I’m sitting in the back of a taxi, and the driver tells me I’m not allowed to smoke, so a cigarette hangs unlit from my lips while I rest my head against the window. The glass was chilled by the early fall air and it felt nice against my temple. I stare at the back of the seat, feeling the vibrations of the street beneath me, and close my eyes. All I see in my personal blackness are canvas bins and the mail needing to be sorted into them at the post office. I wonder how many more times I need to look at an envelope before I die. I open my eyes and suck what little menthol I can get through the filter.
We were driving along the riverbank, towards the bridge and bay which separated the north city from the south city. I live and work in the north city, and I rarely cross the bridge into the south. Through the smudged and blurred window, nearby scenery blurs together while the faint background chases the cab like eyes. Light sparsings of clouds drifted across the sun in spats of hot yellow and pink, and dreamfire was licking down at the river, settling calm and numb at the surface. Burning silver holes in the graying sky let setting sunlight pierce the city, and I watched as the beams rose like toll-bars when the clouds drifted up and the sun drifted down, falling slowly beneath the bridge. They felt angelic, and my co-worker Frank Donnaden stood on the sidewalk in the beams, his own cigarette lit and smoldering.
“Hey, you can pull over here,” I said to the driver.
He did so hastily, scraping his tire against the curb, as though he wanted nothing more than to get me off of his linen seats packed with sandwich crumbs and torn pages of magazines. I don’t blame him. We had only driven a short way, and cabs were few in this small city, cab riders even fewer. It’s odd that there are cab drivers here at all.
As I hand the driver a twenty, I catch his eyes in the rearview mirror. They look numb and hostile and gray, his beady pupils implying I wouldn’t be able to tip him nearly enough to make up for the time I took. Though wrinkles stained the darkened pouches under his eyes, and his mouth was small and taut, he was young. He gave off a detached aura. I imagined him merging onto the freeway, aggressive and unwavering.
Feeling guilty now for having wasted his time, I told him I didn’t need any change back. He nodded curtly, and no sooner had I stepped onto the concrete than he laid down the accelerator, scuffing the asphalt as he embarked on another long search for a customer.
I took the cigarette out of my lips and stood still for a moment, inhaling the crisp air bouncing off the water with a shudder. It rushed down my throat, swirling like a hurricane in my lungs. The temperature was pleasant. I put the now slightly soggy cigarette in my jacket’s breast pocket.
Frank Donnaden stood static and looming as he stared past the bridge at the sky. Fragrant smoke drifted light and swift down the breeze from his cigarette, sprinkling fresh smolder onto the road which was picked up by the wind and tossed back across the sidewalk.
I walked up and rapped my knuckle against his shoulder, apparently waking him from something like a stupor. He turned his face slightly my way, but turned back towards the cigarette he’d been neglecting, apparently desperate to draw as many drags from it as possible before it crumbled. He looked upwards to exhale, and inspected the sky directly above him deeply, as though he could see every cosmic haze bubbling and every star whipping wild as kites through the void. He doesn’t say anything.
His face is rigid and his complexion is painted salmon in the decaying light. His eyes held a permanent squint, with crow’s feet tugging at the corners, and his irises barely peeked out, cold and steely blue. He was clean shaven, but his short, coarse hair was jumbled and tangled, with bunches falling loose against his wrinkled forehead. I wondered how old he was: his black roots were graying. He turned to me.
“Jack,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you come my way before.” His voice was low pitched, and mixed with the rasp from years of smoking it sounded like mumbling thunder.
“Ah, well, I saw you standing out here, and I figured the weather’s only gonna be nice for so long, so I thought I’d join you.” I said. “Do you mind?” I added, after feeling a bit sheepish for having invited myself.
“I’m a bit far of a walk,” Pause. “If that’s alright,” he added.
“I’m pretty far myself.” I said. He started walking, and I followed alongside him. He walked slow and meandering.
To our left was the river, flowing out towards the bay, and as the daylight shimmered orange in the ripples atop its surface I could feel it yearn to fade into the dusty violet of dusk, and melt into ink. As we walked, the distant ambience of cars on the bridge hissed in my ears.
“You gonna be able to keep up with me, Jack?” Frank asks, jolting me out of a trance. I had fallen a few strides behind him. His cigarette was nearing the filter, and he flicked it away when the heat nipped his fingers.
