and it was cold enough to freeze rubber to the runway.
The huge plate glass windows rattled and bulged as Meers lurched down the concourse, his luggage caroming off his hips, ribs, and knees. A chill reached right through the floor and swept around his feet. He hurried into the men's room and set his bags down on the floor. He ran water in the sink and splashed it on his face. The room echoed with each drop of water.
He couldn't bear to look at himself in the mirror.
He had to find the airline ticket counter. Had to get his boarding pass. Needed to find the gate, board the plane, make his connection. He had to get home.
Something told him to get out. Get out now. Leave everything. Go.
He walked quickly through the nearly deserted departure area, slammed through the doors and out onto the frozen sidewalk. He hurried to the front of a rank of taxis. It was an old yellow Checker, a big, boxy, friendly sort of car. He got in the back.
“Where to, Mac?”
“Downtown. A good hotel.”
“You got it.” The cabdriver put his car in gear and carefully pulled out onto the packed snow and ice. Soon they were moving down the wide road away from the airport. Meers looked out the back window. The Denver Airport was like a cubist prairie schooner, a big, horribly expensive tent to house modern transients.
“One ugly mother, ain't she?” the cabbie said.
Meers saw the cabdriver in profile as the man looked in the rearview mirror. Bushy eyebrows under an old-fashioned yellow Checker Cab hat with a shiny black brim. A wide face, chin covered with stubble. Big hands on the wheel. The name on the cab medallion was V. KRZYWCZ. A New York medallion.
“Krizz-wozz,” the man provided. “Virgil Krzywcz. Us Pollacks, we sold all our vowels to the frogs. Now we use all the consonants the Russians didn't have no use for.” He chuckled.
“Aren't you a little far from home?” Meers ventured.
“Let me tell you a little story,” Krzywcz said. “Once upon a time, a thousand years ago for all I know, I was takin' this fare in from La Guardia. To the Marriott, Times Square. I figure, that time of night, the Triborough, down the Roosevelt, there you are. But this guy'd looked at a map, it's gotta be the BQE, then the Midtown Tunnel. Okay, I sez, it's your money. And whattaya know, we make pretty good time. Only coming outta the tunnel what do I see? Not the Empire State, but that fuckin' bitch of a terminal building. I'm in Denver. I never been ta Denver. So I looks back over my shoulder,” Krzywcz suited the action to his words, and Meers got a whiff of truly terrible breath, “and no tunnel, just a lotta cars honkin' at me, me bein' stopped in my tracks. And that's the way it's been ever since.”
Krzywcz accelerated through a yellow light and up onto an icy freeway. Meers saw a green sign indicating DOWNTOWN. Straight ahead, just above the horizon, was a full moon. Traffic was light, not surprising since the roadway was frozen hard. It didn't bother the cabbie, and the old Checker was steady as a rock.
“So you decided to stay out here?” Meers asked.
“Decided didn't have nothin' to do with it. You figure I went on a bender, drove here in a blackout, something like that?” Krzywcz looked over his shoulder at Meers. In a sweep of street-lamp light Meers saw the left side of the driver's face was black and swollen. His left eye was shut. There was a long, scabbed-over wound on his cheek, a slash that had not been stitched. “Well, suit yourself. Fact is, none of these roads go to New York. And believe me, buddy, I've tried 'em all.”
Meers didn't know what to make of that statement.
“What happened to your face?” he asked.
“This? Had a little run-in with the night cops. A headlight out, would you believe it? I got lucky. One whack upside the head and they let me go. Hell, I've had a lot worse. A lot worse.”
Hadn't the pilot said something about night cops? They had sent his copilot to the hospital. Something was very wrong here.
“What do you mean, these roads don't go to New York? It's an Interstate highway. They all connect.”
“You're trying to make sense,” Krzywcz said. “You'd better learn to stop that.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Meers asked, feeling his frustration rise. “What's going on?”
