Greyhound (18 page)

“Sorry, Grandma. I didn’t mean to call and upset you.”

“Awww, honey!” she cried out. “Don’t you feel bad now. When are you getting into town here?”

“Day after tomorrow, real early I think, but it depends…” I started.

“On what?” she asked, really beginning to worry now.

“I think my mother’s family is going to meet me at the bus station in Mount Vernon, Missouri. They might want me to stay a few hours and catch a later bus. I don’t know.”

“Oh my gawwwd, Sebby. You do know how to make your grandma worry, don’t ya, sweetie?” She chuckled a little at the mention of my mother’s family. I could hear her smiling on the other end, trying to make me feel better.

“Will you call me from their house if you stop?”

“I will, Grandma. I promise,” I shouted into the plastic handset.

“I love ya, honey,” she said. It was the one thing that I needed to hear the most. I paused, unable to respond right away.

“I love you too, Grandma. I miss you.”

“Don’t you worry…you just hurry on home now.”

“Alrighty,” I answered, and then got off. I could hear my grandpa in the background still stringing out the expletives. Even the barest mention of my mother upset him. My heart sank with the release of the receiver. My chest deflated, my head spun, and my legs got weak. I was still over a thousand miles away and would have to just suffer through the rest, trying to stay positive.

I was thankful that I had Marcus to wait with me in Mount Vernon. My secret hope was that my mother’s family wouldn’t show up and we’d keep right on going. With the way things already were with my Aunt Sharon in Los Angeles, anything was possible.

I found it disturbing to realize my mother had outright lied to my grandmother, tossing me on the bus and hightailing it away. I knew she never had any intention of coming, as I’d been subjected to listening to wedding plans for months. I also knew she was just appeasing Dick by sacrificing me to the wolves. I was her loose end, and she would do whatever was necessary to get rid of it. As I walked back out to the bus, I knew I couldn’t hate anyone more than I hated my own mother.

As soon as we left Amarillo, the world started to change. The bus pivoted toward the north and slowly began twisting between hills and climbing in elevation. Traffic thickened, and more people, more semi trucks, more everything was all around us. The two men from the Navajo Nation had drifted off, but the old man kept talking in his sleep. At times I couldn’t tell if he was talking or singing. Slowly, the red desert gave way to modest vegetation, trees, and the return of sprawling farmland. Huge barns dotted the landscape and could be seen rising from the horizon over great distances. Truck stops, roadside diners, small burgs with hay and grain warehouses with painted advertisements all became more frequent in the few short hours of driving through the northern portion of Texas and into Oklahoma.

Marcus reclined in his seat, leaning against the bathroom wall with his head stuck in the book he had picked up in Albuquerque. Langston Hughes was somewhere deep in his backpack. I felt an urge to ask if I could read it for a while. He hadn’t said a word in almost two hours and only listened to his Walkman for a total of twenty minutes. A few times I wanted to make my way up the aisle and ask the driver to turn on the air-conditioner. I had gotten hot and had to peel off my new jacket and sweater. When I put my hand over the metallic vent below the window, I was surprised to feel the ice-cold air blowing up. It carried with it an odor of toxicity and charcoal. For some reason, it was definitely getting warmer in the back of the bus.

Behind us, and only separated by a metal wall that had been covered over in cheap wood laminate, the grinding and groaning of the engine became louder and made noises like an overworked farm tractor.

“How’s the book?” I asked.

“Good,” he responded in a daze, miles away.

“I thought you already read it once before,” I interjected, trying to provoke him into talking.

“Mm-hmm,” he answered. “A few times,” he uttered, as he kept on reading. Outside, the sun was setting on the end of my second day traveling by bus. Although it had been a little less eventful than it was earlier, I was thankful. As the afternoon passed, we covered a lot of ground and breezed through place after place. I had already made this same trip twice now, and each time I thought it seemed different but it probably wasn’t. In this instance, I could say that it was. The year previous, traveling with my mother and my sister, Beanie, I had foolishly managed to trap my left hand in a set of automatic doors in Washington, D.C. Concerned that my hand was broken, the terminal manager had called an ambulance and rushed me to the nearest hospital, forcing all of us to miss our bus. We were waylaid for a night waiting for X-ray results that never showed up. I felt an urge to tell Marcus the whole story, but looking over I could see that he was still heavily engrossed in
The Catcher in the Rye.

“Is that book about baseball?” I asked.

“No,” was all he said.

“What’s it about?”

He finally pulled himself from its pages, giving me a long, thoughtful look, and smiled.

“It’s about a young man who has trouble fitting in.”

