FALL

21

SKID ROAD

TAYLOR TURNS THE HANDI-VAN UP Yesler Way, climbing the long hill above the waterfront. The streets are lined with dapple-trunked sycamores. From between the buildings come sliced glimpses of cold-looking water. A blind passenger in the seat behind her is telling Taylor about how she is forgetting the colors. She has lost all of them now but blue. “I think I recall blue,” the woman says, “but I haven’t seen it for forty years, so I have no idea how far off track I might really be.”

Taylor stops carefully at a light. This morning she made a hard stop at a railroad and someone’s seeing-eye dog slid all the way up the aisle from the back. She could hear the toenails scraping over the grooves in the rubber floor mat.

After the van had come to a respectable stand-still, the dog simply got up and walked back to the rear of the van, making Taylor feel terrible, the way people do when you step on their toes and they sigh but don’t say a word.

“I never thought about that, that you might forget colors,” Taylor says, trying to concentrate on her driving and also be friendly to the blind passenger, although this conversation is depressing her deeply. She recognizes the woman as a regular: Tuesdays and Fridays, for dialysis.

“Oh, you do, you forget,” the woman insists. “It’s not like forgetting somebody’s name. It’s more like you have in mind your idea of a certain color but it might drift, you know. The same way you can drift off the note a little bit when you’re singing.”

Taylor’s radio comes on in a fit of static and demands to know her location.

“I just plussed at Pioneer Square and I’m ten-nineteen to Martin Luther King,” she says. “I have two minuses at Swedish Hospital.”

“Okay, Taylor, ten-twenty-seven after that,” says the radio.

“Ten-four,” she replies.

To get the job with Handi-Van, Taylor only needed a good driving record, a Washington State license, and three weeks of training, plus a course in CPR. The hardest part was learning to use the radio code, which she still feels is unnecessary. It doesn’t actually save syllables, in Taylor’s opinion; for instance, “ten-twenty-seven” is no easier to say than “return to base.” It’s probably less embarrassing to say “ten-twelve” than “I need a bathroom break,” but the code doesn’t keep any secrets, she has discovered. Yesterday the radio announced a 10-161, and all six of her passengers looked up and asked anxiously, “What’s that?” Taylor had to read the code display on her sun visor to find out it meant an intersection obstructed by an injured animal. She could imagine every Handi-Van driver in the city looking up at the sun visor on that one.

On her way up Yesler, Taylor passes her own apartment, which resides in a long brown box of a building with twenty identical doors in the front, spaced every twenty feet or so like boxcars. The apartment is gloomy, with battle-scarred linoleum and precariously thin walls and neighbors on both sides who shout a lot in what sounds like Chinese; sometimes Taylor gets the feeling the two sets of neighbors are shouting at each other, using her apartment as a conduit for curses or strange instructions. But it’s a roof over their heads, for now, and she’s feeling more optimistic about finances. It took only about two-thirds of the $1,200 Alice gave her to pay the first month, get the lights on and move in. The rest she hid away inside a plastic cube on her night table that has family photos smiling on all six sides—Jax and Turtle back home in the Retarded Desert; Jax wearing his swimsuit and a paper bag over his head; a very old snapshot of Alice shelling out lima beans; that kind of thing. Taylor figures that’s the last household object on earth a burglar would steal. Barbie is still with them, and was partly responsible for their winding up here; she insists the Pacific Northwest is on the verge of becoming very popular. She also agreed to use some of her loot to help cover expenses. For the time being, Barbie looks after Turtle in the daytime, and starting this week, Taylor is making eight dollars an hour.

She has decided she likes this city, which seems like Tucson’s opposite, a place where no one will ever think to look for them. Bodies of water lie along every side, and snowy, triangular mountains crouch on the horizon, helping her to orient her mind’s compass needle as she winds through un-familiar city streets. Several times each day she has to drive the van across the lake on one of the floating bridges that bob like a long, narrow barge. Apparently they couldn’t anchor them, as is usual with bridge construction, because the lakes are too silty and deep to sink concrete roots into. Taylor got this information and a world of other facts from Kevin, a fellow Handi-Van driver who has asked Taylor seven or eight times if she would like to go out with him.