Chapter 17: The world's biggest totem pole

  

Billboards on the roadside outside the bus boasted of the world's largest totem pole on display at Foyil just a mile or so away.

I staggered to my seat and struggled to light a cigarette when I got there; Mrs. Warton reached over and squeezed my arm.

 "Don't you think you should wipe the lipstick off your face?" she asked.

I nodded, dug a dug a handkerchief out of my suit jacket pocket and rubbed the red revelation from around my mouth.

Foyil passed, and so did its celebrated totem pole, although it was not a pole at all, but a brown, mud-looking business with a door at its center and several windows leading up to its tapered top. A smaller building beside it, echoed its shape although this second one lacked windows or doors.

Someone had decorated both with Indian art, whether a white man's marketing ploy or a legitimate Native American effort I could not tell, though electric wires stretched between the two structures, connecting them to the more ordinary line of telephone poles that ran along the side of the road.

I went through several more cigarettes before I felt less obvious.

Caroline had made her way back up the aisle as part of her official duties, winking me as she made her way to the front bringing the bus driver his coffee.

Mrs. Warton winked, too, as she got up and made her way back towards the rest room, and Bill slid over into her seat, but stared towards the front of the bus and the wiggling rear end of the hostess.

 "Some dish, hey, boy?" the Col. Sanders look-a-like said, with a frankness that startled me. "I'd like to get my telephone pole into something like that myself. But there's not a lot a fellow can do locked into a bus like this, eh?"

"I suppose not," I said.

“I used to be a real hound dog when I was young," Bill went on, saying more now than he had the whole trip since Philadelphia, and showing more independence than I thought him capable of. "I used to get myself up for every pretty lady I saw, flirting with them, making passes at them, taking them aside whenever the opportunity presented itself. Sometimes, I never knew what I was dipping my stick into, and it didn't matter to me.”

I studied him for a moment, wondering if his wife knew any of this. He seemed to talk more to himself than to me, as if reliving those days in memory when he could no longer live them in real life.

 "Things were different back then,” he went on. “All that talk of disease my father used to preach to me about seemed like a thing of the past, with all the new wonder drugs coming on the market. Most of my friends lived the high life, that flapper type life your history books talk about now. We were all so gay and free and full of hope. We kept thinking the future was bigger than anything we'd ever seen before, like one huge dirigible, getting more and more full and rising higher and higher over us, and if each of us managed to get a hand on a rope, we could go for a ride.”

Then, his expression turned sad, and he looked suddenly even older than he was, deeply disappointed, looking back at me as if for the first time.

“That’s when the balloon burst,” he said. “The stock market fell, and I woke up one day to find the lady I was with had my ring on her finger. I don't know how it happened. I certainly don't know what I said. I'd told so many lies to so many ladies I never thought anyone would ever take me serious enough to think I actually meant what I said. She did.”

Bill reached across the aisle and gripped my arm, forcing me to look at him, as if his talk was conveying some lesson, he needed me to learn. He sighed.

"Maybe down deep I really did mean it this one time, something about the way the whole generation just collapsed in on itself,” he said. “I wasn't hurting so much for money as many of the others were. But I felt different, sick of the whole silliness, dancing and drinking and making love. Still, when I see a girl like this walk by me, I still get the urge."

Then, he let out a dry laugh, a resigned laugh. He closed his eyes, the back of his head pressed against the high seat's head rest.

 "But once you've committed yourself to something," he said. "You've got to stick to it, or you'll just wander around the rest of your life, not able to stick to anything ever again. That's the way life works. It gives you a chance to redeem yourself, to make a move, and if you don't take it or you screw around with it, you won't get the chance again. At least, not the same chance."

He fell silent, slipping back into the quiet man he’d been all along, closing his eyes as if asleep, although I knew he wasn’t.

A moment later, his wife returned, nudging him to get back to the window seat where he belonged, as she settled into her own seat.

Maybe she had put him up to this talk, I couldn’t tell. Neither glanced at me again, as the whole group of passengers seemed to stare straight ahead now, towards the front of the bus and the slanting light that seemed so destined to reach the horizon before we did. Caroline made her way out of that light, winked at me again, and vanished into her space in the back of the bus.



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