Angels

1

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

Jamie sat by the window looking out and smoking a Kool. People still crowded at the bus’s door, people she hoped never to meet — struggling with mutilated luggage and paper sacks that might have contained, the way they handled them, the reasons for their every regretted act and the justifications for their wounds. A black man in a tweed suit and straw hat held up a sign for his departing relatives: “THE SUN SHALL BE TURNED INTO DARKNESS AND THE MOON INTO BLOOD” (JOEL 2:31). Under the circumstances, Jamie felt close to this stranger.

Around three in the morning Jamie’s eyes came open. Headlights on an entrance ramp cut across their flight and swept through the bus, and momentarily in her exhaustion she thought it was the flaming head of a man whipping like a comet through the sleeping darkness of these travellers, hers alone to witness. Suddenly Miranda was awake, jabbering in her ear, excited to be up past bedtime.

Jamie pushed the child’s words away, afraid of the dark the bus was rushing into, confused at being swallowed up so quickly by her new life, fearful she’d be digested in a flash and spit out the other end in the form of an old lady too dizzy to wonder where her youth had gone. A couple of times she tried to shush Miranda, because the baby was sleeping and so was everyone else on the bus, except the driver, she hoped — but Miranda had to nudge Baby Ellen with her foot every two seconds because she wanted to play, right in the middle of Nevada in the middle of the night. “Randy,” Jamie said. “I’m tarred now, hon. Don’t wake up Ellen now.”

Miranda sat on her hands and pretended to sleep, secretly nudging Baby Ellen with her foot.

“Move your foot; hon,” Jamie told her. “I ain’t playing. Move your foot now.”

Miranda feigned sleep and deafness, her foot jerking in a dream to jostle the baby.

“Move — yer—fut,” Jamie whispered fiercely, and grabbed her ankle and moved it. “You behave. Or I’ll tell the driver, and he’ll take you and put you off the bus, right out there in that desert. Right in the dark, with the snakes. You hear me?” She jerked Miranda’s foot away again. “Don’t you play like you’re asleep when I can see goddamn it you ain’t!”

She stared with hatred at Miranda’s closed eyes and soon realized the child had fallen asleep. The weightlessness of fear replaced the weight of anger as the bus sailed down the gullet the headlights made. She put her hand over her face and wept.

In a little while she fell asleep, and dreamed about a man drowning in a cloud of poison. She woke up and wondered if this was a dream about her husband, or what? — a dream about the past, or a dream about the future?

Baby Ellen wouldn’t stop screaming.

Jamie held her in one arm, searching beneath the seat with her free hand for the travelling bag, then in the travelling bag for Baby Ellen’s orange juice. “There there there there there,” she told Baby Ellen. “Have a crib for you soon, and a string to tie on your music box with, and Mama and Miranda’ll come sing to you when it’s bedtime, and here’s your orange juice, thank goodness, there there there there there, little Baby Ellen, oh that a good orange juice, such a serious orange juice, such a serious look, oh, see the pretty sun? See the sun over there, Baby Ellen? That’s just a little bitty part of the sun, pretty soon Baby Ellen see the whole sun and then it’s morning time for Baby Ellen and Mama and Miranda Sue.” She wished she could smother the baby. Nobody would know. They were four days out of Oakland.

She fed Baby Ellen her orange juice and watched the sun as it moved into prominence above the dead cornfields in Indiana, the light striking her face painfully as it ticked over the frozen pools and the rows of broken stalks glazed with ice. Her husband angrily sold stereophonic components for a living. He brooded on his life, and it grew on him until he was rattling around inside of it. Why couldn’t she just be thankful to him, he always wanted to know, since he was losing track of what he wanted just so she could have everything she wanted? Couldn’t she see how everything kept happening? It was just — he pounded his fist on the wall so the small trailer shook—one moment goes to the next… He choked her close to death twice, frantic to think she couldn’t understand his complaint. And she couldn’t. He slept almost every minute he was at home. At night, he cried and confessed how everything scared him. Whenever she looked at him he had his face in his arms, hiding from the pictures in his own brain. Finally he’d blown it, their whole marriage. She’d seen it coming like a red caboose at the end of a train.

Cut loose between Oakland and everything that would happen next, she couldn’t stand to let the bus keep moving and thought, I’ll get off this bus at the breakfast stop and change my ticket for the next bus on home, and happy trails, all you folks in Greyhound-land. He’d be overjoyed to see her, she was certain of it. What would she say? Forgot my toothbrush, she told herself, and smiled. Forgot my purse. Left my lunch behind. The ticket man would laugh in her face for turning around right in the middle. Liked the trip so much, you thought you’d start all over, said the ticket man. Yeah, have to go back and look out the left side this time, in case I missed something special. At the breakfast stop, Jamie paid a lady to look after Miranda and Baby Ellen while she took a sponge bath in the ladies’ room. Miranda stood on a tomato soup crate to play the pinball and took pictures of herself holding her baby sister in a little booth with a curtain. Jamie and Miranda ate cornflakes, and Baby Ellen had apricot-peach dessert. They were running out of money. The turnpike took on more curves and hills as it came toward Cleveland.

