The Toll Collector by Jack Kamm

“There’s a toll for everything…the toll for happiness is often sorrow.” — James Carr

Would you opt for a different life if you had the choice?  This is the question I asked myself, a question so burning that it dampened my palms; it’s also the question I needed to ask my best friend, Charlie, because we both hated our lives—just as much as the guy who pulled up to my booth on that icy evening. Under the amber lights, his red Jaguar gleamed like a ruby. Decked out in a fancy camel-hair overcoat, he told me he was gonna jump off the bridge.

Then he unbuckled his watch, which he said was a Cartier, all gold, held it out to me and said, “Go on and take it.  Where I’m going, time doesn’t matter.” 

Noting the glint of the watch, I told him he didn’t have to kill himself.  I told him about the green coin. If he took it, I explained, he’d be born into a completely different life—maybe one that could bring him happiness. Unperturbed by the horns honking behind him, he nodded, paid his fare and tossed the watch onto the passenger’s seat.

“Do yourself a favor, my friend,” he said, “and get some therapy.”

I know I disappointed him.

The Jaguar zoomed away, a scarlet missile disappearing into a swirl of wind and snow. This man was skeptical, naturally—but all my drivers, so far nearly a hundred, who had opted for a new life instead of suicide took the green coin. These are the people, desperate in their despondency, who ride bridges at 2 or 3 in the morning to tell their woes to the toll collector.    

I’m scribbling these words into a notebook for my kids so that they will know the truth about what happened when I entered the toll booth after it was repaired. They’ll know too that I’m perfectly sane.  And from what’s been happening to my best friend Charlie Gibson, he needs to know the truth too before it’s too late.

Although we’re not twins, we’re joined in many ways, two heads on the same body of fate, two souls twirling about in the same gale of either chance or choice. We’ve known each other since high school, married similar women, started families, made sure to move into the same apartment building in the Bronx.  Charlie’s my Beta; I’m his Alpha.     

His latest misfortune came when a passenger shot him in the leg during a robbery.  So at the Mexican restaurant last week, Charlie was limping for the first time without his crutch.  His wife, Franny, who’d left him, had cleaned out most of their joint checking account because she said “Charlie was making the whole ship sink” and she didn’t want her children to drown.

Chairs scraped and tables creaked as the restaurant filled up not only with people, but with the aroma of cilantro and tortilla.  After wolfing down a plate of cheese enchiladas and re-fried beans, Charlie shook into his palm a long yellow capsule from a bottle marked “Better Labs, Inc.” Underneath that, the words read, “Guaranteed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol at the same time.” 

I asked him where he got the bottle. 

“A bartender told me about this new startup company,” he answered.  “Hell, If they can guarantee results, why not?”

Overweight by about 50 pounds, Charlie stood over six feet and displayed a purplish nose born of alcohol and rosacea.  The rest of his face was meaty and rosy. Not only were his arteries clogged, but cirrhosis was chewing up his liver. 

Shaking the bottle of pills, I said, “Charlie, wake up, man. Not even Pfizer can guarantee lowering blood pressure and cholesterol.” I waited for that to sink in. Then I said,  “You’re one of the most gullible guys I know.”

Not replying, he ordered another main course. In a voice deceptively sweet and measured, my wife Lainie said, “You keep eating like this, Charlie, you’re gonna kill yourself.” Then his daughter Terri, with him for the weekend, a petite girl like her mother, piped in with, “Yeah, Dad. I love you.  I don’t want you to die.” 

His cheeks bulging with food, he replied, “Hey, look at it this way, sweetheart. If I’m not around anymore, you and your mom can cash in on my insurance.” He winked at me and gulped down almost a whole glass of Pacifico Clara. 

That was the first time I heard Charlie even hint at offing himself. Before, he was willing to let his arteries do the job for him.  Hell, in the old days, full of cheer, he’d greet me with a smile that made me the most important person on the planet even though I was the guy, overly wary and quiet, who clutched his drink in the shadows just to avoid people.

We left the restaurant and piled into his black Jeep Wrangler, which he had tried out on hairpin-turn roads on top of mountains just for thrills, and which he had souped up for the speed tracks he rented. One thing about Charlie: having saved my ass in a bar many times, he never ran from a physical challenge although I suspect that some of us—like him—did crazy, irrational, even hazardous things because doing them brought us peace or happiness or the cessation of sorrow.

Sure, Franny left him because he was self-destructive but mainly because of his gambling. At one point they nearly lost the Jeep when he couldn’t make the payments, so she hocked her engagement ring. Yet even with her gone, he embraced the track. The monkey—more like a gorilla—was heavy on his back. 

