bUSEs

(Copyright 2007, 2008 by F. E. Mazur. All rights reserved.)

My friend Chance called me one morning while it was still dark out. He wanted to get hold of me before I was off to work. He was living in New York where, a year ago, he'd gone to be an actor. He shared a loft with a writer and a painter, but one was heading to Europe for a couple of months and the other to China.

"Take some time off and drive up," he said. "Think about the Fourth.  You've never been to the Big Apple, right?  We'll put away a few beers, and I'll show you the sights. I know some women, too."

The women sounded good because I hadn't been with the opposite sex for a while, and a measure of inferiority was becoming the real prick in my morning routine. But driving there, I didn't know about that.

"I heard you have to pay to get into the city," I said.

"Better than having to pay to get out," he said.

I hadn't had my coffee yet and couldn't tell what exactly he meant or if he was kidding around, but I'd already been down on my luck once in my early life when there wasn't enough money to buy a quart of milk, and I didn't know how a person could steal his way out of a city.

"I'm not used to driving in big cities," I said.

"So take a bus. We'll meet at Port Authority and catch a cab from there to my place. Don't think about it. Just do it."

For some reason, the bus idea intrigued me. I suppose it was because I'd never been on one, except for a school bus that had hauled my ass and trumpet around to football games and whose road rhythm often threatened a wet explosion down below. But the big cruisers, the kind that carried people all over the country, those I'd not set foot on.

I'd look at them, though. Every time one was near, including those that barreled past me on the highway, I couldn't help but glance up at it and try to see the people inside. There was something about their sitting high above me, like they had been selected to go to a special place, and their elevation and the speed of the bus seemed to prove it.

Nighttime was when the big things really fascinated me. You could see through the tinted glass easier than in the daytime because some of the riders would have a light on overhead if they were reading or doing something with their hands, and the bus and its people appeared like a miniature world all to itself. Once, while I stood on a corner waiting to cross, a Greyhound pulled up, and behind the window to the side of me was a young woman, her face soft and smooth like fresh snow on a moonlit hilltop. She had her light on above, even though she was staring at nothing and not doing anything from what I could tell. It was a perfectly peaceful scene, even with the lazy rumble from the diesel, and this beautiful creature appeared bummed, to say the least. I was standing in darkness, I knew this, but I raised a hand anyhow and waved. She saw me despite the darkness. And tilting her head forward, much like the Madonnas I'd stared at when growing up as an obedient Catholic kid, she smiled ever so faintly. I'd wished then and there I could be traveling on that bus to wherever it was going.

The day I left for New York was the same day a local woman was reported killed in Iraq. It was a sunny Friday. The temps were in the 80s. The bus station uptown was a busy place because of the higher gas prices brought on by the war and the widening economic jaws of the Chinese, but also because the Greyhounds and Trailways shared the space with community transit. These local buses were always bellyaching about operating expenses. The threat surfaced every year they would discontinue service. Their latest effort to ward off bankruptcy, besides the new, creatively frugal catchphrase "bUSEs," was the selling off of the vehicle exterior, side and rear windows included, to a single advertiser.

As I waited on my ride to pull in from Springfield, one of these painted blocks on rolling rubber swung into a slot nearby, so I got a good look. A radio station that switched its fare to Christian Rock and upped its wattage had control of its decoration. Gigantic brown crosses started above the rear wheels and stretched across the windows onto the roof, with the FM number and call letters above and below. There was also the station's new biblical sounding slogan wrapped around the cowling under the headlights. The background color bumper-to-bumper and top-to-bottom was a putrid green. It was an ugly bus, in my opinion. And with the painted-over windows, you couldn't tell who or what was on board. Oh, I know that if you were a rider you could see out, but what if you spotted someone on the sidewalk or coming out of a store that you wanted to wink or throw a kiss at?  Or maybe you wanted to flip the bird. What would be the sense?  During moments when I questioned my fellow countrymen and the condition of their hearts, I thought these buses with their painted one-way windows were just the vehicles that might have the people over in The King's Enclave someday saying to each other, "Have you noticed?  The homeless problem is no more." Never wondering who was on those buses and where their passengers were being taken.

