Travelogues II

I’m at the Jefferson Lines bus station in Billings, Montana. When we got in at 4 am from Spokane the connection to Minneapolis had been canceled due to a storm. It’s 4 pm now. 12 hours to go. I reflexively looked around on my laptop for motels when we arrived, bars, whatever, but after we had all called to reschedule our tickets and harrumphed and settled down and no one left, I stayed. Better to stick with your people. As soon as we got into the station I plugged in my phone and settled down next to what turned out to be the only working wall socket, and now, mid-day, several phones are charging or in line to be charged, all resting on top of my bag. At first people came up with a hesitant ‘Do you mind?’ when they came by to check. Now they just say ‘I appreciate you!’

Poor people, druggy people, confused people ride the bus and you have to be careful about your stuff. But you can’t be clingy about it either, that would be ungenerous, uncharitable, bad form. You have to be open and cautious at once. I think this is something come natural to the poor and either forgotten or never learned by most everyone else. Acquaintances picked up easily in the roll of things, easy talk, easy generosity — great generosity — but also a wariness come from repeated experience having people turn on you. A knowing acceptance grown from the roots coupled with a tough facade, a quick bluster, a ready cynicism, as the protective thorny top layer.

Baywatch has been playing on the one TV since we got in — with sound. The TV is looming and centered like the lyrics screen at an evangelical church. I don’t know how long it takes to watch all the episodes in succession. Maybe we’re already watching them all again? A Native American elder sits before his fire on the beach in Malibu. He’s perfectly cast, he looks like Sitting Bull. One of his people approaches Carmen Electra as she jogs up to them. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘He has chosen this place to die.’ Shocked — ‘He can’t die here. It’s a public beach!’ I lie down on my row of plastic chairs, get up, turn over, lie down, get up again, and in the haze Baywatch and my Iris Murdoch novel flame together. A man forces his lover into a suicide pact. They must crash their cars together at great speed. They both live. The tide rises. Rose loves Gerald who loves Jenkin who loves Rose.

I got on in Seattle, Chicago bound. It was supposed to be 42 hours. Now it will be around 60, but this is good. One must ride the bus. You can’t always do it of course — it takes so long — but, vaguely, it seems wrong to choose where you want to go and skip everywhere in between. Have some respect for the land and for the people. The bus will press you right up against all of it. Sitting in the station for 24 hours is the apotheosis of bus riding, slowing you down until you’re just where you need to be.

Seattle to Spokane was the first jag, just a few of us taking I-90 quiet and fast. My seat was 1D and even though sitting up by the driver I couldn’t tip from my flask while I meditated over the plains, I got comfortable. After awhile it was nice listening to the thoughts of the relief driver, who was picked up as a winter precaution in case the bus needed chains going over the Snoqualmie Pass. He sat right up behind the driver. He’d brought his lunchbox with him. He was enjoying himself. An old white man with a whiff of ex-military, he’d stare at his hands for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, slowly turning them, then start up talking before falling suddenly silent, like an oracle. He’d give short meditations on something of interest to him, speaking without need of response. Did you read the jokes today in Huckleberry? They were more chuckle jokes than belly busting jokes. Pretty hard to imagine in this day and age that you haven’t heard all the jokes already. Half an hour later, Do you go to McDonald’s? A year ago in Missoula they had a 50 nuggets for ten dollar deal. I asked last week and it was gone but they had a 40 nuggets for ten dollar deal. I ate twenty and took the rest home. Pretty good deal. Not bad, especially with the hot mustard sauce. Later he talked about his dislocated shoulder and how the doctors wanted to operate by turning it inside out. No way he was letting them do that to him, he said. Ridiculous. Turning your shoulder inside out. The driver, one hand on the wheel, working his way through a bag of Red Vines laying on his thigh, said ‘mmhmm.’

I got off in Spokane with an hour transfer and walked a couple blocks to a bar I had seen down the street when we were pulling in, Mootle’s. It was a weathered place held together by a few aging bohemian hipsters, the western type, scraggly, poor, jovial, friendly to cigarette ends, with hempish beanies and missing teeth. I get out my book and sit a couple chairs down from a Coors and whiskey, who returns a minute or two later from his smoke. His name is Jim Kendall. Artist and photographer, amateur historian. He has a punk kid doing side work for him who knows all the technology, but most of his stuff is in his apartment, or right in here. He points around at the walls of the bar at his photos of old Spokane. In his twenties and thirties he thought he had to get out to the Big City. He went to New York, Boston, Big Falls, Seattle, Portland, but kept coming back. He’s a Spokane guy. When he was a kid he’d go around with a camera taking pictures of all the buildings before they were torn down for the 1974 Expo. Smallest city ever to host the Expo. They took down so many beautiful old buildings just for that. He should’ve taken more pictures, he didn’t realize at the time.

He says, ‘Spokane used to be a great place. You used to be able to get a little room. You could be a punk kid and get a room for 125 a month, living with the old men, with a bathroom down the hall.’ In the 80s and 90s Spokane really went to shit. The malls were put up outside of town and everyone moved out there, all the little stores closed down. He says Spokane was always a town of prostitutes, drugs and drink but the histories never talk about it. He has to write his own one day. He tells me about prohibition and the tunnels for shuttling liquor. Bing Crosby would go to the Chop Suey joint (he points in the direction it used to be, towards the far corner of the bar) to pick up his booze. I have to catch my bus, I tell him, get that punk kid working on your website. He smiles and says, ‘I’ll be here! Come in again!’