“Is it interesting?” I continued, digging.

“What do you think? Obviously, if I've read it more than once.”

“How many times have you read it?” I wondered aloud.

“Man, you must really be bored,” he laughed. “A few times,” he admitted, flipping the corner of the page over marking his place. He quickly shoved the book into his jacket pocket.

“Are you warm back here, or is it just me?” I asked him. He glanced around, assessing the climate. The look on his face seemed to confirm my suspicions. I watched him take off his leather jacket, fold it up, and put it on the seat between us.

“Feels hot, huh? I’m gonna start sweatin’ if they don’t kick up the air-con.”

“It’s already on,” I replied, running my hand over the vent again.

“Don’t be messin’ with me, now…” he stated. “Is it really on?”

“Feel for yourself,” I answered, pointing a finger at the chrome air vents next to me. He leaned forward, reached out, and held his hand just above the vent.

“You ain’t lyin’!” he admitted, a little surprised.

“Told ya.”

Marcus got up and made his way to the front of the bus to have a word with the driver. I peeked out of the seating section and down the aisle to see him kneeling next to the new lady driver, who had replaced the previous lady driver. She had both hands on the steering wheel and was looking straight ahead. I thought Marcus was going to just say a few words and then come back, but he stayed gone for some time. I saw him sitting on the floor at her feet, just past the thin white line that was painted on the floor where a sign said:
No passengers beyond this line while in motion.
Neither of them seemed to mind as they were still chatting away twenty minutes later.

The heat in the back was like a warm cocoon around me. The vibration of the engine rattled the seat, slowly putting me to sleep. Having gone almost three days without any real rest, my body felt like it was shutting down and warping my thoughts while I was awake. I didn’t want to think about what it was doing to them while I slept.

I didn’t have a clue as to where I was when I opened my eyes. All I knew was that I was standing somewhere in an awkward position and unable to move my arms or legs at all. I didn’t know what registered the loss of movement first, the moment I couldn’t feel my legs or my arms, or the stiff muscle in my neck locking into place. It was dark, but not entirely black. It was difficult to see. All around me the lights were off, and somehow I knew it was night outside, but I knew I was inside by the feel of the air-conditioning breezing by my ears and blowing across my motionless face. Strange shapes and other figures were all cast in dark gray. When I tried to turn my neck but couldn’t, I panicked. Not having control over any portion of my body was massively disconcerting. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I became horrified when I recognized the surroundings.

Large circular racks of clothing evenly spaced across a vast and well-ordered department store only pointed out the obvious. It was after hours, and I was inside of Macy’s, JC Penney, or some other department store. In the far distance, against a wall, a red illuminated sign near the ceiling read
exit.

My eyes darted through the darkness, landing on other human figures. They were elevated above the racks of clothes and merchandise, well posed and casually staring down from the lofty displays. Unmovable and nicely dressed. I was able to gain control of my head and neck slowly and looked down at my wooden arms stuck out in front of me as if I was holding some invisible object; my leg was stepping forward, but I wasn’t moving. My brain relaxed when I realized that I was dreaming that I was a mannequin.

But the dream seemed as real as the pin-striped suit and tie that I could feel against me. My only thought was the desire to move, to step off the elevated stage I’d been placed on and get the hell out of there. I tried to convince myself that it was just a matter of moving quickly enough to the exit.

I was frustrated and betrayed by my own body, even though I began to regain slight movement in my limbs. I felt wooden. I could feel the metal rods embedded in my hands, as I kept them clinched in tight-fisted, agonizing balls. The sensation of long, metal rods shooting up through my legs, locking my knees, and forcing my hips into an immovable position filled me with terror. As I looked out across the department store, I thought I saw one of the other figures jump down from his platform before disappearing into the sea of clothes and slowly start heading in my direction. I was frightened, and my throat was tense and constricted. I struggled even harder to move but couldn’t. I was sweating now, and I wanted to scream, but it felt as if my head was under a glass jar. I looked down and saw a hand reaching out for me from below. I had no air in my lungs or strength in my body for any type of necessary reaction. Brittle and beginning to buckle, I felt myself splintering from the inside out.

“Sebastien…wake up, wake up!” I was being shaken forcefully with a tight grip around the bottom of my jacket. “C’mon, man…the bus is on fire!” Marcus’s face was panic-stricken, and the bus, although slowing, was still moving. I snapped up from the seat, rubbing my eyes and seeing that the lights were all on and the cabin was quickly filling with smoke. My eyes were burning from the chemical fumes. We were reducing speed and pulling off onto the shoulder. People were scrambling in their seats to grab all their stuff. Several people who had their whole lives in plastic trash bags, because they couldn’t afford anything in the way of luggage, were struggling to get all their stuff together.