Earlier in the week, when I'd purchased my ticket, the woman behind the counter asked when I would want to leave. She had a thousand lines in her face and looked like she'd been working in the terminal for all of her life and maybe the previous one, too. She was cheerful nonetheless and said there were several daily runs to New York City that arrived from various points south and west. She rattled off the departure times. I chose the 4:15.

"You sure that's the one?" she asked. "It's not an express. It stops at a dozen small towns and, let's see--you won't arrive in New York until 7:10 the next morning."

Well, that's what I wanted. I wanted to experience riding the bus both when the sun was up and when it was not. I'd heard, too, that many passengers stepped off for the night and got themselves a motel room, so that you might even have a bus all to yourself.  But that wouldn't be the case with this ride. Nearing midnight, there were about ten of us trying to get comfy so that we might crash and not wake up with a crick in the neck and shoulders.

One passenger staying on was a girl who talked like she was over eighteen, but I thought she was probably jailbait. She'd been sitting on the left side of the aisle three or four seats behind the driver, and around midnight she turned back to me--because my mouth wasn't hung open like the others, I guess--and asked if I wanted company. I answered "Sure" because although my lids were starting to weaken, she was damn good-looking, jailbait or not.

But she wasn't a flirt, I can say that. She just wasn't tired, had read enough of her book for the day, a biography of a woman doctor, she said; and there wasn't anything to gaze at through the windows, what with it being night. And it was a joy of hers--her word, "joy"--that she liked to meet new people.

She asked if I was traveling the entire way to New York and I said I was, and she said she wasn't. Then she asked why I was going and I told her, to visit a friend who's an actor.

"Do I know him?  Have I heard of him?" she wanted to know.

"I doubt it," I said.

"Tell me his name. Or is it a woman?  Except you did say 'actor'."

"His name's Chance."

"What's his first name?"

"That's it. It's his stage name, too. I don't know if he's changed his mind on that."

"Like Madonna," she said.

"He was named after a cow," I told her, and I got to laughing as I said this, because it was a fact about my friend that always did make me laugh.

"Go on," she said, and laughed too. "A cow?  Those things we get our eggs from?"

I grinned at her sense of humor and said, "The very same. Ever hear of a show, The Waltons?"

"That's before I was born," she said. "But Richard Thomas, I know, was its star."

"Well, the Walton family had a pet cow and Chance was its name, and that's what his parents named him after."

She then wanted to know what productions Chance--my friend, not the cow--had appeared in and I had to tell her I didn't have the faintest. The three or four telephone calls we'd exchanged in setting up my visit, I'd not asked and he'd not volunteered. We were of the same mind that most people don't really give a shit about what others are up to, and so our greetings to one another went something like: "How's it going?" "Not too bad. How's it going with you?" "You know. Hanging in there."

The real truth, however, was we were good friends, ever since we'd turned the tables on an armed robber while working as teens at a Hometown Pizza (I'd deliberately made a move to distract the tattooed mother, and Chance slammed his head with a frying pan), and we did have a genuine interest in what the other was doing. Only there wasn't always the immediate need to know that you get with those people who have their nose up someone's ass.

Early morning though it was, and a Saturday to boot, Port Authority was still a long way from looking like a crapped-out party when I got there, and it was the first thing I said to Chance, whose long hair resembled the rotting brush pile out behind my apartment: "Who knew there were so goddamn many buses in the world and they're all gathering in New York on the same day I come for a visit."

"You're a popular guy, Bud," he said.

I grabbed my bag and we went out to the street and climbed into a cab. The driver sported some greasy black hair and a beard. And where heavy beard was absent, there was the ol' five o'clock shadow and plenty of sweat, although the sweat was most likely because he'd been working through the night. He had a thick accent and I assumed he was from that part of the world that involved a lot of bloodletting and is always in today's unhappy news.

