The Cage Keeper by André Dubus III Page A

thumb out in the air.
    WHEN THE BIG yellow taxi pulls over with a screech in front of Freeze, Lorilee turns her face away from Barry’s warm open mouth and says, “But we don’t have any money.”
    Barry looks at her with half-closed eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Waters.” Then he pulls her after him and Freeze, who has just opened the front door at the passenger side and climbed in. A hot wave rolling through her stomach, Lorilee follows Barry into the backseat then pulls the door shut beside her.
    “El Cerrito, right?”
    “Yeah,” Freeze says.
    Dave guides the old taxi back into the lighted stream of traffic and into the tunnel.
    “You Berkeley students?”
    “No,” Freeze says.
    “Just hanging out and taking it easy, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    Dave feels the silence before it comes; he reaches down to turn up the radio.
    Freeze is tapping the armrest with his knuckles, trying to keep the rest of his body still. Lorilee sees him look at the thick sheath muscle in the driver’s upper arm, its slight roll when he turns the knob on the radio, and as she watches, Freeze glances too at the swell of chest muscles that push tight against his T-shirt. They come out of the tunnel into the twilight and start down the hill.
    “Where in El Cerrito, buddy?” Dave asks, smelling the booze now, the combination of that and young people and silence beginning to feel wrong to him; he reaches up to scratch a nonexistent itch at his temple then flexes his arm before bringing it back to the wheel.
    “Don’t matter.” Freeze turns around to Barry and Lorilee sitting in the growing dark in the backseat, Barry’s face looking oatmeal-colored, moonlike. Freeze lets his left arm drop behind the seat to touch Barry’s knee. Lorilee looks at the hand, sees it tap Barry’s leg then turn over fast and open-palmed. She watches it do the same movement again, this time faster. Then Barry’s bulk shifts beside her as he moves to reach into his back pocket. She watches his pale closed fist move slowly to cover Freeze’s hand. Freeze clears his throat loud as his thumb and forefinger flick open the blade of the black wood-handled knife. Dave looks over at the lean sunglassioed face to his right. “I can take you as far as Ernie’s Pizza on San Pablo Street.”
    Freeze nods his head and Dave looks back at the road lit yellow now from the streetlamps. He looks in the rearview mirror at the pudgy one with the shaved head, at the blond girl with the most hound-doggish face he has ever seen, then he sees the huge bruise on her cheek and as quickly as Jell-O sliding off a plate, he feels the elation of just a few moments ago leave him.
    Barry puts his arm around Lorilee but she doesn’t let him pull her to him. She is looking at how tight Freeze seems to be gripping the knife, the blade pointing straight at the door behind the driver. She looks at the back of the driver’s head then sees the clean-looking boylike face in the rearview. He’s nice, she thinks. Then the driver’s eyes move up to the mirror and are looking into hers. Lorilee looks away so fast she is afraid she might have made a noise. She looks at the side of Freeze’s face, at his black oily hair, and she sees his eyes looking at the driver from behind his dark sunglasses, hears the tap of his knuckles above the radio, and she begins to rock back and forth on the seat, looks down again at the blade that shines every time they pass under a streetlight. She breathes fast and shallow as they uncoil dark and slick inside her, the pain of her buttocks having melted into something else now. And as Barry burps then drops his hand to her breast, she smells the stomach stench of his rum and closes her eyes to her nipple hardening under her shirt, to the moon-fixed feeling that this is it, this is what she has finally brought everyone to.
    She feels the nervous squeeze of Barry’s hand, and hears the static whine of radio music, the tappity tap tap of Freeze’s knuckles in the