The old Navajo man was wide awake and standing up in his seating section, ready to go. It was the first time he smiled at me and nodded.

“That was quite a dream you were having,” he announced loudly. His voice was deep and easily penetrated the smoggy air, the buzzing overhead alarm, and the wailing old ladies who were all coughing and choking from the acrid haze.

“Well, old man, you did say that this bus was getting ready to keel over and head off for the New World. You weren’t kidding,” Marcus commented.

The old man remained calm, as did his son. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re all going to make it off in one piece.” The bus screeched to a long halt on the shoulder, and the lady driver threw open the front door and yelled for us to get off quickly and safely. Dazed passengers moved with purpose and efficiency. The lady driver told everyone to step down the embankment and get clear of the motor coach.

Within a few minutes, we were all off the bus and standing approximately thirty feet in front of it. A fire had started in the engine compartment while I slept, and there wasn’t anything that could’ve been done to prevent it. The fire burned out of control and escaped from the engine compartment in bursts. The driver, Marcus, and several other passengers decided to salvage as much luggage from the storage compartments on the bottom side of the bus as possible.

The sky was black, and the sun had set hours ago while I slept. The flames grew taller and started to spread. Soon the bus was fully engulfed, and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. I stood as close as I could to the old Navajo man, who was singing, or rather chanting, with his son loudly. Their gaze was fixed on the bus, and both held one palm upward, possibly calling to the spirits. We watched bags being hurled off into the ditch. The backseats of the bus, where I had been sleeping only moments prior, were now completely engulfed in flames. White and black interlaced smoke billowed out the front door, and the putrid stench of the toilet cooking blasted us in the face with frequent bursts of warm air. Cinders rose up into the darkness, spread out, and floated back to earth like a massive swarm of fireflies being released from the soul of the bus.

No one else was driving on the road as we stood on the gravel shoulder watching our transportation quickly turn into a fiery nightmare. The few cars that were going in the opposite direction slowed, but they didn’t stop. The spectacle of the flaming Greyhound bus against a clear and moonless night sky was both engaging and distracting. Listening to the two Navajo men singing made it less frightening but other-worldly. They were both bobbing around as they sang, and the old man had one hand on my shoulder the whole time. I didn’t know if he was leaning on me or telling me something that I just couldn’t understand. At times he was singing directly into my ear. He was singing in his own language and keeping the rhythm with his son. My mind was fixated on the moment. They were also laughing periodically between the long phrases of the song, as if they knew there was a joke that no one else understood. In a strange way, I thought it was funny too. But I just couldn’t bear to laugh.

After all the bags had been saved, the passengers stood motionless along the ditch, watching the bus burn, mesmerized. Ahead of us, far in the flat distance, flashing lights were heading our way. The closer they got, the larger they looked. Wherever they had come from, it looked as if a whole battalion of emergency vehicles was speeding toward us. I felt a sense of relief watching them approach. I knew we’d all be okay, but the bus was a complete hulking waste. Everyone’s face along the roadside shoulder was cast in a golden light that wavered gently as the flames struggled out of the cracking windows, which were breaking from the intense heat, and escaped up into the dark night sky.

“Should’ve brought marshmallows!” the old man announced in a singsong voice, mixing it in with his song. He was probably just trying to settle me.

I stayed with the two men from the Navajo Nation during the entirety of the blaze. We watched a steady stream of vehicles pull up, long after the bus was too far gone. We kept waiting for a fire truck, but none came. The first few flashing vehicles were several State Police from Elk City, followed by three ambulances, the fire chief in a red sedan, and then three school buses.

Flares were set out on the highway farther back to slow any passing traffic that had difficulty observing a bright ball of flaming metal and seat cushion in complete darkness. The old man and his son kept laughing about the emergency vehicles and thought it was fitting that no fire trucks from Elk City or anywhere else had responded.

“He must be the fire chief!” the son pointed out in a quiet tone, just for the three of us. They were both laughing heartily about that most of all. The old fire chief was wearing sweatpants and a button-down shirt. He had the look of someone who had already turned in for the evening but was forced to make an appearance.

“The spirit is free now. No longer a prisoner here. We should be so lucky.
Aho!
” the old man spoke.

“Aho!”
the son answered back.

The police officers who had gotten to us first were a bit on the young side and busied themselves checking out all of the passengers for injuries. They took a head count, then grouped us together farther away from the flaming inferno and quickly loaded us, like cattle, onto school buses.