Chapter19 A previous appointment

 


The land grew slowly out of darkness as the sun rose behind the moving bus, Clinton arriving as the last gasp of a city before the great plunge towards Texas.

The route, loaded with is own landmarks, like the Ideal Trailer Park, where signs advertised wholesale fireworks with red and white letters and black and white painted rockets like some primitive cave painting, with a walkup window where a clerk might have sat.

Then came Pop Hicks Restaurant next door to the Glancy Motor Hotel, then the Del Rancho Hamburger restaurant with its large cowboy sign holding up a large hamburger.

Beyond this came wasteland again, windswept hills along one side of the highway, stucco-sided houses propped up in neat folds of land.

A bus air conditioner struggled against the heat, steaming the windows, revealing streaks left by the leaning heads of passengers or at other times the nose and finger prints of kids pressing to see the world outside, like secret writing from some ancient tribe nobody could decipher, a grim tale of survival many had witnessed for real over the years outside.

Few of the other passengers noticed, half dosing in the semi-sleep bus travel inspired, snorting awake whenever the bus struck a pothole or slowed too much as to eliminate the seduction of the humming wheels.

Caroline, the hostess, passed several times, bringing the bus driver coffee, winking at me as she made her way up or down the aisle.

Bill’s words still haunted me as did the reasons I had set out on this crazy trip, echoing the warnings Sledge Hammer Harry had given me about Louise, back in the print factory in New Jersey.

“She’s no good, boy,” Harry had said, adopting me the moment I had walked through the door, perhaps sensing in me some vulnerability I hadn’t sense enough to recognize in myself, about being attracted to bad women – there and now. A vision of a smoke-filled dive came into my head, a few strong sips of rock gut before a race to some cheap motel.

Then what? Back on the street again, taking up another bus, headed north, west, east or south or worse, nowhere.

If that was the case, I might as well stay on the bus and take my chances in LA and later, if lucky, with Louise in Colorado.

None of it made the least bit of sense since I had joined the army to get away from Louise and found myself after the army plunged in a life of crime to get her back.

I remembered the look on her mother’s face when I showed up at her parents’ door in New Jersey, fresh out of service, asking where Louise had gone off to, begging for the woman to pass my message on, hoping Louise would write later, and she did.

Hank thought me crazy when I moped like a love-sick puppy on the rim of the Washington Square Park fountain, he insisting there were other girls, not then realizing I was already contemplating the theft that would send me west – money now in the briefcase in my lap, a secret treasure that gave me choices I did not want to make.

The bus was closing in on Amarillo where Caroline’s shift ended, and where she lived.

She came floating back a few minutes later, halting in the aisle next to the seat I occupied.

 "Well, honey?" Caroline asked. "Have you made up your mind about what you're going to do?"

 "I'm not getting off in Amarillo," I told her.

Her bubbly expression changed with her disappointment.

 "It's not that I don't like you," I told her. "It's just that I have somewhere to go and someone to meet."

 "Sure, sure, I understand, honey," Caroline said, patting my arm.

 "No, I mean it," I said. "There's a girl I'm in love with and I have to go and see if...."

 "There's always a girl somewhere, honey," Caroline said. "That's the trouble with this world. There's always a woman waiting somewhere and it's never me."

She gave me a pained smile.

"Don't sweat nothing over me, honey," she said. "I've already got more men than I know what to do with. You go find that pretty little girl of yours."

Then, she went on her way, back to her station. I turned and the heavy little pistol I had bought in Philadelphia slid from inside my jacket pocket and tumbled two the floor, hitting the lip of the step with a clatter before bounding down the mat.

Across the aisle, beyond his slumbering wife, Bill snorted awake just as I snatched up the pistol and stuffed it back into my jacket pocket.

 "You ought to be careful with those things," he said softly, with a tone of great understanding. "They tend to go off unexpectedly."

I nodded, then settled back into my seat again, to stare out at the vacant landscape, searching perhaps for answers that weren’t there.

 

 On the lamb menu

 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 1: Thief in the night

Image
    You could hear the clock tick. It was that quiet. The dust of my uncles’ climbing the stairs to bed had settled more than an hour earlier, but I remained still, waiting, listening to their breathing change from rough coughs of half asleep to the thick snores of unconsciousness. Still, I did not move. I clutched the wrinkled sheets of my bed and shivered. The clock ticked on from the dresser, counting off the early morning hours like cadence. Soon it would count itself into daylight and my chance would be gone. I had planned this thing for more than a month and knew this had to be the night. In the morning the money would be gone, transferred from the safe downstairs to the inaccessible vault of a bank, waiting months for the cash to accumulate again. I did not want to wait months for another opportunity. It was now or never. I stuck a foot out into the cold air, shivering not from the chill, but from sheer terror, snatching the foot back at the sound of a s...
Read more

Chapter 24: Turning South again

Image
  The bus turned south. We turned off route 40 and slid down the center of the state along route 17. To one side of the road, the distant hills turned into a dusty haze, while croppings of stone showed to the other like skyscrapers built in the middle of nowhere. Signs along the roadside indicated the beginning of open range, and the fence that had accompanied along the road through the Painted Desert now vanished I could have hopped off the bus at any time and walked anywhere I wanted, though the scrub lands now nearly as wide as the sky itself. I would have perished within a few hours. The excitement of Flagstaff faded from the other passengers' faces, sending most back into that sleepish on-the-road mood that had filled them for most of the trip through the plains. While this part of the country had its stark contrasts, we all hungered for our final destination, and a rest to the ceaseless sense of motion that the last three days had meant. We had been on the road for three days...
Read more

Chapter35 Isolation

Image
    So, I settled in to the apartment, for the first time in my life, having a space that was completely my own. But if felt like a prison. The only company I had were the roaches and I wanted them dead. Back in Philadelphia I had purchased battery operated portable TV, which I had hoped to use to relieve the boredom of the bus trip, which turned out to be useless in the constantly shifting frequencies. Here, it became my only companion, giving me the company of classic old movies and the constant rant of local advertisers such as Ralph Williams, the car czar of Los Angeles, whose face dominated the night time like a vampire. The TV burned out within two days, isolating me further, and force me to head back downtown to replace it – after several days foraging the local bodega for food (canned tamales) and roach powder in my constant conflict to keep them contained. After my experience at the hotel, I knew I could not trust the lock on the apartment door to keep out...
Read more