Spokane is western and weird with the indeterminacy of a movie shot. Sunlight and mist meet in the pines outside the station, with a sudden few flakes of snow — fairy tale weather. I light my cigar against one of the pines and take a couple puffs before heading up for my bus.

Heading into the evening, we’re Billings-bound. I sit nearer the back this time with the bad and the lively. It’s mostly young men, which I like. Young men get on easily, no matter the superficial differences. They’re more trusting, more accepting of natural affinities, than young women. It’s nice hearing ‘yeah bruh, hey my boy, my guy, fuck dude’ among people who’ve just met. They chatter like roommates, with quick laughs. The young man across from me has a puppy, a grey and white pit. He picked it up at the Spokane station. Someone had left it behind. ‘Left it behind, damn’ I say. ‘Yeeuh. Those people. Are going to hell.’ He calls it Hazel, then Diesel. I don’t catch the reason for the name change, which lies somewhere in the nighttime jabberings. At the first Idaho gas station stop he picks up a can of dog food and a couple hot dogs, which he shares with the puppy, trading bites. The dog is bony and hungry. ’This dog gonna be BIG bro.’ He gets a little chatter going about the dog. I can’t tell if the other young men are humoring him or really interested.

Dog dude is white as a bone, the guy behind him black, and the guy across from them both, apparently, Hispanic. Dog dude can’t stop talking. It’s an itch. ‘Yo,’ he says to the Hispanic-looking guy. ‘You Asian right? Chinese?’ After a pause and a stare the guy says ‘Vietnamese.’ ‘Vietnamese! This is yoyo you get me? I’m Vietnamese too dude. I have a Vietnamese uncle. I know Vietnamese but I won’t talk it in here cus you know how Vietnamese people like to trash white people and I don’t wanna be trashing nobody on this bus haha. I’m gonna miss the pho in Montana, dude, you know? Shit.’ There’s a lull, then he casts again. ‘Yo Asianman!’ ‘Yo dude that’s racist as fuck,’ says the black guy behind him. ‘Sorry. He looks Asian though right?’ ‘No dude he’s fuckin Mexican.’ But dog dude and the black guy are quick friends. It turns out they’ve been to the same high schools — they’ve both been to many and gotten kicked out of many. Both know Priscilla, the Mexican chick from that one school in Idaho. ‘Small world bruh.’ The black guy is a little off, a little on edge. ‘My brain ain’t right bro.’ He left his wallet on top of the vending machine at the Spokane station, he thinks, but he doesn’t seem that upset. He still has his phone though. Dog dude helps him call the station, with indeterminate results. The black guy shows pictures of his little daughter, to which dog dude says ‘Shit, man!’ ‘This my world, bruh.’ Later, ‘She’s better without me, bruh, I have to stay away from her.’ Black guy is into fixing cars. Together they run through auto parts and dog dude quizzes him on what could be wrong if you’re going 50 miles an hour and the car starts rattling.

Everyone’s companionable until Missoula. We pull into the station for a long break and I’m pressing myself hard against the window, trying to sleep, when there’s a stir and shout and at once we’re enveloped in a nebulous middle-of-the-night confusion. It’s still dark on the bus. One of the white-trash-looking kids sitting in the back — two guys and a girl — rushes up the aisle. ‘She’s doing meth in the bathroom, bro!’ I’m just awake enough to catch someone doing a quick step to the door to drop the pipe in the trash, wrapped up in a plastic bag, and after not even long enough for the murmur to subside (murmurs subside quickly unless you’re one of the contenders — everyone knows to keep their head down on the bus) one of the white kids comes back from his smoke to find his bag missing. He runs up the aisle and out, scattering like there are three of him. He comes back ready to rip. The police are called. The bus driver, a kind and immensely fat man who waddles through the cold to help the oncoming passengers with their bags, his arms swinging at his sides for support, calls out helpfully from the front of the bus. ‘They say they’re on their way!’ ‘Well if I had found the guy who took it they were gonna be on their way for a body too bruh’ says the kid, in that perfect mixture of loud enough for everyone to hear, but soft enough to be ostensibly for his own benefit. He’s doing the gangsta. He walks the bus as if his pants are hanging down.

The cops come, a young white man and a young white woman. They’re doing the noncommittal as they question the kid, thumbs in vests, not to be taken by surprise but a little bored. You can imagine the last thing they want to do is come to a bus stop to look into a stolen bag. Probably just a bunch of meth heads. As they leave the young man reboards and says to nobody in particular that they’re gonna look at the camera footage and get back to him. Maybe they will.

On the road again. We’re nearing dog dude’s stop, but he’s getting worried. The dog has eaten several meals’ worth at one go, and is now whimpering. ‘He’s gotta take a piss or a shit soon, man. Can I hold you over the sink? Can you piss over the sink? I’m sorry baby, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I did this to you.’ He smooches and smooches it. I’m ready for a strong smell, but all is well. They both get off in the dark, and we roll on.

Somehow we make it to Billings even with the last 50 miles turned to ice. We get in at four in the morning: all eastbound trips canceled. Thank god there’s a station. The last stop was a Walmart parking lot in a mist of snow. But the Billings Jefferson Lines station is large and reasonably clean. There are even two attendants behind an actual counter, a black man and a white woman. We press around it, asking what will happen now, but their powers have been stripped and all authority, such as it is, appears to lie with subcontractors in India. With fading patience they give to each of us the only possible line — ‘You gotta call Greyhound, I don’t know nothing about the next ride’ — and hand out post-it notes with the number. There’s nothing til the same time next day, 4:30 AM. They’ll keep the station open for us for the next 24 hours. Without much fuss everyone settles in.

