It was the dead time of the night for taxi drivers. The last group of telephone operators had been picked up and taken home, and there was nothing to do now but wait for the bars to close and for the last rush of passengers who would finish out my card for the night. I had made enough money by 10 p.m. to pay for the daily taxi lease. The rest of the night, everything I made was mine to keep. I had just finished an airport run and rolled into the White Castle parking lot on West Broadway, where I planned to grab a coffee and listen to the radio for any calls that might come in. I wasn’t hopeful of any work until the bars closed, but sometimes the dispatcher would be begging for a cab in one of the suburbs, and even though I would be standing by downtown, I would volunteer, jumping on I-64 or I-65 and making a run for it. At that time of the night, I could get to just about anywhere in the metro area in 15 minutes. In my 10 months driving a taxi, police radar hadn't yet spoiled my quest to make a living.
“I need two in St. Matthews. I need one in Butchertown”, the radio crackled. I grabbed the microphone from the dash and yelled out my cab number, “576!, 576!”, but someone else beat me to the call in Butchertown. I was able to grab the other call. It was for a nightclub in the shopping center. I raced down Broadway and jumped on the interstate. I pulled up to the club to find a young woman standing out front. “Did you call a cab? What’s the name?" I asked her through the open window. “Yes, Williams”, she replied. I leaned over the bench seat in the front of the cab and pushed open the right rear door for her. It would be bad form to leave a passenger at the curb who had called us while someone else took the cab they had called for.
It turned out to be a good call; she was headed almost 20 miles out on old Route 42, and with no traffic, I would be able to put those miles on the meter in no time. The young woman was chatty and was telling me all about the friends she had met there that evening. She was tired and wanted to leave early. She had a big exam on Monday and wanted to spend a good part of the next day studying for it.
It was somewhat unusual to have such a chatty passenger, and usually, I would not mind, as it made the night go by just that much faster. But at the moment, her endless chatter was not welcome. We were traveling through a construction zone where this portion of Route 42 was being widened from two to four lanes. On the right edge of the road, earth had been removed nearly 20 feet below the surface we traveled along. The only thing between this beat-up Plymouth and sudden death was a series of small steel poles bearing yellow reflectors. I had been making good time, but lowered my speed to 60 as I swung the wheel right and left, taking up the slack in the steering and trying to keep as far away from the drop-off along the right curb as possible.
There was no traffic coming up behind me, but every few minutes a vehicle would pass in the other direction. My young passenger continued to relate her life story to me, and then I saw something ahead that worried me. It looked like the oncoming set of headlights might be in my lane. I was hoping it was just an illusion, but as the vehicle got closer, I became more certain it was traveling head-on toward me. I looked to the right, and there was no relief from the dangerous drop that I had been following for the last ten minutes or so. I slowed and considered stopping, but that seemed stupid. What good would it do to be going slow if this guy was going to hit me head-on? I considered crossing over into the left lane and using the gravel along the curb as an exit route, but that had risks as well. What if the oncoming driver became aware of his/her errant lane position and swung back to the right? I flashed the lights and laid on the horn, but I was running out of time. I calculated a position where I had to swerve to the left and started a countdown while continuing to flash the lights and honk the horn.
“Five, four, three, two”, I counted silently. Then it came, “one”. It was time to make a decision. A decision that might be the last one I ever make in my life. I don’t recall what I had decided. I am not sure I had made any decision when I reached that final number in my countdown. The oncoming car swerved violently to the right, then swished by safely at high speed. My hands were shaking violently as I pulled off the road into a small gas station that had long ago been shuttered.
I looked in the rearview mirror, and my passenger was babbling on. She didn’t seem to notice that we had stopped or to be aware of the event that had just transpired.
