The Blue Taxi (31 page)

The colonials who had made it—the Greenleafs, Remingtons, and those who lived in Scallop Bay—would have been great men anywhere,
Kazansthakis thought. They would always rise above. Their very greatness as the members of a Nation, emissaries of the Colonizing
Power, was due in part but in part only to men like Gilbert Turner, who, through meaningless and boring, necessary acts, propped
up the flash and flare: pushed papers around, organized the books, and never once complained too seriously or wanted what
they couldn’t have. With Empires disbanded, the Thorntons and the Greenleafs could take care of themselves. Gilbert Turner,
Kazansthakis thought, could not. He ought, a silent casualty, politely take his tiny place and not attempt a project that
would only cause him pain.

With two Congo Pilsners in him, frothy, cool, and sharp, however, his mood began to turn. There
was
something new in Gilbert. A weird, intriguing gleam in those watery brown eyes. He was remarkably persistent. Kazansthakis
softened. “What exactly, Gilbert Turner, are you thinking? For…” He stopped himself from wincing. “For the
cars?
” Well, Gilbert didn’t know, exactly. It was enough for him just then to have determined on the way out to the Palm that he
had indeed, perhaps, as a red-faced, pudgy boy in England, acquired as a hand-me-down a modest set of toys in the shape of
such contraptions. Though he could not know, and perhaps had never known, their makes or precise models, he did recall—the
more he thought about it and the more he drank—he did recall, with a ferocity that so shook Kazansthakis he ordered three
more beers at once, that the little cars had thrilled him. Gilbert was quite drunk. “I loved them, Mr. Frosty!”

Gilbert may or may not have owned such items as a boy. But he was certain of his story. “I loved them and abandoned them.
I forgot,” said Gilbert—were there tears in his eyes?—“how very much they mattered.” Gilbert was suddenly amenable to the
explanations Kazansthakis liked. He’d read too many books, perhaps, got tangled up in them, and forgotten who was who. He
began to think symbolically, to entertain theories of fate, and the connectedness of things. “I was unfaithful to them, don’t
you see?” he said, knocking a great glass off balance and retrieving it—surprising himself most of all—with uncharacteristic
grace. “I forgot all about my childhood!” Kazansthakis watched him, noncommittal, slightly worried for his friend but awed
by his insistence. “This thing with Uncle James.” Gilbert belched. “It’s meant to put me on my feet. Return me”—this he said
more softly—“to my forgotten glory.”

The Frosty King had never seen his friend in such a confused state. Glory? Mr. Turner had had glory? Best forgotten if he
had!
Perhaps he had a fever. In his drunkenness, Gilbert for his part experienced his own mind as oddly sharp, uncharacteristically
perceptive. “I’m not ill, Mr. Frosty,” Gilbert said, and hackles rose in him for the first time in what might have been a
hundred thousand years. His throat itched with it, and his back. He felt certain and afraid. As though a deed had just been
done. “No, I say. I’m absolutely serious. I’m not only a thinker, you should know.” And though he did not know at all what
the
thing
was, he said, with a breaking in his voice, “I’m going to try this thing.”

Kazansthakis watched his friend. Nodded to the waiter to bring another round. Indeed. Well. “You’re certain, Mr. Gilbert?”
He rubbed his round, red chin. “One hundred percent, then?”

If Gilbert had stopped to ask himself this question, had not been so drunk, and had not been so—admit, it, yes—
offended
by the Frosty King’s response, he might have answered differently. He might have, as the Gilbert of the weeks and months
before would have, stepped away from his own statement and said, “No, no, Mr. Frosty. Just a little joke, I suppose. I didn’t
really mean it.” Or, “You’re right. I’d best forget it, don’t you think?” But these things he did not. The hubbub of the Palm—soft,
rising in small waves, the tinny skittering of feet and cups and bowls—and the look on Mr. Frosty’s face (surprise, curiosity,
an unexpected glow) spurred him on. So such decisions take. He needed to confirm it, say, “Yes, I am. I have always, always.
Thought highly of engines. You know, cars,” he said, “and things.”

