The Route Taxi

Fitzy runs the route between the town and the bottom of the district, and he runs it from about six in the morning until the last person is home, which some nights is nine and some nights is eleven.

The car seats four and carries five, and everybody knows this, and nobody has ever once discussed it.

This is a Thursday in October, from about half past one.

· · ·

First out of the square: Miss Ferguson, with a crocus bag of yellow yam that goes in the trunk, and a black scandal bag of thyme and scallion that does not, because it bruises.

“Fitzy, easy over the gully.”

“Miss Ferguson, when I ever—”

“Last week.”

“Last week was the road, not me.”

She settles. “You hear about the shop?”

“Which shop?”

“Brenda shop. She closing it December. She say she cannot compete with the wholesale in town and the light bill alone last month was more than she make in the week.”

Fitzy whistles through his teeth. In the back, a young man in a security uniform takes one earphone out.

“So where we suppose to buy bread?” Miss Ferguson says, to the windshield, to the whole parish. “Tell me that.”

· · ·

Three stop at the school gate and two get in: a girl of about sixteen in uniform with her tie pulled loose, and her friend, who is not in uniform and has a phone.

They are in the middle of a conversation and they do not restart it for the benefit of the car.

“—but she never even do the paper, that is what I saying.”

“She do it.”

“She do it sick. Her mother did have to carry her.”

“And she still get the nine.”

“Nine?” says Miss Ferguson, turning around, because there is no such thing as a private conversation in a route taxi. “Which girl get nine?”

“Kimone. Miss Pinnock granddaughter.”

“The one that live at the corner with the dog?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Nine subject.” Miss Ferguson faces front again, satisfied, as though she has personally banked something. “Good. That is very good. Her mother work hard.”

· · ·

At the clinic corner the security man gets out and Mr. Dacres gets in, slowly, front seat, because his hip.

Fitzy waits without saying anything about the waiting. He has done this for eleven years.

“Them give you the medication?”

“Them give me a paper,” Mr. Dacres says. “The medication out of stock. The paper say come back Tuesday. Tuesday I have to find four hundred dollar to come back down here for a paper them could have call me about.”

“I passing Tuesday,” Fitzy says. “Don’t pay me Tuesday.”

“Fitzy—”

“Mr. Dacres, I say don’t pay me Tuesday. Is one stop.”

In the back, the girl who is not in uniform looks up from the phone, and then looks back down at it.

· · ·

Past the bridge a woman flags him down with a baby on her hip and the whole car rearranges itself without being asked. Miss Ferguson takes the scandal bag onto her lap. The schoolgirls compress.

The woman is Andrea, who works at the hotel on the other side and who is doing the shift that starts at four, and she is talking before the door closes.

“The bridge.”

“I know.”

“Them was suppose to start in August.”

“Them was suppose to start last August,” Fitzy says. “This is the second August.”

“So when the rain come again and it wash out, is the same thing. Thirty minutes round.”

“Thirty-five.”

“And who pay the thirty-five?” Andrea says. “Me. Every day. Out of my pay.”

Nobody argues with her. The baby, who is about eight months, looks around the car at four adults and two teenagers with the flat assessing stare babies have, and settles on Mr. Dacres, who makes a face at it, and it laughs, and for a minute the whole car is about the baby instead.

· · ·

The schoolgirls get out at the crossing. The one in uniform says thank you; the one with the phone does not, and Miss Ferguson has a comment about that which she saves until the door is shut.

They pass the big house going up on the rise, the one with the concrete columns and the block wall and the iron gate already hung before the roof is on.

“Whose that is again?” Andrea says.

“Miss Enid daughter. The one in England.”

“She coming home?”

“She say she coming home,” Miss Ferguson says. “She been saying she coming home since 2011. But the house is building, so somebody is coming.”

“That gate cost more than my car,” Fitzy says, mildly, and everybody laughs, and it is only about half a joke and everybody knows which half.

· · ·

Miss Ferguson out at her gate with the yam, which Fitzy carries to the step because of her knee and because she has been getting into his car since it was his father’s car.

Mr. Dacres out at the corner, slowly.

Andrea out at the hotel road at ten to four with the baby, to hand it to her mother and go in for the shift, and she pays and says the thing everybody in that district says at the end of a ride, which is not thank you and not goodbye but: “All right, later.”

And then it is just Fitzy and the last passenger, who has not said a word for the whole trip. She is about twenty-two, and she has a bag, and she is going all the way to the end of the route, past where the route technically ends.

· · ·

The rain starts at the last mile the way it does in October, all at once, hard enough that the wipers are decorative.

Fitzy drives past the turning where he stops and keeps going, up the bad piece of road that will cost him a tire eventually, and takes her the extra half mile to her grandmother’s gate, and puts the hazards on and waits with the lights pointed at the path so she can see her way up it.

She comes back to the window with the fare and he waves it off.

“Sir—”

“Go in,” he says. “You getting wet.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“You is Pauline granddaughter,” Fitzy says. “I know your grandmother forty years. She used to give my father dinner when him do this same route and the car break down, which was regular.” He puts it in reverse and looks over his shoulder. “Tell her Fitzy send to say howdy.”

He backs down the bad road in the rain the way you can only do it if you have done it ten thousand times, and puts the radio on, and goes back up to the square for the last run of the evening.

That is the district. Not the bridge, and not the shop closing, and not the nine subjects, and not the house on the rise with the gate that cost more than the car. All of it, in a Corolla that seats four, going up and down the same eleven miles for the price of a hundred dollars a head.

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