“But one thing, Mother. Just the worst thing to fix.”

  “It’s too late, nothing can fix it. It all started with him. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, may he be reincarnated as a fly that I can swat. May he come back as a fire hydrant for all the dogs to pee against.” Siggy’s mother was impeccably polite in German, but in English she was crude, and, as so often before, Siggy wondered why she still lingered on at a ridiculous ninety-two when Marie, who was delicate and sensitive, was dead. “Don’t be crude, Mother.”

  “I’m an American, I have the papers, I can be crude. Nineteen sixty-eight, that’s when everything went to Hell.”

  “You can’t blame everything on one man.”

  “What do you know? You drive a cab.”

  “One man doesn’t make that big a difference.”

  “What about Adolf Hitler!” his mother said triumphantly, slapping the arms of the wheelchair and rocking back and forth. “Adolf Hitler! One man! Just like Richard Nixon, may his electric razor short-circuit and fry his face.”

  She was still laughing and cursing Nixon when Siggy finally left. Fairy godmother, he said to himself. What do I need a fairy godmother for? I have Mom.

  But the dream wouldn’t go away. The fairy godmother kept flitting in and out, hovering on the edges of all his dreams, wordlessly saying, “Hurry and make up your mind, Siggy. Fairy godmothers are busy, you’re wasting my time.”

  “Don’t push me,” he said. “I’m being careful.”

  “I’ve got other clients, give me a break.”

  “I resent being pushed around by figments of my imagination,” he said. “I get one wish, I want to use it right.” When he woke up, he was vaguely embarrassed that he was taking the fairy godmother so seriously in his dreams. “Just a dream,” he said to himself. But dream or not, he started doing research.

  He took a poll. He kept a notebook beside him in the cab, and asked people, “Just out of curiosity what’s the worst thing wrong with America? What’s the one thing you’d change if you could?”

  There were quite a few suggestions, but they always came back to Richard Nixon. “It all started with Nixon,” they’d say. Or, “It’s Carter. But if it hadn’t been for Nixon, Carter would never have been elected.”

  “It’s the unions, driving up prices,” said a woman. And then, after a little thought, “If Nixon hadn’t screwed up we might have kept some control in this country.”

  It wasn’t just that his name kept coming up. It was the way people said it. With loathing, with contempt, with fear. It was an emotional word. It sounded evil. They said Nixon the way they might say slime. Or spider.

  Siggy sat one night staring at the results of his poll, unable to get out of his cab because of the thoughts that had taken over his head. I’m crazy, he thought to himself, but his thoughts ignored him and went right on, the fairy godmother giggling in the background. Richard Nixon, said the thoughts. If there could be one wish, it must be used to eliminate Richard Nixon.

  But I voted for him, dammit, Siggy said silently. He thought it would be silent, but the words echoed inside the cab after all. “I voted for him. And I thought he did a damn good job sometimes.” He was almost embarrassed saying the words—they weren’t the kind of sentiment that made a cabby popular with his paying passengers. But thinking of Nixon made him remember the triumphant moment when Nixon said Up Yours to the North Vietnamese and bombed the hell out of them and got them to the negotiating table that one last time. And the wonderful landslide election that kept the crazy man from South Dakota out of the White House. And the trip to China, and the trip to Russia, and the feeling that America was maybe strong like it had been under Roosevelt when Hitler got his ass kicked up into his throat. Siggy remembered that, remembered that it felt good, remembered being angry as the press attacked and attacked and attacked and finally Nixon fell apart and turned out to be exactly as rotten a person as the papers said he was.

  And the feeling of betrayal that he had felt all through 1973 came back, and Siggy said, “Nixon,” and inside the cab his voice sounded even more poisonous than the passengers’.

  If there was something wrong with America, Siggy knew then, it was Richard Nixon. Whether a person had ever liked him or not. Because those who liked him had been betrayed, and those who hated him had not been appeased, and there he was out in California breeding the hatred that surpassed even the hatred for the phone company and the unions and the oil companies and the Congress.

