Chapter16 Caroline of Texas
When Kansas City came, I stayed on the bus.
The same dread I felt in Pittsburgh hit me when the bus pulled into the terminal and I started out the window at the streets of the unfamiliar city and at the other buses, each with a different destination listed above its windshield.
In the dark, the road had taken on an ominous air, and I felt as if the sky would fall in on me if I stepped outside. I kept thinking I was making a mistake, going the wrong way, turning a corner in my life that I knew somehow would change me and the direction my life would take from here on after.
Maybe I was a bit embarrassed, fearful at what the Watsons would say if I altered my plans yet again, making a beeline for Denver when I had decided on LA.
Something in the back of my head kept telling me, “It’s too soon,” meaning that I might arrive at Louise’s door as the same time as my uncles or the police, and if I waited, I might avoid getting caught in their net.
Years later, I would think back to this moment in Kansas City and wonder just how differently things would have turned out for me and Louise if I had gone to Denver first, avoiding Los Angeles altogether. Would we have gone on to some other more acceptable destination where the temptations of "the boulevard" would not have lured us into the sex and drugs scene?
For some reason, when the bus started off again, finally making its turn south, I saw only the visions of the hawks in my head, those foolish watchers of the road standing on fence posts behind me.
I slept through Wichita and woke as the bus crossed from Kansas into Oklahoma. I saw no more signs for Colorado. I saw little of anything other than boring landscape, mile-after-mile, little of which attracted my attention until we eased into Miami, a stunning little enclave that allowed me to forget the other road for a moment, watching the ornate Coleman Theater pass advertising some two-year only movie starring Bob Hope, part of some 1920s idea of a strip mall in the center of the city with drug store and other shops spread out on either side and around the corner with awning over their doors, but all part of a larger structure looking remarkably like a Spanish mission, with that same pale stucco exterior and the elevated steeple like tower shingled with red tile.
We passed the neon sign that mark Ben Stanley's Cafe, over which someone in the bus commented claiming it was famous for its steaks and sea food.
"Hello," a new hostess said, standing beside me in the aisle. The change had come in Kansas City only I'd been too weary to notice. "Can I sit down?"
Outside, signs said we had reached Afton, and a road side attraction called the Buffalo Ranch Trading Post, with a supposedly genuine Indian made tepee and several cut out wooden Indians that seemed to wave at the bus.
"Why not?" I said, a little startled by her odd request. The other hostesses had sat in the back of the bus in a special section reserved for them. I slid over to the window seat as she slid into mine. She had dark hair and dark eyes and wore a uniform slightly too tight for her chest size so that her breasts seemed to poke through the fabric.
"So, what's your name, honey?" she asked, in the first clearly western drawl I had heard so far on this trip, one of those half-southern twangs that differed subtly from those voices of the deep south though which we had nearly passed. I guessed she might be Texan.
I lied about my name, learning to sound more sincere with each effort. "What's your name?" I asked.
"Caroline," she said, and stuck out here hand for me to shake, her finger tips lingering on mine as we finished. "So where exactly are you off to, all by yourself?"
"Los Angeles," I said.
"Really? What on Earth for? You got business there or something?"
"Not exactly," I said. "I just always wanted to go."
"Seems like a foolish reason to me, honey," she said. "You've got a have a particular reason to go to a place or there ain't no point of going there, if you take my meaning."
"I have reasons," I said. "I just can't talk about them."
"Don't I know about those," she said with a long sigh, as if she had indeed known something of the travel blues, of going someplace out of hope only to find that it didn't turn out nearly as grand as she had planned, only to have to travel someplace else in hope of finding it there, going and going and coming back, in the end finding herself -- if not geographically, then psychologically -- right back where she had started.
People around us stirred and looked over, and she seemed a little disturbed by their attention, rising out of the seat again, glancing down at me, her taunt red lips parking slightly, revealing the stain of lipstick on her top front teeth.
"Say, honey, why don't you come back to my seat in the rear? I got a lot more room back there and we'd both be a lot more comfortable."
I agreed, partly because of the stiffness my little sleep had left me with, knees cramped, back curved. Even the walk would feel a luxury after being so bent. But part of the reason I got up and followed her was the look she gave me, so sharp it cut into me, so acute it caused a part of me to rise up in attention as if I was still a soldier seeking to salute her. This reaction did not go unnoticed, and her smile took on a new, even more acute edge.
Her space was part of the small lounge the bus provided for the purpose of allowing passengers to stretch. It had a padded seat that stretched along three sides of a small table, and over the last day or so I had seen people playing cards on it when I came and went from the toilet. No one sat there now, although a few people eyed us as we made our way down the aisle to it.
The faces of these people surprised me because all had become familiar to me, as we had become a small community traveling on wheels, each of us playing a necessary part in some small society, with the lovers playing their role, the professor, his, the grey-haired hacking man, the role of invalid, the Wartons, typical tourists, and me, the as-yet-unsuspected criminal traveling undercover. Some of the people, as familiar with me as I was with them, smiled, some seemed to sense what was about to happen between me and the hostess and their eyes glinted.
In the back, she slipped into the rear seat that made up one side the table's padded bench. I slid in beside her, avoiding knocking over the butt-filled ashtray that sat in a slight indentation in the table top.
My arm slipped around Caroline's shoulder.
It was one of those habits I had picked up when working as a theater usher in Paterson, that opportunistic sexual impulse that made me hit on her, as if she was one of the many young theater groupies that had occupied our time and our sexual attentions back then for hour-long non-stop make-out sessions in the balcony.
Caroline raised no objection, and, in fact, snuggled closer into me, as if this was what she had planned from the start, her lips angled upward, waiting, slightly puckered for me to kiss.
When I did not immediately grant this unvocalized request, she pouted a little, then grinned again.
"You still haven't told me why you're in such a danged hurry to get to L.A.," she said.
"To get away," I said.
"From what?"
"From myself," I said, and then kissed her, my free hand easing through the loosened button of her blouse to feel her nipple. She made no resistance to either effort.
"Yourself?" she said, when she could catch her breath again, easing away from me, although not enough to free my hand from inside her shirt. "What exactly does that mean?"
"I don't know," I said, now focused totally on unhooking her bra, kissing her again, harder and longer, feeling her press against me as the snap of her bra came undone.
She jerked back.
"Honey! Not here! Not with all these people watching! Are you some kind of pervert you like to do it in public?"
"No pervert," I said with a laugh. "I just want to do it."
She stared down at my lap and laughed as well. "I can see that, honey, but there is a time and place for everything. Maybe you should go back up to your seat until you cool off a little."
"Leaving us where?" I asked.
"Where we started, honey," she said, though in a lower voice. "I get off duty at Amarillo. If you're a good boy, you can get off there with me and then we can play all night long."
I staggered to my feet, my stiff condition now a clear advertisement for anyone who might glance my way. But now I had a troubled mind and another choice to make, whether to halt my hasty plunge west to Los Angeles to visit Texas for a spell or continue on.
"That's something I'm going to have to think about," I said.
"Fair enough," Caroline said. "We got miles to go before I get off. Now get up front, boy, before that thing of yours pokes someone in the eye."
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