Greyhound

by Piper, Steffan

  “Life would’ve been different without her,” I repeated. Marcus looked at me carefully, understanding what I meant as if it was crystal clear.

  “That’s absolutely right, partner,” he agreed with a grin.

  “Did you get in touch with your grams?” he asked.

  “No, she was out when I called.”

  Marcus was a little shocked. “Uh-huh, nobody was home?”

  “I spoke to my grandpa. He said he’d be there to get me in the morning.”

  “Okay…that’s a good thing, then. Let me ask you though…” Marcus’s face was serious. “They’re gonna be there, aren’t they? I won’t be able to get off and stay with ya.”

  I laughed about it, making light of what he’d already heard and witnessed for himself. “Thanks, Marcus. They’ll be there. I’m sure of it,” I answered.

  “Okay, but I’m just sayin’…y’know?”

  “I appreciate it, but I know that they’ll be there to get me. She’s my grandma.” Even the thought of my grandma letting me down or not being there to get me seemed completely out of the question. She had never given me a reason to doubt how much she loved me, and it was probably why I was just glad to be getting back. Even though I knew that Altoona wasn’t my home, and probably never would be, being with her and my grandpa at their house, with my bedroom up in the oversize garret room, felt more like home than any I had known thus far.

  I hadn’t thought about my room in the attic the whole trip, but I remembered how much Beanie always wanted it for her own. She probably took it after I left, leaving me the small bedroom on the second floor with the wood-paneled walls and narrow windows near the ceiling, which no one ever slept in. The room in the attic was well lit, spacious, and airy. I used to lie in the huge bed near the front windows that overlooked the street and watch the rain fall on the rooftops of the other houses. The attic was always warm in the winter and cool in the summer. During hot days, my grandpa would pull out the fans from the garage and put them up there to circulate the air, making it even nicer. He used to tell me to not play with the plug and electrocute myself, as if I was a baby, but I knew he was just kidding around. I’d spent hours sitting in the bed reading alone and listening to the radio, happy all by myself.

  Part of the attic was used for storage. Walls had been built going in all directions, making three different rooms from the space the attic provided. It was like a maze. There was over thirty years of storage in the attic and always lots of interesting stuff to look through. I got in trouble a few times for digging through some of it, but it never stopped me, as I always thought it was the most fascinating place in the world.

  Altoona was a place I knew like the back of my hand. I’d spent entire summer days from sunup to sundown riding my bike through all the different neighborhoods. My grandma’s house was connected to a rolling churchyard and an old stone church that never had a Sunday service and whose bell rarely ever rang. I’d spent more time on church property playing ball in the grass than people probably spent praying inside. The church tower, with the foreboding bell enclave, could be seen from a long way off, which made it easy to find my way back.

  A small deli and market called Miller’s Corner was usually the first stop for soda and gum. Just past the Weiss Grocery Store in a different neighborhood was a community swimming pool and a few baseball diamonds. The climb up the hill was so steep, I usually had to get off the bike and walk. The farther I went, the stranger and more run-down the houses got. The house that I had been born in, that my mother had once rented, was several blocks in that same direction. I would often bike over just to get another look and see who was living there now. All I knew was that it wasn’t me, and judging by the shape the house was in, I was thankful. But maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

  My aunt lived next to the baseball diamonds, and we would all pile in the car and drive over to see them every few days and watch Little League baseball. My grandpa always drove us, and it seemed to be farther than it was because of how slowly he drove. I would usually get carsick in the backseat, as it was the only car I had ever been in that was upholstered in black velvet. It was a white 1977 Chrysler Cordoba, and my grandma loved it. I loved it too, whenever I got to ride in the front seat, but I hated it whenever I got penned in the back with Beanie. It was stifling, soft, and everything the backseat of a car shouldn’t be. It was a long way from the backseat of a bus as well.

