The Cage Keeper by André Dubus III

statue, where, during the day, he had seen office workers sit to eat their lunches and read their papers. But then, his hands on the wheel, oblivious to the flash and tick of his indicator, all he saw were faces, some caked with drool and blood-vomit, the men’s heavy-whiskered, the women’s sagging, a few with soft fuzzy-looking beards under their chins. Another cabbie honked behind him, so Dave took the turn to the corner of Seventh and Market then locked his cab and walked into the neon light of the sidewalk past the open doors of bars breathing out electric beats heavy with bass. And just before stepping into the piss-wood cigarette smell of The Cat House Lounge, he looked over his shoulder at the plaza, a shiver skipping down his back.
    Then he was walking out of the jukebox dark of it into a cold rain. The taste of peanuts and draft beer on his tongue, his hands in his pockets, he rocked back slightly on his heels, then caught himself when a man dressed in tight jeans and a bright red athletic club T-shirt stopped in front of him.
    “God it’s cold and wet, isn’t it?”
    But Dave was looking across the street to the rain-mist under the streetlights of the plaza, turned to the man as cool as if he had just been interrupted in conversation and said, “Yep.” Then he crossed the slick asphalt of Market Street alone, and when he got to the sidewalk was already shaking his head. The rain was coming down slowly, but the droplets landed cold and heavy on his forehead and nose. He saw close to thirty of them lying on the benches, each in a cardboard box, their heads sticking out one end, their legs out the other. He stood and watched them, his shoulders hunched in his jacket.
    Dave looks over his shoulder and backs out of the space, then drives straight ahead and turns left off Citadel Drive down the hill toward Berkeley. In the last gold light of day he passes neatly fenced-off gardens and trimmed lawns in front of wood and brick houses. He stops at the bottom of the hill then turns right onto Telegraph into the thick of the afternoon traffic. He looks to either side of him at students and well-dressed working people and a few of those scraggly-haired bearded creatures in torn clothes he knows someday he will be able to help, but not right now, not tonight. And he turns on the radio that is only AM but gets Springsteen rapping out a Jerry Lee Lewis beat. He begins to tap the wheel in time, moving his head to the screaming saxophone, smiling out his rolled-down window at two of those brown-eyed beauties walking on the sidewalk who he knows have probably lived in the States their whole lives and are as American as he, but still he can’t stop seeing them on a torchlit veranda in white dresses, their black hair pulled to one side of their faces, the sky dark with stars over a mesquite desert; he would dance with them all night long over creaking boards, would kiss, then lick the taste of lime and salt out of their mouths. “I’m going to find one of
you,
” he says loud enough for the two women to hear; they turn their heads to him and he puckers his lips for a kiss.
    The red taillights of the cars ahead of him look brighter now. He drives past the cafés and bookstores of Berkeley, and he sees in them the comforting light that those places always seem to have. He looks to his left down San Jacinto, the sun completely gone now behind the dark stretch of hills across the bay, the sky filled with long thin clouds that hang crimson against the tangerine Pacific air. Tomorrow he would write that letter before he did anything else and if his father didn’t like it then too goddamned bad because he wasn’t paying for it anyway. Then he is looking straight ahead again, reaching to change radio stations, when he sees to his right just before the dark arch of the brick tunnel that takes San Pablo Street under a hill into El Cerrito, three people, one of them dark and slim, wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless denim jacket, his