The station’s main room is filled with short rows of plastic chairs, thankfully without armrests so you can lie across several of them to sleep. An Hispanic family, man, woman, and child, settles between two of the rows. They lay out a blanket and pillows on the floor like it’s the master bed and settle in. The rest of us sprawl around and make bemused comments about the hours ahead and our mild misfortune. The young men settle in a small carpeted area to the side and put their hoodies up and their headphones on. Everyone starts feeling familial enough to walk across the station for a pee or a drink of water and leave their bags behind for a minute.

And suddenly — a fuss. An older black man is talking, a little loud, then a little louder, til it reaches the everyone-look-up pitch. He’s arguing with the attendants, walking from the counter to his bags and back to the counter, his pace taking on the compulsory quality of the unwell. He’s not cool with the trip being canceled, or rescheduled, or not getting a hotel. It’s hard to tell. ‘Motherfucking faggots! Faggoty motherfuckers!’ he chants, still with that perfect level of just loud enough to be clearly heard and make you a little nervous. He builds up like he’s taking off. He’s one of those complicated talkers who’s going so fast you can’t tell if there’s a problem or even anything to be simplified. ‘Call the sheriff! I’m going to jail! Put me in County! Call the sheriff, I’m going to jail!’ he shouts. He ventures out into the rows, going from person to person asking, humbly, if he can use their phone. Can they call the sheriff for him? Could he use it for a moment? He goes back to the attendants, trying to get them to call the cops and suddenly there’s a fracas and the noise of something being ripped, then thrown. Then they do call the cops.

He paces, patiently in his way, waiting. We all watch him interestedly, sometimes looking around and catching one another’s eye and smiling as if to say, this guy! The cops come, four of them, all white (it’s Billings, Montana), all men, an unruffled brood. The ruckus-causer is gratified and ready. He walks right up to them to explain his case as they come through the door. It is instantly confusing. He’s a convicted child molester, something happened twenty or twenty-five years ago, he has a felony, he has to get to Minneapolis, he has to report to the authorities or he’ll get another felony, they say he can’t be around kids but his kids are grown…The cops listen to him impassively, at length, before venturing mild-mannered solutions. One of them seems to be trained in de-escalation: he purses his lips before he says anything, considering a possible suggestion, then holds out a hand as if to say, ‘You could do this… or not…’ He calls the man ‘Jerry.’ A couple of them go back to their squad car to look him up and see who they can contact in Minneapolis. One of them keeps saying, ‘If you’re just passing through, you shouldn’t need to report…’ Jerry says he ‘caused a scene’ to get the attendants to call the cops, what else could he do?

The cops leave a message with someone in Minneapolis on a number out of Jerry’s shuffle of papers, but Jerry wants them to write a statement on his ticket saying he was here and the bus was canceled. The cops say the two tickets, one with the canceled trip and the other with the rescheduled trip, should prove this. No, Jerry says, they need to write it on the ticket. They need to write it on the ticket. He stabs at his papers with his index finger like a lawyer in a movie going for home. The back-and-forth is interminable. We all start to turn back to our books and phones. Finally, the dawn still unbroken, they clean it up. The attendants don’t want him in the station, but he can come back at four the following morning to catch the rescheduled bus. The cops offer to take him to the shelter up the road — ‘We go there all the time, they’ll take you!’ pleads one, no doubt wanting to get Jerry off their hands — but Jerry keeps saying, zanily but politely, ‘I ain’t going there, take me to the county jail, take me right to the county jail, lock me up for the night.’ Nobody will ever get to the bottom of this one. They let Jerry walk off into the dark with his three duffels. It’s ten degrees outside, icy and blanket dark.

We doze and half doze under Baywatch and white light. A hum of silence reigns, only broken by the shifting of someone on their row of chairs, or a smoker’s propping open of a door to get back in. The black outside becomes dark blue. I’m awake, asleep, watching Baywatch and staring through it, turning over and turning back over, groggy-eyed and everywhere at once, when I realize I’ve been hearing for I don’t know how long ‘Call the police! Call the police!’ in the private shrill of a psychotic person. ‘Benedict Arnold! Benedict Arnold! Hail Mary!’ The face is a darker blur against one of the station windows, pressed right up to us like we’re on view in a fishbowl. The phrases string endlessly from pitch to pitch, like railroad cars. ‘There’s a bomb! There’s a bomb! The stock market is crashing! The stock market is crashing! The stock market is crashing! The stock market is crashing! The stock market is crashing!’ Several of us laugh. ‘Maybe it’s true!’ I say. ‘I hope not, for my sake,’ says someone a few rows down. The smokers keep going out to smoke, their spot outside the door putting them just a few feet away from the shouter, who continues shouting into the window without turning round. Suddenly, when dawn trembles at morning, I realize it’s Jerry.

