6 to 6: Don't Die Before Your Mother

Outside the hotel, two little old ladies climbed into the back seat of my cab and felt the air conditioner.

“2212 North Inn Road,” one of them said.

“Are you sure it’s not North INA Road?” I said into the rearview mirror. I had long, scraggly brown hair and my eyes looked as red as a sunset.

“No, no, no,” the same woman said. “2212 North Inn Road. I should know my own son’s address, shouldn’t I?”

The other woman was silent.

“2212 North Inn Road is a bowling alley,” I said.

“No, it’s not, it’s my son’s house,” she said. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Matt.”

“Well, Matt,” she said, “when we get there, you’ll see.”

So, I drove over there and we sat looking at the bowling alley.

“What else can happen, Linda?” she said. “We came all the way from Chicago, we put an ad in the paper that cost me $140, and now the cab driver doesn’t know where John’s house is.”

“Ma’am,” I said, “you have the wrong address.”

She exploded. “I DON’T HAVE THE WRONG ADDRESS! JESUS! What’s going on? First my son goes and croaks on me, and now I’ve got to deal with all this.”

Linda nodded and kept her fat hands in her fat lap. I called my boss over the two-way radio.

“They’ve got the address wrong,” my boss, Harriet, blurted over the crackle. “She must be talking about North Ina.”

“You tell that lady she is in the wrong business,” the old woman said, pointing her wrinkled old finger at the radio.

“She’s been driving a cab in this town for thirty years,” I said.

“Look,” she said, “my son is dead. I have to find his house and sell it. Okay?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do your mother a favor,” she said. “Get a wife. Get a wife so your mother doesn’t have to deal with it when you croak. You married?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good boy,” she said.

“John ate fast food every day,” the woman said. “He was a bachelor. He moved here when he was 19, and that’s just what bachelors do: they eat fast food and don’t worry about it.”

“Can’t you call someone about the address?” I said.

“I don’t have a phone,” she said. “Do you think everyone in the world has a cell phone?”

I handed her my cell phone.

“Who am I going to call?” she said.

“You could call Geneva,” Linda said quietly.

“I guess I could call Geneva,” Diane said.

She managed to dial the number in three attempts.

“Be there, Geneva,” Diane said, while it rang. “For once in your life, be there—hello, Geneva, it’s Diane…” She sighed as she realized it was only an answering machine.

Frustrated, I pulled back onto the road and headed back toward their hotel.

Well, then she sure got busy with that phone. She kept calling numbers, but no one answered.

“Isn’t anyone home?” she said.

She finally got a busy signal. She waited a minute and then called the number again. It rang, and rang, kept ringing.

“It was busy a minute ago,” Diane said.

“Some vacation,” Linda said, looking out the window at the brilliant day. Three blocks from their hotel, at River and Campbell, by miracle a human being was contacted on the phone. However, Diane couldn’t seem to get the person on the other line to understand the situation. So she handed the phone to me.

“Hello?” I said.

The other person on the line turned out to be a 93-year-old woman in Summum, Ohio.

“Do you know where we are going?” I said loudly.

“Yes,” the old woman on the phone said.

“How do we get there?” I said.

“Where are you now?” the old woman said.

“On River Road.”

“That’s not where it is,” the old woman said.

“You don’t say,” I said.

“It’s a long way from there,” the old woman said.

“What’s the closest cross street?”

“It’s off of Park Avenue…”

I hung up.

“Well?” Diane said accusingly. “You figure it out?”

“It’s on North INA, which is off Park,” I said.

Diane sank back in her seat and braced herself for the G-forces of my U-turn. Linda had a slight smile on her face.

When I pulled up to 2212 North Ina, she said, “There it is, I told you!” The meter said $74.45. I only charged them $50 because I felt sorry for them.

Diane told me they needed a ride back to the hotel at four that afternoon. They were not going to sleep in a dead man’s house. It would be another $50, so I agreed.

