Innocents on the Lamb

When Kansas City came, I stayed on the bus. The same dread I felt in Pittsburgh hit me when the bus pulled into the terminal and I started out the window at the streets of the unfamiliar city and at the other buses, each with a different destination listed above its windshield. In the dark, the road had taken on an ominous air, and I felt as if the sky would fall in on me if I stepped outside. I kept thinking I was making a mistake, going the wrong way, turning a corner in my life that I knew somehow would change me and the direction my life would take from here on after. Maybe I was a bit embarrassed, fearful at what the Watsons would say if I altered my plans yet again, making a beeline for Denver when I had decided on LA. Something in the back of my head kept telling me, “It’s too soon,” meaning that I might arrive at Louise’s door as the same time as my uncles or the police, and if I waited, I might avoid getting caught in their net. Years later, I would think back to this moment i...

  I stared out the window of the bus and watched the farm pass, across a landscape someone once called “The Great Bread Basket,” though for me, the monotony of sameness I could not relieve with the book I had purchased in Philadelphia but had neglected. The bus plunged on into the afternoon of my second day out from the city of Brotherly love, and the red glow of the slanted sunlight illuminated everything as if we moved in a dream, or a reminder of those better days at home when I wandered Garret Mountain in late autumn, a similar sun setting through the changing leaves. The miles wore on. Fence post after fence post connected by strands of wire, behind which late season corn grew, swaying in anticipation of a final harvest. While speculation over the cause of the dead man's demise lasted many people a long time, even that ran out after a while, with most of us clinging to our windows for some relief, signs that we could read that would even momentarily break up the monotony of t...

   Our departure from the terminal in Lexington, stirred up the passengers again – we finally stepping over the threshold into “The West”, although in truth that distinction went to St. Louis later when we crossed the mighty Mississippi. We traveled in growing predawn light, although lights also came on above many of the seats. We could see the growing green of the hills around us, and staples of horses, reminding me of some of the tales Laura had told me earlier about her brothers’ love of cars and horses – and country music. Trucks crowded the highway around us, coming from or going to the west. Signs posted for cars gong the other way boasted of places like Fork Knox, Radcliff, Elizabethtown and other places the night had denied us. I even saw a sign for a place named “Horse Cave,” and tried to envision it. Sounds stirred from many seats whose lights remained un-illuminated. The two young lovers had constructed a blanket tent above their two seats out of which a strin...

    The young woman climbed aboard the bus a moment after the drivers changed, small with dark hair that wrapped around her face like a seashell. She wore a white dress buttoned up the front almost to her throat, though tight enough to show off her firm breasts. She drew everybody’s attention as she made her way down the aisle in search of a seat, when she decided to take the vacant seat next to me. Mrs. Warton glanced over, her gaze curious, bearing its usual nosy humor. The young woman smiled and held out her small hand. "My name is Laura, what's yours?" Her southern drawl made her that much more attractive, not like the phony accents from bad movies about the Civil War, but deeper, carrying whole history of the south in word. I told her my name, and then told her I had come from New York. "New York?" she said, exaggerating the words so that they sounded like some other town from the one I meant. "Why that's where I just came from. Not dir...

      The snow tapped the windows as the bus plunged ahead, stirring up in me rumors of the north, and the reports of a blizzard sweeping across the northern states. A vision of blotted out highways and buried cities came to me like a dream, making me wonder about Louise and how she fared in far off Boulder where such storms made up a way of life. Winter in mountains came early and left late, fingers lingering deep into spring as if to threaten even the coming of summer. The snow pellets clung to then fell away from the windows, melting under the consistent blast of the bus’s heaters, turning into tears wiped away by the motion of the bus. Not yet two days away from my family, I wondered had they already picked up my trail or at least the rumor of where I might go. Had they reached out to Louise’s parents, gotten a number to call her, and had they already altered her to my possible arrival? Would she cooperate with them if they had, agreeing to call them if my shadow fe...

  We left Pittsburgh and its Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers was behind, a dark memory of flowing under bridges I never expected to see again and the city’s stench slowly fading as the bus plunged into the darkness, tires rubbing over asphalt as we continued west. I kept nodding, but could not sleep, jerked awake by some flaw in the road, my face reflected in the dark windows floating on a sea of black – the other passengers floating there, too, like ghosts. Sometimes, the headlights of the bus or passing cars illuminated the mileage marker like a countdown to our next destination. We passed through West Virginia, happy home of Wheeling, slowing through smaller towns, gray shapes of dilapidated buildings like grave stones, punctuated by monuments to Confederate heroes put up a half century after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, not to intimidate former slaves, but as a gesture of defiance to the carpetbaggers that had come south from the north to rape the Old South and to perm...