‘Ambassador! Ambassador!’ He seems to mean the station attendant. He’s been shouting now for almost an hour for everyone to hear. It’s unclear what should be done — he’s not hurting anybody. But letting him shout all day would be too ridiculous. Finally she calls the cops. Again they roll up, three or four standing outside to talk with him, one coming inside to ask her what the deal is. ‘What do you want, to keep him away from the station?’ She says yeah, he can still board the 4:30 am bus but he can’t return until 4. The cop says he’ll take him to the hospital which can hopefully hold him until then. I assume this means the Emergency Department waiting room. It’s still 10 degrees outside. You can see the breaths of Jerry and the cops making their cases. Finally Jerry walks over with them to the ambulance they’ve called. They drive away.

Around 11 Jerry comes back, no longer obviously ill. We all recognize him and one of us lets him in. Jerry goes over to the desk for a quiet talk with the attendant (a new one by now), asking if he can stay inside. But no, he can’t come back, he ‘had an altercation.’ He leaves quietly.

As the lucky finder of the working socket, I am now Guardian of the Bags when the young men go out. Backpacks, cords, phones and chargers are piled by me. I give them a nod when they ask if I can watch their stuff. They’re circumstantial comrades, tramping off together through the ice in their tennis shoes to get something to eat. The attendant told them there’s a gas station four blocks away. They trade smokes and head out. Among them are the ‘Vietnamese’ guy, a young white dude with a red beanie who saunters around offering everyone gum, and an older black man named Julius, who grew up outside Calera, Alabama, where I lived for awhile. They return with gifts: Mr. Vietnamese brings me a cheddar bacon hamburger, Julius an extra Mountain Dew the station attendant gave him. The young white dude pulls out a dollar and asks, with gestures, if the Hispanic couple’s little girl would like to use it to try to win a stuffed animal from the Treasure Chest, one of those arcade games with a three pronged attachment that no one ever beats. The mother says shyly in a heavy accent, ‘thank you,’ and walks the beaming girl over.

We exhaust the number of possible sleeping positions. A succession of friendly, lackadaisical people sit behind the counter to babysit us, though the station is officially closed — the only buses scheduled are for one and four thirty in the morning. They order Dominoes — cheese, sausage, pepperoni, and ham — and keep not only a coffee thermos filled, but one with hot chocolate for the little girl. Is the generosity a northern thing? It starts to feel like a rainy day in elementary school where you stay in and watch movies at lunch.

Jerry keeps around the building though the temperature never gets above 11. He’s sometimes just outside the door and sometimes ten or so yards away by a lamppost, standing stock-still, his every cell, I imagine, poised towards Minneapolis. He doesn’t even stamp or rub his hands together. When he’s by the door he chats with the smokers. It’s friendly having him around. He’s one of us — the one in the doghouse. Someone with a problem, but everyone’s got a problem, or has had them, or will have them, or knows people who have them. The law has the right to kick him out but he has the right to pull himself together and try to come back in. Now and then he knocks on the window for something, and as we head into evening I notice a question forming in myself: if Jerry knocks in the dark should I be friendly and see what he wants? Or keep my head down and let someone else do it because who knows what might happen? The creeping nature of bourgeois timidity.

Sometime after dark there’s another knock. Before I can think I jump up and walk over to what I figure must be Jerry. I crack the door and peek outside to see what’s up, but it’s just an elderly white couple who’ve come to inquire about bus tickets. I let them in and they wave thanks to Jerry, who’s standing shadowy several yards away. He waves an acknowledgment. He must have banged on the glass for them (the doors are locked since the station is closed). The couple is told that the station will open to sell tickets at 11 pm. They leave.

Over the hours as the attendants change Jerry comes in to use the bathroom, then puts some of his duffels in the vestibule, then inside the station. It’s a fairly-played incursion. Whoever’s closest lets him in, and each time he humbly exits. The attendants don’t make a fuss. He starts standing right behind the door, staring and smoking, wed to the building, as if we’ll disappear and he’ll never ever get to Minneapolis if he even blinks or turns around. Maybe he’s only here in Billings by the skin of his teeth. I suddenly realize he hasn’t had pizza. Probably he hasn’t eaten anything. I haven’t even seen him drink anything. I call across to Julius, who’s lying on top of his duffel on one of the chair rows, noodling through his phone — ‘Do you think he’d like some pizza?’ ‘Yeah yeah! Do it!’ I trot over and edge the door open. Yes, Jerry wants pizza. Pepperoni and sausage. I warm a couple pieces in the microwave and bring them back out. He eats them like you see starving people eat in movies — you can’t see him swallow.

The attendants get lackadaisical. If he isn’t causing a nuisance, why not let him in? At the end of the evening he gets an hour’s reprieve sitting quietly by his bags, inside, just by the door. He’s a tough old bird. He was standing in the cold for at least ten hours. He’s wearing cheap fancy shoes, faux leather with the stitching popping out, but he’s got decent-looking gloves. I say his feet must have gotten cold, and he says, no. ‘Only thing that got cold is my nose,’ which he points to. But finally, late late, the original attendants return. The black man comes over like he’s not taking any nonsense, and says, you gotta stand outside til you catch the bus, you can’t come in here. Jerry troops out.