Three seats back and on the other side of the aisle, the two nuns sat muttering to themselves, sleepy with breakfast. Secretly Jamie watched, and she realized they were praying, the bright cut rose the shorter nun had been clutching in Oakland now replaced by a dark rosary. Jamie wondered if they made nuns pray each day after breakfast. Did they think to themselves, here I go, praying, and did they hold a portrait in their heads of God’s face with his white beard, nodding thoughtfully at their Latin? If praying was their job, then did they get any holidays? She glanced at Miranda making broad, even strokes with a crayon across a woman’s face in People magazine, and wondered if her own little girl would ever be a nun with a black and white hat on top of her long hair. But then, Miranda wasn’t a Catholic. They hadn’t been much of anything in Oakland, though they’d been retired Baptists in West Virginia before the move. You couldn’t be very burning for your religion in California, because California was full of atheists and Birchers and Hare Krishnas, and the only ones very serious about religion were the crazy people like that, who were always jumping off the Golden Gate when seized by the power of God. Baptism seemed just another way of getting yourself wet.

In California there were funny-eyed old women convinced the world would momentarily come to an end, or that spacemen would be landing soon for the Judgment. You picked Venusians or Martians or Jesus Christ, or people with twelve arms and blue skin from India. Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed by an atom bomb dropped from a rocket ship.

Jamie heard low snores issuing from the shorter nun when she was supposed to be praying. God had heard it all before anyway, and didn’t bother to wake her. From nowhere the bright rose had appeared again, and she choked it in her two hands while she slept.

The man in the seat behind them, Jamie could tell, had her figured for some kind of thrill-seeker. But he was a nice man with a kindly grin and a tattoo of a seahorse on his left arm that fascinated Miranda. “King Neptune gave it to me,” he told her, and winked at Jamie and rolled his coatsleeve back down, and that was all he’d say about his tattoo.

As the morning passed, Miranda drew him into her activities, and by the afternoon they were terrific buddies. In his airline bag he had four beers, and offered one to Jamie. For all the pushing and shoving and disrespect for nuns shown on this trip, the seat beside him, as were several others, was vacant. She accepted his invitation to join him. “Thought you were about to jump clear off this bus a while ago,” he said. “I think your kids are drilling your head a little bit.” He was wearing his glasses now — silvered wraparound sunshades — so that he had two mirrors instead of eyes. In his face she saw her own face.

And he sported a pencil-thin mustache that just made her ill. A little bit of foam clung to it briefly, and then he licked it away. “I don’t never take no planes,” he said. “I get sick as a dog on one, even on a cross-the-country jet. I was hitching, but I started to freeze.” He jiggled his beer can, popping its aluminum rapidly in his grip. “So now I’m taking the bus. Which I guess you can see for yourself,” he said.

“Half the time I can’t see anything for myself.” She gestured with her Stroh’s toward the seat in front of them, where Miranda and Baby Ellen both napped. “Like to drive anybody half blind, looking after them two twenty-four hours ever day.” Stroh’s, she noticed, was Shorts written backwards. She had never heard of this beer.

“Going to Pittsburgh for some high old times,” the man said. “I got me some bread, but I ain’t spending none except on wine, women, and song. So that’s why I was hitching.”

“Jesus,” Jamie said. “Twenty-four hours a day ever single day of the year.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so,” said the man.

“Till Miranda’s eighteen, and then Ellen’ll be — what, twelve? No, eighteen take away five, that’s thirteen she’ll be. Then five more years till Ellen’s grown up, and that makes twenty-three years in all.”

“That’s a big job you got,” the man said.

“No fooling. And then when you’re done you’re a dried-up old sack and when somebody says What you been doing all these years, you got no idea what in the world to say. Just like a hermit. Just like a nun.”

“You better take you a night off next Sairdy,” the man said.

She wondered what he was getting around to, and looked right at him. He was about forty, maybe a bit younger. He had curly hair not yet actually too thin, but preparing to go bald in the front. Under a western-style suit coat, designed apparently for a cowboy bandleader, he wore a white teeshirt. He removed the coat now, holding his can of beer between his knees as he did so, and uncovered the shirt’s emblem: “Harrah’s — Vegas.” When he poked his wraparound sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose with his thumb, his shirtsleeve rose with the movement to reveal a tattoo on his triceps of a single naked breast cupped in two disembodied hands. “Let me guess. I bet your name is Louise,” he said.

“No way. My name’s Jamie.” She looked in the rear-vision mirror, trying to see the driver, wondering if he’d noticed the obscene tattoo on the upper arm of the man she was suddenly sharing a seat with. She could only see the driver’s ear in the mirror, she thought, and maybe part of his cap.

“You nervous about that driver? He don’t see a thing, Jamie.” The man gulped from his beer without ducking to conceal the action. “He don’t see.”

“How do you know? Where’d you get all this information?”

“I been a driver before. All’s you can see is if somebody’s in a seat or out of it. And only some of the seats. You got no way of telling if they’re drinking beer or pop, or if they’re asleep or awake or what they’re doing.”

They observed the power lines as they dipped and swooped and ran by over the phone poles, the straight rows in the planted fields, less occasional now in Ohio, as they spread out like fans from the horizon, then whipped shut as they passed The sky had gone grey after dawn, and the hills pushed up directly against the burden of it; a few winter birds glided and wheeled just under it. “Let the boy rock and roll,” she hummed to herself, and the man hummed a melody too, interjecting a hissy whistle into the tune.

