Jerk-runs by Mather schneider
My next call comes from Fry’s grocery. These calls always stink, total jerk-runs. I pull up through the chaos of the parking lot. A deaf lady dangles in the swarm. Anarchy cooks at the supermarket doors stuck half open. She thinks the cab’s for her, but I’ve come for a man named Glenn. Her eyes eclipse from prayer to rage like she’s been punched as an old man approaches, says he’s Glenn. She throws a fit! She karate-chops me a new asshole with her sign language. Mute fumes. Pissed-off mime with moldy spaghetti hair on her mutilated skull. She begs a pen and digs out a Tucson Daily Star from the trash can. “waiting 2 ½ hours” she scribbles in the gray margin, waves the news in my face. July 5th. Headline photo of the foothills burning. No rain forecasted. 10 a.m. Blue ink veins her rheumatoid claws. Asphalt hot as Satan’s abscessed tooth. She tosses the paper to the oven wind. I stare directly at her face and tell her I’m sorry but I have to pick up Glenn. Just following orders. She’s somebody’s mother. Grandmother. Glenn in puppy shit thrift store slacks isn’t looking for trouble. 70 years old. 5-foot-1. 80 pounds. The sun throbs like a sore on the back of a leper’s neck. Embolism air bubbles trample toward our hearts. I pile Glenn and his groceries into the mustard-yellow cab, swear to the deaf lady I’ll drop Glenn off and return for her. No clue which cab company she called or if she’ll curse my soul. Doesn’t matter. We’re all nutsacks and frail promises collapsing in the funk. Glenn lives eight blocks away where the rippling water mirage evaporates at a stroked-out apartment complex. I lug his bags up four crooked flights. Back in the cab I get another fare and take it without thinking in my automaton nod. I remember deaf lady but can’t turn back. I’ve got my own problems, I rationalize to my gin blossom in the rearview mirror. My wife is crippled and someone hacked my bank account. There’s a constant ringing, a voice in my mind I can’t plug up. Sweat beads like spider pearls on this faded roulette wheel that bites. Hell, she’ll be alright, bawling in her silent sentience. I pass a rotted coyote in the cinders of the shoulder, like a poet grinning in a heroin suicide or a theorist who wrote his final pamphlet on the social ecology meltdown. Horse flies rifle loud and mad in the cracked mud ditch. I suck oxygen into wretched sciatica biomass and hold the fuck on. A 17-tired truck skids sideways through the red at Rudasill Road. Spilled oranges bounce like propane orbs in amber oblivion. Tremulous meteorites criss-cross my eyeballs. Oblique brakes rip the fabric of traffic like knees bending the wrong way and shattering, like bees sizzling the bliss with 10,000 flames, like the future blow-horning my name right here right now and there’s nowhere to go but straight into it.
Mather Schneider works as an exterminator in Tucson, Arizona. His writing has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Rattle and The Threepenny Review.
