I nodded in understanding, following his logic.
“When you go to prison though, chances are you’re never going to get to go home again. And no amount of money will break you free,” he emphasized. His words were terrifying. It was a reality I’d never considered. He sat back in his seat again, looked away, and then stood up.
“If you do get to go home again, it’s only by the grace of God. And they usually let all the wrong ones out, like your good friend Dick. Like I said, arson—don’t trust ’em,” he added, as he opened the lavatory door and quickly stepped inside.
The bus cruised through the empty desert, slipping through the black of night, vanishing without an argument. The only interruption was the headlights on the freeway, breaking the world apart like a knife wound across its invisible face. Stars dotted the sky above us like nails, pointing downward as if there just might be something to pierce and hold down. Low voices were barely audible over the sound of the tires roaring underneath us. The sound of a chuckle from the front was the only familiar thing, the only human thing. Trapped inside the large aluminum shell, we were not of the same world.
We traveled for an unknown period of time, sliding through a black vacuum at an easy speed with a continual low groan. Occasionally, my head would jerk and dislodge itself from the folded-up jacket that separated it from the window. As I watched the road beneath me, several cars swerved and were pushed left and right as they tried to whip around the bus, passing us at breakneck speed. The large bus weaved dangerously a few times into the next lane from the occasional blast of wind.
“You’re pretty quiet, huh, Sebastien?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s a problem. Sometimes I want to say something, but I can’t.”
“You do alright in school?” Marcus queried.
“No…not really. We move around so much, it’s impossible. As soon as I start meeting new friends and getting comfortable, my mom either has a change of plans or I have to go stay with my grandma.”
“You don’t have any say in it, do you?”
“What do you think?” I scowled. “They never ask me. That’s for sure.”
“All you have to do is speak up. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”
“Yeah…and then I get smacked and told to ‘shut up’ or ‘go to my room.’”
Marcus didn’t take an eye off of me at all. “Yeah, so? You telling me that you’re afraid to get hit a few times?”
“Wha…?” I answered, confused.
“Lesson number one: everyone’s going to—always—dish it out and do everything they can to beat you down. You better get with that, quick.” His face was calm and relaxed. He blinked a few times and even cleared his throat. “But it doesn’t mean that you have to take it. You gotta be ready to repeat yourself and make your case, and for you that’s a problem.”
“Are you insane or something, Marcus?” I was a little annoyed at him for pushing it. He just laughed it off without a care.
“I bet you get into a lot of fights in school, too, don’t you?”
Now I was watching him. “And how would you know that?”
“Just a lucky guess, I guess,” he rejoined with a grin. He was being funny at my expense. It was alright though. I wasn’t bothered.
“Kids make fun of me all the time at school. Every time I start a new school and find myself surrounded in a classroom full of people staring at me, it starts without fail, and it’s always the same. They tease me because I stutter.”
“You stutter?” he asked, incredulously.
I opened my second bag of pretzels and slowly began chewing a few to give my brain a break. I didn’t answer right away. I don’t know why I told him that, but it was too late to take it back.
“I stutter a lot,” I responded, almost in a whisper, as if I had only thought the words rather than vocalized them.
Marcus spoke with concern in his voice. “I couldn’t tell, honestly,” he confided. I shared my pretzels with him. He took a few from the bag and then handed it back.
“I have to be careful what I say. Sometimes the words just won’t come out, no matter how hard I try. There’s a lot of words I can’t say, because if I do, well…” I paused. “It turns into a mess. Sometimes I just have to think up other things to say, even though what I want to say is clear in my mind. That’s when things go wrong, and I end up saying some really stupid stuff.”
“And that’s why they tease you, huh?”
“Yeah. I try to be cool, but it just makes things worse. My mother always gets mad if I stutter when I’m around her. She usually tells me to stop stuttering or stop talking, period. She said that I would probably stutter my whole life because of the way I was.”
“And what way are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s…” The tension approached, causing me to pause and re-route my mouth. “I’m just always alone.”
He laughed. “You’re a loner.”
“A what?” I responded.
“A loner?” he grunted. “Someone who’s by himself, alone, doesn’t travel around in a pack or a large group of people. Like a lone gunman or a gravedigger.”
“Yeah, that’s me then. The Lone Gunman.”
Marcus laughed, cracked his knuckles, and stretched his feet out into the aisle. “So, you’re a loner. You travel around a lot without your parents. You get into fights at school, and you stutter. I bet you don’t have many friends either.”
“Most people don’t like me. Even when they say they do, they’re usually lying. I had a friend for about six months at one school, but when he found out that I was moving again, he didn’t want to be friends anymore.”
“I knew it. You got it rough, kiddo,” he remarked.
I felt strange talking with Marcus. I wasn’t hesitant to tell him what was on my mind. He was probably the only adult who had ever listened to me or asked me questions, or rather the only adult who asked me questions not related to some kind of trouble I was in.
“My cousin has a stutter,” Marcus said after a few moments. I paid close attention as I ate my pretzels. “He used to get teased a lot in school too. It started a lot of fights, and he was always messed up in some kind of hassle with the school or the police. He wasn’t too well liked either. Trouble always found him, no matter what. He was pretty smart though, but always being under the eye, he eventually got kicked out of school. After he was gone a while, everybody just forgot about him, even the boys who’d picked on him.”