“Sorry, I’m just spacing out.” I said
To our right across the street, a dog was tied to a dumpster between a bar and an apartment building. It was a mutt with layers of thin and coarse brown hair, and splotches of tan scattered around a thin body. Sitting on the thrashing cracks and filthy dust of the concrete on scraggly haunches, its tongue bounced against its teeth. As we passed through its vision, the dog leapt up and let out a volley of barks, almost immediately causing a sheet metal door to fly open from the bar and slap against the alley brick like a gunshot. A young girl leapt out. The dog tossed its tail in the air and splayed out its front paws at the sight of her, but the girl simply spoke a few quick sharp words to the animal which I couldn’t quite hear, but were most likely to shush it up. After she slipped back through the door, the mutt spun slowly in a circle and laid down again, chin resting on its elbow, eyes flicking left and right. I wondered how cool it was in the alley’s shade.
We walked in silence for a couple of minutes, and just when I thought about retrieving my crumpled cigarette from my pocket, Frank spoke up.
“You ever think about quitting someday, Jack?”
I paused for a moment, unsure of the conversation’s direction. He might be talking about cigarettes or the post office. I patted the cigarette in my pocket, looked at him, and took a gamble on what he meant.
“I don’t really think that far ahead, I suppose,” I said, “I think I might try carrying the mail one of these days. Switch things up, get some fresh air. How about you, Frank?”
I must have been correct, as it seemed as though he wanted me to ask this. He sighed, and started ranting, his voice starting quiet but growing louder the more he spoke, “I need to get out, I think. Not that it’s hard work, it‘s not. My brain just feels like tearing itself apart as I label this and label that and correct what seems like everybody’s mistakes. And then all around, I got people telling me to be grateful. That because it ain’t ‘hard labor’ I ain’t got anything to complain about. Well, to me, mindless work is just as-”
He cut his words short as a young woman approached us, her back toward the sun. Her head was down, and she must have been scouring the cracks and the separations between the sidewalk’s cement panels as she walked, her hands buried in her jacket pockets. I slowed my stride and Frank shuffled in front of me to let her pass. She glanced up for only a second, flashing a smile before she hurried by.
After she had passed, Frank stayed quiet for a while, dropping us into another lull of silence. He too began to inspect the cracks in the cement.
“What will you do when you get out?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I never know. Guess I’m just tired. Forget it.” Frank said. He started to pull out his pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, but stopped and let his hand drop back to his side.
We had been walking for quite some time, and the river next to us had been gradually broadening as it merged delicately into the bay. The sun is setting and the clouds are orange and purple and even though the wind is chilled it feels as though the air is getting hotter. My jacket is suffocating.
We turn onto a side street and arrive in a few minutes. Frank Donnaden lives in a decrepit apartment building. A fire escape zig-zagged down the brick, and the trim around the windows was peeling and scaly. Weeds were grown through the cracks littering the sidewalk in front of the building’s entryway, and through the screen door I could see a wall of brass mailboxes, one of which belonged to Frank Donnaden.
“Well, I’ll see you, Jack,” Frank said. “Thanks for keeping me company.”
“Of course. I might walk with you again sometime, if that’s alright.”
“Yep, yep.”
“See you tomorrow, Frank.” I said.
“Yep,” Pause. “Yep.” Fatigue seeped through his voice.
He stepped inside with a slight wave and a smile, but when the screen door slapped behind him, I feared I might have lost Frank Donnaden to the labyrinth of doors inside. Doors hiding lives behind them, which mumbled and shouted their own glories and derelictions. I listened intently, trying to hear the rustling of existence beyond the screen door and mailboxes, but all I heard was the wind gently whistling past my ears and the hush of distant cars and their barking horns.
As I turned away from Frank Donnaden’s apartment, I pulled the cigarette from the breast pocket of my jacket. I patted my jeans for my lighter, and after the paper lit, I sucked down the menthol. It tasted bad. I smoked it anyway as I made my way back towards the river.
I lived a mile further towards the water, so I continued walking alone, pulling on the fire and letting out the smoke. As I walk along the river I watch the smoldering sun dip into the darkened bay and drown beneath the bridge.
Trenton Bebermeier is a graduating senior majoring in Music Performance and minoring in Japanese. He enjoys reading literature by Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, Aldous Huxley, Natsume Soseki, and Hemingway. When he is not reading or writing, he is making music and sound with whatever means currently at his disposal, as well as trying his hand in every creative medium available.
This story won 1st Place in our 2022 Literary Awards.