  I will wish him dead, Siggy thought. And inside his mind he could hear the fairy godmother cheering. “Make the wish,” she said.

  “Not yet,” Siggy said. “I’ve got to be fair.”

  “Fair, schmair. Make the wish, I’ve got work to do.”

  “I’ve got to talk to him first,” Siggy said. “I can’t wish him dead without he has a chance to say his piece.”

  Siggy had planned to travel alone. Who would understand his purpose, when he didn’t really understand it himself? He told no one he was going, just pulled five hundred dollars out of the bank and got in his cab and started driving. New Jersey, Pennsylvania; found himself on I-70 and decided what the hell, I-70 goes most of the way, that’s my highway. He stopped at Richmond, Indiana, to go to the bathroom and get something to eat, then decided to spend the night in a cheap motel.

  It was his first night in unfamiliar surroundings in years. It bothered him; things were out of place, and the sheets were rough and harsh, and there weren’t a hundred reminders of Marie and happiness. He slept badly (but, thank heaven, without the fairy godmother), and when he left in the morning he realized that he was lonelier then he thought possible. He wasn’t used to driving without conversation. He wasn’t used to driving without a fare.

  So he picked up a hitchhiker waiting by the on-ramp to the freeway. It was a boy—no, in his own eyes doubtless a man—in his early twenties. Hair fairly long, but cleaner than the usual scruffy roadside bum, and he’d be somebody to talk to, and if there was any trouble, well, Siggy had always carried a tire iron beside the seat, though he was not quite sure what he would ever do with it, or when. It made him feel safe. Safe enough to pull over and pick up the boy.

  Siggy reached over and opened the car door as the boy ran up.

  “Hey, uh,” the boy said, leaning into the car. “I don’t need a cab, I need a free ride.”

  “Don’t we all,” Siggy said, smiling. “I’m from New York City. In Indiana, I give free rides. I’m on vacation.”

  The boy nodded and got in beside him. Siggy moved out and was on the freeway in moments, going at a steady fifty-five. He put on the cruise control and glanced at the boy. He was looking out the front window, his face glum.

  “Where are you going?” Siggy asked.

  “West.”

  “There’s lots of west in the world. Wherever you go, there’s still more west on ahead.”

  “They put an ocean at the end, I stop before I get wet, OK?”

  “I’m going to Los Angeles,” Siggy offered.

  The boy said nothing. Obviously didn’t want to talk. That was all right. Lots of customers liked silence, and Siggy had no objection to giving it to them. Enough that there was someone breathing in the car. It gave Siggy a feeling of legitimacy. It was all right to drive as long as someone else was in the car.

  But this couldn’t go on all the way, of course, Siggy realized. When he picked the boy up, he figured on St. Louis, maybe Kansas City, then the boy gets out and Siggy’s alone again. He’d have to stop for the night, Denver, maybe. Did the boy think a motel room went along with the ride?

  “Where you from?”

  The boy seemed to wake up, as if he had dozed off with his eyes wide open. Looking out on Indiana as it went by.

  “What do you mean, from?” the boy asked.

  “I mean from, the opposite of to. I mean, where were you born, where do you live?”

  “I was born in Rochester. I don’t think I live anywhere.”

  “Rochester. What’s it like in Rochester?”

  “I lived in a Mafia neighborhood. Everybody kept their yards neat and nobody ever broke into the houses.”

  “A lot of factories?”

  “Eastman Kodak and Xerox Corporation. There’s a lot of shit in the world, and Rochester exists by making copies of it.” The boy said it bitterly, but Siggy laughed. It was funny, after all. The boy finally smiled, too.

  “What are you going to do in California?” Siggy asked.

  “Find a place to sleep and maybe a job.”

  “Want to be an actor?”

  The boy looked at Siggy with contempt. “An actor? Like Jane Fonda?” He said the name like poison. The tone of voice was familiar. Siggy decided to try him out on the Name.

  “What do you think of Richard Nixon?” Siggy asked.

  “I don’t,” said the boy.

  And then, madly, knowing it could ruin everything, Siggy blurted, “I’m going to get him.”

