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For lack of a better option, Frank limped back toward the Black Cow, his knee and back hurting and his head throbbing like a Paul McCartney bass line. Feeling a need to get off Garfield Avenue he walked around to the back of the brick restaurant, saw a light on inside the building. And the sky was full of twinkling stars now but they didn’t give a shit about Frank Ford.
Is anybody up there?
Feeling like the last man on earth, he squeezed the tire iron for security. His little sword, just like that hobbit in the Lord of the Rings, Frank having finished the final book in the trilogy back in March.
And it was a long way across Mordor from here.
And where were those goddamn orcs?
Then, as if the stars were listening and sending him an answer, Frank saw licks of white light coming down the short street alongside the Black Cow. Hustling across the back of the restaurant, he jumped behind the wall and pressed against it, edging back along until he could peer around the corner. Now the street was flooded with light and a beaten down Checker was idling in the middle of it, Blue and White Taxi on the door. Frank heard the back door of the restaurant opening. Heard voices and laughter and saw two men coming out the back door inside a ball of yellow light, their faces flushed. They were soused. But wait a minute, he knew the guys. Had served them a lot of drinks. You had your Christian Brothers and water for the skinny guy and a Miller and a shot of Petri for the fat guy, the cook. Chef. Skinny one was Larry Seline and the cook was Bruce Munkwitz. Both of them at the Metropole nearly every Tuesday, the one night a week the Black Cow was closed.
Frank dropped the tire iron to the damp grass and tried to make himself presentable, running his fingers back through his black hair and wincing as his hand bumped against a large lump on his forehead, the pain reverberating back to the beginning of time. As the two men were getting in the taxi, he came out from behind the wall and crossed through the cab’s headlight beams. The cab’s interior light was on and he saw the looks of disbelief on the faces. The grizzled, gray-haired cabbie was trying for a pissed-off, authoritative stare but not quite making it.
Arriving at the still open back door of the cab, Frank put his hand on the roof and leaned in. “Hey guys,” he said. “Care to share the cab? I’ll pay the fare.” He pulled a fistful of ones from his pants pocket— tonight’s tip money—and showed it. “Afraid I had some car trouble.”
“It’s Frank fuckin’ Ford,” Bruce Munkwitz said, grinning like he knew something special, his head cocked to the side. “Sure, Frank, come on in. You okay, man, you look a little under the weather?”
“Been a long night,” Frank said, folding himself into the faded red vinyl seat of the Checker hoping he could hold it together just a little while longer, any control he might’ve had over his mind now dissipating like air in an old balloon.
“How ya doin’, Frank?” Larry Seline said.
“Hey, Larry,” Frank said, shutting the cab door and wishing everybody would stop with the gawking looks.
The cabbie turned to the back seat. “Where we goin’, gentlemen?” Voice like a foghorn with gravel in it; face tired and filled with resignation.
“Fifth Avenue East and Sixth Street for us two,” Munkwitz said, gesturing at Seline. “You’re somewhere in that general direction, aren’t you, Frank?”
“Close enough.”
His adrenaline ebbing slightly, the acid currently on a downswing and the belief that the two orcs would be arriving soon turning him cold, Frank flipped up the collar on his jacket and slumped down in the seat as the cabbie pulled the shifter down, hung a U-turn, drove out to Garfield and turned right.
Passing by what was left of Frank’s Pontiac, the derelict wagon wrinkled like an industrial-sized lasagna noodle in blue, Bruce Munkwitz said, “That your sled there, Frank? Somebody plow into you, man?”
“Needs a battery,” Frank said, scrunching down behind the collar of his jacket and staring out the window, not wanting any one to know what he was seeing out there in the vast wasteland.
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