Travelogues IV

I

Derrick didn’t seem like the kind of person who went anywhere. You couldn’t imagine anyone meeting him at his stop. Maybe a social worker at the other end. He wore a bright red polo that smelled like a room that had been lived in for many years, and never aired. I thought of the shut-ins, the old Poles and alcoholics, blinking out the windows of their subsidized rooms in Chicago onto a world that was no longer for them.

“I’ve never seen a gas station turned into a bus station before,” I said to Derrick as we pulled into the Columbus stop. Together we considered the scatter under the window, people in blankets and people with face tattoos, people with sweatshirts on their heads. “There’s some messed up things, along these ways,” said Derrick, as if concluding a tragic poem.

In Indianapolis we all had to get off. Everyone got off. Derrick had not moved. “I think we all need to get off,” I said. He stood up with a start, lurched back two seats and laid himself between the rows so you wouldn’t know anyone was there.

Derrick said he had come out to Dayton from St Louis but had run out of money. Things didn’t work out. Now he was going back.

II

The woman across the aisle asked if anyone had a cup of ice. She had a southern accent, but her voice was high and sharp like a child’s. Why would anyone have a cup of ice? If they did, why would they give it to her? I said maybe she could run over to the station store, they might have one. She said she’d tried that. Papers were all around her, folders and booklets and loose sheets. She picked one out and studied it for a while. Quiet Moments, was the title. She was a tiny woman in a cheap blue windbreaker several sizes too large. She wore sunglasses and a ball cap saying TEXAS.

Every time we got on a new bus she’d make some kind of query or investigation. She’d look up or around or stand and look over the next seat or peer through to the person ahead.

“Excuse me, sir! Excuse me! What is that button for? The red one? What is it for?” “It’s to get the driver.” “Oh THANK you, thank you!”

“Excuse me! Where are the lights, how do I turn on the lights?”

“Excuse me! Can you help me find the address of a church in Los Angeles? It’s close to Union Station and I need to know where it is… It’s a missionary Catholic Church. Do you have the address?” “Missionary Baptist Church?” “No, missionary Catholic Church. It’s just a few blocks away. I need the mass times. Can you help find the mass times?”

“Does anyone have a cup of ice?”

How could anyone not help someone who was so sure you would give it? Someone always helped. Did she really not know what the red button was for? Did she really think someone had a cup of ice? I started to think she was just getting her bearings, like reaching out to pat the bedside table in the dark.

In the station in El Paso I went up to talk to her. Where was she headed? She was going to Los Angeles. To do what? She was going to build a tiny home. She’d get a plot of land… Did I know if Union Station was open all night? (She’d interrupted herself) I said I didn’t think so. They might close it between midnight and 4 am. Her face fell. But it would probably be warm, there would probably be somewhere to camp, I said. She would try to find a church, she said. She had stayed at one once, in New York. It was in the middle of everything. Times Square? Yes, she said, she’d stayed at a church in Times Square.

At each stop she’d sit right up next to someone, however many empty seats were around. Perhaps she needed to feel someone was close at hand.

Her name was Bella.

III

The station door swung open and a beautiful girl jumped through, barefoot. One leg was cocked like the leg of a bird. With another hop she landed just inside the door next to the charger, and plugged in her phone. She was 18 or 19. Her sweatshirt was a man’s, much too big, her pants stringy and stained at the heels. Crosslegged she took up her crippled foot and nursed it. Her shining hair hung in French braids over her shoulders.

She was with a man ten years older. “Get me a Mountain Dew!” she whined as he crossed to the vending machines. The girl looked around without looking at anyone. “What?” she seemed to say. “You think there’s something wrong? You think I can’t handle it?”

Lined up in the cold, waiting to head on out of Albuquerque, I watched the girl come through the boarding doors. Barefoot she leaped down the corridor, her braids flying behind her, her injured foot bouncing along, her face set. As she passed we caught each other’s eye and for a full second we stared at one another as she flew through the air.

