for the best in town

by Rick Krizman

WHEN I CHECKED IN for my cab at five o’clock, the winter sun had already dropped behind the green wall of Fenway. I was an hour late and famished but had to bag a couple of fares before I could afford a slice at Santori’s. I got one to go and sat in the cab without moving, blowing on the hot cheese and watching all the other cars not moving either. On the radio, Johnny Most was making the Celtics pregame shoot-around sound more interesting than it was. I finished up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and went to work, bullying the cab across four lanes toward a Beacon Hill back street, fishing for a game-bound latecomer.

Ten minutes later, I dropped off at the Garden and wheeled around toward North Station, honking past Norm, who was leaning on the top cab, lucky 222. Norm liked to play North Station: short rides, white people going to civilized places—the airport, ritzy Back Bay, or the nearby working-class Charlestown—instead of the more “colorful” neighborhoods, as he put it, in Roxbury or Jamaica Plain, “where just robbing the driver never seemed to be enough.”

I pulled in line behind Skeeter, who was behind Rami, with Norm first, all of them out smoking, and I got out and lit up with them. Norm was telling a story about a recent fare.

“So the back door opens and a guys sticks his head in. ‘Airport?’ he says, and I say ‘You bet.’ I hear the door slam and I peel out of there, thinking it’s a good time to hit the cab pool at Logan. Traffic’s light and I’m booking it through the tunnel when about halfway through I turn around to ask the guy what airline, and fuck me, there’s nobody there.”

“What, he fell out of your cab?” said Rami.

“No, you dipshit, he never got in,” Skeeter said. “You only heard the door close, right, Norm?”

Norm’s radio squawked. “There she blows,” he said and yelled his number into the mic. The dispatcher gave him an address in the North End, and he grinned and peeled off.

I eased my cab up, flipped my spent butt out the window, already half through my first pack of Marlboros, and opened the paper to peruse the night’s events, noting the times, trying to envision the rip-tides and eddies peculiar to a given evening—the alternating current between the bars and clubs and concerts at the Orpheum or the Paradise; the migrations of horny conventioneers to the Combat Zone, who I’d pick up later from discreet Back Bay apartments; then the two o’clock last-calls, the broken hearts at two-thirty, bartenders at three, the sweet little-old-lady phone operators half an hour later. Then I might enjoy a final smoke, windows down, drifting through the clammy air of the waterfront and listening to the dinging buoys and foghorns mooing over the bay, or one night, a saxophone off somewhere, some tortured melody warping its way through the downtown alleys.

I didn’t notice that, ahead of me, Skeeter and Rami had gotten rides until I heard my own back door skritch open then slam shut. I turned to make sure somebody was actually there: a guy, maybe late-twenties, polo shirt, short hair, trim mustache. Probably coming home from work, tired, ready to call it a day, go home to his family or girlfriend or wife.

“You go to Charlestown?” the guy said. “Sorry, short ride.”

“Can’t everybody be going to New York,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Get over to High Street and I’ll show you.”

I poked the meter and U-turned toward the bridge. It was so close the guy could’ve almost walked, might even be faster this time of day. But the bridge was clear, and my luck held as the red lights domino-ed to green, and soon we were halfway up Bunker Hill, where the stench of downtown fumes gave way to a tangy ocean breeze. Off to the right, over the tops of the squared apartments and rows of clapboard bungalows, I could see the USS Constitution, silhouetted like a ghost ship against the graying sky.

“Take this left,” the guy said. “Keep going and I’ll tell you when.”

I steered down a street that wasn’t much more than an alley, threading my way between the parked cars that hugged in from either side. The road hooked a sharp left, and the cab bucked over the potholes until I was forced to a stop in front of a construction barrier.

“When,” the polo guy said. The back door opened and slammed shut, and then he was hightailing it up the hill towards what I recognized as the back of the projects. “$2.25” glowed forlorn on the meter. I was pissed, but tough shit, you just amortize it.

Halfway up the hill, polo guy turned back to me in the cab and held open his arms, staring at me, daring me, and I thought of the stories about other drivers who’d taken that dare. They weren’t happy endings. Then he gave a funny glance toward the back of my cab, and my stomach registered something that hadn’t yet made it to my mind.

Two gunshots cracked from behind the car. I ducked and went for the gearshift. A black-masked face appeared at my rolled-up window, something hard struck against the glass; then again, as I jerked down the lever. Another blow, shards flying, then one more, and broken glass avalanched over me. I got into reverse and slammed the pedal, and the cab rocketed backwards. On a Hail Mary, I dragged the wheel hard to the left and the car squealed around the turn, then bounded out from between the parked cars and into the middle of High Street, where it fishtailed to a stop.

