Rural Sunset
James had never been outside of New York City in
his entire life.
Suddenly he found himself in a whole new world.
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James pulled his cab into the dirt at the side of the road and turned it off. For a moment he sat still, his eyes pressed shut, his breathing slow and steady. Alone at last, he thought, as the silence enveloped him. That had been one hell of a long drive. Long, loud and nerve-racking. That lawyer hadn't shut his mouth once. Two hours of his drunken jabbering, with James making obligatory grunts in all the right places, while straining to read road signs and sneak peaks at his Rand McNally atlas. Two hours! Shit. And now two more hours to get home. James hadn't thought about that part of the deal when he'd agreed to take the lawyer and his wife to their unusual destination. But when someone waved hundred dollar bills in front of his face, he knew when to grab them. If Amtrak wanted to go on strike he was more than happy to take its leftovers. But now, as he sat in his parked cab trying to calm his nerves, he wondered if the cash really made up for all he'd been through. The highway driving had been tough enough, with everyone speeding and cutting in front of him. But listening to that stupid yuppie's theories on social issues and enduring his prying questions had been excruciating. Even when the guy fell asleep for the last 20 minutes James had remained on edge, sure his wife would take over the inquisition. Thankfully she had kept silent. This easy money hadn't come so easily. James had never been to Massachusetts. He'd never even left New York, in fact, except for a few fares to Jersey City. He'd gotten his road atlas long ago as a birthday gift, and he used it mostly for Long Island fares. It had sure come in handy today, he thought. Plus, getting paid up front was a big incentive for not getting lost. James opened his eyes and looked out the side window. The sun was going down already, he noticed with annoyance. He had driven the night shift many times in the city, but driving long stretches of highway at night was a different story. He would need plenty of coffee. A little fresh air wouldn't hurt either. With this latter thought fresh in his head, James opened the door and stepped out onto the unpaved shoulder. A birch tree off to his left caught his eye and he walked over to examine it. Reaching out, he touched its smooth paper surface. With little effort, he peeled a long section off and examined it a while, alternately crushing and stretching it to test its durability. It might amuse the kids, he thought, as he stuffed it absently into his pocket. They could bring it in for show-and-tell--if they still had such a thing. These days you never knew what a kid would bring in. Just last week they took a gun off of a 10-year-old right in Crown Heights. What a show-and-tell that would have been. His bright yellow cab looked comically out of place on the shoulder of this rural Massachusetts road. Several cars had slowed as they passed, perhaps assuming he was lost, but none had stopped to ask. If only he could pick up another fare around here, he mused with a grin, and get paid again for the trip back to the city. Then he'd have enough money for the week--certainly enough for Friday night poker. James stepped past the trees to the edge of the field. At its far end the setting sun had colored the sky a brilliant orange. His initial gaze of passive curiosity slowly blossomed into a sense of wonder as the full beauty of the sight filtered in. he realized, with amazement, that this was the first time he had ever watched the sun set. He had seen sunsets in movies, but never in the city had he bothered to watch it set. His eyes moved left to the mountain, which rose taller than anything on Wall Street, its trees painted with Autumn's brightest colors. Every fall he had seen trees turn red and drop their leaves, glimpsing them as he sped through Central Park. He thought of them only as a nuisance, making driving slippery in bad weather. He had never before wasted his time gazing at sights and thinking about notions of color and beauty. Yet here, with the endless shades of color flaring across the vast countryside, James was stunned by the absolute beauty of it all. It reminded him of pictures from the National Geographic magazine that someone had once left on his back seat. As he stared across the open field, James began to notice other details. He marveled that the field, which at first had appeared to be just a green, weedy area, was actually dotted with pumpkins--live, growing pumpkins. He had known that they grew somewhere, but he had never seen them on vines before, not even in pictures. Certainly no one in Bed-Stuy grew them in the few gardens he'd seen there. His cab forgotten, James began stepping along a crude path at the field's edge, his feet crushing the leaves that lined the way. He breathed deeply, something he had never desired to do in his life. He thought of the buses he had been trapped behind as he sat in traffic, as they spewed their black fumes in his face. He had grown so used to the air in New York that it never occurred to him it could be any different in other places. The dirt was moist beneath his feet as he walked deeper into the field. He stepped over puddles and potholes, not caring about the growing globs of mud caking his shoes. He never took walks in the city--not unless he had to. What fun was there in walking? Yet here, with mud clinging to his sneakers, James could not stop himself from moving deeper and deeper into the field. His grandfather, he had heard, worked on a farm in Georgia his whole life. His grandfather, in turn, had probably been slaved to it. It was ironic to think that he was as trapped in his world as they had been in theirs. The two worlds were so far apart that he, now entering theirs for the first time, was doing so with a sense of awe and wonder for the things that had been so commonplace to them. To his left he spied what had had been looking for and altered his course. The pumpkin lie on its side, bright orange with a tinge of green near the stem. Lifting it, he felt its weight as the vine fought to hold it down. He was holding a live pumpkin. The kids would really love this. They could carve a face into it and put it in their window, and it could look down from the third story onto Stuyvesant Avenue. James looked at the live pumpkin in his hands. He tried to picture it in its perch on his city windowsill, watching the teenagers and their loud radios, feeling the earth shake when trucks roared by, breathing the pungent New York air. Still holding it he looked up to the sky, listening intently to the profound silence of the evening. There was nothing--no sound at all, save the faraway chirping of a bird. No cars, no sirens, no horns. This all-enveloping silence was something he had never experienced, not even on outings to Prospect Park with the kids. There had always been something to hear, even if just the faraway rush of traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. But here there was nothing--nothing he could identify with, no noise he could locate. It was almost scary in its strangeness--a forlorn and alien world. The sun was almost down now and the sky above the road was nearly black. James looked back at the cab, feeling a sudden twinge of relief at its familiarity. This was not his world. For all its freshness and wonder, it was not meant for him. James lowered the pumpkin back to the earth, feeling it draw toward the comforting arms of its vine. He rose slowly, kicking the mud absently from his shoes, and gazing once more toward the setting sun. Then, with a last look down at the pumpkin, he turned and headed back to his cab, back to his world.
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