2 Stories by Mather Schneider

Laughter Like Rain

It was a good feeling to be first-up at the Dog. The Dog was taxi-talk for the Greyhound bus station. Cabbies sat at the Greyhound when the radio dispatch calls were slow. We licked our lips and watched the people getting off the buses as they arrived twice an hour from Phoenix and L.A. and Vegas and Nogales. I had waited two hours and was finally at the front of the queue. 

She was a beautiful young girl, 20 years old at most, college smeared all over her like a fake tan. Beneath a short pleated green skirt her pink thighs quivered like Jello. Her slim arms tapered to graceful wrists and fingers, with elbows that bent and fit perfectly into the downward curve that led to her waist. Her brown hair fell to the small of her back and brushed the top of her skirt when she checked the noon desert sun and donned her oversized designer sunglasses. 

“Need a cab?”

She nodded yes.  

I put her suitcase in the trunk and opened the back door. Maybe she was thinking about how attractive she was and the burden of that, but she wasn’t thinking about what she was doing because she hit her forehead with a thud on the part of the car where the door meets the body. She shrieked, froze for a second and then bent backwards and plopped straight down on her baby-fat ass on the parking lot asphalt. Her legs went akimbo, and her skirt hiked up to reveal her red Victoria Secret panties. The cabby behind me whistled. It was the first pair of panties either one of us had seen in person in years.  

I tried to control myself, but laughter is spontaneous as rain. And this was the desert, we needed rain.

I crouched down over. My face was very close to hers and she could probably see my nostril hairs. My belly hung out from under my old blue t-shirt. I tried to help her. She brushed me off angrily, sat up and put her face in her hands. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re okay, right?”

I could not stop laughing.

“I’m fine,” she hissed. 

She stood up and pulled down her skirt. There was a small piece of rubber stuck to her forehead from the cab door seal stripping. That whole damn cab was falling apart, just like me.

“You’ve got something there…” I said, pointing to my forehead, then hers.

She picked it off and whipped it to the ground. 

She bent her head very low this time and got into the taxi. I shut the door as gently as you’d shut a music box and ran around and hopped in behind the wheel.

“Alrighty then,” I said. “Where to?”

I looked at her in the rearview mirror.  

“1213 E. Second Street.” 

A sorority house in the heart of the college district. I pulled out and took a left on Broadway.

“You’re a student, huh?”

“Mmmm, hmmmm.”

She put her head back on the headrest as if God was punishing her.

“What’s yer major?”

“Psychology.”

“Gonna be a shrink?”      

“Something like that.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Why not?”

“What’s it mean when you dream you’re flying?”

“It means you’re insecure.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. I would have thought the opposite.”

At her sorority house I unloaded her suitcase and set it on the ground. She paid me and walked away. No tip. I stood there smelling the fresh cut grass of the sorority house lawn, perfectly manicured and thick despite the drought. I wanted to throw myself down on that soft blanket. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream and holler. But they have rooms for people who do that sort of thing.

The Feel and Weight of Things

I picked up a blind couple in my taxicab to take them to the grocery store. I knew them. They were two of the most well-mannered, humble, unassuming people I’d ever met. Both young and blind from birth. I always felt comfortable around blind people. They didn’t scrutinize. They had their new baby who I’d never seen. The baby had perfect vision. I could tell by the way her big, beautiful eyes looked at me and seemed a little afraid. I startled my own self sometimes when I looked in the mirror. Uglier every day. The woman held the child in her arms and the man carried a car-seat. They didn’t use canes. I asked him if he wanted me to help him put the car seat in and he said no, thank you. I watched him install it in the back seat and it was the first time I'd ever seen anyone do it correctly.

“So that’s what those straps are for!” I said.

We all laughed. Even the baby.

I took them to Fry’s grocery. The man paid me with some folded bills which included a small tip and asked me to come pick them up in one hour to take them home. They got out and went slowly but directly to the shopping carts, as the rude maniacs gawked at them and rushed around them and bumped into them. The man put the baby who was still in the car seat into the grocery cart and pushed it into the store with his wife beside him, holding his arm. One time I asked him how they found their items in the store and he said they memorized where things were and knew by the feel and weight of things. He said they asked people questions if they were unsure and most people were very helpful. I had never liked people much but he pointed out the good in them.

Later I picked up another lady, also blind. It was a strange day with all these blind people. She was a little older, my age. She used a cane and tapped it in front of her, tapped the cab and found the door handle and got in before I had the chance to open it for her. After we got going, I asked her if she’d always been blind. Some people don’t like questions, but I figure there’s only one way to find out and that’s to ask. She told me she went blind at the age of 32, 20 years ago. Her eyes just gave out and the doctors didn’t really know why. Just degeneration, no cure for it.

I told her about the blind couple from earlier. I told her I figured it must be hard to raise a child while blind. She agreed. She said she wanted to have children but never did and then when she went blind, she gave up that dream. I asked her if she thought it would be worse to be born blind or to lose one's sight at a later age. She said she thought it would be worse to be born blind because you can never have any idea of color, or the way the sun looks on a person’s face or on the mountains.

“I always thought it would be worse to lose your sight after having had it,” I said. “Because of the emotional trauma, the sadness, the depression.”

“There's that,” she said. “Maybe you're right, because when you're born blind you don't know what you're missing.”

“Still,” I said, “you know you're missing something.”

“Oh yes. There are so many things I miss. But music is different now. And rain on my skin. The feel of things. And voices and smells.”

I looked at her in the rearview mirror and she had a natural, childlike, inside-out expression on her face. I had picked her up from the beauty parlor where she got her nails done. They were a brilliant pink.

“Your nails look pretty,” I said.

She smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice to hear.”

Mather Schneider’s poetry and prose have appeared in hundreds of journals since 1994. His first novel, The Bacanora Notebooks and his story collection, Port Awful are both available from Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and works as an exterminator.