I begin to feel guilty about not having given anyone anything. Nearly everyone’s made a gesture. I’ve gotten a soda, a burger, a stick of gum. Everyone else has traded smokes, maybe weed (once the white dude in the red beanie nods towards the exit in a furtive way to Mr. Vietnamese, and says ‘You want to smoke?’ and I figure it must be something else. But I’m not sure. Could it be meth? I don’t know how it works). I lean towards the two smoking buddies. ‘You guys like cigars? I’ve got an extra. My cousin gave some to me, they’re pretty good.’ ‘Yeah,’ they say, and they actually do go out to share it. Coming back in Mr. Vietnamese says ‘Thank you, that was nice!’ I am pleased: I’m no longer in debt. It’s like those country bars where as soon as you make the slightest human gesture (it’s possible to be the guy who keeps his head down and never talks to anybody but then what’s the point of going in) you’re caught in a web of credit. Someone buys you a shot. You chat. You’re introduced to friends and relations. Soon you start to think about who you should buy shots for, and before you know it you’re on the train, so many times over giver and receiver you don’t know where you are. This is why fancy bars and restaurants are so pleasant: you can enjoy something nice, pay, walk out, and forget about it. It’s not the steak or the cocktails, it’s the sense that you’re getting away with something you’re paying for. But it’s not true. You can’t ever get away. Everyone’s caught in the web — caught, too, in the web of fate. I liked the friendly, biding-one’s-time demeanor in our group, everyone saying ‘I don’t know’ and keeping on as best they could, because who knows what will happen. We all knew Jerry might erupt — but also that he might make it, and really he’s not so different from us, so we should open the door when we can just like we would do for anyone else.

The one in the morning bus rolled in from the west as scheduled. It was a shock — suddenly not only were we overtaken by a bleary raggedy bunch like ourselves, but a tangle of relations and conversations that had been crystallizing for hours and fell on our own like a swarm. The driver, white, came in with a small black boy dead asleep over his shoulder. He walked up to another little boy sitting in one of the rows. ‘This little guy your brother?’ The boy nodded and the driver said ‘I thought so!’ and stood holding the little guy for a few minutes until the mother got in with the bags. They were from Africa, I think. The children immediately hooked onto Baywatch like they were receiving an alien transmission.

The Hispanics gathered around the Hispanic family, who were now sitting up on their blanket on the floor, talking a million conversations at once. Standing patiently in the flux was a short, undemonstrative man with a beard. He was one of several men in the new group who were modestly outfitted for any situation. He could dig a hole in a blizzard and come out okay a week later, you were sure. He carried a roller bag with a tent and sleeping bag neatly folded and bungee-corded to the top. Someone mentioned some sort of misbehavior and just like in a trashy country bar the switch was pulled: drinks and DUIs and jail time flew out of mouths like they’d been hanging by the teeth, ready to go. A white guy with a black beanie said he had three DUIs. A very young man at the edge of the group said he had two felonies. And so on. The camper man spoke only when he had reason to, always in a sweet soft high voice, and always after a pause. Like everyone else, he had no money.

Money, money. It was everywhere, like in Dostoevsky. People had none, or very little, or some was on the way from a friend, or the last of theirs was on the way to a friend. I remember the amounts. The girl who shouted through her phone that she had sixty-one dollars. The guy who phoned somebody that he wouldn’t have nothing when he got in, ‘I’m down to pocket change.’ The Filipino lady going through to Minneapolis who said to everyone at large that she had spent her second-to-last twenty on snacks for the (several day long) ride, and was going to use the last twenty to get postcards and gifts for her friends, but her friend said don’t do that you might need that money. In Minneapolis, she did: a driver told her she had to pay for her extra bags. She didn’t have it and as she started to cry someone from the line came up and paid. And in Billings just before our bus out arrived a young white man with a mean, turned-in face came in with a much older man limping behind. They were like one of those querulous codependent pairs in Dickens, each circling round the other in a perpetual motion driven by bad vibes, their relation impermeable to the rest of the universe. The younger said ‘Bye. Are you gonna give me that twenty?’ The old man mumbled something. ‘Cus I don’t have anything and you were gonna give it to me and that’s all I’ll have.’ The old man mumbled something again and left. The young man lay down on top of his bags with an effluvium of noxious energy.

For the camper man the amounts were 50 and 150. He would have gotten in the day before, but with all eastbound trips canceled his driver had told everyone he’d drop them off at the Holiday Inn in town since the next bus stop was on the side of the road. The camper man asked to be let out on the side of the road anyway since rooms were going for $150 a night and he didn’t have that kind of money. He tried to set up his tent but the snow was blowing sideways and the stakes blew away. So he walked through the blizzard back into town and found a motel with one room left going for $50, a miracle.

He had grown up in Florida. He rode the bus around the country setting up new branches for a cell phone repair service, but he lived with his wife and kids in North Dakota. It seemed the company he worked for didn’t provide any kind of perks. Maybe he even rode the bus on his own dime. He was telling all this to the kid with two felonies. The kid said (his standard line, probably) ‘I grew up in and out of juvy, I’m not proud of it but it is what it is’ and talked like he had a bug in him. He was warm and endearing, ignorant, enthusiastic, dangerous (I imagine) when insulted by one of his peers. He wanted to become an underwater welder, he said. He’d gotten his welding license but you had to be 25 to get the diving certificate, and he was 21. The camper man, who seemed to know everything about life, said no, you could get your certificate when you were 21. He distinguished between the various certificates for underwater work. He himself had come up from Florida when he was young to work in the oil fields. The kid said ‘Yeah I always wanted to do that’ and the camper man said he wouldn’t recommend it — he’d seen lots of young guys ruin their lives doing that. The kid said ‘Ruin? What do you mean, ruin?’ ‘Ruin, they lost it, they lost their lives. I saw a nineteen year old kid come up to work in the fields and he made the same kind of mistake we had all made starting out…’ He talked about oils and gases and valves but the end of the story was that he fell in and lost his life instantly. This happened all the time. The kid stared at him for a moment, then kept talking.