“Nope. Nope. No sir,” the man said, popping his beer can. She glanced at him, but he didn’t continue, and she turned her eyes again to the fields running away beside them. “Nope, Jamie, nobody sees this,” he said suddenly, and kissed her cheek.

She swallowed beer. “Hey now — quit!”

“Quit what?”

“I’m married!”

“Where’s your husband?”

“He’s home.”

“Where’s that?”

“He’s home. He’s at the next stop. He’s in Cincinnati.”

“This bus don’t go to Cincinnati.”

“He’ll meet us in Cleveland then.”

“Now, I heard you telling your little girl a while back, she won’t see Daddy no more.” He grinned and opened another beer. It hissed loudly opening and she jerked. No one had noticed. The two nuns were asleep toward the back, one leaning against the windowpane and the other resting her head on her shoulder.

“Well,” Jamie said, “I had to leave him.”

“Now we’re getting honest.”

“Honesty is the best policy.”

“Have another beer, before I drink it all up.”

“You didn’t even say your name yet.”

“Name’s Bill. Bill Houston. Told it to your little girl there, and I thought you must’ve heard.” He took her hand in his.

“Hey, I can’t use this,” she said. “Specially at this moment. Why don’t you just get straight?”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Forget it. Hey — here. I got something here going to make that beer taste like champagne.” He sneaked a pint bottle of bourbon from his bag, and, catching hold of her wrist, he sloshed some into her can of beer. “That’ll perk her up. Called a Depth Charger.” He slapped his nose with a forefinger, rolling his eyes and allowing his tongue to fall from the corner of his mouth. A little stupid, but Jamie couldn’t help laughing.

She sipped from her drink and they discussed the passage of eras, the transformation of the landscape, the confusion of people in high places, the impersonality of the interstates. The bus carried them out from under the cloudbank covering Western Ohio into a rarefied light where old patches of snow burned fiercely in the dirt of hillsides. Soon the beer was gone and the cans held only bourbon. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Bill Houston said. “I been married three times.”

“Three times? What for?” she said.

“I never could figure out what for myself. After the first time I said, next time you want to do something like that, you better remember. So I got this here.” He displayed a tattoo on the inside of his elbow, a tiny feminine Satan’s face over the motto, Remember Annie. “Didn’t do me no good. Three months later I was right back married again, to a big and fat one. First one, she was little and skinny, so the next one I made sure she was big and fat, sort of for the variety.”

“Variety’s important.”

“Yes it is. Variety’s important.”

“Course, you have to be dependable, too.”

“Third one I married was dependable. I could just never get my mind around it — she was so dependable, but then one day right in the middle of everything she says, what was your first wife’s name. I says it was Annie; she says, oh yeah, Annie what, and I says, Annie Klein! What you asking me for? Well, she was just wondering. So about five minutes later she wants to know what was my next wife’s name. So course I told her, which it happened to be the same maiden name as she had. That why you picked me? she wants to know. What do you mean, I told her, coming up on me all of a sudden with this shit — excuse me. She says, so, I’m wife number three, and Roberts number two, but when it comes to number one, honey, I ain’t nothing, and next day she filed. Just all of a sudden like that. I says hey! you’re number one! you’re number one! But she just went on ahead and filed. Very weird lady.”

Jamie said, “You in a band someplace?”

“Me? In a music band, you mean?” He took a pull of his beer, and Jamie fingered the shiny material of his jacket on the seat between them.

“Truth is, I got it at a second-hand type thrift shop,” he said. “I must’ve been under the weather or something. Anyway, what the hell. It don’t fit too bad. You know any jokes?”

“Jokes,” Jamie said, trying out the word as if for the first time ever.

“Yeah, you know. Like ho ho ho.”

“Right,” Jamie said.

A spell of dizziness stabbed her head and then passed away. She sensed how the dead smoke of ten thousand cigarets caked the air. Out there in the blinding day the winter would sting your lungs, but here they carried with them a perpetual stifled twilight and a private exhaustion. She didn’t know if she was coming awake or going crazy.

And Bill Houston said, “How come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

“This a joke now?” she said.

He was irritated. “Yeah.”

“Okay — how come they ran out of ice cubes in Poland?”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you asking me?”

“I must be. Because I sure as hell don’t know the answer. You know what we need?” she said. “Ice cubes.” She had a feeling she might be laughing a little too loudly.

“Hey, I’m really getting off on this whole conversation,” he said with fervor. Good-fellowship thickened his voice. “Now listen: how come there’s no ice cubes in Poland?”

“Because they ran out. We just went through all that.”

He shook his head. “I can see you’re a hard one to deal with,” he said with some respect.

“No, I’m not, really.” She let her gaze drift out into Ohio. Her mood went blank. “It’s just that I’m going to be into some of that divorce stuff pretty soon myself.”

“Don’t let it get to you. You just stand there, and everything they say, you say yes. Pretty soon you’ll be divorced. It don’t feel no different.”

“I think it might probably feel different,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Never felt a bit different to me. Course, pretty soon, being married was the difference, and getting divorced was the usual.”

“That ain’t going to be my way. I’m single from here on out.”

“You just keep saying that, like I did.”