  “What?” the boy asked.

  Siggy recovered his senses. Some of them, anyway. “I’m going to meet him. At San Clemente.”

  The boy laughed. “What do you want to meet him for?”

  Siggy shrugged.

  “They won’t let you near him anyway. You think he wants to see people like us? Nixon.” And there it was. The tone of voice. The contempt. Siggy was reassured. He was doing the right thing.

  The hours passed and so did the states. Illinois came and went, and they crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis. Not as big as Siggy had expected, but still a hell of a lot of water, when you thought-about it. Then Missouri, which was too wide and too dull. And because it was dull, they kept talking. The boy had a bitter streak a mile wide—everything seemed to lead to it. Siggy found it more comfortable to do the talking himself, and since the boy kept listening and saying something now and then, it seemed OK. They were beginning to pass signs that promised Kansas City as if it were a prize when Siggy got on the subject of Marie. Remembered things about her. How she loved wine—a French vice that Siggy loved in her.

  “When she was a little drunk,” he told the boy, “her eyes would get big. Sometimes full of tears, but she’d still smile. And she’d lift up her chin and stretch her neck. Like a deer.”

  Maybe the boy was getting tired of the conversation. Maybe he just resented hearing about a love that actually worked. He answered snappishly. “When you ever seen a deer, Manhattan cabdriver? The zoo?”

  Siggy refused to be offended. “She was like a deer.”

  “I think she sounds like a giraffe.” The boy smirked a little, as if saying this were somehow a victory over Siggy. Well, it was. It had worn down his patience.

  “It’s my wife we’re talking about. She died two years ago.”

  “What do I care? I mean what makes you think I give a pink shit about it? You want to cry? You want to get all weepy about it? Then do it quiet. Jesus, give a guy a break, will you?”

  Siggy kept his eyes on the road. There was a bitter feeling in his stomach. For a moment his hands felt violent, and he gripped the wheel. Then the feeling passed, and he got his curiosity back again.

  “Hey, what’re you so mad about?”

  “Mad? What says I’m mad?”

  “You sounded mad.”

  “I sounded mad!”

  “Yeah, I wondered if maybe you wanted to talk about it.”

  The boy laughed acidly. “What, the seat reclines? It becomes maybe a couch? I stuck my thumb out because I wanted a ride. I want psychoanalysis, I stick out a different finger, you understand?”

  “Hey, fine, relax.”

  “I’m not tense, shithead.” He gripped the door handle so tightly that Siggy was afraid the door would crumple like tinfoil and fall away from the car.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said finally, still looking forward. He didn’t let go of the door.

  “It’s OK,” Siggy answered.

  “About your wife, I mean. I’m not like that. I don’t just go around making fun of people’s dead wives.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re right. I’m mad.”

  “At me?”

  “You? What’re you? A piss-ant. One of twelve million piss-ants in New York City. We’re all piss-ants.”

  “What’re you mad at?” Siggy could not resist adding the figures to his checklist. “Inflation? Oil companies? Nuclear plants?”

  “What is this, the Gallup poll?”

  “Maybe yeah. People get mad at a lot of the same things. Nuclear plants then?”

  “I’m mad at nuclear plants, yeah.”

  “You want ’em all shut down, right?”

  “Wrong, turkey. I want ’em to build a million of ’em. I want ’em to build ’em everywhere, and then on the count of three they all blow up, they wipe out this whole country.”

  “America?”

  “From sea to shitting sea.”

  Then silence again. Siggy thought he could feel the whole car trembling with the young man’s anger. It made Siggy sad. He kept glancing at the boy’s face. It wasn’t old. There were some acne scars; the beard was thin in quite a few places. Siggy tried to imagine the face without the beard. Without the anger. Without the too many drugs and too many bottles. The face when it was childish and innocent,

  “You know,” Siggy said, “I can’t believe—I look at you, I can’t believe that somebody loved you once.”

  “Nobody asked you to believe it.”

  “But they must have, right? Somebody taught you to walk. And talk. And ride a bicycle. You had a father, right?”