I got to wondering how New Yorkers saw their immigrants these days. Since 9/11, that is. Where Chance and I come from, when people spoke of New Yorkers, it was said they'll tolerate everyone and anything. It was said with a little blow of air at the end. If that were ever true, I couldn't imagine that it was true after the twin towers fell. And the fucked-up mess in Iraq was saying there's no end to the number of these people eager to kill themselves in order to kill others. Rest assured if I were throwing a goddamn shindig of any kind, I wouldn't be inviting any Muslim immigrants any time soon. Invite them just to show yourself off as fair, open-minded, and that you don't paint them all with the same brush?  The risk--just my opinion--wouldn't be worth it. Doing business the old way where you had to see your kid actually smoking weed before accusing him; where you first got a few photographs of the old man slipping it to his secretary before filing the papers; where you gathered the facts before making the accusation is what I'm saying; that way, depending on the matter, could get you killed nowadays. Today's world requires a dude to act on his hunch and live with the result. Whatever it is.

The taxi ride to Chance's took about ten minutes, and going up in the elevator almost as long, it seemed. I kept expecting it to die between floors and was certain the cracked red emergency button on the operator's panel would not work, the phone neither.

The loft was on the fifth floor of an old, I presumed no-longer used warehouse. The whole neighborhood was basically warehouse after warehouse, and many of the upper floors of these were now rental lofts--if the trimmings on the windows were any indication--with all types of small shops at the bottom. The first time that I looked out to see what the view of the big city was that Chance had every night when he turned in and every morning when he got up, I saw the huge sliding door on the street floor of one warehouse closing behind a black car; and in the shadows beyond the car was a bus with painted-over windows.

Later that day, Chance treated me at a really nice restaurant, and two women joined us. He'd kept the second part as a surprise. Mine's name was Serendipity (and I almost said "Go on" like that girl I'd met on the bus less than twenty-four hours earlier). Within a few minutes, it was clear Serendipity didn't think much of her date. And I wasn't thrilled either. All the same, I endured because I had a hunch we'd both been doing similar exercise in the morning and were dedicated to putting a stop to it, at least for a while.

But here's how the mutual hatred started. I asked where and how far the twin towers were from where we were sitting, and she threw her head back and directed this to Chance: "Just how many hogs are on his farm?"

Chance kind of laughed, and his date did laugh. Then she turned back to me. "You didn't hear about the airplanes, baby?  The big jets that some Arab screwballs crashed into the towers on purpose?  And then the towers fell down and took about three thousand of us with them?"

"My god, Ser, he knows about Ground Zero," Chance said.

And I said, "I misspoke."

She turned her head toward the entrance and let out one of those laughs that you were supposed to think wasn't intended to be heard. "What are you?  A budding politician?"

"Ser works down at Wall Street," Chance said in a kind of explanation. "She makes indecent amounts of money."

"I pay indecent taxes, too," she said.

"Well, the homeland thanks you," I dared.

Which is when she cocked her head at an odd angle and stared at me a time before saying, "The little half-assed hamlet you're from, Bud, whatever it's name--is it receiving some of that money earmarked for Homeland Security?"

"What if it is?"

Chance, he chuckled because he knew where she was coming from, the same as I, and figured I was just stoking her fire to have some fun. But that wasn't the case. I could agree that the terrorists' most likely target would again be a big city like New York, L.A., or Chicago. But it wasn't out of my realm of possibilities they would strike small towns, really small towns, podunks, and strike them all at the same time. Maybe a dozen of them spread across the country. What a statement they would make if each of those towns reported on the same day a hundred dead. I thought, too, they wouldn't even have to trouble themselves with a suicide bomber. Fuck no, they could just leave the loaded truck or van on Main Street, sort of like McVeigh had, and book; and no one in those little rural burgs would be the wiser. The message to America would be: "We can hit you anywhere!"

It was a big space, the loft, but there weren't any interior walls, just a couple six-feet high dividers, which the painter had decorated with partially clothed men and women (I'm no art critic, but I thought they were nicely done), and so hooking up in such an environment was a new experience for me. But Serendipity made it easy. She had her tough side--no faking the evening before as she was giving me the what-for--but a soft core emerged in the night, and I realized she was terrified that another terrorist attack would come. At the collapse of the towers she had been only a few blocks away, and the dust and ash that quickly billowed through the surrounding streets, the same stuff that I had watched safely on television while finishing an early beer at Applebee's on my day off, engulfed her. She told me in the night there were many moments when the taste and smell of the dust came back and overwhelmed her to where she would stop whatever she was doing and cry.

