by Chris Lynch
I can do that, shut up. But I do go on thinking about her, and her kids, and what life must be like. And it’s only fair, since she was happy enough to draw whatever conclusions she wanted to about me.
Eventually I slip away to sleep myself, thinking as I do that I’m glad they ate my food and I wished I had had more for them.
• • •
I’m wearing cargo pants because they make me feel autonomous. It gives me a kind of peace knowing that in the case of hijacking or firebombing or what have you, I can always jump out the window and hit the ground ready to carry on a mostly functional life. My wallet, phone, secret cash stash, Kleenex, gum, and throat lozenges are all safely secured on my person. This also lets me be less freaked than I otherwise would be about getting separated from my jacket. The only item in the jacket pocket is a new deck of cards for playing solitaire. I’ve never played solitaire, but figured if there was ever a time to learn, this would be it.
But it is my varsity team jacket, from senior year football. There is a lot of stuff attached to that thing.
As I come up out of my cat nap, I glance back and see the window-seat girl has fallen asleep, comforted by my jacket. Her partner is still—or again, since I lost track—bravely managing the occasional halfhearted kick but seems to be running out of gas.
I have a sudden, overpowering urge to play solitaire.
My right thigh pocket jolts me by silently vibrating. It takes me several seconds, and I do contemplate my window jump, before I work out that it’s my phone. I have never used the thing much, and it still surprises me every time it demands attention.
I fish it out and see that it’s Ray trying to call. I can’t talk. I cannot contemplate talking. I have to ignore this. I have to ignore you, Ray, and I hope you can understand.
I try to nap a bit more as the bus leaves Massachusetts and crosses into New York State. I may or may not achieve sleep a few times, but the phone’s relentlessness is beyond question. I know he will eventually give up, and as we approach the next stop in Albany, he does. Sort of.
There is a little pulsating beeping tone, because I didn’t realize that you had to set both phone and text tones to silent vibrate if that was what you wanted. We are pulling into the Albany Greyhound station, with the low rustling activity of people preparing to exit, as I read the text.
DID I DO SOMETHING WRONG?
I breathe deeply and noisily through my nose, and I try to recapture my dissolving autonomy. I reach for a throat lozenge.
“Girlfriend not happy with you, I guess,” the woman says as she climbs over me.
“Hey,” I huff, indignant to find that a Greyhound bus in Albany is shockingly not a private space to be respected, and strangers wouldn’t read your phone messages just because they can.
She laughs heartily. My indignation is the final proof that she was right about me being a clueless rube out here. We both hear it the instant the huff comes out of me, and I think we’re both glad I finally settled the matter.
“Yeah,” I say, looking down at the message again for no good reason at all. “Girlfriends, right?”
“Right,” she says, pulling down the stroller and nearly conking me on the head with it. She gathers up the stroller, the noisy trash bag, and with a quick “Yep,” the children.
I’m looking at the phone again, this time trying to work out the silencer on the messages, when the three of them edge toward the exit. I look up and see the two girls occupying my varsity jacket together, each with one hand clutching a sleeve and the other Mom’s saggy jeans.
I am a good guy, but not that good. I badly want that jacket, but I badly don’t need “child molester” on my resume, even for a minute.
I scoot up to them and, reaching right over the top, relieve Mom of the stroller.
“Thanks,” she says. “These aisles are stupid narrow.”
“Stupid,” I agree, still carrying the stroller over my head and trailing closely behind my varsity jacket.
It is a smelly, bustling scene we find in the bus depot, and I feel like things are getting away from me quickly. Things like the woman, who has grabbed the stroller firmly out of my grasp and turned away from me with a barely audible, “Thanks again.”
Things like my jacket, which I see hot-stepping away from me on four little legs. Nobody but me seems to notice what’s wrong here, unless that’s the whole point and now it is going to be an even messier scene if I try to prevent this frail little family from stealing my jacket like they’re doing.