It took a long moment before I recognized the ringing in my ears as blaring car horns, and I hardly recognized the hand that fumbled for the microphone or the voice babbling to my dispatcher. I felt around my chest, wondering if I’d been shot, looking for blood, and stupidly splintering myself on bits of glass. A voice rolled out of the radio, weirdly reasonable. “Where are you? Are you okay? Pull out of the street.” I coasted over to a red-painted curb, wondering ludicrously if someone was going to write me a ticket, then leaned my head back against the partition and held perfectly still, my entire body pulsing. My breathing slowed, and the honking gave way to the sound of traffic picking up where it left off. I used my jacket to swipe at some more glass, inspected myself for leaks, and finding none, told the dispatcher I guessed I was all right. The radio returned to business as usual, and I steered my bruised vehicle slowly onto High Street, right past a woman clutching bags of groceries with her arm outstretched.

Two nights later, I was wrapping up another shift, lined up in the drafty Town Taxi garage at four in the morning. The shaggy assemblage of drivers squinted beneath the fluorescent overheads, smoking and trash-talking. Turned out Skeeter had a hundred-dollar night. Rami was pulling an impressive lump of bills out of his sock, and a whiff of marijuana came from the Turk, who was waltzing around in some kind of tai-chi performance as if the open garage door was a stage. Norm cut into line behind me, said he’d heard about the deal in Charlestown the other night, and I told him the story.

“You’re lucky that guy was such a dumbfuck,” Norm said.

“How’s that?” I said.

“If he’d had any sense, he’d a left the back door open.”

On Christmas Eve, the Arctic express was funneling down from Canada, and I walked through swirling snowflakes to the Town Taxi garage to get an early start on the evening. When I rolled through Kenmore Square and onto Commonwealth, the snow was already piling up and the roads were getting crunchy. As far as I could see, I was one of the only cars on the road.

Maybe I was depressed. Not clinically, you know, probably just the blues. But whatever the case, for the first time in my twenty-eight years, I wouldn’t be going back to the ancestral home in Kansas City for Christmas. I’d reached the point where I could no longer explain, to myself or anyone, how I’d diddled away almost a decade since my high-falutin’ William and Mary philosophy degree. Senior year, I joined a band and that was it for my academic aspirations. I moved to Boston to attempt music school, with mixed success, and since then, I’d played in a long string of half-assed bands, wrote many doleful ballads, and felt around for any remaining handholds that would pull me into a successful career as a musician and songwriter. Five years of freezing and starving and gigging and writing. Growing up in suburban Kansas, I’d always been the smart one, i.e., the smarty-pants, but I never felt superior or enlightened. Mostly, I felt left out. And now, exhausted by the whole deal, I didn’t want to hear any more “What are you up to?” questions, which would only make me feel even more odd man out at my family’s Christmas table. I didn’t want to account to anybody for anything, because I knew I’d come out on the short end.

In Copley Square, a woman waved frantically at me, and I pulled over. She had a swaddled baby in one arm and a large Filene’s bag in the other. She huddled into the back seat.

“Oh my God, you are the gift of the angels,” she said and gave her baby a squeeze. I put on my Santa hat and handed her a candy cane. Before I could pull out, somebody pounded on my passenger side window, and against my better instincts I opened the door. A middle-aged man in a greatcoat stood there shivering and holding the hand of his young son. We worked out that they were all heading the same way, so I beckoned the father-son duo into the front and headed around the park and up Commonwealth towards Brookline.

“It’s terrible out there,” the man said. “The T’s down.”

His kid, having warmed up a bit, started poking around and zeroed out the meter.

“Billy, no,” said his dad, but I handed the kid a candy cane and told him no problem. The man fished out two twenties and handed them to me. “This should cover. Hers, too.”

And that’s how the night went. Every time I dropped off, I was greeted by more people than I could carry and worked out routes and destinations and loaded up the cab and did my best to get everyone home, to a store, to Grandma’s, or wherever they were desperate enough to want to go on this freezing, snow-plagued night. I kept the meter off and humbly appreciated the tens and twenties stacking up in my candy cane bowl. The cab itself became a festive holiday party with guests shifting in and out, everyone happy and gracious, enlivened by the season and glad to be warm and on their way. Nobody cared that I was a starving artist, that I’d blown off my privileged legacy, that I was perhaps a disappointment to my family, and to myself. Somehow it didn’t matter that I might not have first-tier keyboard chops or didn’t know how to write a hit song, or any song that anybody might want to listen to. These were my people, whom I loved unconditionally, and I was their Santa Claus, granting everyone’s wishes. Naughty or nice, I didn’t care.