“You just watch. Once is enough, brother. I had a man running around on me once — that’s all, that’s it. Not no more. Thanks anyway.”

“Well. Takes a lot of will power, stick to the same brand all the time with no variety.”

“I stuck to the same brand! Wasn’t no trouble to me! He only had to stay out three nights, and I said that’s that. Three nights is just about three nights too many, I says to him. Wasn’t long before I found out who it was, and how many times, and ever-thing. I told him, I’m hard to fool. And I am. Hey.” She stared minutely forward, scrutinizing the nearer distances. “Do I look like I’m loaded?”

Bill Houston said he’d been working some place for the last few months, but she didn’t believe it. He’d had something to do with oil rigging, she wasn’t paying much attention. He’d saved up some money, perhaps a good deal of money, and he was lonesome. Cleveland went by like a collection of billboards.

Without actually deciding yes or no, she found she’d agreed to stay over a day in Pittsburgh and see the town with Bill Houston before travelling on to Hershey, where she intended to take up residence with her sister-in-law. But didn’t Hershey come before Pittsburgh? Or didn’t the place where they were supposed to change for Hershey come first? He didn’t know. She didn’t know, either, and by God she didn’t care. She’d been on this bus five days and couldn’t care less. Let her sister-in-law wait all day and all night at the bus station — let Hershey, Pennsylvania, wait one more day for her; she’d been waiting five days for Hershey, Pennsylvania.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

But you know who he was doing it with, Bill? Want to know who? Sarah. Old Sarah from the same high school six years ago, same graduation, same California trailer village, and now same lover, same everything, Sarah Miller. Because on the third night, she couldn’t take this treatment, not for one second more. She snuck over to Sarah’s to borrow the gun and there he was, sneaking home, out of Sarah’s trailer with the door creaking so loud in the quiet she took it for herself, screeching, Bill, and he saw, and she saw, and Sarah in the doorway with her panties saw, so everyone knew that everyone else knew what was what with who. If anybody knows how to handle that kind of a scene, they can tell the world on Johnny Carson or whatever and make a million. So she left. What could anybody say? Just had to pack and not look at each other and be very very quiet, even though Sarah came and was going to knock on the door but went away before she could make herself, twice; and then at nine-thirty the Yellow Cab for the Greyhound and the new life; and she’d left him standing in the kitchen with half a grapefruit in his hand. Everyone was observing her as she wept on Bill Houston’s obscenely glamorized shoulder.

She went to the toilet in the back to be sick. Briefly she tried to be graceful, and then she blundered from one pair of seats to the next, commenting angrily on the erratic and inconsiderate driving around here. Wasn’t that the way? Never a bus driver who knows where the road even is. Three feet from the door she declared she’d changed her mind and would be sick wherever she felt like it, and watch out because she probably would, any second now. Right now she’d see if she wanted to walk a bit more, or be sick first. She’d walk up and down the aisle here for a minute, to take the air and cry for a minute.

And goddamn it, didn’t she have a right to cry with the kids driving her crazy for five days on a bus with the windows going by like a movie? You can give her permission to cry or just go on back to your convent with your rose in your teeth. I’ll puke here if I want to or anywhere I want to, Sugar. Keep smiling but I can see what you think, the goddamn white line goes right through me every time I close my eyes five days on this bus. Go on, smile. I can see you got to make yourself smile and smile with your convent funny hat, everybody sees you getting mad just like anybody else nun or no nun. Five days on this smelly bus how long you been on? Your whole life is a bus your convent is a bus you do it with the priests and janitors I’ve read all about you in the medical articles in the papers, lady. Pride goeth before, I know pride goeth before a fall, all I need is wings Lord I’d go with my pride and no one ever have a thing to say about it, specially nuns. You think I got problems? Honey lover baby angel, you got more problems figuring out what to do with that rose than I got in my whole fuckin life. She looked up and she was a woman sailing toward Pittsburgh on the bus, drunk, making a commotion like none she had ever made before.

The four motels of Jamie’s experience had all been flat. They hadn’t stood up to declare themselves for six storeys amid congested Pittsburgh, they had only reclined by their swimming pools taking the dust of the cars going by and Jamie did not care if the Hotel Magellan was a rotten hotel, peopled by escapees, with pocked, frayed carpeting and bedding that smelled of sorrow. It was a hotel, that was the important thing, and only seven blocks from the Golden Triangle, where the great buildings appeared ready to take off from Earth. Things were looking up, and she’d been gone from her husband only sixteen days. She thought it would be nice if they had a car.

“A car,” Bill Houston said. He was standing before the bathroom door with a towel around his waist and a gigantic, completely naked black-haired woman all over his back whom he’d acquired in Singapore, in the Navy. He had navy tattoos and prison tattoos, and it was easy to tell which were which, because the navy ones were multi-colored and dazzling, while those from prison were faded to indistinct black smudges, like dirt. His mouth was open and his head thrust forward in a manner implying she should not talk any more about buying a car.

“Sure, why not a car?” Jamie said. She imagined pleasurable drives through the suburbs with Miranda Sue and Baby Ellen behaving nicely in the back seat, and the breezes of the new spring, not yet arrived, coming in through the windows of the car. “Save us all them taxis,” she said. “All them buses.” Miranda was dragging Baby Ellen all around the room exclaiming, “Lookit! Baby Ellen can finally walk.” Jamie rescued the baby and laid her down on the bed.