  I was going to listen to my Walkman, but the driver had turned on the overhead radio, which was tuned to the oldies station that played long blocks of the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley. Marcus was reading his book, and his face was stuck in concentration. We had pulled away from Saint Louis entirely now, and all my thoughts were focused on being back. I couldn’t think of much else, and I imagined it was the same for him too.

  When Marcus finally put the book away, he gave all the usual signals that he was about to have a cigarette. As I watched him light up, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the same ill will toward Marcus and his smoking habit that I had for my mother and her habit when she would light up. Maybe it was because he didn’t chain-smoke. He didn’t have endless fits of coughing until his face and head exploded or fill up drinking glasses with cigarette butts and only ever rinse those same glasses in lukewarm water. Maybe it was all those things and the fact that he didn’t reek like a wet ashtray all the time, or rather at all. That’s what made me have no concern about his habit. He was sparing with his cigarettes, often had people openly offering him one, without having to ask, and always seemed happy, relaxed, and in good spirits. He could’ve been in a television commercial advertising Marlboro cigarettes, he was so calm and relaxed. Not the frantic, hacking, red-faced mess that my mother was. She was fit for the funny farm and looked like someone in front of a firing squad every time she had a cancer stick hanging haphazardly from her lip. I wondered if I would ever smoke cigarettes but quickly hoped not. Marcus said people never seem to learn from the mistakes of others, no matter how many examples they’re given. He said you could probably test it in a laboratory and prove it every time. This stuck in my mind and resurfaced as I thought about whether I would smoke cigarettes or not.

  For a few hours, we both sat quietly, listening to the radio. Marcus had spent a good portion of the afternoon reading The Catcher in the Rye and was now more than halfway through it. I found it exciting that he could read that fast. When I asked him if there was a special trick to it, he just laughed and kept right on reading.

  After a pause, he said, “Once you’ve read a couple hundred books, you’ll figure it out as well. It ain’t hard.”

  “You get to read a lot of books in prison?”

  “You get to read constantly,” he continued, still absorbed, flipping another page methodically in time, like the beat of a drum.

  “Food any good?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Mine was, being the head cook. I ate better than all the prisoners and most of the employees. I only ever ate what the warden ate.”

  “Did you fight a lot in prison?” I asked. “People in movies about prison always fight a lot.”

  “Some do, some don’t. I rarely ever did,” he answered. He put the book away, folding a corner over. “Rarely,” he emphasized.

  “Were you ever in prison with Al Capone?” I wondered aloud. He was someone I’d heard about in school who had gone to prison.

  “Al Capone?” He laughed out loud. “Man, he died a long time ago. Long before I showed up.” He shook his head and kept right on chuckling. “What’s your latest interest in prison? You planning on making a visit? I hope not.”

  “No…me neither,” I answered sheepishly.

  “I was in the same prison as Charles Manson,” Marcus noted aloud.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “You’ve never heard of Charles Manson?”

  “No,” I replied meekly. “Who’s Charles Manson?”

  “Don’t worry. If you don’t know who he is, you will. He’s on
TV enough,” he stated.

  I began to mentally drift. “Maybe my dad was in prison. Maybe that was why he never called or came around,” I suggested.

  “What makes you say that?” he rejoined.

  “I don’t know. Maybe…I…just…” I couldn’t find an explanation for what I was thinking about.

  “Look, sometimes there is no answer or reason. Some people don’t want to be fathers, y’know? Not everyone’s cut out, see. I’m not making any excuses for the sorry piece of trash, but he doesn’t have to be in prison to not come around. Besides, you know what the truth is, and it has nothing to do with prison.” I looked at Marcus silently for a moment.

  “Sorry I called your birth pops a sorry piece of trash. I was just trying to be real with ya, that’s all.”

  “Cowards and men.”

  “That’s right,” Marcus acknowledged. “Soon, you’ll come to grips with the fact that deep down we’re all the same, but some folks will work overtime to not act the same. It’s real life.”

  “Deep down, we’re all the same…” I repeated quietly, contemplating what he said. I didn’t feel the same, not by a long shot, but I think that I understood it.