By eleven o’clock, the stores were closed. The last shoppers had been tucked into their warm homes, and I was delivering the few remaining employees here and there through the pillowed snow. I was exhausted beyond belief and just wanted to hit the barn. One more ride, I thought—and just then a young man hopped into the back and gave me an address in a part of Jamaica Plain I preferred not to frequent. Plus, it was further than I wanted to go. I sized him up in the rearview but couldn’t see much more than a dark face tucked inside a puffy coat and hood. But okay, it’s Christmas, and this is the next act of kindness in a charmed night. We squeaked through the unplowed streets to his place, a three-decker on a challengingly hilly street. At this point, if he beat me for the fare, I didn’t care, but he got out of the cab like a gentleman and tossed a twenty through the partition.

I flipped around and headed toward home. A block further, a church appeared in the midst of a winter wonderland. The wind had died, and the snow drifted down in large, feathery flakes, draping itself over the grounds and piling up on the outstretched arms of the beckoning cross. Light glowed out of the arched windows, and I could hear singing from inside. I hadn’t been to midnight Mass in years and thought then how much it used to mean when I was an altar boy singing in the choir, all of us in our cassocks and surplices, holding candles in the darkened church. The magic of Catholicism had disappeared a long time ago, but at that moment I felt drawn to either nostalgia or a new mystery, so I pulled the cab over and walked into the church. The liturgy was in Spanish, and well underway, so I removed my hat and eased into a back pew. I felt warm and safe and might have dozed off a bit, because suddenly the priest was giving a final blessing, and then we were all shuffling back out into the night.

The snow-damped landscape—quiet, glowing in the ambient light from the church—was a different world from the one I’d left. I found my cab and eased back into the street, happy to end the night on such a fine note. A block away a man flagged me, but I was done, and really, this was not a neighborhood where I picked up. I tried not to look at him as I passed, but there he was in the rearview, alone, hands stuffed in his pocket. “Probably a gun,” I thought as an act of self-justification, but the glow from the previous hour intervened and against my better instincts, I steered back towards him.

“Wait here,” he said. He went up to a house and after a few moments emerged with two other men. Fuck, I thought, here we go. But then other people followed and there was Mom, Grandma, and two young kids, their arms all full of packages. I opened the trunk, and they piled them in, then squeezed into the front and back of the cab. It was a tight but cozy fit.

“So where we going?” I asked.

“East Boston. We’ll show you,” said the man I’d stopped for.

East fucking Boston? From here it was the other end of the universe, a huge ride. As we crunched down the empty streets, they explained in halting English that they were delivering presents to their family in East Boston and kept blessing me and thanking me for being there. It was a long but jolly ride, the kids bumptious and the adults laughing and trying to tell me stuff in Spanish I didn’t understand. We finally got through the tunnel and pulled up to a small bungalow where my new best friends hoisted the presents from the trunk and steadied each other through the snow to an open door that spilled light and warmth out into the night. The one man stayed behind, and I thought he was going to pay me the fare, which was humongous.

“Please wait,” he said. “We are going back soon.” He disappeared into the house without having paid the fare, leaving me alone and unsure. But ten uncertain minutes later, the door opened and the whole crew piled into the cab again, and off we went back to Jamaica Plain. In the front seat the kids fell asleep on Grandma, and I heard light snoring from the back.

It was who-the-hell-knows o’clock when I finally dropped them off. The man wished me a Feliz Navidad and slid a one-hundred-dollar bill into my candy cane basket. I wanted to refuse it, to tell him how this remarkable event—in fact the entire night—may well have saved my very soul, that I needed to pay for my shame and my doubts and give thanks that the world was not at its core the cruel and fearful thing that for so long had enabled my distrust and cynicism. But then he was gone, and I was left alone to sort out my own conflicting feelings. My conscious mind was done for the night and my exhausted brain burned with a collage of faces and traffic lights and blowing snow and doors opening and closing, the droning of the priest and laughter of the kids and howling of the wind. I put the cab in gear and headed back to the garage, to a beer and a warm bed, and to whatever might come next.

About the author:

Rick Krizman writes music, stories, and poems and holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. His fiction has appeared in The Wising Up Press, Sediment, Flash Fiction Magazine, Star 82 Review, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Driftwood, Switchback, The Big Smoke America, and elsewhere. His first novel, Big Sausage, will be dropping in March, 2025. Rick is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and other animals in Santa Monica, CA. You can find him on Bluesky and learn about him here.