Chapter 28: The last go round
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 rather than disturb his sleeping wife, seemed to sense some of my indecision, he managing to guess more about the nature of my trip than I cared anyone to know.
"I suppose you have a place to stay when you get to Los Angeles?" he asked.
"Sort of," I said.
Bill frowned.
"I'm playing it by ear," I said. "I figure I'll spend a day or two at a hotel before I decide where to go."
In truth, I had deliberately avoided thinking over these details, keeping them from haunting me the whole way across. Yet now, they pressed in with Bill's grim stare, suggesting I needed a plan of some sort before I staggered off the bus.
"What about you?" I asked, changing the subject. "I vaguely recall something about you and Mrs. Warton going to Santa Monica."
"We've come to visit her brother," Bill said, eyes rolling upward, indicating his own distaste. "We have a few relations on my side of the family in the area, and I'm sure we'll see them before we leave."
Bill glanced passed me and out towards the side of the road, and the lights that now dominated the landscape, houses replacing mountain as we came into the valley, the beginning of the land The Monkees mocked in their song "Pleasant Valley Sunday." Even in the dark, the houses looked much the same, with a grid work of streets, and a predictable pattern of lives that allowed mothers to drive their kids to school, or to various other activities later, while dads labored in their offices in more distant places like Los Angeles.
Did Bill see such places the way the hippies did, as an elaborate web in which souls were trapped, places where people spent their lives and fortunes until old enough to make the transition to retirement villages?
I didn't have the courage to ask or to remind him that Florida waited for his return. But then, I didn't need to remind him, he seemed to have the same thought.
"I suspect this will be our last go around," Bill said softly, his gaze shifting back to my face. "After we spend a little time here, we'll travel north to Seattle. I have a brother there. Then, we'll head East to Maine to see my sister there. Then, we'll head south again."
"Surely you can take more trips later?" I said.
"We could, but we won't. We'll talk about it, and talk about it, yet lack the energy to make the effort. This is our farewell trip. We're making the rounds now, saying goodbye to people in person before we hang up our traveling shoes. You'll make this trip someday. Everyone does in some fashion or another."
I was appalled.
"You shouldn't talk that way," I said.
"I have to, boy," he said. "I'm at the end of my life. But I don't suppose someone your age could understand. How old are you, eighteen, nineteen?"
"Eighteen," I said.
"At eighteen, I had the whole world ahead of me," Bill said. "I didn't think about dying. I thought I could do anything, be anyone, go anywhere I wanted."
"Did you managed to do all those things?"
Bill snorted out a laugh. "Heavens no," he said. "For a long time, I was no one at all, doing nothing, going nowhere, yet strangely, happy. I can't put a finger on it or say why I should be so happy when I had nothing to be happy about. But I was."
"Aren't you happy now?"
"No," Bill said. "I can't say as I am or have been for a very long time."
"Why not?"
Bill shrugged. "I suppose I woke up one day and realized that I wasn't going to live forever after all, and the years I saw as so long a time when I was 18 seemed far less long when I was 45. I started getting scared. I started looking around at my life and saw exactly what it was I'd accomplished, and I didn't like at all what I saw."
"What did you do then?"
"I started over, this time building a new life as fast as I could, deliberately making it a point to acquire things that marked me as a successful man. I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to find death there and kept cursing myself for wasting so much of my youth being happy."
"That sounds sad," I said.
"You don't know how sad," Bill said, glancing across the aisle at the sleeping Mrs. Warton. "For the most part my wife knows very little about my wild youth, nor how much I wish that part of my life."
"But you just said...."
"I said I was afraid, and fear makes a man think oddly. I didn't realize as I was building my new life how much it resembled a tomb," Bill said. "The pharaohs in Egypt spent most of their lives constructing pyramids for their trip into the afterlife. Well, that's what I found myself doing, when I should have kept up with what I had started. In the end, you don't take anything with you, and things you've accomplished here on this earth aren't the important things later, after you're gone."
"What about Mrs. Warton? Surely you don't regret marrying her?"
"Of course not," Bill said. "If anything, she's the one thing in my whole misconceived notion of success that actually worked out to be something significant, someone with whom I could share my life. If anything, I suspect she'll out live me and be able to use some of the other things we've collected. For that, it was almost worth hammering the first few nails into my own coffin."
Mrs. Warton, as if something of our conversation had seeped into her dreams, woke with a start and stared.
"Bill! What are you doing over there?" she asked.
"Just talking, my dear," Bill said, giving me a wink and then a pat on my shoulder, as he made his way back to his own seat, looking a little sadder and a little older than he had only moments before.
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