“Well, what kind of a car?” Bill Houston said. “You mean like maybe a Chevy, or what?”

“Chevy’d be nice. That’d be just fine, Chevy or a Ford. Or whatever you want, Bill.” It was his money.

He removed the towel from around his waist and started drying his hair. “Yeah? Well guess what,” he said, and she asked him what, but he wouldn’t tell her. He sat on the bed, where Baby Ellen lifted her head with difficulty and stared at him, her neck wavering unsteadily. Bill Houston stared at her blankly. The TV in a neighboring room blared momentarily at top volume, and then settled to a low murmur. A collection of saliva bubbles escaped from Baby Ellen’s pursed lips. “She always looks like she’s finally onto something real important,” Bill Houston said. “But then all she ever does is spit all over herself.” He stood up, and surveyed the room absently. “I got about two hunnerd left, that’s what,” he said.

“Oh,” Jamie said. “That ain’t a whole lot.”

Bill Houston began to search the dresser for clothing. “Now, two hunnerd bucks, that’ll get you maybe part of a semi-decent car. Or you can go to some smiley bastard on TV and go broke on a car that just don’t run for shit.” He pulled the bottom drawer out entirely and let it crash to the floor.

“Oh.” She sat on the bed, sorry to have brought it up.

“Or,” he said, “you could get you some food with it. That’s in case you’re the type of person who gets hungry every now and then. You ever get hungry?”

“I’m hungry now!” Miranda said.

“You shut up. I’m not talking to you now. You just had your lunch a half hour ago.”

“Hush up now, hon,” Jamie told Miranda. She caught hold of the child with the vague intention of embracing her, or braiding her hair. “Well. What all you going to do today?” she asked Bill Houston gaily.

“Don’t go changing the subject on me,” he said. “I had twenty-three hunnerd. I got two hunnerd left. What I want to find out — where the fuck did it all go?” He pulled in his stomach and cinched his belt.

Of course Pittsburgh was colder and wearier than Oakland, but it wasn’t any filthier. What it seemed to lack that Oakland had was a sky. By day it looked like old newspapers had been pasted over the sun, and after dark the universe ended six feet above the tallest lamp. There were no dawns or sunsets in Pittsburgh; there were no heavens in which they might occur.

Tonight the stores on Irvine were still open, and they put enough light onto the sidewalks that Jamie could almost make out colors and tell the cares and joys on people’s faces. She tried to enjoy it to the full: she knew that Irvine would turn into Second Avenue — for Bill Houston, the door to intense merrymaking and oblivion.

Horrible gargoyles jutted from the walls around them. They moved along the sidewalk under the streetlamps, among the headlights, and Jamie shouted over the traffic noise, “Well I don’t care if it is far. Let’s us just go to Philadelphia. I never been there either. I never been any goddamn place.”

“Now in my estimation,” Bill Houston said, “there just ain’t nothing in Philadelphia.”

“Liberty Bell’s something, ain’t it? You going to tell me it’s just nothing, just because it’s in Philadelphia and you say there ain’t nothing there?”

“The Liberty Bell ain’t nothing to do. Ain’t even anything to talk about. Talk about something else.”

“It ain’t so far to Philly,” she said. “What about our fore-fathers?”

He began to draw ahead of her, a stranger to this woman a bit behind and to the left of him. “I would love to see the Washington Monument because it doesn’t piss around. It’s tall. One other thing is those four big statues of faces carved out of a mountain. But they ain’t neither of them in Pittsburgh or Philly. Only thing in this state’s the Liberty Bell, and that’s just a bell — know what I mean? A bell.”

“Well, it ain’t far,” Jamie pleaded. “I just wish we could go see it. It really ain’t that far. It’s patriotic.”

“I was already patriotic for six years in the fuckin Navy,” he said, grabbing a fistful of his purple cowboy shirt. “Anyway, I think it’s too damn far. It’s just crazy.”

She saw she was ruining his evening, but couldn’t keep from coaxing him as they moved down the block. He told her the Liberty Bell might be anywhere right now, maybe touring the country. He insisted they often took the Liberty Bell all around, parking it in schoolyards. Then he started telling her, “I just ain’t going to Philly. You can’t get me to go there no way! Forget it!” and she decided to talk instead about the Easter decorations already displayed in the storefronts. “I don’t have time for baskets or rabbits,” he said. “It costs too much money to go to Philly now. We don’t have enough time”—and she thought that he meant they’d be finished when the money was finished. But they’d been together only eleven days. She was sorry to have ruined his evening.

They walked in silence for a time and then she asked casually, “Hey — how much you got left these days, anyway?”—but breathlessly, too, winded from their walking.

“I think there’s a good country band up here a ways,” he said. “Ga-damn, I’d like to see Waylon Jennings. I saw Johnny Cash when I was in the joint, but I never have seen Waylon.”

“Well, maybe we hadn’t ought to go there tonight,” she said. “Maybe we ought to save that band for another night, huh? What do you think about it?”

“What. Think about what.”

“Think we ought to save Waylon for another night, Bill?”