Against my better judgment, I stay close on their heels, saying, “Hey, hey, hey,” increasingly loudly at their backs and looking every last ounce the dirtbag I hoped not to be. But since I am being ignored comprehensively, I am just going to have to make the scene and risk the whole vigilante routine right here in this filthy bus station that has probably seen it loads of times before.
“Hey,” I say one last time.
But I am topped by a triple-loud and angry “Hey,” coming back the other way.
But it’s not the girls and not the woman.
“What the fuck is this?” the man bellows, snatching my jacket off the girls forcefully enough to send the two of them teetering sideways like candlepins.
“Hey, hey, hey,” I shout, rushing forward.
“Jesus Christ,” the woman says. She moves like a martial arts ballerina, in one motion grabbing the jacket from the man and spinning around perfectly timed to hand it off to me. “I’m sorry, mister,” she says, looking up at my eyes and carrying on a whole separate conversation there. “I didn’t realize the girls had your jacket.”
“Are you okay?” I say low, looking over her shoulder at the small stocky guy breathing steam at me while two little girls tangle up in his legs.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You want me to—”
“Go? Yes.”
“Ah, I don’t know about this.”
“You like me?” she says, seizing all my attention just like that.
“Yes, I do,” I say.
“Good, because if you do, you will turn and go right this second.”
I glance up again toward the bad guy.
“That’s not a good guy,” I say. “I think—”
“Right . . . this . . . second,” she hisses. “Now.”
She gives me a shove firm enough to move me, subtle enough to go unseen. And warm enough to make me ache as we spin off in our opposite directions toward our opposite situations.
Several steps farther I turn back, which I know is probably a mistake. They are all walking off together, but the man is gripping her arm and sort of tugging her this way and that just enough to imbalance her and make her look helpless and messed up.
Which I know she is not. I’m less simple about things than when I first got on that bus—even if she’d surely laugh at me for saying so. I know he is not a good guy, and she is a fine woman, and neither one of them is getting what they deserve.
And I know that if I do what I badly want to do, which is run after them, I will wind up making the bad a whole lot worse.
I stop looking. I turn and head for the bus to my next destination.
rude awakenings
I’d like to say this is the first time I ever woke up in Erie, but that would sound like a lie. Dropping that second e makes a whole lot of difference. It is, though, the first time I’ve woken up in Pennsylvania.
Erie the town may be a perfectly fine place, but the sensation I get, from the minute the bus bumps roughly to a stop and rudely awakens me, is eerie.
I’ve been on the road for twelve hours. I fell asleep shortly after we left Buffalo about two hours ago and was into some deep dreaming that I cannot now remember anything about. What I do know is that when I woke up, I remembered her name. Tracey. The girl I loved in grade school. She was unfailingly sweet to me all the time I knew her, and I am certain she only agreed to be my girlfriend because she was too kind a person to mangle me the way a rejection would have doubtless done. I a
sked her at the most awkward moment when I semi-accidentally crashed my bike into hers. I timed it perfectly and crashed her up over the sidewalk and into Paul Burnam’s front yard on Sunnyside. I was only even in that neighborhood because Paul told me she hung around there with some friends, so I jumped on my bike that very day after school and motored down there like a guided missile, and then bam. You’d probably be right to call it a targeted hit, even though that wasn’t exactly the plan. I just had an overload of emotion but a deficiency when it came to control.
We were an incident within two minutes of my arrival on Sunnyside, and an item within three minutes of that. The kicker was that how it started was all my reckless doing, but I came off the worse of the two of us, flying right over the handlebars, almost clearing Tracey and her bike completely as they lay there. But my shin cracked the handlebars and my face planted deep enough into Paul’s lawn that I could come back out with a report that his tulip bulbs were sprouting roots already. I was a mess, dirty and disoriented and grappling to even get up to my feet and remain steady on them. I could have been an especially ugly baby bird just thrown down out of a nest. But I got the words out quick in case they were my last, and Tracey smiled shyly from her seat still on the ground and she giggled me a yes.
