The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee

Author:Lee Durkee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2020-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

MISSISSIPPI!

As I drive toward Country Club Road, I’m half expecting Stanton to come over the seat back and start stabbing my neck with a syringe. He has said nothing the entire ride, and I can’t even see him in the rearview. It’s freaking me out a little. He’s just a lurking presence back there, a breathingness. We’re turning into his suburb, which borders a golf course, when I realize he has no money. Does he even know he got robbed? Fuck! I check the address and pull into the driveway of a house that could sleep fifty people, all the lights off, no cars in the massive driveway, and Stanton gets out without a word and walks in front of the hood and up the many stairs into the dark empty mansion to quiver in ecstasy for hours or weeks.

I sit there doing the middle finger thing for a few minutes. Then, to calm myself down, I briefly consider burgling him. Finally, when it feels safe to drive again, I back down the long driveway and, while bottoming out, remind myself I need to swing by the Rebel Motel to warn the meth-head twins about Jason. But first I need to fetch Anna.

Twelve minutes later I have her in the cab. It’s early rush hour and I’m backed up four rides when Anna asks can we please stop by the bookstore. Et tu, Anna? I close my eyes for the briefest shudder before saying sure and aiming us downtown for what will be at least a twenty-minute detour. As I drive, I’m trying to text Horace to pick up my fares, but the autocorrect keeps changing the message into nonsense. A lot of people seem to be honking at me, but I can’t flip them off because of Anna. To my great shock there is a parking space open in front of Corner Books. I pull in and step into the godless heat and unbuckle Anna and hold open the doors of her life before walking into the air-conditioned bookstore behind her. It’s my favorite bookstore in the world, but today its charms are lost on me as I slink among the hardbacks sneering at author photos and muttering schoolteacher, schoolteacher, schoolteacher . . .

I’m flipping off the author photographs—the MFA parade, man, they open those things faster than Starbucks—and muttering among the stacks of new books when—what’s this?—I spot a coffee table book called Mississippians! The book is filled with glossy photographs of our state’s most outstanding living citizens and even has a chapter on Mississippi writers.

Hey, maybe I’m in here a part of me thinks in spite of the fact I know damn well I’m not in there. Dirty writers, man, we’re nothing to flaunt. Nevertheless I open the book to the section called “Mississippi Writers!” Not that I’m expecting to find myself, but, hey, you never know with this writing bluff, right? For instance, decades ago, shortly after I published my one perverted novel, I won this

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