  “Deep down…we are all the same, and don’t you forget it,” he reaffirmed. “But it doesn’t mean to turn your back on them or let your guard down.”

  Marcus and I continued talking for the bulk of the afternoon. The conversation shifted around from getting home by tomorrow, to music, to all the waitresses we had met, specifically the black waitress back in Gallup. I admitted to Marcus that I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. He just laughed out loud and told me I’d feel that way about a lot of girls in the next few years and that it was perfectly natural.

  “If I can tell you anything about girls, the one thing you need to remember—and never forget,” he emphasized, “is that you can’t choose who you’ll fall in love with. You may think you can choose, but it just gets more complicated. Things get weird when you mix women with your own expectations.”

  “I think you may have lost me,” I rejoined, but he made me write down what he said, word for word, in my notebook.

  “File that under ‘incredibly important,’” he remarked, pleased with what he had said. During the afternoon, I found myself looking out of the windows on the opposite side of the bus. We had passed lots of semi trucks on the road in the past few days and even seen a few convoys, but what we were seeing now was different. We kept passing large convoys, one after another. The line of trucks at times was so long that it blotted out the view as we slowly crept past. Marcus and I counted a few lines and were surprised every time we would break twenty.

  “There’s no way this convoy’s gonna break twenty,” he’d say, but we just kept counting. The record was thirty-two trucks in a row. Once, the driver even came on the overhead, a little overwhelmed and amused.

  “That’s the biggest convoy I’ve ever seen.”

  Trucks filled the sides of the highways at rest stops and weigh stations. Pieces of blown-out rubber tires seemed to litter the roadway across the entire landscape and could’ve been a healthy food source for any animal that would eat them. Numerous times we passed lone tractor-trailers on the soft shoulder changing a tire. Once we even passed a truck that had gone off the side and into a field, spilling boxes of fruit everywhere.

  When we had talked about almost every subject I could think of, Marcus finally asked me the question.

  “You gonna tell me about what happened two years ago?”

  “Why do you ask?” I deflected it unknowingly.

  “Stuff like that is usually best let out of the darkness. It’s usually like a poisonous snake that someone might put inside a black box, and then you’re always afraid to open the lid.”

  “Maybe it’s better that way. Not to ever look, you know?” I stated.

  “Well, it’s all well and good, but eventually the snake in the box is going to die and turn to dust, and the person who put it in there to begin with goes on being afraid to open the lid for no reason.”

  I knew what Marcus was driving at, and he was right about that as well. “You learn about all this stuff in prison?” I asked.

  “Maybe…maybe not, but you’ll be the one with a dead snake in the box if you don’t lift the lid.”

  “Where do I begin?” I asked.

  “Just start off anywhere you like. It’ll be easier than you know.”

  “Two years ago, my mother…” I coughed, clearing my throat, “…my sister and I all lived together in an apartment. She was dating this sleazebag named Roger McDougall-Daggett,” I began.

  “Are you messin’ with me? Roger McDougall-Daggett? What kind of a sissy-ass name is that?” he asked, almost at the point of laughter.

  “I don’t know, but everybody he met, he always introduced himself that way. He was even more annoying about it on the phone because he would spell it out. ‘Capital em-small-cee. Capital Dee! Oo-you-gee. Ayyy. Double ell. Hyphen! Capital Dee! Ayyy. Double Gee, E. Double tee. McDougall-Daggett, just like it sounds!’” I imitated from memory.

  Marcus couldn’t help but laugh hysterically now. “Man, I didn’t think your story was going to be like this,” he rejoined, laughing.

  “He was always drinking, and he talked nonstop about his great-great-grandpappy being a Civil War hero in the history books. I didn’t like him at all, nor did Beanie, but my idiotic mother was in love with the guy and laughed at all his stupid jokes and dull stories.” I was breathing bitter disgust as I thought of Roger.

  “Civil War hero, huh? North or South?” Marcus asked.