After Ser and her friend left in the morning, I asked Chance over coffee if he was afraid of maybe a dirty bomb coming into Manhattan. I knew I had other questions also when, seconds later, I watched him get up from his chair and remove a gun, a snub-nosed revolver, from a leather bag and place it on the table. I say "other questions" because somehow I was certain the gun was not related to my first.

"Ever hear of a book called Babi Yar?" he asked. I hadn't. "It's another story of the Nazis rounding up and murdering Jews. This one in Russia or the Ukraine."

I waited as he stared at me.

"At the front of the book is a quote from a poet. 'Let no one forget. Let nothing be forgotten.' What do we have?  We have: 'We will never forget.'"

I must have shaken my head.

"Bud, this is New York.  Where there's Broadway. Where's there's the New Yorker. Where there's lived some of the best writers in the world. Where there are some of the most daring publishers. There's no poetry in 'We will never forget.'"

I could see it bothered him more than just some ordinary irritation as he uttered the statement yet again.

"Something about it doesn't inspire confidence that we know what the hell we're doing," he said. "That's all."

I waited a while before switching to a different topic: "What's with the gun?"

"You can take it when you leave," he said without interest. "There's no inspection of bags on a bus, is there?"

"Is it real?"

"It's a cheapie, but it's real. There's even enough shells to load it."

He understood when I didn't reach out and pick up the gun.

"You don't want it?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"It's nothing to do with terrorism," he said, probably aware that I was wondering why he had the thing in the first place, since we each knew the other had no interest in firearms for hunting or protection.

It turned out he was to read for a part in an off-Broadway production and the character recited many of his lines with a gun in hand. He'd wanted the feel of what that was like. The part was bigger than anything he'd done to date, he really was hoping to land it, and when some of his theatrical friends refused to cop to owning a handgun that he could borrow, he took a chance and went out on the street to obtain one. While the gun most likely had been stolen to begin with, he eased his conscience of having it with the belief that he was possibly preventing a killing, simply because it was in his responsible possession and not some criminal's.

"How about you listen to me read," he said. "Tell me what you think."

"Hey, the last play I sat through was in high school," I told him. "And that was only because I had it bad for a girl with a role. I don't know fuck about acting."

"Then you're perfect," he said.

And so was he. Later, when he read for Ser and her friend, they agreed.

A gun is like cat shit, as it guarantees you'll take notice. Yet under the handling of Chance, the snub-nosed revolver was clearly a minor thing. Between when he grabbed it up and later set it back on the table, it seemed no more important than a coffee mug, or that frying pan. Even when the lines implied a threat to another character and required he raise and point the gun, it was out there in space like a new shoot on a tree limb. None of that tipping it to one side to show the wielder was a tough guy. I told him he was a cinch to get the part.

The Fourth of July brought an end to my four-day visit. It came more quickly than preferred since what Ser and I were doing, I liked a lot. Chance said he'd ride along with me in the cab to Port Authority, then walk back for a little exercise.

It was a bright day that was there for us and everyone in the city when we stepped out of the building onto the street, and the air had lost some of its unpleasantly civilized aroma. People were already appearing in numbers as most of them didn't have to work the holiday. As it was still the morning, many men and women were sauntering in and out of the flag-decorated shops, especially the coffee shop and deli.

We checked up and down the street to see if a taxi was anywhere close that we could hail, but were out of luck. A second later a cheer went up behind us and as I swung around to look, to discover what it was about, it multiplied rapidly, joined by that Sousa fellow. Someone in a nearby apartment must have put on a CD of the composer's marches and stationed a speaker near an open window.

Encouraging the cheer was a bus, likely the same I'd had a glimpse of the day of my arrival. It had driven from the warehouse where there were no shops, and it was the most beautifully painted bus I'd ever seen, nothing commercial about it. All patriotism, it had a huge Old Glory billowing in two dimensions up and over the roof with wavy golden banners on the sides that read God Bless America and We Will Never Forget. Behind it was the black car that I'd seen at that same time, and it was now clean and so high gloss that it rivaled a soldier's spit-shine.