The Frosty King was not entirely convinced that Gilbert had really had a motor-love as a small boy. It was the very first
he’d heard of it, and they’d been meeting there for years. When had Gilbert ever sympathized with Mr. Frosty over the difficulties
he endured supplying his own Fiat? Had they ever spoken wisely about OPEC, the ups and downs of fuel? The crises? Had they
ever talked about the buses that the Soviets had brought in? No, he did not believe his friend. But he was swayed by something
else. By Mrs. Frosty, truth be told, who had rubbed his neck and back, kissed him hotly on the ear, and said, “Poor, poor,
Mr. Turner. Can’t you try to help?” And also, yes, by the fierce red look on Gilbert’s face, a kind of shame and fury, an
excitement, something that could, perhaps—yes, why not, why not, if it did not portend disaster?—be transformed into joy.
So what if people changed their spots?
he thought. Perhaps this world was made for that. Oil prices were stable once again. He could not think of any trouble rising,
other than another war on the far border, and wars were good—weren’t they?—for a certain kind of business. People used their
cars, and most of them were old. The buses broke down all the time.
Why not?
he thought. Indeed. This shift, this sudden news—he thought:
It’s just like in a movie
. The dawning of adventure. So he stopped shaking his head and raised his glass to Gilbert.

Gilbert sensed the change in Kazansthakis, and it stilled him. He sighed, felt the roll of his own gut settling nicely at
the high edge of his trousers. He dug his hips into his seat, puffed out his pounding chest, expanded, spread his weight over
the crooked metal chair. Beyond them, in a busy wind, white clouds came and went.

When the Frosty King said, “Spare parts, then? Is that where you are going?” Gilbert, had he owned and worn a hat, would have
thrown it in the air. Exactly. Spare parts, absolutely. He felt as if the world around him had come to an invigorating stop.
And, in a moment, Kazansthakis, who did like a little play—especially when it involved outsmarting the smart (who liked to
put men behind bars or at least extract from them large sums for putting into motion plans for things like this)—made a few
suggestions, said he’d like to help. “Fun!” he said. “We’re going to have some fun! Spare parts, my dear Mr. Gilbert. Have
another drink. To spares!”

“To spares!” said Gilbert Turner. In the wet and dizzy moments that ensued, Kazansthakis drinking with both fists and Gilbert,
belching, struggling to keep up, the Frosty King suddenly recalled a man he knew who now worked at the airport. And wasn’t
there a woman he’d once tried to kiss (a single weakness, one small moment, about which Mrs. Frosty didn’t know—and thank
God it hadn’t worked) who still harbored a small flame for him and now wielded at the Customs Office a much-desired stamp?
What about, oh, yes, the Frenchman from the airlines who frequented the Frosty Kreem for scoops of sweet vanilla? And that
other person, too, very, very local, who had liked pistachio in his youth and who was now, if Kazansthakis was correct, the
Minister of Trade? The Frosty King did have a motor of his own, and he was often worried about spark plugs, brake shoes, base-plates,
and the like. By his fifth order of drink, the Frosty King was hopeful and, indeed, violently, irreversibly impressed by Mr.
Gilbert Turner.

“I will find things out for you,” Kazansthakis said. “Do it, Mr. Gilbert.” He stood. He shook Gilbert’s hand with both of
his, meaningfully, with respect, as if sealing something private, as though Gilbert Turner were a new, important man. Someone
to be reckoned with. A Greenleaf or a Thornton! “The sky’s the limit!” Kazansthakis said. He gave Gilbert a wink before skipping
down the stairs.

Gilbert returned home with hubcaps spinning in his mind. “Spare parts,” he said under his breath, repeating it until the two
words might mean almost nothing, or be the meaning of the world.

By the following evening, a secret competition thrilled the tiles and carpet of the Turners’ old apartment. Gilbert paced
and Sarie
skulked. Each made notes beneath their fingers in the air, and, when colliding in the parlor, each turned from the other to
hunt down the scraps of paper on which each had tried out sums. Though neither of them knew it, skinny statues, jewels, and
woven bags were warring in the parlor against pistons, calipers, and flywheels. They each had an Idea.

Sarie, however, was the more honest of the two. One day over lunch, she told her husband of the plan. “What do you think about
it, eh?” she’d asked. “The crafts? For the big men who have gone back to their home? For people like your uncle?” Gilbert
pushed his rice away and found himself contemplating Sarie with a kindness in his heart. In his visions of the future, Gilbert
had begun, without so much as trying, designing for himself a slightly mythic spouse: a sweet one, a docile one who would
admire him. So inspired by his talks with Kazansthakis, charged, excited, he felt himself becoming, in his own estimation,
something like a businessman. And didn’t businessmen have charming, pretty wives who listened? He wasn’t really being cruel.

