The Cab Driver

Eddie Morales picked up his fourth fare of the morning at the Southern Pacific depot on a Thursday in April 1951, a woman in a navy traveling suit with a leather case at her feet and the practiced patience of someone who had been told to wait at curbside for a cab. He pulled the Plymouth in alongside the loading zone, set the brake, and got out.

“Riverside Hotel?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

He took her case and put it in the trunk. She got in the back. He went around and got behind the wheel and pulled into traffic.

He was thirty-seven. He had been driving the cab for almost three years, since the casino he had cashiered for had cut its day shift in late 1948 and he had needed work that did not require him to stand still in one place for eight hours a day. The cab had been a small revelation. He had not known that he had a feeling for the city until he had driven it for a living. Now he knew the streets the way a man knows the lines on the back of his own hand. He could tell you which intersection on Virginia would back up between the lunch rush and three o’clock, which alley behind the Riverside the bellmen used for short-stop pickups, which side streets the divorce women preferred when they did not want to be seen going to and from the courthouse, which motor courts on South Virginia were paying their drivers a small surcharge for bringing in fares from the depot.

He did not steer his fares to the courts that paid the surcharge. He had decided early that he would not. A driver who took bribes from a desk clerk was a driver whose route choices were no longer his own, and Eddie had a particular feeling about route choices.

The woman in the back said nothing. Most of them said nothing for the first part of the ride. The depot pickup was not the moment for conversation. They had just stepped off a train that had carried them across a continent for the purpose of dissolving a marriage, and the first ten minutes in Reno were almost always a kind of hush. Eddie did not push. He drove. The Plymouth ran smooth. The morning sun was on the river when they crossed the Virginia Street Bridge and he saw the woman, in the rearview mirror, turn her head a little to look at the water, and he understood that she had not expected the river to be pretty.

“First time in Reno?” he said.

“Yes.”

“The river surprises people.”

“It’s nice.”

“Six weeks?”

“Six weeks.”

“Riverside is a good hotel,” he said. “The dining room serves breakfast until ten.”

She thanked him. He brought the cab around the corner and pulled up at the entrance and a bellman came down the steps. Eddie got out and unloaded the case and the woman tipped him fifty cents and went inside and that was that.

He took the dispatch call on Center Street at nine forty. A man and his teenage son going from the Greyhound depot up to the air base, where the man had a brother in the maintenance squadron. Eddie drove them. The road north climbed slowly out of town, past the new houses that were filling the empty land at the edge of the city, past the irrigation ditches and the cottonwoods and the open sage. The base lay flat against the desert beyond a ten-mile run, the C-119 transports parked in a row along the apron, the windsock visible from a half mile off. The man tipped him a dollar and Eddie thanked him and turned the cab around and drove back to town empty.

He did not mind running empty. The empty miles were the hours of his job he had come to like. The radio off, the windows cracked, the sage smell coming in. He drove the loop down through the new west-side neighborhoods, where the houses were laid out on streets that had not existed five years ago. The streets had the look of new streets everywhere in the country: the cement was still pale, the trees were small, the lawns were thin and bright. The families he picked up on these streets had names he had never heard before, men who had come from California after the war, who had bought half-acre lots from ranchers and put up two-bedroom houses and were already, in 1951, talking about adding a third bedroom and a garage.

At eleven-fifteen the dispatcher called him back to the depot. He turned the cab around and drove east on Second Street and turned onto Center, and there at the curb a woman in a courthouse-clerk’s plain dark dress was waiting with a handbag tucked under one arm and a manila folder under the other. She was, he guessed, in her early forties. She had a settled look about her, the look of a woman who had been in town a long time and had made it work.

She got in. “Washoe County Courthouse, please. Court Street entrance.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He pulled out. The courthouse was three blocks away. It was the kind of fare that did not pay much but that drivers took because it kept them in the rotation.

“You’ve worked at the courthouse a while,” he said. He had seen her getting in and out of cabs at the courthouse for at least a year.

“Going on twelve years,” she said.

“You came for a divorce and stayed.”

“That’s the usual story.” She gave him a small smile in the mirror. “Nora Fitzgerald. I’m the deputy clerk.”

“Eddie Morales.”

“Morales.” She considered the name. “There was a Rosa Morales who worked the kitchen at the Golden Hotel in the thirties. She any relation?”

“My mother.”

“She still there?”

“She’s at the new place, the Mapes.”

“Tell her Nora Fitzgerald says hello. We worked the same shift one summer in 1939, on a fundraiser for the courthouse roof. She wouldn’t remember me.”

“She’ll remember you,” Eddie said. “She remembers everything.”

He pulled the cab around and stopped at the Court Street entrance. Nora paid him a quarter for the fare and a dime tip and she got out with the folder under her arm, and as she straightened up on the curb she paused for a moment with her hand on the door.

“Tell her,” she said, “that I’m glad she’s still working.”

“I will.”

She closed the door. She walked up the steps. She did not look back. Eddie sat at the curb for a moment longer than he needed to, watching her go in through the heavy bronze doors, and he thought, the way a man thinks about something he has noticed for the first time without quite realizing he was looking, that he had been driving people back and forth across the same six square miles of city for three years and he had not yet fully understood how many of the people in his cab knew each other, or had once known each other, or were related in some quiet way to people he himself knew.

The radio on the dash crackled. The dispatcher gave him a Mapes pickup, a party of three, going to South Virginia. He keyed the mic and acknowledged. He pulled away from the curb. The morning was, by the dashboard clock, only one quarter over.

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