Ride

That Friday night, for all that came later, was a blur until Samantha drunkenly slammed his door.

Taye watched her leave with her friends, then ended her ride in the app. She would tip nicely; sometimes he could just tell. He rated her the full five stars, as he did for all but the absolute worst riders. She’d been drunk and loud, but she’d kept her hands to herself and her dinner in her belly.

It was nearing 1 AM. Taye removed his glasses and rubbed his itchy, bloodshot eyes. It wasn’t much help. His eyelids still felt like sandpaper and it constituted a constant fight to keep them open at all. He knew if he closed them for more than a few seconds, he’d probably conk out. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He looked around at the street. Barhoppers and revelers strolled along the sidewalk and across the brick-paved street, laughing and stumbling, most at some stage or another of drunkenness. Many still clustered outside the Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark, far enough gone that Taye couldn’t tell whether the Dodgers had won or lost or if anyone even cared.

He locked his phone. Rides were slow; nobody got started so late and most drinking and clubbing at one stayed drinking and clubbing until two. He had time to kill - but how to kill it? Bricktown was only a few miles south of his apartment. He could drive there, rest for a bit, and get back out in time for the 2 AM rush. On the other hand, an hour’s sleep was usually worse than no sleep at all, and things would probably die down again by 3:30 anyway.

Coffee. A good, strong cup of coffee. There was a nice compromise. He shifted into drive.

Once on I-35, however, he began having doubts. Coffee would cost a few dollars, and it’d been a slow week for midsummer. Normally he’d get a cup at home, but he’d run out the week prior and hadn’t found time to get to the store. He ran the numbers in his head. His last paycheck from Best Buy had covered rent and utilities. Groceries…yeah, those were good…he still owed Atif, but he could put that off…savings. That was the problem. His family’s savings.

Right on cue, his mother called, his phone rattling on the retainer clipped to his AC vent. When had he last talked to her? Two weeks? A month? He couldn’t remember. Too many shifts followed by too many drives.

He only felt more exhausted as he regarded the screen and its two buttons, the red telephone and the green. He knew he should answer, but he also knew he didn’t have it in him to keep up the false smiles, to tell her he was working hard and saving lots. To skip around the truth that a cup of coffee was a hurdle and an illness could set them back months. That the money, better than anywhere in Ethiopia, might still only be enough to help them emigrate on that nebulous someday.

It was almost a relief when the call dropped, though he still felt the pang of guilt when the notification of a new voicemail appeared. He pretended to believe he’d listen to it later.

He exited at the next gas station, the shrill whine of his brakes reminding him to get the pads replaced as soon as he could afford it, and went inside. The AC felt nice on his sweaty forehead and he took his time meandering to the coffee machine, stopping by the soda fountain to splash some water into his hat, the rivulets wriggling down his back icy and refreshing.

The coffee machine’s smell, somewhere between “burned rubber” and “electrical fire”, didn’t exactly imply quality but he nonetheless poured himself a large cup. The cashier looked as ragged as Taye felt and said nothing as he rang him up. He didn’t have to. Taye could simply feel that they were kindred spirits.

The coffee was a little over two dollars. There was a ten in his wallet so he asked for a pack of cigarettes, immediately regretting it but not enough to take it back before the change was warming in his palm. He smiled at the cashier as he left but didn’t see if he smiled back.

Outside, he stood on the curb and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling against the clear night sky. The parking lot was empty but for his car and that of the cashier. Even the interstate seemed unusually quiet. He wanted little more than to sleep but knew he couldn’t, not yet. He took a long drag, the mental fog thinning as his blood pressure spiked. The habit had started as something to keep him awake and earning on late nights, but then almost every night was a late night and the jaundice-yellow stains on his fingertips never left.

His phone buzzed with a new ride request. He didn’t know whether to feel irritated at the interruption of his break or relief that he might make up for the indulgences. He swigged his battery-acid coffee and opened it.

