The Benny Kramer Novels by Jerome Weidman

Author:Jerome Weidman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

13

THIS WAS NOT TRUE, of course. I had arrived in the candy store an hour and a half early. In the larger sense, however, Abe Lebenbaum’s mother was right. Forty years later it occurred to me that the toothless little old lady’s statement had been more than just another demonstration of her limited command of English. The old crone’s words had been prophetic.

Walking out of the morgue in the Queens County General Hospital on that gray, cold Sunday before Christmas Eve when my mother died, I realized I was late again. In a way that, it seemed to me, could not fail to give any man pause. Not to mention the willies or even the screaming meemies. I was late for the identification of the body of my own mother.

“How’d it go?”

I looked down at the taxi driver sitting in the cab at the foot of the two steps that led up into the morgue. It occurred to me that he, too, must have had a mother.

“Not very good,” I said. “I have to make another stop.”

I opened the rear door of the taxi, humpbacked myself in, plopped down on the seat, and pulled the door shut.

“Where to?” the driver said.

“The year of Our Lord 1927,” came to the surface of my mind as the only possible reply, but I did not utter the words aloud. I said, “You know where you picked me up?” I glanced at the clock. “About seven dollars ago?”

“Yeah,” the taxi driver said. “I been thinking about that.”

I pulled out my wallet, slid from it a ten-dollar bill, and pushed it across to him. “Let’s start all over again,” I said.

He took the bill, stared at it for a moment, then flipped up the flag of his ticking clock. “I didn’t mean by what I said—” he said as the clock stopped ticking.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “It’s just that I need you more than you need me, and I don’t want to worry about you worrying about me.”

The driver started punching the keys of his coin box and fussing with his back pocket. “I didn’t mean you should get the impression I don’t trust you,” he said again.

Who did?

“Don’t bother with the change,” I said. “That’s your tip for round one.”

The driver looked up into the mirror over his steering wheel. Startled. “Well, gee,” he said.

Why not? I was not at the moment on the prowl for phrase-makers. “Forget it,” I said. “It’s Christmas.” And I was on the trail of my mother’s body. What a parlay.

“Well, gee,” the driver said. That settled it. A phrase-maker he wasn’t. “Thanks a lot, mister.”

The witless phrase held my ear. One man’s despair is another man’s gratitude. I waited for him to ask the inevitable question. He did.

“Where to, mister?” he said again.

The beginning of the road. The start of the trip. The invention of the riddle. The initiation of the horror. But how would he know that destination? He didn’t look any smarter than I did.

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