  “South. It was all he ever carried on about. How the South would one day rise again. He said he was a descendant of Stonewall Jackson too.”

  “Stonewall Jackson…wow, that’s rich.” Marcus seemed to be taking mental notes, pressing his lips and leaning in to hear better.

  “Anyway, he was always drunk and on something. One day, when I came home from school, our dog, Gorilla, was nowhere to be found.”

  “You had a dog named Gorilla?” he interjected.

  “It was a little black poodle and always made strange grunting sounds all day and all night, even when it slept. Beanie named him that. Our neighbor said the dog probably had asthma.”

  Marcus made the sound of a wheezing gorilla as quiet as he could without making a scene. “Man, your story just keeps getting weirder,” he added.

  “Roger was passed out in the bathroom drunk, but before I could wake him up, the police came and were knocking on the apartment door. Someone had seen him outside in the parking lot of the complex beating the dog to death with his bare hands. They arrested him and took him away in handcuffs. He struggled with the police and tried to get away. He was yelling at me the whole way out the door.”

  Marcus’s face cringed when I mentioned Roger beating the dog to death against the hot cement like a madman. “What the hell did he do that for? Sorry. Did you see the guy again?”

  I paused for a moment and stared out the window, watching the traffic. “When my mother found out that he’d been arrested and had killed the dog, she broke it off with him and refused to post his bail. At the time, she had been saving money for us to move into a house or buy herself a different car…something. She had almost a thousand dollars, and Roger knew about it. Four days later, I came home from school, and no one else was in the apartment, but the door had been kicked in.”

  “He broke into the apartment to get the money,” Marcus surmised.

  I nodded yes. “Did I mention that my mother also had a loaded shotgun in the hallway closet? My uncle gave it to her after someone tried coming through our bedroom window one night.”

  Marcus’s eyes grew wide. “Damn” was all he said.

  “Roger was angry and looked strange. He was raging and pissed off that my mother had quit him and left him to sit in jail.” I took a huge breath of air. Marcus just watched me without interrupting.

  “I’d never seen him like
that before. He was holding the shotgun and loading it with shells when he saw me. He pointed the shotgun at me as I stood in the hallway. He started screaming, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money?’ When I tried to run, I ducked from the hallway into the kitchen. I didn’t think he was going to fire at me, but his first shot hit the air-conditioning unit in the window. The gun sounded like a loud explosion going off in my head. He fired a second time and hit the kitchen cabinets above me. They splintered everywhere. I was crouched down on the kitchen floor against the refrigerator door in the corner. He screamed again about the money as he got closer, but my head was ringing. I remember I was crying. He put the front end of the shotgun against my forehead and pushed me back into the refrigerator door. When I looked up, all I could see was the bottom of the barrel of the shotgun rising back up toward his face. He was smiling on the other end. He told me to quit crying.”

  “Holy shit…say what? What an evil son of a bitch,” Marcus said, squirming around in his seat.

  “It wasn’t a good moment for me. When he pulled the trigger back, all I heard was this loud metallic sound, like a dry snap, but nothing followed. I looked up at him, and he was confused. He thought he was going to kill me. As soon as he took the gun from my head and began to lift it upright, it fired. He blew a hole in the kitchen ceiling, and plaster showered down on us from above. My ears were ringing so loud I could barely hear anything else. Before he slammed the butt of the gun to my head, I heard him say that if he ever saw me again, he’d pull the trigger and I wouldn’t be so lucky. After that, I don’t remember much. It’s kinda blank.”

  I sighed and sat still for a moment and stared blankly into the nowhere that I was surrounded by.

  “I couldn’t hear very well for weeks. I had a ringing in my ears for almost a month. Once the ringing faded, I began stuttering all the time. It came on gradually, but it might as well have been there the whole time. I was teased about it a lot. Saying my own name is still the hardest thing for me to do.”

  “That’s a really messed-up story, Sebastien. My heart goes out to you, bro. Did you ever see that fool Roger McDougall-Daggett again?”