The kid had been raised by his grandparents in North Dakota but had been living in San Bernardino (half the time California was mentioned on the bus it was San Bernardino) but you really called it San Bernaghetto or The Dino. He hated California. Gotta get out of it. He was taking the bus back to North Dakota because his Auntie had just gotten out of the hospital and he was going to help her. He hoped he remembered the house color. He hadn’t been back there in years. His Auntie (his grandmother, I gathered) had only been in his room to vacuum it, she’d left everything the same. Everyone thought he was white (he did look white) but that’s just cus his dad was white, he was Hispanic.

Everyone started to settle down after the excitement of a new station at one in the morning, and we curled into our places. The kid kicked it on a few of the chairs lying back with one arm cradling his head, his knees cocked up, reminiscing on the phone with a buddy from juvy. Remember Chad? Remember that white boy? Did you hear what happened to Mikey and Juan? No? Dude… Did you hear how they set up Danny? Yeah man he got 35 to life. They got some chick to say he had raped her. I was like, no, that doesn’t sound like Danny. They’re in prison in Montana and if I get a few hours I’m gonna go beat their asses. If somebody calls you a bitch you know you gotta fight them… Some people talk real big but turn out to be little bitches…

When we finally got on the bus I settled in the middle. I didn’t want to seem like I was following anyone around. But Julius, packed with the rest of our crew in the back, shouted ‘Sarah! Sit with us!’ I slid in across the aisle from him, right behind the kid, who was sitting across from the camper man. The bus was freezing. I said, ‘Man, it’s cold, I wish I’d brought my hat!’ and the kid turned around in a burst of a smile and said ‘Do you want my blue one?’ I said ‘No, no man, you’re gonna be up here in North Dakota.’ He said his Auntie still had all his old clothes in his room… Maybe I should have taken the hat. I’ve never been good at accepting things.

Everyone got quiet as we took off, suddenly tired, and as the driver cut the lights and we fixed our nests to sleep — as in Proust, a bit of backpack, the corner of a scarf, a crumpled sweater — the kid popped up and thrust his phone over the seat for me to look at. ‘Can you read it???’ He had found one of those memes with words written in scrambled letters. Do yuo fnid tihs smiple to raed? I read some of it back to him, trying it out. ‘Isn’t that crazy!!!!!’ He ducked back down, put the blanket over his head and passed out.

When I finally opened my eyes the sun was high in the sky and the kid was gone. I was sorry I hadn’t gotten to wish him goodbye. I imagined him taking off with everyone passed out around him, walking a few miles to his Auntie’s house that he couldn’t even remember the color of, in the dark, in the snow, with his carefully whitened sneakers and polyester beanie.

The bus driver had changed too. This one was the don’t-fuck-with-me type. He only announced the cities — ‘Fargo, Fargo’ — so whenever we pulled off the highway everyone would murmur. ‘I need to pee!’ ‘Do you think we can smoke here?’ ‘Is it Valley City yet?’ Sometimes we would coast in and out of a gas station without stopping, presumably because no one was waiting outside. This seemed dangerous. It was cold out, maybe someone was waiting inside? The only people who matched the devil-may-care of the driver were the smokers, who would run down the aisle and out to take even half a puff. Sometimes someone would say hesitantly ‘Do you think it’s a smoke break?’ and someone else would say ‘Go, go!’ and everyone would hustle off. Someone said two women had been left behind at one of the stops. I wasn’t sure if this was true, or if the assholeness of the driver had everyone making assumptions. But for the next few hours everyone was saying it. Don’t go too far! He left someone behind! He didn’t even honk for them to come back! I told him to wait but he just stared at me!

In Fargo quite a few people got on and we had to start sharing our seats. Two settled among us in the back: a tall, handsome, pockmarked white man in his forties with several bags and a two-month-old in a baby carrier that he wedged across the aisle from him like he did it every day, and a late-middle-aged white woman in a pleasant Sears-ish blouse and brown bob who was entirely unselfconscious. She had a South Dakota accent. I suddenly realized I should make room, and sprung up to move my bag so she could sit next to me. I said, sorry, it’ll just take a second, and she said cheerfully ‘I don’t need much legroom!’ In the few minutes after she settled herself she told me that she was going to Minneapolis to see the results of her MRI since she had a noncancerous brain tumor, that she had two daughters in the area and usually they’d driven her to appointments but the last four or five times she’d taken the bus, and that whenever she told a friend she was doing this they gasped — take the bus??? — but she liked it! People were friendly and it was a beautiful ride. She showed me the tumor on her phone: the size of a golf ball, a cheesy white mass.

She and her husband were cattle ranchers, living in a house built of stone more than a hundred years ago. They lived right across the border from Standing Rock, where he used to dig wells. She was part Norwegian, part German, her German forebears among those who fled Germany in the nineteenth century as conscientious objectors. They lived in Odessa before coming to America. She recommended that I read Homesteaders on the Steppe about these people. All her family had been ranchers. She grew up by Standing Rock; in the second and third grade she’d gone to elementary school on the reservation, where few of the children had seen a white person. They would come up and touch her blond hair.

