Nine Fingers by Thom August Read Free Book Online Page B

something, all I caught was ‘it
     sounds like…’ ”
    “It sounds like you’re having an interesting experience of the music business,” he said, and with that comment, cryptic as
     it was, it was over.
    We cruised east on DesPlaines, just plowing along. The snow up here was about seven inches deep, and piling up. I was thinking
     that maybe it was becoming the kind of night to deadhead to O’Hare, a rarely attempted maneuver, and see if I could pick up some scraps—people finally giving up, airport staff who didn’t
     want to drive, whatever.
    I was also thinking about why I was jabbering on and on to this perfectly strange stranger about my perfectly strange hobby,
     if that’s what it was, and why I was feeling so this-way-and-that-way about it, when up ahead loomed the Marriott. I swung
     in along a path of lights glowing softly through a thick coating of snow. We pulled up under the canopy. I stopped the meter
     and gave him the total, about twenty-two bucks. He pulled the money clip and handed me a twenty and a ten, said “Thanks. Keep
     it.” That half-smile again. I handed him a receipt, and he snaked it into his pocket. He tucked that case under his arm, pulled
     his coat closer around himself, placed his hand on the door handle, then turned and said, “Good luck with the music. And play
     your piano, every single day, no matter what,” and was gone out the door. I could see him wave off the doorman, politely,
     as if it were some failing of his that he wasn’t yet frail enough to need help; then he went in through the revolving doors
     and was gone.
    Interesting fare, I was thinking, when one of the doormen blew his whistle directly in my fucking ear—me turning to face front
     as he swiveled to face me. I hear you, I wanted to shout. I fucking hear you.
    I pulled forward a few dozen feet. I looked through the window and it wasn’t snowing, it was raining. Big fat drops splattering
     on the windshield, increasing in intensity as I sat. I turned the wipers from intermittent to full. What was this shit?
    Suddenly there was a knocking on the driver’s window. I rolled it down two inches. It was the doorman again. “You can’t park
     here. If you’re going to wait you have to move it over to the cabstand there, on the other side of the circle,” he said, swinging
     his arm.
    “Yeah, I got you,” I said, like this was news or something. “What’s with this rain? Is it going to wash all this snow away?
     Wouldn’t that be nice?”
    “Not gonna happen,” he said.
    “Say again?” I asked.
    “Temperature’s dropping. They say it’s gonna rain for an hour, then drop into the teens and freeze,” he said. Curious—he sounded
     strangely happy telling me this. What, like he wasn’t going to be outside in this mess chipping ice while I was sliding all
     over the roads? Where was the fellow feeling, the salary man’s solidarity?
    “Sounds like lots of fun for all of us,” I said, sarcastically.
    “You weren’t here in ’78, were you?” he asked.
    “You mean that blizzard, the one that stopped Massachusetts for a week?” I asked. “No, where I was it mostly missed us.” Where
     I was was still practically in diapers, but for some reason I didn’t mention that.
    “Well, out here,” he said, “it snowed about a foot, rained two inches, froze, and the temperature didn’t get above twenty
     degrees for the next week. Highest murder rate in the city’s history, that was. People killing each other over a fucking parking
     space. Lot of heart attacks, too, people trying to get their cars open with scrapers, picks, hatchets, acetylene torches…I remember in my neighborhood there were cars that didn’t get opened until April. A fucking mess. ‘The Deep Freeze,’ the
     TV assholes called it.”
    Great.
    “Well, sounds like fun for all of us, ” I repeated.
    Some people do not respond to sarcasm, and he was one of them. He leaned back from the window, gave the car a rap, not too