If Sarie had ever said to him at an attentive moment, about someone else, “That person doesn’t look,” or, “That person doesn’t
listen,” he would have said, “You’re right. Awful, yes, just awful,” because he himself had often felt that no one looked
at him or heard him. He didn’t do it meanly. It was just that he had his little hopes, and he did like his daydreams. But
Gilbert’s dreams, just then, were taking on all kinds of lucid shape. That evening in the kitchen, he found it hard to tell
which woman was real and which woman he was just coming to sense would spring fully into being once the business plan was
firm. When Sarie told him her idea, as a good man ought to handle a good wife, he decided to be tender, and took care not
to be dismissive.

“Why, certainly,” he said. “A good idea, dear.” And though he
didn’t press her and didn’t ask for details about what she’d already sorted out, Sarie smiled at him over her teacup. It was
not the full response she’d hoped for, but she was trying to be patient. The thing had been decided, had it not? She could
wait, and would.
Men like Gilbert
, Sarie thought,
need time for bright news to sink in
. “All right. We’ll talk about it soon.” She rose up from her chair so surely and so happily that it looked to Gilbert for
a moment as if she had just burst up from the ground, a sudden tree, a fleshy woman-geyser. He refocused his eyes. “Oh, yes,
my dear. We’ll discuss it at great length.” And then he turned back to his little paper, where he scribbled with his pen.
“I am sorting
les détails
, you know,” she said, and Gilbert, a little bit impressed, thought, as he sometimes did,
My Sarie can speak French
, and murmured, “Yes, of course, I’m sure.”

Sarie was relieved. She’d won. She’d had their idea. And Gilbert, she believed, would in good time come around.
He will need to soothe himself at first, because he hasn’t thought of anything and he will owe to me success
. She’d give his manly pride some room. Gilbert, thankful for her silence, began to write down what the Frosty King had told
him (spark plugs, Germany or Japan; fan belts, France or England; flywheels, Emirates; and shipments, island ports and airports).
It occurred to him as he wrote,
flywheels
, that he could not remember, exactly, what Sarie had just said.
Baskets? Hm
.

As he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, an illuminated world emerged before his eyes, one of his own making, and he grew increasingly
intent on keeping all specifics from her until everything was right. He’d reveal nothing to Sarie, to his wife—
My helpmeet
—until he’d seen Kazansthakis one more time and gotten his approval. He’d meet up with the Frosty King for some final talk
and be ready in the end to compose a reassuring letter to great old Uncle James. Or perhaps, he thought, seduced by the idea
of presenting
her with (what was it people said?) a great
fait accompli
, he’d wait a little longer, until Uncle James had been so mightily impressed that everything was set.
Then
, he thought,
I’ll tell Sarie what I’ve done
. Gilbert wanted, shall we say, to impress the woman he had married, the mother of his child, just as, he thought, he had
once done in his youth. Had he not been fine then, a promising young man? And had she not been darling? He was sprouting,
bit by bit, a certain kind of wing.

In the meantime, unimpeded by someone else’s sharper mind, advice, or realism, Sarie’s visions soared. How clever she was!
How amazing that she had in all those years of living in the city, of sitting with her child, of cringing at the thought of
garden parties and of functions, not thought even once about going into business, of setting, so to speak, up shop. She’d
spent years sitting at home, moving slow through rooms, wiping things, folding and unfolding washed and dirty clothes. She’d
only had one child, and late—and for this Sarie was glad, grateful for whatever it had been that had kept her insides free.
But free for
what?
she asked herself, feeling now that she must hurry. She’d had so much
time!

Lots of people started businesses, so it seemed to her. Even, no, especially, in the Jilima highlands (
Where, in some way
, Sarie thought,
I am really from
). Men sold everything they could, transformed trash into commodities (rubber tires for molding into shoes, beaten tin for
making mixing spoons and lamps), and women, too, did things. Women sold tomatoes, onions, woven fans, and carpets; they fashioned
brooms from twigs, and ladles from palm husks. In Sarie’s new conception of herself, she, lost child, little Belgian girl,
had grown up at the breast of enterprise, suckling acumen and savvy from everyone she knew. She began to think more deeply
of herself. Of how she’d come to be, of who she might become. And in that other part of her, the part that she had
felt so still and quiet when she woke from her idea, she thought about Majid Ghulam, whom she hadn’t seen for several days.
But, oh, how she wished to share her thoughts with him! How she missed her other man! She’d go, she thought. She’d go see
him alone, and revel in their limbs.