Over the next eight hours I learned about the increasing depth of wells, the law forbidding ranchers from dosing their own cattle, the surge in diseases from animals being pumped with antibiotics at the big ranches, crop rotation, fallow summers, plowing the edges of the ranch to keep out wildfires, filling the grain in minus twenty degree weather, how sad it is to have a record snowfall when you’re helpless to save your animals locked in the drifts, and, finally, about the money going into foreign wars when so much was needed in the States. She shook her head, for shame. She bought some no-bake peanut butter cookies at a gas station and passed them round.

The man with the baby was a talker, too. A charmer. Had been around some. Could get into trouble if he was given the chance. His son Beckett — ‘second rarest boy’s name’ — was turning three months old on the 7th. The guy was obviously capable, although a few of the women kept a little eye on him and gave bits of advice. He burped the baby, fed him, changed him, passed him around — ‘Mind holding him for a second? Can you do me a favor?’ — drooped the baby clothes over his shoulder, pulled a diaper out of his back pocket, stuck the pacifier between his teeth — all while rattling on about his three sons and three daughters, one of whom was going into treatment just as he, the dad, was getting out of it.

He had been working in North Dakota as a snowblower for a hotel chain while he and the baby lived in the basement of his mom’s house. His ex-wife had fucked up, something to do with drugs. He was moving back to Huntsville Alabama — ‘where chivalry still lives!’ — for good. He made friends with everyone. He’d get up and hoist the baby over to someone who caught his eye, once swaying down the aisle to introduce him to a little black boy sitting with his mother, who for the rest of the ride said ‘Hi baby! Hi! Bye bye baby!’ whenever they passed. Getting back on after a gas station stop I found the baby held and cooed over by a Hispanic family who didn’t speak English while his daddy smoked outside. ‘Don’t be like your daddy!’ he’d say. ‘Don’t run after the ladies!’ A daddy just out of treatment, a momma who needed it, sisters in rehab, money from an ex being sent to his daughter to be forwarded to him so he could settle, but it wasn’t enough money, not what they agreed on, but how can you blame the daughter, she’s still getting it together. Later that night in the station in Minneapolis he stood by a post and stared dully away, his jaw fixed, and, standing near him, I asked if things were all right. Without moving his eyes he pursed his lips and shook his head like it was too much. Then he said, ‘Have you ever been in jail?’ I said no. He said, looking around at the people milling around jutting broken water fountains and metal benches, soiled bags with a lifetime’s remaining belongings slouched on the streaked floor, ‘This is about as close as you’ll get.’

The ranch lady, whose name was Lois, told us about last year’s blizzard. She and her son between them lost some 150 out of 400 cattle. The dad talked about snowblowing through it. It blew horizontally for so many hours that once he’d finish all the hotels he’d have to start over again with the first. He said ‘Near the end I just started crying!’ He’d worked for 60 hours straight. His hands were webbed white.

He always had something stirring and he was always catching everyone around him in it, a cluster of mild anxiety that ebbed with the radius. He couldn’t find his phone when it got lost under the seats, causing a ripple of distress to find it. He didn’t know his number cus he got the phone the day before. Could the women sitting behind him call these numbers to see if someone would answer who could then call his phone to see if it would ring? ‘Fuck. FUCK! I’m gonna have a fuckin anxiety attack.’ ‘I am too!’ said one of the women to herself, ‘all these people make me nervous.’ ‘What the FUCK is the number ahhhh fuckin god DAMN it!’ Finally one of them reached his daughter, who rang his phone, which was found. ‘She said ‘love you!’’ said the woman to the dad, who called ‘Love you girl!’ and the little son of the woman, squeezed by the window, shouted up ‘I love you!’ All the while the Filipino woman — the one whose friend told her to hold on to her last twenty — held the baby, which slept for most of the trip.

The Filipino woman was moving from Montana to Oklahoma. She was psyched. I could hear her chatting to a friend on the phone as we started off — ‘I was super excited but fuck dude now I’m fuckin just super scared. I’m nervous. I guess whatever happens happens!’ Sometimes she would give the dad advice, or at least make pointed comments. ‘Should you change him? You don’t want him to get diaper rash….’ As we pulled out of her North Dakota town she pointed through the window to a flea market barn with a vast sloping metal roof, saying ‘When I was a kid we used to slide down that in snow storms. I thought I was badass. Now look at me!’

People came, people went. We got to Minneapolis. Jerry was still with us. I was proud. He’d done it! He was almost there. But he was wearing. He was staring nowhere, talking to himself, cresting up to the moments where he couldn’t keep it in, spilling into a phrase or patter before looking round like he’d forgotten where he was. ‘Extra extra read all about it!!!’ he’d trill, with a little footwork. Keep it together, I thought, keep it together. He jigged forward and back, again startling himself and subduing. Break and recede. Keep it together, keep it together. We got back on the bus and I forgot about him, sliding through the dark towards Milwaukee. Only later did I remember that he was supposed to report in Minneapolis. Wasn’t he?

Halfway to Milwaukee, pulled over at a nowhere stop in a parking lot, people wheeling their bags toward us in the cold, he erupted. ‘FUCK……FUCK!!!’ ‘Don’t get in my face like that, you’re messing with the wrong person! Doing that to a woman!’ came the voice of a driver, a white woman, tiny and tough. We lengthened our necks. ‘This is racial profiling!’ ‘Racial profiling…nobody says that to me. I’ve got black kids!’ A lady in front of me, black, shouted ‘I saw what he did to you, girl, I’ll testify for you!’ ‘I’ve done years already!’ ‘Maybe he’s got to do some MORE years…’ ‘Call the sheriff! Call the sheriff!’ he shouted, just as he’d done in Billings. It wasn’t a taunt. Again he sounded like he wanted the sheriff to be called. He refused to get off. The driver, who in her shrill way had also lost it, screamed about calling the police. She marched off the bus and we watched her frowning into her phone, her arms crossed in the cold, making the call. Everyone sighed. Someone said, ‘This is the first time I’ve taken the bus in years and this happens.’