“What happened to him?”
“After he dropped out, he started working as a janitor for a clothes manufacturer where my moms worked. It was easy work, because he didn’t ever have to talk. He just kept the floor clean, helped move the large bolts of fabric, and straightened up the dock on the ground floor. Pay wasn’t bad. Probably the best he had.”
Marcus looked away without saying anything. He was quiet and stared off into space. For a few moments I thought he might say something, but he didn’t. When he looked down at his hands, I had the urge to speak.
“What’s your cousin’s name?” I thought it was the best thing to ask. He looked up at me again.
“His name was Elias.” His response was cold. “The two of us used to spend a lot of time together, but it’s been a long time since I’ve laid eyes on him. He’s thirty-five now. I haven’t seen him in seven years.”
“What happened to him?”
“Take a guess, but let’s see if you get it right.” Marcus began folding up his jacket, getting ready to close his eyes for a while. I was starting to feel sleep catching up to me as well.
“He went to ja…I mean prison.”
Marcus nodded, made himself comfortable, and yawned. “Yep. You got it, chief.”
“What did he go to prison for?”
“You really want to know?”
“I do,” I said steadfastly.
“Well, Sebastien…he killed a man. It wasn’t his fault though.” He shook his head. “The man had broken into my mom’s hous
e in the middle of the night. My cousin was there…” Marcus seemed reluctant to tell the story. “He hit the man across the head with a lamp. He fell quick. They said the blow had killed him instantly.”
“He went to prison for that?” I asked, surprised.
“The man he killed was white.”
“What does that matter?” I answered.
Marcus grinned and eased back into his seat. “Well, unfortunately, life is a little more complicated than you may realize. But that’s another story.” He yawned and slowly began to disappear into the darkness of the bench seat, his clothes and the wood laminate wall behind him.
“Did your cousin…stop stuttering?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know?” His eyes were still closed as he answered, and he shifted around a little, trying to find the sweet spot on the seat.
“I don’t know,” I answered absently. “I sometimes wonder if it will go away.”
“How long have you stuttered? Since you could first talk?”
“No,” I rejoined. “Just two years ago.”
Marcus opened his eyes and glanced over at me sideways. “Two years ago?” He seemed surprised as he repeated my words. “Usually kids who stutter start young, pick it up early. You were, what, ten years old then? Something happened, didn’t it?” His words seemed sharper, more direct. His tone was crisp and had an edge to it. I didn’t know what to say to Marcus about that. Maybe he knew. I wanted to say something, but I realized I was having one of those moments where my mouth wouldn’t function without falling to pieces.
“Stuttering is often the result of something really bad, something traumatic, that happens. Why don’t you tell me what happened to you two years ago?” he continued. He spoke just above a whisper.
I turned my face away toward the window, feeling a little ashamed and a little upset. I didn’t have any way to explain it to him, and my brain was telling me that my mouth wouldn’t have a way to speak the words without fumbling all over them.
“Can…we…” I tried slowly.
“What? Can we what?” he asked, concerned.
“Nothing. Can we not talk about it?” I cut myself short, satisfied with what I was able to get out. I felt light-headed, and my throat went dry and began to constrict, as if someone was choking me. The grip felt unbearable. I closed my eyes and did my best to shut down. I was becoming convinced that I was slowly turning into one of those mannequins. I was absolutely useless. They probably wanted to speak but couldn’t, their throats wooden and closed, unable to articulate the personal hell that they were trapped in. It was a life of constant manipulation, with no ability to respond. I feared for myself and what was up ahead. Slowly, I slipped away, letting go of it and everything else. Sleep was the only thing that I had any reasonable control over. Lately, I hadn’t had much of it either. When it came, I didn’t feel like struggling against it just to watch the constant river of headlights passing outside the window. For the moment, drifting into darkness was better.
I was barely able to open my eyes, as they were crusted shut and blasted dry from the air-conditioning vent. My lips were cracked, and the inside of my mouth tasted like the strange blue water that was now very evidently fuming from the bathroom toilet.
The overhead lights dimly shone down from above. The engine was still. The bus had stopped. I got up and noticed that I was the only one still aboard. Everyone else had disembarked, including Marcus.
As I made my way down the center aisle, I couldn’t hear any noise coming from the overhead intercom outside, but the exterior of the pale concrete and iron terminal was brightly lit up like an airport or a UFO landing site. It looked like the middle of the day outside, but it was closer to nine p.m. From the rafters of the overhang, I saw a sign that read Blythe.
Outside the bus, Marcus was having a cigarette with the driver. “Look who’s awake,” he announced, as I came down the metal steps. “I didn’t think you were ever gonna wake up. You looked dead to the world back there.”
I rubbed my eyes, assaulted by the intensity of the bright light. “Where are we?” I asked.
“California-Arizona border,” the driver bellowed with a smile. It took me a second to realize it, but he wasn’t the same driver that got on in Los Angeles. The man’s name tag read Monty.