What we wound up really was to be exceptionally great friends. She was my girl, but that was a technicality. A technicality I had no intention of ever clearing up, mind you. But for two years we went off privately and secretly the way steadies do, walking the Muddy River, hiking up Peters Hill for the view and the sensation, and making use of all that opportunity to just talk, about stuff that was real stuff, stuff that was less real, and it was the easiest talking I have ever known with a girl. Still. I talked mostly about my family, who I thought were just magically perfect. And she talked, eventually about her dad punching her in the stomach.
She didn’t finish grade school with us because her family had to move. She told most people that any bruises had come from her brother, who was certainly jerk enough in his own right. But brothers bashing their sisters sometimes are one kind of jerk. Fathers who punch their daughters are a whole different class of jerk. She protected her dad, and her brother could protect himself.
Until they were gone. Beamed up by aliens, I guess.
I can’t stop thinking about Tracey since Albany. Tracey, and Tracey, because why not? Could be. The world can surely be that random if it’s in a mood to be.
I hope Tracey is all right. I hope she gets away. She’d be all right if she was with me. I think now I dreamed of her. But she was not quite with me there, either.
• • •
I look all around, trying to get my bearings, and notice a total of about a half dozen other passengers as we depart the station for the next stop, Ashtabula, Ohio. It probably has more to do with whatever I was dreaming than with reality, but I feel like I’ve landed in a particularly gnarly neighborhood on wheels. There’s a smell. Nobody else is within ten feet of me, and I’m still getting a powerful whiff of bad body business that’s making me queasy.
It’s dark outside, and as I make my way to the bathroom at the rear of the bus, it is dark inside as well. No reading lights or anything; the few bodies I notice are shadows.
As I reach the bathroom, it certainly smells, as it has right along, but it’s not the same smell as the other one. It is, in fact, almost a relief to think of getting in there and breathing better-quality air.
The little window that’s supposed to rotate and show us whether the bathroom is vacant or occupied ain’t showin’ me nothin’ right now. Where one word or the other is supposed to be visible, there is nothing but a heavy green-brown smudge that I don’t care to contemplate.
I knock lightly, saying, “Anybody in there?”
“Vacant,” comes a quick, high nasal reply.
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re truly vacant there, bathroom. So I can just wait till you’re out.”
“Vacant,” he says again. “Come on in.”
Right. The toilet room is so small that if you were squatting and straining and wound up suffering a catastrophic Elvis Presley event, the only falling-down option would be forward, and when you did so, you would block the door so comprehensively that by the time they got you out, your rot would match the reek of every tortured ass that ever fouled a Greyhound convenience.
“I think that’s a little impractical,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not desperate, so I can wait.”
“What, are you saying that I am desperate?”
Jesus Hell.
“No. I’m sure you have no reason to be desperate. I just meant I was in no rush. No rush to be rushing you. Right?”
This, after all that, seems to have rushed him. I hear a little agitated bumping and thrashing inside as the man finally muscles his way out, passing with a snarling, “Fine, then,” directed at me. Was I supposed to apologize for being patient? Maybe there is a whole upside-down etiquette to shadowy Greyhound Society, and I’d better get the guidebook before I commit something unspeakably heinous.
Finally in the bathroom, I do my best to catch up on the long-neglected clean-and-shine. I give it a good bit of soap and toilet paper wipe-down to the point where I can contemplate using the facilities of toilet and sink. The mirror is actually shiny sheet metal that distorts, clouds, and somehow even delivers one’s reflection into a deep-looking-glass space about six feet away from the owner of that reflection. I stare at it, mesmerized by the distance between this me and that one. I don’t like it. It gives me a zinging spine, and I have to shake it out. Then, just before sitting down, I glance back at it, and the zinging strikes again and I cannot decide if I need that other me to come closer like a regular reflection would do, or to just buzz off completely because this midrange creep show is too hard to bear.