“You mean, are we in the fuckin' Twilight Zone, or something?” Krzywcz looked at Meers again, then back to the road, shaking his head. “You got me, pal. I think we're in Denver, all right. Only it's like Denver is all twisted up, or something.”
“We're in hell,” a voice said over the radio.
“Aw, shut the fuck up, Moskowitz, you stupid kike.”
“It's the only thing that makes sense,” the voice of Moskowitz said.
“It don't make no damn sense to me,” Krzywcz shouted into his mike. “Look around you. You see any guys with pitchforks? Horns? You seen any burnin' pits full a . . . full aâ”
“Brimstone?” Meers suggested.
“There you go. Brimstone.” He gestured with the mike. “Moskowitz, my dispatcher,” he explained to Meers. “You seen any lost souls screamin'?”
“I've heard plenty of screamin' souls over the radio,” Moskowitz said. “I scream sometimes, myself. And I sure as shit am lost.”
“Listen to him,” Krzywcz said, with a chuckle. “I gotta listen to this shit every night.”
“Why do ya think it's gotta be guys with horns?” Moskowitz went on. “That guy, that Dante, you think everything he said was right?”
“Moskowitz reads books,” the cabby said over his shoulder.
“Why do you figure hell has to stay the same? You think they don't remodel? Look how many people there are today. Where they gonna put 'em? In the new suburbs, that's where. Hell useta have boats and horse wagons. Now it's got jet airplanes and cabs.”
“And night cops, and hospitals, don't forget that.”
“Shut your mouth, you dumb hunky!” Moskowitz shouted. “You know I don't want nobody to talk about that over my radio.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Krzywcz smirked over his shoulder and shrugged.
Hey, what can you do
? Meers smiled back weakly.
“It don't make sense any other way,” Moskowitz went on. “My life is hell. Your life is hell. Everybody you get in that freakin' cab is livin' in hell. We died and gone to hell.”
Krzywcz was furious again.
“Died, is it? You remember dyin'? Huh, Moskowitz? You sit in that stinking office livin' on pizza and 7-Up, nothin' happens for
months
in that shithole. You'd think you'd notice a thing like dyin.' ”
“Heart attack,” Moskowitz shouted back. “I musta had a heart attack. And I floated outta my body, and they put me
here.
Right where I was before, only now it's
forever,
and now
I can't leave!
Either it's hell, or limbo.”
“Aw, limbo up a rope. What's a Jew know about limbo? Or hell?” He switched off the radio, glanced again at Meers. “I think he means purgatory. You wanna know from hell, you ask a Catholic Pollack. We know hell.”
Meers had finally had enough.
“I think you're both crazy,” he said, defiantly.
“Yeah,” Krzywcz agreed. “We oughta be, we been here long enough.” He studied Meers in his mirror. “But you don't know, buddy. I could tell soon as you got in my cab. You're one a those airplane pukes. Round and round ya go, schleppin' your Gucci suitcases, cost what I make in a month. In and out of airports, off planes, onto planes. Round and round, and you think things are still makin' sense. You still think tomorrow comes after today and all roads go everywhere. You think that 'cause the sun went down, it's gonna come up again. You think two plus two is always gonna equal three.”
“Four,” Meers said.
“Huh?”
“Two plus two equals four.”
“Well, pal, two plus two, sometimes it equals you can't get there from here. Sometimes two plus two equals a kick in the balls and a nightstick upside the head and a tunnel that don't go to Manhattan no more. Don't ask me why 'cause I don't know. If this is hell, then I guess we was bad, right? But I'm not that bad a guy. I went to mass, I didn't commit no crimes. But here I am. I got no home but this cab. I eat outta drive-thru's and I piss in beer bottles. I slipped offa something some-wheres, I fell outta the world where you could go home after your shift. I turned inta one of the night people, like you.”
Meers was not going to protest that he wasn't one of the “night people,” whatever they were. He was a little afraid of the mad cabbie. But he couldn't follow the logic of it, and that made him stubborn.