“I never said Waylon was playing at this place. You think Waylon Jennings is going to play at one of these piss factories? Use your brain.”

“But what I mean to say is, you don’t have a whole lot left, do you? Didn’t you pay the hotel tonight? I thought you paid—”

“Yeah, I did. You got to pay them or you can’t stay there. They insist on it.”

“Oh. For a day’s worth?”

“The most important thing you can do right now,” he said, “is be quiet.”

“Oh. Uh-oh.” She looked away from his bobbing shoulder. She looked at the street. I am ruining this evening.

“I guess I got like a hunnerd and ten left. Something like that,” Bill Houston said.

“Oh,” she said, hurrying to catch up to him and look into his face. “Well, maybe we just better go home,” she said. “If that’s what you feel like, it’s okay with me, because we don’t have to go out ever single night.”

“No. Let’s just step inside of here a minute. And then we’ll take the bus to this one other place I was telling you about.” And abruptly he was in fine spirits. “Oh, come on! What you think — you can’t have you a good time on a hunnerd and ten bones? Well you just step in through here with me, little Miss, and we’ll see about it.”

They stopped at several other bars where Bill Houston drank large and Jamie watched as if scrutinizing a mystery, rarely joining him. She felt she was falling apart with weariness, but Bill Houston seemed oblivious to the whole idea of the Hotel Magellan. “Right here. This is what we been after all along,” he said, gesturing at the entrance of the Tally Ho Budweiser King of Beers. In the window beneath this sign, neon blinked BUD — BUD — BUD. “We’re here to stay.”

“Now, hey — this ain’t the one you were telling about.” She held back. “This one doesn’t even have a band playing or nothing. All they got is Budweiser Beer, looks like. Probably don’t even have a bar.”

“This is a fine place,” he said. “We’ll go in this fine place right here.”

“You don’t even know this place,” she told him.

“This is a fine place,” he said.

“I don’t think you ever been here before.”

“Listen here,” he said. “I grew up here practically. This is practically my home. It was a fine home.” With a hand he influenced her through the door.

Immediately Jamie disliked its insides. There were unescorted women at the bar itself, drinking glumly with their chins sticking out. There were innumerable sounds — low voices, chairs moved, a voice rising with passion and then subsiding — but in her frayed weariness Jamie felt that these were a continual breaking of a general stunned silence, and she was tempted to whisper as in a hospital. “We ought to go back and see what’s happening on the television,” she said not loudly, and Bill Houston cast her a look. “I’m awful tarred right now,” she insisted. They sat down at a table toward the front. In the back a man pounded on his table, spilling a drink, and the woman who was with him suddenly got up and left, her earrings jiggling as she marched away stiffly. All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces. They’d been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening. Nobody came to their table to take their order. A man came over and tried to take Jamie away from Bill Houston. He pointed to the woman he was with, over at the bar, and offered to trade.

“I knew this would happen,” Jamie said.

“This is the third time I’ve picked her up — over at the Far East Lounge,” the man explained, pointing again to the woman at the bar. The woman was scratching her throat with a pinky while looking at herself in the mirror. Bill Houston listened politely.

“Oh, she’s all right,” the man said quickly. “Nothing wrong with her. Just I’ve hung out with her before is all, about six times, and she tells the same old jokes. But they’d be new to you, right? What do you say?” He turned to Jamiie. “What do you say? You don’t mind.”

“I most certainly — Bill! Will you tell him what’s what?” She pulled Kleenex from her purse and started wiping at her make-up. She shifted in her chair and yanked at the hem of her skirt.

The man smiled. “She seems stuck on you,” he told Bill Houston. “But she won’t mind. You won’t mind, will you? She won’t mind. What do you say, old buddy?”

“Well now, I don’t exactly know,” Bill Houston said. “All depends. How much you say you’re paying that lady?”

“Oh, there’s no — it’s very unofficial,” the man said. “We haven’t really gotten around to that yet. She just wants, you know, a present. It all depends.”

“Hey. I don’t know if this is a joke, or what,” Jamie said excitedly. “You stop it. Listen, I can’t use this. What are you doing?”

The man seemed to sense complications. His smile turned wary.

“You think this one’s worth fifty?” Bill Houston asked him.

“Bill!” Jamie caught hold of his arm and clawed it frantically, remaining stiff and erect in her chair.

The man began looking Jamie over. Bill Houston smiled off toward the shadows.

“Oh, yeah, definitely — fifty dollars,” the man said.

She didn’t want to draw stares by rising from her place. She covered her face with her hands. “Bill,” she said, into her hands.

“Well now, you were the one crying about money just a while ago.” Then he laughed with embarrassment.

Jamie found herself, behind her hands, considering the amount of fifty dollars. “Stop. Stop. Please,” she said into her hands.

The man stood uncomfortably beside their table, and put his own hands in his pockets.

“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Guess that’s that. Just a misunderstanding. Nobody’s fault. Right?” he said to the man.

“Oh, hell — a misunderstanding?” the man said. He looked at Bill Houston. “Oh, listen, say, I guess I — boy, I’m sure sorry.” He turned very red even in the dim light, and left their table. He took the woman at the bar by the arm and went out with her, lifting a hand weakly to Jamie while staring angrily at Bill Houston. The woman went where she was urged, trying repeatedly, and failing, to get her purse-strap hooked over her shoulder.