  Suddenly the boy’s fist shot out and slammed into the glove compartment door, which popped open with a crash. Siggy was startled, afraid. The boy showed no sign of pain, though it seemed he had hit hard enough to break a finger.

  “Hey, careful,” Siggy said.

  “You want me to be careful? You tell me to be careful, asshole?” The boy grabbed the steering wheel, jerked on it. The taxi swung into another lane; a car behind them squealed on its brakes and honked.

  “Are you crazy? Do you want to get us killed? Get mad, wreck the car, but don’t kill us!” Siggy was screaming in anger, and the boy sat there, trembling, his eyes not quite focused. Then the car that had honked at them pulled up beside them on the right. The driver was yelling something with his window down. His face looked ugly with anger. The boy held up his middle finger. The man made the same gesture back again.

  And suddenly the boy rolled down the window. “Hey, don’t get us in trouble,” Siggy said. The boy ignored him. He yelled a string of obscenities out the window. Siggy sped up, trying to pull away from the other car. The driver of the other car kept pace with him, yelled back his own curses.

  And then the boy pulled a revolver out of his pocket, a big, mean-looking black pistol, and aimed it out the window at the driver of the other car. The man suddenly looked terrified. Siggy slammed on the brakes, but so did the other driver, and they stayed nearly parallel.

  “Don’t!” Siggy screamed, and he sped up, leaving the other car in the distance. The boy pulled the gun back into the car and laid it on his lap, the cock still back, his finger still on the trigger.

  “It isn’t loaded, right?” Siggy asked. “It was just a joke, right? Would you take your finger off the trigger?”

  But it was as if the boy didn’t hear him. As if he didn’t even remember the last few minutes. “You wanted to know if I had a father, right? I have a father.”

  At the moment Siggy didn’t much care whether the boy had been born in a test tube. But better he should talk about his father than wave the gun around.

  “My father,” said the boy, “spends his life making sure enough Xerox machines are getting sold and putting more ads in the magazines when they aren’t.”

  They crossed the border into Kansas, and Siggy hoped the incident with the pistol wouldn’t get reported across state lines.

  “My father never taught me to ride a bike. My brother did. My brother was killed in Mr. President Nixon’s war. You know?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Siggy said.

  The boy looked at him coldly. “It was yesterday, asshole. You don’t believe those calendars, do you? All lies, so we’ll think it’s OK to forget about it. Maybe your wife died years ago, Mr. Cabdriver, but I thought you loved her better than that.”

  Then the boy looked down at the pistol in his lap, still cocked, still ready to fire.

  “I thought I left this home,” he said in surprise. “What’s it doing here?”

  “I should know?” Siggy asked. “Do me a favor, uncock the thing and put it away.”

  “OK,” the boy said. But he didn’t do anything.

  “Hey, please,” Siggy said. “You scare me, that thing sitting there ready to shoot.”

  The boy bowed his head over the pistol for a few moments. “Let me out,” he said. “Let me get out.”

  “Hey, come on, just put the gun away, you don’t have to get out, I won’t be mad, just put the gun away.”

  The boy looked up at him and there were tears in his eyes, spilling out onto his cheeks. “You think I brought this gun by accident? I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Then why’d you bring it?”

  “I don’t know. Jesus, man, let me out.”

  “You want to go to California, I’m going to California.”

  “I’m dangerous,” the boy said.

  Damn right you’re dangerous, Siggy thought. Damn right. And I’m a doubledamned fool not to let you out of here right this second, right this minute, very next off-ramp I’ll pull over and let him off.

  “Not to me,” Siggy said, wondering why he wasn’t more afraid.

  “To you. I’m dangerous to you.”

  “Not to me.” And Siggy realized why he was so confident. It was the fairy godmother, sitting inside the back of his head. “You think I’m going to let anything happen to you, dummkopf?” she asked him silently. “If you knock off before you make your wish, it ruins my life. The clerical work alone would take years.” I’m crazy, thought Siggy. This boy is nuts, but I’m crazy.