I’m sitting down finally, a little less anxious but not quite relaxed. A secure and relatively pestilence-free spot to do unavoidable business is one of the real basics of a civilization. Greyhound has been doing this for long enough to know that and to have the systems in place to make this work.
I dropped my vigilance too soon, and as the thought hit me—that lock doesn’t work—it hit somebody on the other side of the door at much the same moment.
“It’s occupied,” I say in a screamy small dog/large bird cry of horror. My hands shot straight up too, like I was blitzing the quarterback. This guy is quick, though, and his upper torso is through the opening before I can shove the door on him.
“Ow,” the guy says in a firm, but even, accusing tone. I have him pinched right at the waist and pinched mightily. If he were an ant, he’d be in two separate rooms now. “Will you release me?”
“Will you get out?”
“Release me.”
“Get out.”
“What’s wrong, Cecil?” asks a new voice outside the door.
“There’s a crazy guy on the toilet trying to guillotine me door-style. He’s one of them totally hairless ones, so we already know he spends too much time down there to begin with.”
“Well, that’s not right. Hey, man, let the guy go, will ya?”
“Is he gonna get out?”
“Where else is he gonna go?”
“Shouldn’t have come in here in the first place like that, just bursting in.”
“Oh,” Cecil says, sounding noticeably weaker, “I’m getting the death penalty for failure to knock? How did we wind up in Texas?”
Next thing I see is that either Cecil has sprouted a second head, or else . . .
“Hey, man, I’m Dirk. Listen, I’ll vouch for my friend. He will back out directly if you let him. But otherwise he’s gonna pass out, and who knows what kind of trouble you’ll be getting into.”
“All right,” I say, more spooked than a real man should be by the mere mention of getting in some vague trouble. I pull the door hard toward me, surprising Cecil and dropping him to the bathroom floor. Or that’s where his head and one arm lands, with the rest outside.
“God, look at that,” he says. “You were right, Cecil, bald as a blind pinky rat. Whatever is with these boys today? Can I ask you something? What exactly is it all about, like what you get out of it?”
This has gotten strange in a way that couldn’t possibly fit into any TV anthology of strange, strange things.
“Could you go now?” I say, trying as coolly as possible to hook my underwear with one finger and drag them up to me with as little fanfare as possible. It is harder because Dirk won’t stop watching every move to see if there is any more show coming. I once pushed a dead car home for a mile and a half up a gradual incline, and it felt quicker and easier than this.
Cecil is on his feet now, the rose of frisky good health back in his cheeks. They are both observing. I finally give up on any remaining discretion just to get it over with. I hop up and try frantically to get my underwear in place with speed, but the nervousness makes me fumble the whole thing, and the underwear gets tangled, then twisted on one side and . . . I have to pull them partly back down to get them right again.
The humiliation is something I could not have even contemplated before. I’m sweating, my hands still doing more flapping and tangling than just pulling my friggin’ clothes up over my body the way I had been doing successfully for over a decade and a half now.
The two of them, remarkably, suggest no physical threat. But they also are not moving out of that doorway until I have underwear up, pants up, shirt tucked. I feel both relief and the greatest humiliation yet as I hitch up my pants and secure the pewter buckle of my belt with a snap-clank at the point directly above my fly.
The eeriness gets to its peak and conclusion as the two of them simply look at me when I make it obvious I am getting out. They nod, something like approval, or thanks, or yes to something I would never ever want to know.
Then, just as I am about to bump past them, there is another knock at the door.
“Vacant?” The guy says the same word, in the same high tone he used when he was in here—and lying about the vacancy. We all say yes, vacant, and as I exit last, the little man says to me, “See, shoulda came in with me when I invited you. And I got caramel corn, too. I bet them guys never gave you no caramel corn.”