“So we're in a different world, that's what you're saying?”
“Naw, we're still inna world. We're right
here,
we've always been here, night people, only nobody don't notice us, that we're in a box. The hooker on the stroll, they think she goes home when the sun comes up, with her pimp in the purple Caddy. Only they don't never go home. The street they're on, it don't lead home. That lonely DJ you hear on the radio. The subway motorman, it's night there alla time. The guy drivin' the long-haul truck. Janitors. Night watchmen.”
“All of them?”
“How do I know all of 'em? I'm gonna drive my cab inna office building, ask the cleaning crew? âHey, you stuck in purgatory, like me?'”
“Not me.”
“Yeah, you airplane pukes. Most of us, we
know
. Oh, some of 'em, they gone bugfuck. Nothin' left of 'em but eyeballs like gopher holes. But you been here long enough, you stop thinkin' you're gonna find that tunnel back home, you know? Except you âpassengers.' Like they sez in the program. In . . .”
“Denial.”
“In denial. You said it. Look ahead there.”
Meers looked out the windshield and there it was, just below the yellow moon. The sprawling canopy of the Denver Airport, like some exotic, poison rain-forest caterpillar. He stared at it as the cab eased down an off-ramp.
“Always a full moon in Denver,” Krzywcz cackled. “Makes it nice for the were-wolves. And all roads lead to the airport, which is bad news for airplane pukes.”
Meers threw open the cab door and spilled out onto the frozen roadway. He scrambled to his feet, hearing the shouts of the driver. He clambered up an embankment and onto the freeway, where he dodged six lanes of traffic and tumbled down the other side. There were a lot of closed businesses there, warehouses, car lots, and one that was open, a Circle-K market. He ran toward it, certain it would vanish like a mirage, but when he hit the door it was wonderfully prosaic and solid. Inside it was warm. Two clerks, a tall black youth and a teenage white girl, stood behind the counter.
He paced up and down the abbreviated aisles, hoping he looked like someone who belonged there. When he heard the door security buzzer, he picked up a box of cereal and pretended to study it.
He saw two police officers walk past the counter. They've come for me, he thought.
But the cops walked toward the back of the store. One opened the beer cooler, while the other took a box and loaded it with donuts.
Both officers passed within ten feet of him. One had two six-packs of Coors hooked in a black-gloved hand and he cradled a huge black weapon that had a shotgun bore but a fat round magazine like a tommy gun. The other wore two automatic pistols on her belt. She glanced at Meers, and gave him a smile both insolent and sexual. She wore bright red lipstick.
They strolled past the clerks, who were very busy with other things, things that put their backs to the police officers. They went out the door. There was a moment of silence, then a huge explosion.
Meers saw a plate glass window shatter. Beyond it, the male cop was firing his shotgun into the store as fast as he could pump it. His partner had a gun in each hand.
He hit the floor in a snowstorm of corn flakes and shredded toilet paper. Both cops were emptying their weapons, and they had a lot of ammunition. But finally it was over. In the silence, he heard the police laughing, then opening their car doors. He got to his knees and peeked over the ruined display counter.
The patrol car was backing out. He caught a glimpse of the woman drinking from a beer can as the cruiser pulled out on the road. In a second, a yellow Checker cab pulled into the lot, the battered face of Krzywcz behind the wheel. He saw Meers and motioned frantically.
Shattered glass and raisin bran crunched under his feet as Meers walked down the aisle. Behind the counter the black man was crouched down near the safe. The girl was lying on her back in a pool of blood, holding her gut and moaning. Meers hesitated, then Krzywcz leaned on the horn. He turned his back on the girl and pushed out through the aluminum door frame, empty now of glass.
Krzywcz took it slow and careful out of the lot. Parked off to the left was the police car, headlights turned off, facing them. Meers couldn't breathe, but Krzywcz turned the other way and the police car did not move.
“They'll be piggin' out on beer and sinkers for a while,” the cabbie said.