IV

“The superintendent’s gonna be our driver,” said Nathan in Albuquerque. “He’s the one who’ll decide which route we’ll take. He’s been driving for 30 years so he knows. Going downhill on some of those roads, in an ice storm? You could lose control, we could all be dead.” He stared. I nodded.

Nathan walked off to tell someone else. He’d make for you insistently from across the station. He’d gotten on in Springfield and when the girl he was talking to got off in Dayton he’d said to me over the next seat “Do you mind if I ask, where you’re heading?” and had talked until I had to stare at the open page of my book. For the next two days his life trickled to us over the seats. His foster father, West Virginia, failing out of basic training, the tow truck job his wife’s family had set up for him in Phoenix. Two of the employees had been struck and killed. Now there was an opening.

His tone sharpened with the hours. “Well do what the fuck you want, I’ll call you later, I guess,” he’d said to somebody on his phone, and hung up. I could feel his face reddening with anger. It was easy to forget how young he was - 22, 23? He was big, pale, plump, eager. His hair was a greasy brown mess. He had to keep pushing at his glasses to straighten them on his face - one of the arms was missing. In St Louis he put on a cowboy hat with a slouching brim. He looked like he’d gotten it as a prize at a carnival.

Nathan almost got into trouble in Albuquerque. Poor Nathan, he couldn’t stop himself. It was just a couple of tough guys throwing their weight around about the route. An army man who’d been in Fallujah and a guy with tatted up calves parading in front of a map of the US on an Amtrak promotional poster. Would we take I-40? Would we bypass Flagstaff? They traced their guesses like they knew a thing or two.

Nathan walked over purposefully from the other side of the station. We would not be taking I-40, actually, said Nathan. He had been at the ticket counter and had just heard the whole thing from the superintendent himself. “To get around the ice,” Nathan explained.

“No man, that’s not what he said, he said that’s the longer route,” said the man with the calves. “Well I was just out there and -” The man with the calves turned back to the man who’d been in Fallujah and laughed. Nathan left, twitching.

Nathan came back. “That’s what I was saying!” said Nathan, breaking in. “So then you couldn’t take I-40!” He pushed at his glasses.

“Yo, I was talking to him. You don’t just step in to answer someone else’s question. He was talking to me” said the man with the calves. “I was just trying to help -“ sputtered Nathan. “We’re having our own conversation here, you don’t just step into it.” “Well - fuck you, then,” said Nathan, and left.

Up rose the man with the calves. Not much was required to give him his moment. “Oh,” he said. “Oh no.” He came forward like a cat, taking his time.

How had Nathan gotten himself into such a silly situation? Any food could have avoided it. The man with the calves walked by me, pegging Nathan across the room. It was all a lot of hot air, it was like a snowflake that melted as it touched your finger, and before I could decide I stepped in front of the man with the calves and held out my hands like you see in the movies. “Come on man, come on don’t do that man,” I said, backing up, the man with the calves smirking at Nathan over my shoulder, pressing on. “Come on man, come on.”

We pressed back and back until we were up against Nathan and as if in a dream the pressure released and air again filled the room. The men sniggered. Nathan was gone.

Stupid, stupid Nathan, throwing himself at life, but in the wrong direction. You had to like him.

V

Someone had touched my knee but when I looked over they were already withdrawing. “I’m having a panic attack!” she said. I hate emergencies. But on the bus things happen and there you are and you have to do something. It was dark. The lights were off and we were crossing the plains and I could see just the outline of someone now pressing herself against the window. She caught her breath and pulled tightly at some sort of shawl.

“How can I help?” I whispered. Well that was lame. Think again. “Can I get you some water?” But I didn’t have any water; there wasn’t any water. “Breathe!” I said. That was better. “Try to breathe. As slowly as you can.” The woman gasped and let out a scatter of sobs. “Try to breathe slowly, in and out.” My seatmate stirred, shaken from sleep. “Oh GOD somebody get the driver,” he said. No, no, I thought, we mustn’t get the driver. This was just a person. We could figure it out.