The request was about as inconvenient as one could be at that moment. The rider (whose name, the app informed him, was Jim) wanted to be picked up on Newcastle Road in southwest Oklahoma City and driven to Lexington. The former was a questionable part of town and the latter was the sort of place that was only a town at all because everyone there agreed it was, but more troublesome to Taye was the fact that they were separated by precisely forty-one minutes.

Taye hesitated. It was 1:17 AM. The drive would take close to two hours total, precluding him from all but the dredges of the 2 o’clock rush. The payment was good, and with such a long drive he hoped for a nice tip, but it was a gamble; even with a tip, it might not make up for the time outside the city.

The timer below the ride request dwindled lower and lower, urging his choice, waving it in front of him with the promise of handing it off to another driver if he didn’t hurry. An X button and a check mark button, no in-between.

The timer was only a few pixels thick when he accepted. The GPS screen opened immediately.

Get on with it, it said. Time is money for the both of us.

He took one more pull from his cigarette, the nicotine tingling at the back of his throat, then stubbed it out and tossed it into the trash. He climbed back into his car and left, coffee in hand.

With any luck, the rider would be too drunk to notice just how high above the speed limit he intended to drive.

Newcastle Road was a sad, scary place.

The potholed street ran parallel to a railroad which separated it from the grime-encrusted workshops and skeletal cars intermittently visible between patchy, clumped trees, stubbornly dead despite the summer’s warmth. The whole street seemed stripped of color, even in the dark. There were few lights and even fewer which worked well; some flickered, while others were clouded by age and mounds of dead insects. The area simply reeked of gray and beige, excepted only by the blood-red Oklahoma dirt and the garish, sun-cracked signs of dollar stores, cheap restaurants, and mechanics’ shops. The place looked bled-out, and Taye felt as if it was trying to drain his color too, a vampire of cracked concrete seeking its sustenance.

He drove slowly, scanning for his rider. They were usually easy to spot: they’d stand on curbs or corners, glancing back and forth from their phones, looking somewhat disoriented even if they stood outside their own homes. Sometimes they’d even wander distractedly into traffic, as if blind to any cars but his.

This time was different. The rider had requested pickup outside Club Safari, a cheap nightclub decorated with a mural of leopards and scantily-clad jungle women stalked by rifle-toting hunters, a piece that in the dark went from bad to grotesque. Once there, however, Taye saw none of the usual signals. Nobody stared at their phones except a few drunken clubbers getting some air, nobody waited on the corners except a couple loping figures peddling some ware or another, and everywhere else shambled the ubiquitous hare-lean drifters who, unable to fit into America’s machinery, had fallen through its cracks.

Soon he’d passed the club and, according to his GPS, the rider. He made an illegal U-turn at the next intersection, frustration building as he mentally calculated just how much each extra minute might cost.

The second pass was also unsuccessful. As he turned around again, he decided that the third pass would be his last. If the guy didn’t want to show up, he wasn’t going to wait around.

Unfortunately for Taye, the third time was the charm.

Once he finally saw him, it was clear why he’d been missed. Where the clubbers wore the flashy colors of mate-attraction and where others stuck conspicuously to the shadows, the rider faded effortlessly into the background as if wearing camouflage. He stood beneath a dying streetlamp, outlined by its dim orange glow, his jutting brow drowning his eyes in shadow. His thin, graying hair was as unkempt as his clothes; he wore a suit that was clearly once very expensive but which was now dirty and frayed, the knees so threadbare as to be nearly translucent.

Taye pulled into the parking spot beside the lamp, his car making some rather disconcerting grinding noises as its bottom scraped over chunks of neglected, disintegrating asphalt. The rider didn’t move immediately; he just stood and stared, not at a phone or anything else but directly at Taye. He couldn’t see the rider’s eyes in their shadows but he thought he could feel them, a shiver crawling up his spine despite the heat. He got the distinct impression that he was somehow being measured. Sized up.