Jamie and Bill Houston said nothing. The bartender came over to their table with two Seven-and-Sevens, compliments of the mistaken gentleman. Jamie wanted to leave right away. Bill Houston downed both drinks and they went out.

They said nothing for a while on the street. Jamie halted at a bus stop on the side of the street pointing home. Bill Houston walked on in apparent ignorance of her stopping, then turned and went back to stand with her, as if puzzled why she was no longer in a partying mood. After a while Bill Houston breathed deeply of the night and then exhaled, saying, “Aaaaaaali!” And then he stretched and yawned and said, “Hey there!” and “Well now!” and other such things.

The bus had passed through Homewood, then Brushton; they’d missed their stop a long, long time ago. Jamie rested her head against the back of the seat and read all the advertisements above the windows. Bill Houston was up at the front of the bus, standing there with his arm wrapped around the silver pole and leaning over as if looking for something he’d dropped in the driver’s lap. “Listen. Got a proposition for you,” he was telling the driver.

“No,” the driver said. “Nope, no propositions. I just can’t listen to any propositions.” He was a compact young man with a boot-camp style crew-cut under an official bus driver’s hat supported solely by his ears. It was plain he didn’t want to talk to Bill Houston.

“You got nothing better to do than listen to me,” Bill Houston said. “Ain’t nothing else happening. We’re the only ones on your bus.”

The driver glanced around and touched the buttons of his shirt with the fingers of one hand. “Look. There’s certain rules on this bus,” he said.

“Course there’s rules! Has to be rules to make everything work out right, right?”

The driver rubbed his chin, unwilling to agree too hastily.

“Certainly!” Bill Houston said. “Hey, I learned all about rules in the Navy. When it comes to rules, you just listen to me.”

“I’m not listening,” the driver said. “You can’t get me to listen.”

Jamie imagined a great blade protruding for miles from her window, levelling the whole suburbs six feet above the ground. She sat there waiting for Bill Houston to get arrested.

Bill Houston rode the floor of the bus like the pitching and heaving deck of a great ship. “There has to be rules to make things run right,” he was explaining, “but. If you got an idea about breaking the rules to make things run better, why goddamn it then a course there ain’t a reason in the world not to break the rules.”

“I don’t know. Look — what are we talking about?” the driver said.

“Now, here it is: I’m going to pay you a little extra to take this bus where we want to get to, that’s all. I’ll pay you all the extra you want.”

“Never happen.” The driver shook his head. His hat seemed to stay in one place while his head moved from side to side beneath it. He stopped at a light and put his elbow on the steering and his chin in his hand.

“What! Wait up one second,” Bill Houston said. “I ain’t even said where we’re going yet. This is a winner. Going to make you a lot of extra cash. You want to listen?”

“No sir. Don’t want to listen.” The driver removed his hat and put both hands over his ears.

Fishing several dollars from his wallet, Bill Houston held them before the driver’s face. The driver shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll name you a figure,” Bill Houston said. The figure was thrown from his heart, from the depths of his body: “Fifty bones.”

The driver took his hands from his ears and drew a small printed sheet from the shelf below his steering wheel. “I got my specific route right here,” he said. He snapped the paper several times with his finger. “This is it. If I don’t see it on here, then it just isn’t it. That’s all.”

Bill Houston took all the money from his wallet and held it out to the driver like a bouquet. “Tell you where to point this thing,” he said. “We want to see the Liberty Bell. Over in Philly.”

The driver’s eyes grew wide. “Sure. One in the morning.”

“Right here”—Bill Houston thumbed the money—“right here is, here is, here is — ninety-six dollars! Ninety-six big old big ones, boy. Now how much you make tonight all night, driving down your specific route there? Don’t seem exactly like the big time, does it?”

The driver looked over his printed sheet carefully, as if hoping to find that Philadelphia had become part of his route.

Bill Houston fanned his sheaf of money. “Ninety-six dollars.”

“I know how much it is. It’s just that I’d be out of a job. I’d lose this job for sure.”

“You won’t need no job, with ninety-six dollars”

“Philadelphia!” the young driver said.

“You got it! You’re getting it! The Liberty Bell! Which my poor wife sitting right over there has always wanted to see, poor woman, and she never has seen it yet, poor little old gal. And she’s dying. Got a disease, if you want to know the truth. Ninety-six dollars!”

“Now, hold up a minute,” Jamie said from her seat, but Bill Houston waved her off. She said nothing else, waiting to see how far this whole show was headed.

“I just can’t go anywhere I want to with a crazy man to Philly,” the driver said. “Philadelphia!” He put his hat back on his head. He checked his hand brake. He looked at his watch. “Standing in front of the white line,” he said in a neutral tone, pointing down at the line. “Delaying the bus driver. Attempted bribery.”

“What? What is this?” Bill Houston slammed his palm against the metal pole and made it ring. “Right in the middle of negotiations you’re handing me the goddamn rules. Don’t you know when the world is trying to do you a kindness?”

“Talking to the driver. Trying to get the driver to go off his specific route,” the driver said.

“Ninety-six dollars,” Bill Houston said. The driver put his bus in gear.

“Now you turn this bus off,” Bill Houston said, “and let’s talk.”