“Looks like the middle of nowhere,” I said after glancing around at the alien structure, which was surrounded by a massive, flat parking lot and sat a long distance from the freeway. My eyes had a difficult time piercing the blackness that was being held off by the flaming white lamps.
They both laughed at me. “It is. Literally,” Monty answered. Monty was older than all of the drivers so far. His hair was white and curly. He was darker than Marcus and had an easiness about him that made him look comfortable in his oversize Greyhound uniform. He might’ve been driving some type of transport his whole life just by the way he was standing close to the bus, smiling and palming his cigarette. He had deep lines around the edges of his mouth.
“You best go use the latrine now, youngun’. We’ll be leaving directly.” He spoke his words kindly, with just enough purpose.
“What time is it?” I asked, as I thrust my hands into my coat pockets, yawning.
“Just past eight-thirty. Be leavin’ up outta here in ’proximately ten mics.” Monty spoke to me in a type of elusive military/truck-driver code that seemed perfectly normal to him and Marcus. As I wandered into the terminal, I felt relieved that I had figured out some of what he had told me.
Inside, soft music was dropping down from the high ceiling above. The large center of the lobby was devoid of any of the riders and residents that I’d seen back in Los Angeles. Blythe was a stark contrast. Along the main wall stood a long row of old-fashioned enclosed telephone booths from another era. They had sliding glass doors for privacy, which were edged with dark wood, and the inside had a soft amber light shining down on a small wooden seat next to the dialing pad. Almost every one of the twenty or so phone booths had someone inside. Maybe this is what you’re supposed to do when you come to Blythe. Call home. Maybe it had something to do with crossing a border. I turned away, having no desire to call anyone. It was three hours later at my grandma’s in Pennsylvania, and they were most likely in bed. It was too late to call. My grandpa wasn’t the type of person who appreciated late-night interruptions. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want a phone call from me either in the middle of the night at the border of California and Arizona. It just wasn’t worth it.
On one of the large walls hung a huge painting of a sprawling green forest with a winding stream and craggy mountains rising up in the background. The words Welcome to California were painted neatly within the upper portion of the canvas like it was a good thing. A very unconcerned and innocent-looking bear was frolicking in the stream, grabbing at a fish. I stared at the painting for a few minutes, locked in a trance. It wasn’t the California I knew at all. Maybe this is what it was for the adults or everyone else. Maybe this is what it was for my mother on her honeymoon with Dick. In my mind I pictured the innocent bear fishing them both from that frothy stream. They were gasping for air, their mouths full of ice-cold water, trying to get away. That was possibly the only California that would’ve made sense to me.
The Blythe Terminal was something to see. It was large, well-built, and clean, which was quite the opposite from the overcrowded and dirty Los Angeles Terminal, which was too small, too cramped, and falling apart. It would’ve made some sense if they could’ve switched terminals, but that just wasn’t possible.
I made my way across the charcoal gray marble to the far end. Two thin signs hung above two doorways and read Mens and Womens, amber-lit from inside. The bathroom was covered in white square tile from floor to ceiling. In the middle stood a large, round stainless-steel fountain with running water that was being used by one other man. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone peeing in a water fountain. I surveyed the room for urinals. Once I realized that the fountain contraption was the urin
al, I stepped up and did my business. Thankfully, the center portion of the fountain was raised, obscuring me from the other man directly across from where I stood.
A short row of stalls that was made of the same wood as the phone booths was set back opposite the sinks. The bathroom was bigger than a lot of apartments I had lived in with my mother. The sound of someone flushing cut through the calm sound of my pee mixing into the running water below me.
I noticed that even though I was in a bathroom, the air smelled fresh and clean, and the place was considerably relaxing. A tile mural of horses running across a desert plain was embedded into one of the walls just left of where I was standing. The homeless people in Los Angeles would’ve loved this place.
I washed up quickly and left. I was starting to feel the vise grip of sleep closing in and twisting around me. My eyes were heavy, the joints of my hands hurt, and I couldn’t stop yawning. I thought I was going to swallow a bug the third time my mouth stretched open to vacuum in the night air and fill my body with the dark poison of the middle-of-nowhere. As I stepped outside, I could see that the bus was running again and people were filtering forward in a hazy state. I saw a lot of the same riders from Los Angeles and Palm Springs, but only a few other people had been on the bus ride longer than I had: an old woman with her not-so-pretty daughter, the creepy guy in the suit, and the man with the red hair and green army jacket who had gotten hassled by the evil Frank Burns in Bakersfield.
We rumbled back out into the night, away from the Blythe Terminal with all of its clean and well-lit surfaces. A man with a janitor’s cart and a hose was spraying down one of the bus platforms. After we left, the place looked vacant. It was easy for me to huddle back into the corner of my window seat and fade away. Marcus said it was okay for me to take two seats, as he was stretched out on the third and into the aisle, slowly drifting away.
When Monty had merged us all back onto the freeway, I looked across the bus and out one of the windows on the opposite side to see if the Blythe Terminal was still visible. With the glare from the passing cars, the strong glow wasn’t all that impressive now and could’ve been easily missed if you weren’t paying attention.
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