Chapter 26: Five Hundred Miles
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 remained empty for most of the trip, the seat on the other side of the bus as if no one was willing to disturb the spirit of the man who had died in it back near Cincinnati, even though it was not the same bus. From time to time during the miles since, I had even glanced back and thought I saw a hazy vision of the man seated there in the dark, imagining his spirit as hitch-hiking along with us.
Names like Goodyear, Avondale, Wintersburg, Tonopah flashed passed in the night, without meaning, the darkness erasing whatever clues the landscape might have provided as to what life was like in these places. Daylight, I learned from my later trips here, provided no better clues, since most of these places stood off the highway with scrub land and desert making them as invisible to a passenger in the day as they were at night, with the night providing a few flickers of distant lights to proclaim life existed there.
Names like Pictograph Rocks intrigued me, as did the name Quartzite, but the road itself had become a burden I wanted to shed, and even when I saw signs indicating the Colorado River Indian Reservation, I was already too consumed with reaching Los Angeles.
The whole bus seemed caught up with that anxiety, and even before the sun completely vanished in the distant westward flatness, all eyes turned in that direction as if seeking some sign of the great city even though hundreds of miles still separated us from it. Mrs. Warton and her husband, Bill, chatted away about their plans once they reached the city. Mrs. Warton had apparently called ahead from Phoenix to have someone meet them at the bus terminal.
I heard the giggles and whispers of the lovers as they made their plans, too, filled with the electricity of arrival that charged everyone in the bus. They like those around them, pulling down bags from the top, to check their contents, in a needless procession that would fill the hours for them as we drove on.
Sunset and the darkness that followed had only underlined the feeling that I had finally reached the west I had sought since I was a kid, those years when I had hopped freight trains thinking they would take me all the way to California, only to find myself in Jersey City or Buffalo, hopping a freight train back to home. During the trip through Northern Arizona, I had seen such trains speeding along in the middle of the plains, a flash of red box car that brought it all back, me, aching to have found the right train the first time, envisioning myself at this moment, on that train headed to the sea.
In the dark, I saw the long snake-like shape working its way through the blackness, a single light as an eye peering ahead along tracks I could not see, part of that non-stop community of rails that traveled back and forth from coast to coast, as divorced from the reality of the world as if locked in a long tunnel. This vision made me realize how much I might have missed had I succeeded in my initial efforts, and for that brief moment -- perhaps the only moment I would have for the next two or three years of my flight from the law -- I felt remarkably satisfied, as one dream of this Paterson-born boy had come true.
From time to time, I saw lights along the side of the road, and then when we grew close, saw pickup trucks and men in cowboy hats engaged in some activity, ground cluttered with tools as they made some repair, I could not determine in such a short glimpse.
These were cowboys of the new west, Bill told me, when he saw my puzzled expression.
"But where are their horses?" I asked.
"People hardly ride horses these days except for the more inaccessible parts of the land," Bill said. "They ride pickup trucks."
After that I noticed more and more pickup trucks weaving in and out of traffic, seeking to get places more quickly than the buses or trucks or campers would allow part of some fevered activity that required them to be somewhere fast. Some of the cowboys were clearly drunk, waving their hats out the windows at passing traffic, screaming obscenities or making their meaning clear through a series of gestures.
It was a concept of the West I had never considered, as if the wrong crowd had survived all the gunfights and ranch wars, leaving the inheritance of the west to a batch of bronco-less bullies, all of whom had no purpose, no more wilderness to tame, indians to steal from, or gold to dig up.
Down deep, I recognized something familiar in them, aspects of the uncles from whom I was running, who had struggled their whole lives, working tough jobs, needing to get something out of them before it caused them to explode, not bullies so much, as people without purpose, who had helped tame the frontier only to have the frontier evaporate like a mirage in the desert, with even the one-time noble savage they struggled against, equally without purpose, each looking across a landscape of time wondering what exactly had happened.
Meanwhile, the bus rushed through a tunnel of darkness towards the civilized boundaries of Los Angeles.
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