“What about laser surgery again?”
According to the eye doctor, there was no hope for Lamonia’s bad night vision. She had been managing all alone only because she had a pretty good memory and knew how many steps led up to the porch and exactly where the furniture was. She could tell by feel which skirt or dress she was putting on in the dark, but driving at night was another matter. The city streets had not changed, but memory could not help Lamonia when cars switched lanes or stopped in front of her, or pedestrians decided to cross to the other side. She was explaining all this to the police officer, who was no longer there.
“So if you can just point your flashlight, I’ll follow it and pull over,” Lamonia said as another helicopter thundered into a low hover and its searchlight blazed on the crime scene.
She detected an illumination and headed toward it, bumping over a curb and then something that crunched under a tire.
“Now what was that?” she muttered as she hit a stretcher and sent it sailing into the river right before she rear-ended the ambulance.
“Stop! Stop!” Voices all around her Dodge Dart screamed.
Lamonia slammed on the brakes, even though she was already stopped. Confused and frightened, she shoved the car into reverse and backed up through a perimeter of crime-scene tape and felt another bump under her right rear tire.
“STOP!” The shouting voices were more urgent. “STOP!”
Hooter Shook sensed something urgent was going on when Trooper Macovich showed up with a trunk full of traffic cones and flares.
“Hey! What you doin’ closing off all these lanes?” Hooter called out to him as he arranged the blaze orange cones that always reminded her of the Cap the Hat game she used to play as a child.
“Setting up a checkpoint,” Macovich informed her as he dropped hissing, lit flares across 150 North, a busy four-lane interstate that led in and out of the city.
Hooter watched with interest and a little anxiety as Macovich barricaded every lane with a wall of blaze orange plastic and fire, leaving only her Exact Change lane open, forcing all northbound motorists by her window, where they would directly place money in her glove. She was a senior tollbooth operator for the city and remembered the days when she didn’t have to wear surgical gloves that were always getting punctured by her artificial nails. In modern times, all the operators seemed to worry about was coming in contact with a driver’s fingers, when in truth, cash and coins were far dirtier than some stranger’s hands.
Money was touched by millions of people, Hooter knew. It was picked off the ground and rubbed up against other money inside dark wallets and little coin purses. Coins jingled against each other inside pockets that may not have been laundered in recent memory. Cash was porous paper that absorbed bacteria like a sponge, and in local topless bars, men stuffed dollar bills into skimpy clothing and the money came in direct contact with diseased body parts.
Hooter could talk for weeks about all the places money visited and how filthy it was. So she was happy to wear gloves when she finally realized the city didn’t mind if she switched to cotton ones that her nails couldn’t tear. But it did make her feel bad when she stuck a gloved hand out of her booth, as if the driver were Typhoid Mary. She hurt thousands of feelings every shift and never had time to explain to the driver that in her mind, the glove wasn’t about him or her, but about the unsanitary condition of the economy.
“Germs,” Macovich said as he smoked, waiting for the next car as he stood outside Hooter’s booth and talked to her through the sliding window. “Everything’s ’bout germs. Wooo. I ‘member learning CPR on those life-size rubber dolls, and you was lucky if they wiped the rubber mouth off before you pinched the rubber nose shut and smacked your lips right over its rubber lips, blowing away. Now, you roll up on a scene and see someone unresponsive and bleeding bad, you got to double glove and drape the face with a sheet of plastic that’s round with a hole in the middle, sort of like those ‘sposable toilet seat covers you see in public restrooms. You just hope the person don’t sneeze on you or puke or start moving around, and you pray they ain’t got AIDS.”