The impatience of lost revenue dissipated as he stared back at the rider, the stumbling vagabonds and flitting moths in his periphery blurring out, his view seeming to narrow into a tunnel ending in those two black pits where eyes should have been.

He would wonder later at the fact that he never thought of canceling the ride. Calling off rides that intuitively didn’t feel right was part and parcel of driving, something he’d done many times before. That Friday night, the idea didn’t even cross his mind.

Finally the man (Jim, Taye reminded himself) moved. First he nodded, a single jerking motion so fast it looked more like a tic than a deliberate gesture. Then he stepped toward the car. His movement was almost greasy, his overcoming of inertia so smooth he might as well have been already walking when Taye pulled up.

For a moment the man disappeared from view, melting into the surrounding darkness. In that moment Taye’s heart leaped in his chest in a single, weird instant of panic, but the door opened and shut and Jim was in the backseat, his breathing phlegmy as if with allergies.

Taye took a breath, assured himself all was fine. Just the caffeine, man, he thought. You need some real sleep.

Taye pressed the button confirming he’d picked Jim up. The ride had begun. It was 1:31 AM.

“How is it going?” asked Taye as he reversed.

Jim didn’t answer. He sat and stared straight ahead.

“Headed to Lexington? Do you live there?”

Still nothing, though when Taye glanced in the rearview he thought he saw the ghost of a smirk. He shrugged it off. Silent types weren’t especially rare and didn’t bother him. If anything, the quiet would be a nice break.

The smell hit him just as he was sipping his cooling coffee. It wasn’t the salty musk of body odor, nor the sweetness of alcohol-laden breath; rather, it was similar to both, but not exactly like either - bubble soap and oil, or maybe aspartame and axle grease, something metallic and savory and sickly sweet. Not horrible, but so strong that the beginnings of a headache pulsed behind Taye’s eyes. He committed to breathing through his mouth.

Besides the smell, the drive wasn’t initially so bad. The silence beat listening to rowdy frat boys, and unlike most of his other riders that night, Taye wasn’t especially worried about him puking in the backseat. He got onto I-240, then cut onto I-35 South, Jim thankfully not appearing to mind they were going ninety in a sixty-five. The wind roared past as they left downtown behind, its lights glowing like artificial stars trying to replace the real ones they smothered out of the sky.

There were few other drivers so he hit the cruise control and stretched his sore legs, repeatedly curving and crossing them in his little anti-atrophy routine. Then he leaned back in his seat, drummed his fingers on the wheel, and let his mind wander.

For a while, at least. Almost immediately his thoughts drifted back to his family’s situation and anxiety, his constant companion, bloomed in his guts. The constantly-shifting wars with the myriad rebel groups were still far from his home, but they were consistent in that they were getting worse and they were getting closer. Before long, they would reach his family.

Taye straightened in his seat and forced his drooping eyelids open, shoving his thoughts into their usual little corner. They weren’t helping things. He was saving; slowly but surely, he was saving. Every cent brought them closer, even if it meant his shoes had holes and he sweated during summer nights to save on electricity. They would be fine. He was going to make sure of that.

He glanced back at Jim. He’d barely moved and still stared fixedly ahead, silent aside from his thick breathing. Taye thought of the club, the painted hunters with their frozen gazes. The motionlessness was beginning to give him the creeps. He wondered if he was on something, and it occurred to him then that Jim might not even be Jim - he had not actually seen a phone and his behavior was so strange that it was entirely possible someone else had ordered the ride for him. If that was the case, he could say goodbye to any tips.

He looked down at the outline of the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Such a stupid, impulsive decision. So many rides, so many hours, and he still hadn’t learned. Now it seemed like he might not even make enough on the drive to cover it.

Thinking about the cigarettes made him crave one, especially as the white noise and rhythm of late night driving started to make him drowsy. But then his car would smell like cigarettes and he’d get bad reviews which would mar his perfect record, meaning fewer rides and even more lost revenue. So much damage from leaves wrapped in paper and tipped with plastic foam, to say nothing of what they were doing to his lungs.