When I showed up at four to take them back to the hotel, they were standing in the yard behind the closed security gate. It was heavy steel, about six feet tall. When I had dropped them off earlier, the gate was open. The rest of the property was surrounded by a cement block wall.

I wondered about the strange son who had died before his mother. I pulled up and got out of my cab and looked at them standing in there like captured animals, half-blind in the afternoon sun. Diane had white, short cropped hair. She reminded me of an effeminate man. Linda was Hispanic. She had dark skin with hundreds of little brown moles all over the sides of her face and neck. She used a cane because of a bad right hip.

“Damn thing shut on us, it’s fucking haunted!” Diane said, holding the bars like someone in jail. “Can you believe this?”

She asked me for my phone and she started dialing numbers.

“I can’t wait here all day,” I said.

“Go on, go on,” Diane shooed me away. “We’ll call the fire department and they’ll come and get us out of here.”

I stood there. Shit.

I climbed over the fence with some difficulty.

“There must be a switch or something,” I said, out of breath.

We looked everywhere, inside and outside the house; no switches.

I saw a ladder in the backyard of the neighbor’s house, climbed back over the wall, and knocked on the door. No one answered, so I went around back and grabbed the ladder anyway.

“How’s Linda going to climb a ladder?” Diane said.

“We could try,” I said. Linda gave a small nod of consent.

I leaned the ladder against the wall and held it.

“Okay, Linda,” I said.

She hesitantly stepped up to the ladder.

“I’ve got you,” I said, holding the ladder while Linda slowly lifted her left foot up to the first rung. She reached the second rung and then the third, one at a time, each a great effort. If she toppled backwards with her weight, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

At the top, she celebrated with a “Hurrah!” Then she realized she could not lift her leg up over the wall.

“Try going up backwards,” I said.

The slow process began again downwards and then she turned around and started to put her foot up backwards.

“Like this?” she said.

“You can do it.”

She did it. At the top, she moved, one inch at a time, her fat ass onto the wide flat top of the cement block wall. I put my hand on the pendulous waddle of her upper arm. She got both her legs over and was sitting on the wall with me and was quite happy about her accomplishment. She giggled. I moved the ladder over the fence and hopped over and situated the ladder under Linda from the other side.

“Okay,” I said. “Come on down.” She began to lower herself and we held our breath.

All this time, Diane was talking on my cell phone.

“Yes, Jackie,” Diane was saying, “we tried that. We’ve tried everything. No, I can’t get hold of Bill. I can’t get hold of Bill and the cab driver’s here and it already cost me $73 for the cab ride, and he couldn’t find the address and then we stayed out here all afternoon and no buyers showed up…”

I noted what she said about the fare being $73 instead of the $50.

“…they got a ladder,” Diane said, “What?…Yes, Linda’s going over right now.”

Diane smiled at Linda, who was just then reaching the ground on the other side.

“Land,” Linda said, like a sailor after months at sea.

“…Okay,” Diane said. “Bye.”

Diane handed the phone up to me. “My daughter,” she said. “She lives in Michigan. I thought she might know something. But of course, she didn’t. Watch: she’ll die on me next.”

She nimbly climbed up the ladder and over the wall, a regular gymnast.

“Some vacation,” Linda said.

“But you climbed the ladder,” I said.

“I can’t believe I did it,” she beamed. “What was I thinking?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Diane said. “If John was here, I’d kick his ass, I swear I would.”

We all climbed into the cab and were laughing by the time we were halfway back.

I showed Diane and Linda a bakery near their hotel and suggested they have breakfast there. I rolled up to the hotel doors. Diane paid, including a tiny tip. They moaned and groaned with the creaking of old bones as they climbed out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk. They waved goodbye and disappeared into the resort lobby.

“232 Clear,” I said into the radio mike.

“10-4, 232,” the dispatcher said.

I sat there for a minute. Then I slowly drove over to Jacob’s Park. I dialed a number on my cell phone, back in Illinois, but then didn’t make the call.

***

This is an excerpt from Mather Schneider’s new memoir, 6 to 6. You can purchase the book from Terror House Press here.