Chapter 11: On the wrong bus?
We left Pittsburgh and its Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers was behind, a dark memory of flowing under bridges I never expected to see again and the city’s stench slowly fading as the bus plunged into the darkness, tires rubbing over asphalt as we continued west.
I kept nodding, but could not sleep, jerked awake by some
flaw in the road, my face reflected in the dark windows floating on a sea of
black – the other passengers floating there, too, like ghosts.
Sometimes, the headlights of the bus or passing cars
illuminated the mileage marker like a countdown to our next destination.
We passed through West Virginia, happy home of Wheeling,
slowing through smaller towns, gray shapes of dilapidated buildings like grave
stones, punctuated by monuments to Confederate heroes put up a half century
after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, not to intimidate former slaves, but as a
gesture of defiance to the carpetbaggers that had come south from the north to
rape the Old South and to permanently punish those southern patriots that had
had the audacity to resist their dictates, faces of Lee and Forrest, Jackson
and Davis, who had stood up when it counted, icons to former glory the south
would never witness again. I saw no tributes to the underground railroad here
and the other heroes that had helped slaves escape, just their memory floating
in the wind, caught between the greedy north and the defiant south, used and
abused by one, ignored by the other. Then in a blink of the eye, West Virginia
vanished, a speck of dust in the rearview mirror, one more place I would never
see again in my lifetime.
Silence filled the bus, disrupted only by the rumbled of
wheels beneath us, the irregular snores of the men and women now nodding off,
old couples leaning into each other like gnarled and entwined trees, while the
young couple Mrs. Warton had admired earlier, clung to each other with their
eyes closed, as if fearful they might lose each other in the dark.
Mrs. Warton was asleep. So was her husband. The bearded man with his constant cough only
snorted as he slept. Some passengers had taken the new hostess' offer for
blankets so that only their heads were exposed, their reflections floating like
strange science experiments in glass. The man with the pipe behind me and
across the aisle, stoutly resisted sleep, keeping his light illuminated and his
paper firmly open on his knees. He looked like a professor of some kind with a
tiny, almost imperceptible tuft of hair growing on his chin, moving each time
he took a swallow from his coffee cup.
Because I could not sleep, and because during the day I was
not brave enough to look around too closely at the others, I spent this time
studying many of the faces of my fellow passengers, searching their expressions
for clues as to what they might be like when not traveling.
The Wartons I knew, but the others man for a pleasant
guessing game that kept my mind off Pittsburgh, Chicago and my family.
Two rows back from me on my side a fat man with three chins
slept, a regular sulfur pit of bubbling and grumbling and burping, each new
dream apparently causing a new series of sounds, his knees knocking against the
back of the seat in front of him as he tried to escape some inner demon. I
envied his sleep, but not his nightmares, and knew that mine would be just as
troubled if I could force my eyes closed and my mind into unconsciousness.
A car appeared on the highway coming the other way, its
headlights suddenly relieving the boredom of black, spreading news head of
itself of a landscape I would not otherwise be able to see, shadowy shapes
looming large for a moment before vanishing again when the car passed.
Another set of headlights revealed a subtler secret, one
verified by the flicking of something against the glass, tiny shards of frozen
rain struggling to grow into snow, creating bubbles of melting wet on the
glass, and a spread of glittering went on the surface of the highway.
I saw signs for Columbus and Cincinnati.
“We won’t be stopping at Cincinnati,” the hostess told me
when she stopped to see if there was anything I needed. “I have some sandwiches
in the back if you’re hungry.”
I declined. She moved on to check on one of other awake
passengers, through her inquiry stirred Mrs. Warton.
She rubbed her temples with her fingertips, then her eyes,
then gave me a brief sleepy smile before she worked herself out of her seat and
stumbled to the toilet at the back of the bus, returning much wider awake,
frowning at me, as if struggling to recall some detail about me that she ought
to have remembered.
"Aren't you on the wrong bus?" she asked.
“No, I’m going to Los Angeles with you,” I said. “Don’t you
remember? I decided not to go to Chicago when we were in Pittsburg.”
“Oh yes,” she said, looking sleepy again. “I forgot.”
She eased back into her seat and a moment later fell into
sleep again.
The old man in the seat in front of hers looked over at me,
apparently finished with a chapter in the book he’d been reading and searching
for some distraction.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked me.
“I can’t sleep on buses,” I said.
I hadn’t slept in almost two days; the weariness wore on me,
distorting perception. His voice and other sounds echoed, a bad sign I
recognized from the army when I went AWOL at night and played soldier during
the day.
I wondered if I ought to get off at a rest stop, book a
night in a local motel, then catch another bus west after I woke again.
But fear of pursuit kept me from doing this. I needed to
keep moving, needed to put as much distance between me and the east as
possible, hoping the miles would keep me hidden from the pursuit I knew must be
coming after me by this time.
“I get that on boats,” the old man said. “I can’t handle all
the conflicting motion. I took a cruise to Europe with my wife two years ago, I
swear I didn’t sleep 12 hours total for the whole crossing. When we hit dry
land, I slept solid for two days straight.”
He chuckled, mumbling something about his wife wanting to
kill him for it, but soon fell off into sleep himself, dreaming no doubt about
the high seas he had once sailed.
For some reason, I started to think of Disneyland, recalling
how I’d always wanted to go there as a kid, and how that became one of the
places the Wartons planned to visit once we got to LA, a perfect place where
fantasy ruled, with clean streets and nice people to greet me, and characters
out of my childhood to pose with for photographs.
Behind me, the man with the pipe and newspaper finally
flicked off his light, leaving us to ride along in the dark, the glow of his
burning tobacco occasionally painting the interior of the bus red.
Now, I could see outside the bus without the aid of passing
headlights, the bus lights spreading its own illumination to the front and
sides, revealing the treasure of growing frozen glitter on the landscape.
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