The bus turned left and the car went right, and each paused next to the curb. The driver of the spotless car got out, marched over to the warehouse door and rolled it shut. He signed to the bus driver before heading back to his vehicle. It drove off away from us, while the bus turned the corner onto our street and moved deliberately, as a number of other cars and delivery trucks were making their way. It was such a stunning and tastefully painted exterior to this bus that more people gathered on the sidewalks on both sides of the street, including guys from the deli who had on their white aprons and another guy from a tune-up shop who held an air hammer with the long compressed air hose still attached. Soon, people all along the sidewalks began to applaud, and it got louder and their cheering got louder, and a few started to whistle. Sousa, too, was cranked up, and I heard someone say the names of many of our soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan were inscribed on the bus, and I thought of whoever was in charge of the paint job and marveled at his patience, since the bus would always be a bus and not a monument, meaning someday it would end up in a junkyard. The whole scene grew into an event, and I couldn't imagine what was now happening in any other city, nor on a day other than the Nation's Day of Independence.

I myself got caught up in it. I started cheering, pumping my fist, hollering, and the Bud head swelled as I thought these city folk needed to be shown how to whistle. Dropping my bag, I slipped both pinkies into my mouth and blew like a sonovabitch. I took in just enough oxygen between blasts so there was hardly a break. Someone in the building behind was flinging out confetti, while the mechanic across the street raked the air with a series of raucous bursts from his hammer.

I turned to look at Chance, sure that he too was enjoying this unexpected grand start to the Fourth of July, only to find that he was bent over with his hands in my bag.

He was loading the gun. And there was a note beside it.

I can't say exactly what the mixture was racing through my head at that moment, except that he must have feared having an unlicensed gun in his possession for very long and that he had slipped the revolver and the shells into my bag while I was taking a final leak before we left his loft. I began to read the note as if it would clear my instant confusion, but he clicked the cylinder shut, inserted the gun behind his belt at the back and was off up the street in the direction of the bus, without a word.

I took two quick steps after him--maybe it was more, I can't say, and it's not important--before stopping myself cold.

And I prayed that he was right.

And I understood there was no choice but to accept that he was. The fellow would not be getting off. He would not walk a few blocks, then punch a number into his cellphone. He would stay in his seat is what he would do.

And I would have to stand where I was in order to avoid being the Devil's match.

And so I did. I watched my friend the actor approach the bus. Twenty feet away, he moved into the middle of the street. He raised his left hand and I could see the driver scowl and wave at him to get out of the way. In response, Chance raised the other hand and together they patted the air between the bus and himself as if to say, "Calm down, I just have a question."

The bus drew near and the driver put his face closer to the front window and gestured his thumb upward at the route display that read "Out of Service," and Chance patted the air harder without retreating or moving to either side. Finally, like that Chinese tank everyone's seen, the bus came to a stop rather than run over the person before it. Which is when I wondered if Chance had thought it through. All the way through. Did he realize not just what he had to do, but how it had to be done and how horrible the act would be? How he had to make as certain as possible that the arms, hands, the fingers especially, wouldn't move afterwards.

He stepped quickly then to the side of the bus and the driver opened the door for him. I could see Chance's eyes now. They held an actor's smile as the right hand found the gun. He brought the revolver around front and, at point-blank range, shot the bus driver in the face.

Louella. Her last name of African origin. Swahili, someone once said. Too many letters and too many unfamiliar combinations. In the end it was just Louella to all of us who knew her. Everyone had murdered it, even the local anchors. She'd been first a waitress, then a private, then dead. Dead by an IED.

As the cops swarmed, I'd spotted her name on the bus. It had been painted just to the left of the door. I thought she'd be grateful to Chance that it wasn't murdered yet again by a giant box of explosives.

That Fourth of July I caught a much later bus home. An express. It stuck to the interstates. Once the sun disappeared, the many small towns along the route began to set off their fireworks. The bursts were distant and so did not appear to be very far above the horizon. Everyone on the bus stared while each firework exploded without a sound. I stared too while I worried for America. I worried for Chance as well, even though he'd likely be getting all the dramatic parts he wanted. At least for a while.

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