Bridge of Sighs

daddy. Want some other man don’t have nothin’ to do with him. Preacher, prob’ly. Somebody too good to howl. You stick to white girls, you know what’s good for you. Older they get, the better they like it. Even the ugly ones. Nothin’ better than a old ugly white woman. Grateful’s what they is.”
    That seemed to be the end of the lecture. Gabriel closed his eyes again and was silent for so long I figured he’d fallen asleep. When I climbed back on my bike, though, he spoke again, eyes still closed. “So, you tattle on me yesterday, or what?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Don’t get cagey on me now. I seen you sittin’ there in the liberry window watchin’ it all. They must of asked you who done it.”
    “I said I didn’t see.”
    He just nodded and said, without opening his eyes, “You look just like your daddy, Junior. Spittin’ image. But you your mama’s boy.” He must have sensed me glaring at him. “You don’t like me sayin’ that, I guess.”
    “It wasn’t very nice what you did,” I told him. “Breaking that bottle on Mr. Beverly’s car. He never did anything to you.”
    “How you know what he did and didn’t do?”
    He had a point, but I wasn’t about to concede the moral high ground. “Okay,” I said. “What did he ever do to you?”
    He didn’t reply at first, but finally he said, “Nothin’. Man never done nothin’ to me. Truth is I’m ashame of myself, acting like God’s own fool. Woman right, she don’t want nothin’ to do with me. Right to warn the boy against me, too. My own damn fault, the whole mess. There, you happy now, Lou Lynch Junior? Got it all straight now? Know up from down now, case somebody ask you?”
    I wasn’t happy, and I think he knew it. It was the first argument I’d ever won with Gabriel Mock, and it was worse than losing. It was true; I hadn’t liked him saying I was my mother’s son, even though he meant it, so far as I could tell, as a compliment. And when he’d called me Lou Lynch Junior I hadn’t liked that either, sensing an insult. One or the other, it seemed, should’ve given me pleasure, but neither did, and in the end, pedaling away from Whitcombe Park, all I’d felt was guilty. Which didn’t make any sense either. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten drunk and smashed a bottle on somebody else’s Cadillac. It wasn’t me sitting on the ground with a hangover, oozing blood from a torn eyebrow, the embodiment of my own foolishness. He could be sarcastic all he wanted, but it
was
all his fault, just as he said.
    Still, the closer I got to building an airtight case against my friend, the worse I felt and the more convinced that I
was
a slow, stubborn learner. Maybe I
didn’t
know up from down.
             
     
    I N T HOMASTON, then as now, the only taxi service was Hudson Cab. Their ad in the Yellow Pages referred to a “fleet” of taxis, all clean and spacious, with courteous, punctual drivers—proof, my mother said, that you could claim just about anything and get away with it. Hudson Cab favored big rusted-out station wagons with torn vinyl upholstery and tailgates fused permanently shut by rear-end collisions. It wasn’t unusual to hear one of these, its dangling exhaust system sparking along the pavement, before you saw it, and all the drivers looked as if they’d just that morning come off a four-month bender. Courtesy was hardly an issue for these men, who seemed incapable of any utterance at all.
    It was just such a cab and driver that pulled up in front of Ikey Lubin’s one day about a month after Karen and her mother moved into the flat above our store. The way the vehicle sat there, its motionless driver staring straight ahead, caused my father and me both to wonder if he’d in fact died at our curb, and the angle was such that we couldn’t see whether there was a passenger in the rear seat. My father, who’d been about to go home for supper, was reluctant to leave until he knew what this was about, so he remained behind the register. Finally, there was a lurching movement in the rear seat, as of a man awakening from a dream so dreadful that the sour backseat of a Hudson cab represented a distinct improvement. Whoever it was went into a series of contortions, apparently searching for the fare. In vain, it seemed, because the driver’s head rotated around on his thick neck so he could memorize what his passenger had looked like when he was still alive. From the rear seat a hand pointed vehemently