“You gotta play the odds, Hank,” he advised me after quitting Gamblers Anonymous. He gripped my shoulders.  “Even if they drag a horse out of the glue factory with a hundred-to-one odds against him, bet on him for a long-shot cause it’s the long-shots that bring miracles. It’s the long shot that can turn your life around.”

Regarding my life? I expected no miracles. My headaches had turned into hammers making neat cracks in the back of my skull.  On those days, instead of going into work, I sat at a table in the library (I was well known there) and called up memories, like the first time I kissed Lainie or saw the birth of Peter and Jen.   

For a while now, I’d been drifting in and out of what some would call reality.  It was just a matter of time before my body, already breaking down, would become a locked cage in which I’d be rattling the bars because the key, already rusted, could no longer fit the lock to release me.

Lainie worried that Peter, who was only ten, would turn out like me.  Maybe he would.  Hell, we both loved fairy tales.  Just as my father had read them to me, I read them to Peter and Jenny, including the ones I wrote.  We’d act them out using stuffed animals as characters, to whom Jenny, who was only seven, assigned squeaky voices.

By contrast, far from fanciful, Lainie was the pragmatist in the family, a no-nonsense woman with feet on the ground. With her rosy fingers and manicured nails, she wrote the checks, called the repair men, took the kids to the doctor, who she told about the coins in the tollbooth.  His response, as she passed it on to me: “Your husband might very well have a fantasy-prone personality.”

On the other hand, some of the books I’d read on the preternatural and paranormal—and they were numerous—said that people like me could actually see into the netherworld itself. And that’s what happened whenever I worked the tollbooth after they’d repaired it.

But it was Lainie’s decision to sleep on the cot in the kids’ room that broke me down.  The first casualty was my memory, like the time  I forget to shut the car only to remember, blocks away, that the keys were still in it with the motor running. But my worst breakdown happened the time I boiled water for tea but left the pot on the stove.  In slippers, as Jenny carried the pot to the sink, the water spilled and seared a red patch into the flesh on the instep of her foot.     

Two hours later when she and Lainie came back from the ER, I saw the large bandage taped to Jenny’s foot, and my legs went weak. She had suffered a second-degree burn. That night Lainie took the kids and went to her sister’s. She wouldn’t consider talking to me again until I got help and was no longer a danger to our children. Who could blame her?  

Just a few nights later Charlie texted me that he was giving me his Jeep Wrangler. In sweatpants and a sweatshirt, I raced out of my apartment and took the elevator up to the third floor and pounded on his door. Minutes later we were sitting at his kitchen table, each gripping a half-glass of Dewars and looking at the framed photos of his wife and children that he had placed on the table.

“I don’t want your damn Jeep, Charlie.  What the hell is going on?”

He was wearing a blue-striped bathrobe over a white dress shirt with a bolo tie, pajama bottoms, sweat socks and the ever-present Stetson, the color of hay. He sipped the Dewars, pinky raised. “I’m not gonna bullshit you, Hank. I’m Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall and I broke into little pieces.  And there ain’t no glue in the world gonna put me back together again.” 

I know he’d been drinking because of the way his tongue labored through the stickiness of his lips.

I said, “Is all this because Franny left you?”

“Most of it, yes.” He picked up one photo showing his children laughing together on the steps of a pool. He slid a finger across the glass.  “My sweet Jen.” His eyes pooled. “Sometimes I see myself falling on my hands and knees and begging Franny to take me back and me swearing I’ll never gamble or drink again.” His words slurred. “I think I’m gonna go to her brother’s place and just…break the damn door down and drag her out.”

“She’ll have you arrested, Charlie.”

He turned away, thought for a while, then looked back at me. “You’re right.  You’re always right.”

With a trembling hand, he removed the Stetson and ran his fingers through whorls of blond hair.  I felt a wave of heat come through the vent above my head.  “The doctor told me yesterday my limp is gonna be permanent, and now with my workman’s comp check held because of a contract glitch, I’m gonna wind up on the street.” The whiskey sloshed in the glass when, with his hand still trembling, he pointed a finger at me. “And I don’t want your charity, neither.”

I said nothing; my palms were damp.

 “But here’s the bright side,” he told me grinning.  “I still have the .38 Special I kept in the cab.  And it’ll do the job.” He picked up the picture of his wife and daughter again and studied it. “At least my family will be well taken care of. To the tune of fifty-grand.”

“You’re wrong, Charlie. I checked it out.  Insurance doesn’t pay out for suicides. But they will for disappearances.”

“Disappearances?”

I nodded and took a big swallow of scotch.  “There’s a way out of all of this.”

“Oh, yeah?  Who do I have to blow? The Devil?”

“No.  Just pay a toll.”

