I still wasn’t certain, but I convinced myself I must have done it automatically. That night I just couldn’t remember if I’d locked the back door of the restaurant after taking out the dining room garbage. At the end of a busy night I’d be so spent I’d sometimes forget some of the closing jobs, like making sure the heat lamps were turned off, or that the cooks hadn’t left the convection oven on. This was back when I was closing by myself. The moment we turned onto Hochelaga I had a nagging doubt. We were driving down D’Iberville, getting close to my house, must have been 1:30 in the morning. I remember one time two or three years ago. The kind of guy who’d pull over to help two people moving, stuck under a fridge on their outdoor staircase. They know me because I’m a customer of #287.

Half the time I catch a taxi at the stand, I don’t have to say where I’m going every third time I don’t even give my address. Even the old guard, the holdouts still driving for Taxi Coop, respect him to a man. He’s owed favors by every taxi driver working the area between Saint-Laurent and l’Assomption from west to east, Jean-Talon and Sherbrooke north to south. Mohammed is a fifty-four-year-old Algerian.

Mohammed is the cabbie who nightly takes home half the bar and restaurant workers who ply their trade in Rosemont. Mohammed, Car 287, is senior driver at the cab stand on the corner of Beaubien and des Érables. Mohammed knows the route by heart, has for some time.

We keep driving to Sicard, then turn right. In the extra rearview mirrors he has mounted on each side of the windshield, I can see his serene face and wrinkled, baggy eyes under bushy eyebrows. He never answers when he’s with a customer. Tall snowbanks line either side of the street. Just a small Koran with an illuminated cover and a receipt book. No crumpled-up newspaper floor mats, no old coffee cups or leftover food in the compartment under the radio. Mohammed turns down his music the moment you get into his black Sonata. You can just hear the dispatcher’s voice on the CB. The comfortable warmth of the car interior is almost enough to put me to sleep. Low-hanging cottony clouds fill the dark sky.

We finally manage to pass it and turn onto a small, dimly lit street. The snowplow’s rotator beacons light up the buildings’ white-coated facades as it slogs up Hochelaga pushing snow. Pablo Strauss has translated several works of fiction from Quebec, including David Turgeon’s The Supreme Orchestra and Maxime Raymond Bock’s Baloney. He received a master’s in comparative literature at Université de Montréal and has worked in the restaurant industry for the past fifteen years. Stéphane Larue was born in Longueuil in 1983. The following is an excerpt from Stéphane Larue's debut novel The Dishwasher translated by Pablo Strauss.

Le Plongeur by Stéphane Larue