Innocents on the Lamb

  The first cockroach appeared after everyone else had gone, peering at me from an end table near the coach. It eyed me like a predator, and I eyed it back. The bug spray still sat in the kitchen cabinet, too far to go to retrieve it, knowing the little bastard would be gone by the time I got back. So, we stared at each other until I crushed it with a folded-up magazine. Even then, I knew others of its kind existed, most likely in the walls, likely to come out once dark came. I had no intention of pulling out the Murphy Bed, let alone sleeping on it. Instead, I decided to defend the couch, which seemed a safer haven – if I had enough bug spray and power to create a barrier. At some point, I knew I would have to go out and find more. But I was already weary and grateful to have found a safe place I could hide out until I made up my mind to go to Denver to meet up with Louise. I pulled her letter out of my pocket, a tattered manuscript I had carried for weeks prior to...

   The cab driver steered east, weaving through the now-late morning traffic, out of Skid Row and into a landscape that reminded me less of New York City than it did of my home town, Paterson. Low three and four story stick style buildings replaced the six to eight story stone constructions – Bodega stores, travel agencies, beauty parlors, nail salons, Latin night clubs, auto repair shops, barbers, tailors, cheap clothing shops filling the bottom floors of those structures along the main drag, while behind these, rising slowly into the hills beyond, two and three family houses cropped up like mushrooms, remnants from a bygone era from when real estate investment companies had sliced up old Spanish estates into lots for house, creating a grid work of streets into which Mexicans and other Chicanos flocked. The cab rolled down a street of shops, wheels rumbling over the still visible rails of a one-time trolley, while along the curb, young men clustered around refurbished c...

   I woke to darkness and a stiff mattress under my back. The sounds from the night had faded away, replaced by rattling in the hallway and the suggestion of morning I could not see from my windowless room. Voices, carried from the hall, muffled by the thin walls, were full of the efficiency of a hotel staff, strangers moving around outside, scaring me the way the dark streets had the previous night during my walk from the bus depot. The dimly lighted digital clock on the dresser read 9 o’clock and I vaguely recalled the desk clerk telling me check out was at 11. Weary from the trip and the late arrival, I had gone to sleep in my clothing, except for the wrinkled suit jacket that hung on the back of a wooden chair near the dresser. The stench of the bus, with all of the cigarette smoke and sweat, clung to me and my clothing. I could do nothing about the clothing. But I forced myself up and into the bathroom for a shower, the scalding water and the harsh bar of soap d...

  The dark closed around me as I walked. The glow of street lights creating islands of light that could not pierce the deeper shadows beyond their reach, allies filled with scurrying and the clatter of metal or glass, heavy breathing of things I could not see, animal or human, I could not tell, like an echo of my own breathing, breath for breath, keeping pace with the click of my shoes against the pavement.   Urgent sirens wailed in the distance, not far, yet not too near, also like an echo announcing some serious matter within a few blocks, the cops warning making me hurry by step.   After 3,000 miles of sitting in one seat, my limbs felt stiff, unresponsive, making me stagger like a drunk, the sidewalk glittering with bits of broken glass, like rubies and diamonds and sapphires, just not so rare, the walls of some of the buildings marked out with gang tags, as incomprehensible to me as hieroglyphics, while beneath these, leaned dark figures almost inviable in the gl...

When the last bags banged down the front steps of the bus and the driver had opened the belly of the beast to recover those buried there, I rose, pulled down the brief case I had purchased in Philadelphia from the rack above my seat and slowly made my way to the front of the bus, my shoes squeaking on the rubber mat of the aisle, seemingly overly loud in the totally vacant interior. The professor, the lovers, the man with a hacking cough, the Wartons, all gone, already a memory. "This is it," the hostess said, greeting me near the door, perhaps a bit startled to find I had lingered. I dropped down the three steps to the platform where I found my suitcase from the belly of the bus already waiting, the last piece of the puzzle that allowed the driver to close up the compartment. Through the fumed-stained glass of the depot, I saw the other passengers scattering, making their way to the street to catch cabs or meet friends, lost souls in the City of Angels, I thought. The fumes ...

The stirring started as soon as the bus passed the sign saying: Los Angeles 50 miles. Hands gripping the arms of seats as passengers rose up into the aisle, unsnapping and re-snapping the latches to luggage in the overhead racks, some cases thudding on the floor as they dragged them down. Fifty miles could have been fifty million as the landscape outside changed, city lights filling the darkness where cactus had been, growing closer together from remote collections of buildings into the first semblance of city, the rumble of wheels changing, too, from the ragged beat of dessert miles to the steady hum of well-paved throughways. Faster moving cars so remote previously, roared by us, leaving a stream of exhaust behind, horns blaring at slower moving cars that clung stubbornly to the slow lanes the hotrodders claimed as their own. Outside grew brighter as city rose like a false dawn many hours away, yet irresistible, drawing the attention of even the sleepiest of us, gazes looking for the...

I pressed my nose against cool glass as the bus rumbled on towards Lose Angeles, thinking: Am I out of my mind? Why on earth did I decide to come here, when the whole point of my stealing the money was to meet up with Louise near Denver. The closer we got to the City of Angels, the more reluctant I was to go there, still caught up with those silly fantasies from when I was a kid. Each attempt to run away had one destination, California, and now that I had arrived or was about to, I couldn’t figure out why. If there was scenery in the dark beyond the highway, I caught only the briefest glimpses of it, a building there, the glow of a gas station, a cactus or two. Only the ever shrinking number on the milage markers seemed real, a parade passing us as we stood still in this long dark tunnel. Even the faces of the other passengers did not seem real, caught in the headlights of cars rushing the other way, ghostly faces, as familiar as gravestones. Bill, who slid in the seat next to mine rat...

I had either fallen into sleep or an extended daydream, because I didn't realize we had reached California until the bus pulled over next to a huge sign declaring our arrival in that state.  The signs telling 1930s Oklahoma refugees to go home no longer showed, yet within moments I understood how independent California saw itself as the door opened uniformed officers climbed on board. Highway Patrol officers surveying the interior of the bus with stern gazes, uniforms as crisp as the Nazi SS. I sank down in my seat, pressing myself against the cool window, hoping that they might somehow miss me in the shadowy interior as they strode down the aisle, dark against the police flood lights that bathed the exterior of the bus. It was like being in a movie. Other passengers mumbled, many stirred out of a doze the way I had been, alarmed as the officers made their way seat by seat down the center of the bus. "We're in the middle of the dessert," a person a few seats behind me...

 Leaving Phoenix, I was convinced the city was made up of mostly motels. I did not know until my return here several more times that Grand Avenue was a facade for the passing tourists, the road that absorbed the interstate highways passing through the center of town, and thus attracted the proliferation of hotels, an angled street that cut unnaturally northwest when the rest of the streets of the city went east and west or north and south. The glow of the motel signs said more about the coming of night than sunset did, although as the bus plunged west along Route 10, darkness came. Again, the Peter, Paul and Mary song rolled around in my head, as I searched for the mile markers along the side of the highway. We had lost half of our passengers since Texas, so I was free to ease from my seat on the left side of the bus to a number of seats on the right, where I could see more clearly the highway signs as they became illuminated by the bus’s headlights. Oddly enough, one seat had rema...