‘And you’ve always been able to do that?’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Hardly ever.’ The smile slipped a little. ‘But it was strong tonight, Sarah. I had that Wheel …’ He closed his fists softly and looked at them, now frowning. ‘I had it right here. And it had the strangest goddam associations for me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Rubber,’ he said slowly. ‘Burning rubber. And cold. And ice. Black ice. Those things were in the back of my mind. God knows why. And a bad feeling. Like to beware.’
She looked at him closely, saying nothing, and his face slowly cleared.
‘But it’s gone now, whatever it was. Nothing probably.’
‘It was five hundred dollars worth of good luck, anyway,’ she said. Johnny laughed and nodded. He didn’t talk anymore and she drowsed, glad to have him there. She came back to wakefulness when headlights from outside splashed across the wall. His cab.
‘I’ll call,’ he said, and kissed her face gently. ‘You sure you don’t want me to hang around?’
Suddenly she did, but she shook her head ‘Call me,’ she said.
‘Period three,’ he promised. He went to the door.
‘Johnny?’
He turned back.
‘I love you, Johnny,’ she said, and his face lit up like a lamp.
He blew a kiss. ‘Feel better,’ he said, ‘and we’ll talk.’
She nodded, but it was four-and-a-half years before she talked to Johnny Smith again.
2.
‘Do you mind if I sit up front?’ Johnny asked the cab driver.
‘Nope. Just don’t bump your knee on the meter. It’s delicate.’
Johnny slid his long legs under the meter with some effort and slammed the door. The cabbie, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a paunch, dropped his flag and the cab cruised up Flagg Street.
‘Where to?’
‘Cleaves Mills,’ Johnny said. ‘Main Street. I’ll show you where.’
‘I got to ask you for fare-and-a-half,’ the cabbie said. ‘I don’t like to, but I got to come back empty from there.’
Johnny’s hand closed absently over the lump of bills in his pants pocket. He tried to remember if he had ever had so much money on him at one time before. Once. He had bought a two-year-old Chevy for twelve hundred dollars. On a whim, he had asked for cash at the savings bank, just to see what all that cash looked like. It hadn’t been all that wonderful, but the surprise on the car dealer’s face when Johnny pumped twelve one hundred dollar bills into his hand had been wonderful to behold. But this lump of money didn’t make him feel good at all, just vaguely uncomfortable, and his mother’s axiom recurred to him: Found money brings bad luck.
‘Fare-and-a-half’s okay,’ he told the cabbie.
‘Just as long’s we understand each other,’ the cabbie said more expansively. ‘I got over so quick on account of I had a call at the Riverside and nobody there would own up when I got over there.’
‘That so?’ Johnny asked without much interest. Dark houses flashed by outside. He had won five hundred dollars, and nothing remotely like it had ever happened to him before.
That phantom smell of rubber burning … the sense of partially reliving something that had happened to him when he was very small … and that feeling of bad luck coming to balance off the good was still with him.
‘Yeah, these drunks call and then they change their minds,’ the cabbie said. ‘Damn drunks, I hate em. They call and decide what the hell, they’ll have a few more beers. Or they drink up the fare while they’re waitin and when I come in and yell “Who wants the cab?”
they don’t want to own up.
‘Yeah,’ Johnny said. On their left the Penobscot River flowed by, dark and oily. Then Sarah getting sick and saying she loved him on top of everything else. Probably just caught her in a weak moment, but God! If she had meant it I He had been gone on her almost since the first date.
That was the luck of the evening, not beating that Wheel. But it was the Wheel his mind kept coming back to, worrying at it. In the dark he could still see it revolving, and in his ears he could hear the slowing ticka-ticka-ticka of the marker bumping over the pins like something heard in an uneasy dream. Found money brings bad luck.