Chapter49 – On the Road again
I heard the cough first, then recognized the face.
The man who had hacked his way from LA to Denver, sat in the
seat behind us and had picked up right where he had left off.
With the bus already pulling out of its slot for the long ride
back, I couldn’t do anything about it – although Louise squeezed my hand and
indicated that we might move up a few seats since half the bus was vacant.
Yet we had to wait.
The bus had already started up the steep incline, pressing
us against the backs of our seats as if we were being launched into space.
I dared not look out the window to see how close our side of
the bus came to the edge. I simply grit my teeth and gripped the arm of the
chair, and waited for the bus to level off so we could move away from the
coughing man.
We couldn’t sleep for the hacking and the motion of the bus.
Each time I came close to dozing, the memory of the man with
the hard eyes out of Philadelphia jerked me awake again.
I kept thinking: “What if this guy dies, too?”
He certainly sounded at death’s door.
But worse, my imagining his hacking our way for the whole
day and half ride back to Los Angeles made me wish he would die.
When eventually I was brave enough to look out the window, I
realized my fears were groundless since we couldn’t see anything except our own
faces reflected back at us in the glass.
For the first time I got to see the two of us together, as
other people might see us, as we must have looked even in the days when we
worked together and stood together on the bus stop after working our shifts in
the print factory.
Yet I could see in her eyes tales of a life that had gone on
after our parting, after I had wandered off into the army. She had secrets she
would not reveal too soon and I knew no amount of prodding would pry them out
of her.
She simply bubbled on about the mountains and how she would
miss them, even though for the hours we saw little of anything else, the bus
rising up out of Denver and into the body of the Rocky Mountain chain. Snow
decorated the landscape, painting each tree and each roadside into a post card,
still untainted by the congestion snow back east always suffered.
Eventually, Louise loosened up a little and started to laugh
again, the dark angel of her life in Denver left behind. She even talked of Tim
again without apparent pain. She seemed unaware of the pangs of jealousy each
mention brought to me.
I felt cold and scared again, and even the steady flow of
hot air at the window could not ease the chill.
“I’ll miss him,” Louise said, but immediately smiled and
hugged my arm.
Years later, I would come to understand this moment and how
moments like it better, how the past was always perfect, and how Louise would
spend her life perpetually trying to get back to a place she had just left.
Future happiness was always rooted in the past. The here and now was always
flawed until it became the past.
I also would learn that Louise always had secrets that over
time she would tell.
But I was still young and inexperienced, and spent many
hours of that ride pondering what dark things she kept from me, and whether I
would be shocked when I learned what they were.
Each time she came close to one of these, she shut up.
But listening closely, I picked up clues. Her secrets had to
do with the mountains, too – tainted with suggestions of wild sex and violence.
While she gave me nearly a day by day account of her life here since coming
from the east, she managed to skirt a whole month in which her darkest secrets
occurred.
Each time she came close to saying something she shouldn’t,
she told me she would tell me all when we reached LA.
“Anything you say,” I told her, despite my raging curiosity
to know the worst immediately before our lives got even more entwined.
She thanked me and hugged my arm again, and for a time, we
rode in silence.
Daylight arrived along with the signs for Salt Lake City.
We had a four-hour lay over there as our bus turned back and
we were to wait for the bus from the East to pick us up for the rest of our
ride west.
Although I had passed through Salt Lake City twice already
in my brief wanderings in the west, it remained a strange place to me.
We squinted as we came down the stairs from the bus. The
hacking man hacked his way off the bus behind us.
“Let’s get coffee,” I said as I lead Louise through the
station and out onto the flat, warm streets of Salt Lake City.
The air had the familiar tang I recalled from my days down
at the Jersey shore with my family where the salt from the ocean filled me with
awe and hope. I thought this strange, of course, since we were a thousand miles
from the nearest ocean.
Then, for some reason, I stopped and looked at Louise.
“Why did you come with me?” I asked. “I mean you’re still in
love with Tim, aren’t you?”
She stared at me, a startled look staining her bright blue
eyes.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“You mean you came with me for no reason?”
“That’s not what I meant. I came with you because I care
about you. But I don’t know why I just jumped up and left like I did.”
She stared at me, her gaze taking on that hazy look she got
when she needed to avoid something. She studied my face, then looked passed me
at some vision she alone could see.
She seemed pained by the question, as if unable to come up
with an easy answer.
Suddenly I saw the real common thread in us, some deeper
compulsion that had connected otherwise totally different human beings.
She had come with me for much the same reason I had picked
up my life back east and hunted her down here.
Love was the wrong word; This was something obsessive in
both of us.
“I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “I thought you might know.”
Her gaze flooded with relief as she gave a short laugh.
“I’ve been wondering about it myself, about both of us,” she
said, reaching out to touch my hand. “But when I touch you I know I did the
right thing.”
This was no answer. But it felt good to hear. And her smile
struck me as a more positive note to start our journey on than the previous
frown.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me along. “Let’s go get the
coffee you wanted.”
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