[I have changed a couple of locations in this story, for reasons that will become apparent.]
If she ever told me her name, I have forgotten it. She may not have. We knew each other for a day, no more than that, and that day was a quarter century ago.
I know she was strawberry-blonde, and wiry, and perhaps ten years older than me. Her eyes blue. Her voice of a middle register, a midwestern twang overlaid on old learned Great Lakes vowels. She wore denim and a print shirt. She lived in western Iowa. She had been visiting an old friend in western New York.
I sat on the bus as it idled in the Buffalo terminal, looking out the window. The driver closed the door, revved the engine, and then opened the door again to let her on. She thanked him effusively and walked past ten empty seats to sit next to me.
I groaned a bit. She was talkative. Her husband was a Vietnam vet. They were having problems, and he had suggested she visit her friend as a sort of vacation. She had two sons, I think. Her visit had been wonderful.
I looked out at the leafless pin oaks and maples along the New York State Thruway. The state line passed. We rolled through the old brick neighborhoods of Erie, let a few passengers off, took a few on. Stray glimpses of the lake caught my eye across the aisle. Ohio came and the trees gave way to Cleveland.
“I tell ya,” she said, “I could write the book on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. My husband has it bad. He tries hard, but he’s just been damaged. It has not been easy. I love him. I love my family. And I spent the last two weeks with my friend thinking about leaving and going somewhere else.”
We had an hour in Cleveland between buses. I bought coffee. On an impulse I bought one for her. When the Chicago bus arrived she sat next to me again. I asked if she wanted a turn at the window. She didn’t. We talked for a while. We rode in silence for a while. I read some of the book I’d brought along - Dhalgren. She asked me what it was about. I tried to explain, omitting the sexual content. A man traveling cross country found a city in the Midwest that was oddly isolated, post-apocalyptic and desolate, which people rarely left. Its residents tried to survive in creative ways, made art and music and new culture. But all that was a spark against the desolation.
“Sounds like Sioux City,” she said.
At midnight we were in downtown Chicago. She bought the coffee.
Heading west again she asked why I had been in Buffalo. It was my brother, I said. He’d been crossing an icy road to his friend’s house. A pickup truck hit him doing 55 miles an hour. By the time I got time off from my job, found a driveaway car and two friends who wanted to head east, drove cross-country in mid-winter, and got to the hospital, he was recently out of the ICU and more or less conscious. “You didn’t have to come,” he said.
“Is he going to be all right?” she asked. “I think so,” I said.
90 miles west of Chicago the bus slowed suddenly. A blowout. The driver pulled us over to the side of I-90, went to look, came back in shaking snow off his hat. We bumped a mile down the road to an exit with an all-night diner. 25 of us trooped in as the driver radioed for a new bus. Pale linoleum and buzzing lights at two a.m. In the dark next to her for hours I had grown familiar with her voice, but had forgotten what she looked like.
She looked like a stranger. It was as if I had woken up from a long dream to a life I could not remember. I was a stranger, and she was a stranger, and yet we were traveling together fondly. Nothing untoward had happened between us, and nothing would. But we were, it seemed suddenly, a couple.
At three the new bus arrived and the drivers transferred our luggage. We got back on the road. “I think I’m going to try to sleep a little,” I said. “Good luck,” she smirked. I leaned up against the window.
I woke slowly at first, until I realized that my forehead was nestled up against the left side of her neck, my temple against her collarbone. I sat up, embarrassed. She smiled. “Good morning.” It was getting light out, a little. We were a mile or so from the Mississippi River.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“About an hour and a half.”
“How long was… was I…”
She laughed. “About an hour and twenty-five minutes.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t…”
A hand on my forearm. “Relax. I really didn’t mind.”
We crossed into Clinton. The sun came up over snow-cloaked Iowa hills. She napped a bit, sitting up, head back. Cedar Rapids came and went. I could live here, I thought.
I have thought the same thing often, since then.
A bit later she snapped awake. “Where are we?”
“Marshalltown.”
“Marshalltown? I have an old boyfriend who lives in Marshalltown.” She looked out the window as if to search for him. “I haven’t seen him for ten years.”
She rubbed her neck, winced, twisted her head back and forth. Still half asleep, I unconsciously reached for her shoulders, began working the knotted muscle with my thumbs. She murmured quiet, achy gratitude. Her tendons were steel cables.
“That’s not all from the bus ride, is it.” She shook her head. She settled back against the seat. “And now I go back to it,” she said.
We watched the hills head east beneath us for a time.
We reached I-35 at Ames, headed south. “Well, so much for the good scenery,” she said. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, looked up at me.
“You could use some more sleep, I bet.” She nodded. I flipped up the center armrest, shifted to lean obliquely against the window, looked at her and patted my left shoulder. “I think I still owe you one.”
She lay herself across the seat, her back to the footwell, her face on my chest. She was asleep in seconds. She held my shirtfront in her left fist, more and more tightly the deeper she submerged.
Time passed.
In Omaha she rummaged in the overhead compartment, found her bags. She looked at me from the aisle. “We’d better do this here so my husband doesn’t see,” she said. She bent toward me, grabbed my face, planted a peck on my smiling lips.
Then she was gone, and it was three more days across the West before I made it home.
I like it when you write about people.
Such a moving story, Chris. A beautiful portrait. I have a similar story, except, we both got off the bus, sat at a diner, talked for hours, and ended up living together for a summer in the hot, dry hills west of Garberville. That was 30 years ago. Thanks for the memory.
My similar story ends in marriage and the existence of you, your sisters and brother.
I admire—almost envy—your ability to remember and to tell the stories about your memories. And I love the paragraph about waking up to a new life; it seems like I can almost remember how that happens on buses.
As your story headed west I waited for you to get to Ames, my home town. I smiled as I envisioned in my mind the turnoff from US 30 heading west to I-35 going south and thought of how I spent part of a hot summer working in the cornfields there.
Greyhound? Continental Trailways? Jack Rabbit Bus Lines? Buses on the upper plains were so much fun way back when. Perhaps, one of the hidden blessings in 21st century rock-n-roll touring is the return of the tour bus as the primary mode of transport throughout the US. I am sure that there will be stories told 25 years from now about bus rides in the first part of this century that lead to the joys expressed above.
These are the days I thank God for the interwebs!