I thought of a friend, who was so good in these crises. We had been walking to our job site and came across a woman coughing up blood in her car, the door swung open into the street. Perhaps she was dying. My friend knelt beside her, put an arm around her, leaned her forward and held back her hair. “How did you know to do that?” I asked her later. My friend dealt with heaters and air conditioners. She looked at me in surprise. “I just did what I would have wanted someone to do to me,” she said.

Should I try to sit next to this woman, put my arm around her? Is this what a more, say, bodily attuned, person would do? “Do you have any medicine?” I said. “In my bag - not here -” She shuddered, and shuddered again. “Breathe slowly, in and out…” I said. And then I thought of it - “Do you want a hand?” I reached across. She took hold and for a minute we sat, leaning across to another in the dark. Finally she let go. She lay back and again the bus was still.

VI

The old man was smoking Newports, flicking the ashes at the side of a McDonald’s trash can. “They take a long time to get the orders through,” said the driver, come up beside us. “People always try to run over there during the break. I tell em not to but they do it. Someone always gets left behind.” It was the middle of the night. The Culvers glowed blue across the road.

I hadn’t noticed the old man til the McDonald’s stop. He was one of those people who doesn’t look to the right or the left. You might see them pulling themselves up the bus stairs. Then somehow they become invisible.

“What do you do?” I asked him. He was an older black man, in a big black coat. “I was in the army,” he said. “What did you do after?” I said, perversely. He paused. He’d worked at a car wash. He was retired. What did I go and ask that for? He wasn’t a talker and already I’d ruined it.

At the station in Albuquerque he stopped by, giving me a nod on his way to the men’s room. “I hear they might have to change the route, where are you headed?” “I’m going all the way to Phoenix,” he said. “Mesa.”

That was all. Enough to catch his eye when we got back on the bus. There was an empty seat next to him and the driver had told us to sit anywhere we could find; the bus was filled.

“May I?” He smiled up at me and scooted over. “I’m William,” he said, “Pleased to meet you.” He gave me his hand. He was in St Louis for his sister, he said. She had just passed. Miss Bernice White. He got out his phone and fell silent and I thought he’d done. But he was pulling up her picture, at church, holding flowers, looking benignly out.

The bus was freezing. The driver said he apologized but the heat wasn’t working. I put on my wool cap, and another sweater and when the lights switched off and we pulled away I put my last shirt on too and spread my pajamas over my legs. William covered up in his black coat so all you could see of him was a tent.

At the first rest stop William got off, to stretch his legs he said. He came back with a coffee in each hand. “Something to warm us up!” I blinked up at him under the lights. It was the sweetest coffee I’d ever had.

Later I got up to go to the bathroom, clutching the seat tops to the back of the bus. Everyone was asleep. The aisle was filled with legs. I couldn’t make out, inside, whether the toilet seat was missing or there wasn’t supposed to be one, and the floor was slick with urine. I squatted. There was nothing to do for your hands.

I opened the door and took a couple steps out in the dark and a light turned on ahead of me in the aisle floor. It was William, kneeling on the floor with his phone, guiding me back.

I opened my eyes and it was morning. I must have fallen asleep. Red mesas stood off the highway. William was awake, watching out the window. “You glad to get to Mesa?” I asked him. He said he’d be glad to get clear of Phoenix. He’d lived there for two years, then he moved to Mesa. Phoenix was nothing but crackheads. Everywhere you walk there’s people asking you for drugs. Mesa was a little better. At least he had his own place and he could close his door. He said he lived with his son and his grandbaby but it wasn’t working out. Landlord problems. He’d have to ask them to leave. “First thing I’ll do when I get back is have me a stiff drink. A stiff drink and a cigarette.” He’d close his door and sit back. He wanted to hole up and not be bothered by anyone. Close his curtains and lock his door.