Cabbies

Two white gulls appear from the perfect blue and startle the water. It is 8:00 a.m., the start of a new day. The cab drivers’ voices rise and fall in time. They come to this parking lot every morning. There is a Dunkin Donuts, which opens early, and Value Pricing, an Arab store that sells dates, olives, and tea. On a good day there are twenty of them, with ten drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, watching the sun rise over the canal from foldout chairs around an ornate rug that’s stored in Horiya’s trunk. Four other men sit cross-legged on stools. The older men wear well-ironed gray trousers and pastel shirts that puff nicely near the waist. One has a tweed jacket neatly folded over one knee. They have striking mustaches and black hair that’s combed over dignified patches bare scalp. The others recline in their cars and close their eyes and do not talk except out their windows. They come to see men that look like their grandfathers talk to men that look like their fathers, letting the language drift in the open window...

“He received the...ah... Peace Prize in 1964 to make the world a better place. Then there was 1967, and ah...”

“—Whole new ball game?”

“Right,” the first one says. “Exactly.”

There’s a rumble in the distance that scares away the gulls. (What does Horiya, whose father’s business was destroyed three times by airstrikes, hear in the summer when the sky is dark and booming with rain?)

“I could drive cab for 30 years with no raise,” a young driver says. “Already I speak better English than Jerome, and he is the boss.”

“He speaks black,” another says. “‘Yo Yo.’ Right?”

 “It’s an outrage.”

An older man with the folded tweed jacket raises his hand. “Outrage?” he says. “You not realize how bad it could be.” “Look where we are. The air is good. You are not questioned by the guards. You may go anywhere you like. It is a blessing.” His palm is flat, held from a bent elbow, like a frozen snake ready to strike.

 “Yes, but we still must work,” – the other old man adds– “very hard.” The last two words carry the full weight of his breath, as if it were too early for them to be spoken, and they remind the men to be a little afraid. Two men roll up Horiya’s rug and carry it to his trunk. They finish their coffee, crush half-smoked cigarettes on the pavement, start their engines and drive away. Then the parking lot is empty. They hear it on their radios. The first plane hits at 8:14. The second at 8:22. If you hadn’t been there an hour before, you’d never know they were there.