I pointed out that for these past twelve years I’d worked bridges from GWB to the Goethals to the Henry Hudson, but this was the only booth, after repairs, that talked to me.  “Voices, Charlie. Fucking voices in deep, throaty whispers.” I told him about the basket that held a hundred green coins and disappeared when my relief came and reappeared on my shift. The coins, I pointed out, were the size of nickels.  “Any one of them, if you take it, will let you cross the bridge to a new life.”

“What new life?”

“That’s just it.  That’s the hitch.  It’s a crapshoot.  We’ll know only once we start to live it.”

His head cocked as if I were a picture hanging crooked on a wall, and his lips fumbled a smile. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“There’s probably one other bridge like it,” I said. “The Daniel Hoan Memorial Bridge in Milwaukee because they recently did repairs on several booths on that one too.” 

“Yeah?” 

There was a silence, except for the sleet splashing and clicking against the window. Down below in the street, the tops of puddles had already crusted over with ice. Charlie lighted a Camel. “Don’t them Indians believe in that?”

“You mean reincarnation? This is not reincarnation in the sense you come back a better or more enlightened person. Just that you get born from different parents…and begin a new life—could be a better life, could be a worse life.  In either case, you’ll never be Charlie Gibson again.”

“Oh, yeah?  Well I pass.  I’m always gonna wanna see my daughter.”

“You won’t even know she exists, Charlie. Don’t you see? This’ll be your 100 to one longshot that you keep talking about. This is the horse that comes out of the glue factory.  The only question is: are you willing to bet on a new life…bet that it’s gonna be a better one?”

By this time, his cheeks were flushed and sweaty.

I informed him that hundreds of people go missing in New York and Milwaukee every year. “Take it or leave it, Charlie, but that’s a fact.  You think those people just disappeared? Turn into dust? And what about Atlantis? You think a whole city just vanished under the Atlantic Ocean? And the Malaysia flight disappearing off the radar without a trace….? And the Bermuda—”

He held up a large, beefy hand, his palm red and callused. “All right, all right.  I get the picture.” He finished the scotch in his glass and poured himself some more.  “You think this is some religious thing?” 

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You believe in God, Hank?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe a better question is does He believe in us?”

“See? I’m not smart like you, reading all them books so I doubt I can answer your questions.  In fact, I doubt I understand you at all. But all them disappearances?  It’s the Lord’s work.  And if your booth is telling you people can have a better life if they pay with that green coin, then you’re hearing God’s voice.”  

“it’s a gamble, Charlie.”

He smiled.  “I know.”  He heaved up from the chair and teetered over to me. His fingers around my arms strong as blood pressure cuffs tightening. He said, in a voice coarsened by nicotine, “I love you, pardner.” 

***

The beams and girders on the bridge were filling with snow.  Wearing his Stetson, Charlie was in his Jeep outside my booth, his window down. There was a MacDonald’s Styrofoam cup in the holder on the console.  I leaned out into the cold, blowy air, showing him the green coin in my palm.

“It’s the last one in the basket, Charlie. Take it.”

He stared at the coin, then at me. “The last one? You were saving it for yourself, weren’t you?”

“You should take it, Charlie, but please make up your mind because I’m freezing my ass out here like this.” My teeth were clacking. “And I’m gonna be in for a long night if my relief doesn’t come, so—”

Horns blared behind him.  His thick fingers, red from the cold, snatched the coin from my palm. “Better get yourself back in the booth before you get frostbite, pardner.” He stared at me and blinked. “If nothing happens after I cross the bridge, I can always turn back, right?”

“Sure you can.”

By now my ears felt icy even with the woolen hat over them.

He looked up at me.  His eyes were wet. “Tell Franny I never loved no other woman but her.”

When he punched the accelerator, the Jeep skidded and zigzagged into the converging lanes along with the other vehicles that were disappearing into the snowfall.

***

It’s a day later and the temperature gauge in the rented Bronco reads seven degrees. For the past two hours I’ve been driving on Route 39 headed for Milwaukee. I’m wearing a sheepskin jacket and a hat with earflaps and gloves with finger pads yet, despite the heater, I’m cold. And these hands gripping the steering wheel haven’t stopped shaking.

Earlier my call to Charlie’s cellphone went to voice mail, and he didn’t answer the door when I knocked, both of which had never happened before. I had put my ear against the wood as well, but there was no sound coming from inside. I can always call Franny’s brother to make sure, I suppose, but I think Charlie went someplace else.

Hey, it’s a small world.  Maybe he and I will meet up some day, except we won’t know it.  Wouldn’t that be a kicker?  All I know for sure is right now I’m so nervous my armpits are sweating and there’s a plow in front of me spinning out sand, the heavy blade clanging and scraping and leading the way.

Jack Kamm

Image: A pile of green coins from Google images