Word came that the police, on their way, wanted us to deboard. More murmurs, about the baby — ‘a newborn can’t be out in this cold!’ — Jerry, the cold, the night, the trip, but out we went until we all stood alongside the bus watching Jerry through his window, sitting nobly. Two squad cars rolled up and three hale and fat officers walked over, two white, one black. They were jovial, ready-to-go types. You could imagine them saying as they set off ‘The bus! Gotta do a removal!’ They climbed aboard and stood over him but Jerry still refused to move. We watched them handcuff him and lead him out and through the parking lot. They ducked him into the squad car.

The Filipino woman was holding the baby, a sphere of blankets in her arms. She called out to the closest person, ‘Cover his face! It’s too cold!’ and whoever it was covered the little nose and mouth. Suddenly I remembered Jerry’s bags, which he’d stood over and sat on and dragged around Billings for 24 hours. I sidled up to the driver. ‘I was with him in Billings. He has some bags down there, could we get them?’ She stared at me, friendly but exasperated and still a little piqued, and said, ‘Do you know how much time it would take to get to those bags?’ I said, confusedly, ‘He was thrown out of the station in Billings. He waited in the cold for 24 hours.’ ‘And they let him back on the bus???’ She goggled. The officers walked back, in their element, puffing in the cold. One of them got out a notepad. ‘What else did he do, did he just accost you?’ Someone said ‘He said to the lady across from him that he was gonna slap her face.’ ‘Ah!’

Maybe Jerry lived month to month like this, losing it, carrying his bags, losing them, two, three, four, ticket to Minneapolis, ticket to Milwaukee, write a letter to your parole officer, register as a sex offender, get thrown off a bus, spend a night in jail, go to County, call the sheriff, ‘Call the sheriff!’, back on the bus. Maybe the sheriff was all he knew, the common denominator, the least troubling place to be. It always comes back to the sheriff.

Once more we boarded and tried to sleep. An Arabic speaking African family joined us in Milwaukee. They filled up the last two or three rows. They had a warmth and solidity to them that the rest of us seemed to lack, like we were all ghosts and they the women and men among us. When they talked through the dark it sounded like fighting or laughing or crying, grownups, babies, children, arms and legs cast over the rows. Once I gripped my way to the bathroom in the dark and the mother smiled up at me saying, brokenly, ‘Sorry!’, scooting the limbs of the sleeping babies out of the aisle. They were beautifully robed, magnificently wreathed.

The last couple hours of a trip are the worst. I was wearing all my wool but still shivering, I’d run out of tequila the day before, I dazed and woke and dazed and woke, eyes opening to black and streaks of white of passing headlights in some netherstate, soft and real and insubstantial like white bread. Someone got on and sat next to me in the night. When I awoke, pulling into Chicago, I saw an older black woman, hands folded over the lovely black and white carpet bag on her lap. I — greasy-haired, rumpled, smear-faced and by then smelling and sweating through my woollens — said ‘Is this the end of your trip?’ No, she said, she was going to Louisville. ‘I’ve been on the bus for three days!’ I said proudly. ‘Have a good stretch of your legs!’ she said.

There we were at 5:30 in the morning in the Chicago Greyhound station. Everyone, the benches full, life stretching out and down toward the vending machines, back by the boarding doors, around the information booth and into the usual raggle-taggle of hangers-on around the exit. I humped my bag over to a spare square of bench and went through my stuff in a dream. Wallet, phone, keys, charger. Laptop. Murdoch, Lawrence. Flask. Dirty underwears in the front pocket. Running shoes. I put it beside me and leaned back into the hum. Across the aisle was an older black lady sitting on her walker, her bags carefully beside her, a young and bearded white man in a hoodie standing a few feet away, diffident, deferential. He gestured towards the woman. ‘Well… good talking to you!’ ‘Yes,’ she said with a large and gracious smile, ‘I hope you have a good journey.’ The young man paused, then made another foray. ‘Maybe we’ll meet again someday!’ The woman smiled again and said ‘I believe….’ but the buzz in the station swelled, and I couldn’t hear what she believed but I was sure I believed it also. The young man smiled too, open and unselfconscious. In the pause he said ‘Would you like an orange?’ digging for one in his bag. He handed it over, gleaming like a royal thing, and the woman took it and turned it in her fingers and considered it, saying ‘Thank you!’ I hoisted my bag and walked away, it didn’t seem right any longer to listen, I couldn’t possibly see them part — I walked through the rows of people for the exit and caught in my eye a large and round figure behind a bundle of cloths. It was the Filipino woman, still holding the baby. She waved at me from the folds. ‘Hey lady! Still with us?’ I said, ‘No, this is my stop! I’m back in Chicago! Have a good trip!’ She said ‘Thank you! Bye!’ I asked the guy at the information booth what the quickest way to Ogilvie was and he said if I went out door 13 I could walk two blocks down and I’d hit it. I ducked out door thirteen and was among the buses, all flayed out. I crossed over to the street and the city was empty before me in the morning dark.