“Just please wait one minute,” Jamie put in. “Hold up there,” she said good-naturedly. Nobody was listening. Bill Houston had taken a pint bottle of Gordon’s Gin from his pants pocket and was waving it around in the area of his mouth.

The driver was maneuvering his bus around a circle with a lawn and a big ugly statue in its midst. “Consuming alcoholic beverages on the bus! Standing in front of the white line talking to the driver with ninety-six dollars attempted bribery!”

“Goddamn I’ll show you ninety-six dollars bribing.” Bill Houston moved his face and his fistful of money in front of the driver’s face. The driver continued driving his bus, leaning to one side to see past Bill Houston’s head and hand. “I don’t want this money, see?” Bill Houston said. “1 just don’t give a shit about this money. Do you give a shit about this money?”

“I do!” Jamie said. “Bill! Sit down!”

“You better leave me alone — right now,” the driver told him. “You’re disturbing the other passengers on my bus.”

“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “You don’t give a shit about this money. I don’t give a shit about this money. Okay. All right, that’s just perfectly okay with me.” He placed the bills in a pile on the floor beside the driver’s seat. Jamie and the driver looked on as he adjusted the flame on his Bic butane and then set the money afire.

Jamie wailed terribly.

The driver wanted to watch the street and Bill Houston with amazed eyes both at once, turning his head rapidly from front to side. “Burning money! On the bus! My Christ! A fucking lunatic! Get away from that white line!”

Jamie had leaped forward to save the money. She stamped on it repeatedly, shouting along with the driver. Bill Houston was ready, the flame on his butane set high as possible, and he blocked her feet with his arm as he knelt by the pile of dollars, ravaging it with flame. Jamie managed to snatch the top few bills from the pile and held them tightly in her fist, but the rest was charred past rescue.

The driver stopped his bus and opened the door, and the three of them regarded the black smoldering heap until it was ash and the smoke had all blown out the door, and the bus ride was definitely over. “Guess nobody’s going to Philly now,” the driver said.

Jamie ran out of the bus. Bill Houston watched her. “Now look what happened,” he told the driver, flabbergasted, leaving.

They stood on the sidewalk surrounded by a windswept and desolate shopping mall in Lincoln Park. It looked like a nice place to drive around in, in the daytime, if you had a car. Jamie had saved thirteen dollars. She was seized with a desire to run back to the dingy bar and find the man who had valued her at fifty. Bill Houston was experimenting with his Bic butane lighter, holding it upside down and trying to keep it lighted. “The gas wants to go up,” he explained to her, “but then it has to go down before it can go up. It don’t know what to do.” When it exploded in his hand, he stared at his torn fingers through eyes spattered with blood, looking like he didn’t know what to do. He turned to her, astonished, wanting some kind of endorsement, some kind of confirmation. “Did you see that?”

“Your fingers are all tore up,” she said.

“That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Did you burn your hand, too?” Jamie said.

He said, “Did I burn it? Yeah I burnt it.”

“Does it hurt?” she said.

“Does it hurt?” he said. “You can’t imagine.”

He blew on his fingers and then shook them as if trying to get a bug off his hand. Then he held his hand in his other hand and pretended he wasn’t crying. Jamie took wadded pieces of Kleenex from her purse and tried to straighten them out and administer them to the wounded fingers, but the wind blew them away and they went scudding along the sidewalk. “This kind of shit just keeps happening until you’re dead,” Bill Houston told her. They took a cab to the nearest Emergency Room. Bill Houston took up the middle of the seat, chuckling now and then in disbelief, staring at the injured hand in his lap as if to find any kind of hand there at all was unexpected and portentous. Jamie leaned up against the left-hand window, snuffling and crying and looking out at the shut avenues hard, as if only a little while ago she had owned them.

Every time she did the laundry she threw away some of the clothes. One of everything: less to wash, less to carry, less to know about. She threw four pairs of socks into the trash. One of her bras didn’t look right: she threw it away. “Listen, you want this suitcase?” she told a man standing there. He looked like a bum who was on vacation from destitution. But he didn’t want her suitcase.

She was looking at her children and hating them when a black woman opened up one of the big driers and took out her child, a little boy about three. “More, Mama?” he said. “More? More?”

The woman sat him on the floor and he staggered about. Jamie couldn’t believe it. The woman tried to fold her clothes, but her little boy grabbed hold of the hem of her skirt as if he would climb right up her. “More, Mama? Mama? Mama? More.” Annoyed, the woman picked him up with one arm and put him back into the drier. She slugged in a dime and shut the door and went back to folding clothes.

Miranda approached her mother, wide-eyed, looking ready to speak, pointing to the driers. “Don’t even think about it,” Jamie told her. “I’ll let you know when it gets that bad.”

Jamie lay flat on her back on the green table. If she stared at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling and kind of let her eyes go loose, the pattern would shift and the tiles would seem to draw down on her until she was inside of them. There was nothing else to do right about now.

She was the only woman in this row of tables. In the entire room, which was the size of a ballroom, there were four women and nearly fifty men, each stretched out on a green table with a green sheet, getting a good look at the ceiling. Out in the large anteroom, a couple of hundred others looked at the television or studied the floor, waiting to be attached to plastic bags and drained of five dollars’ worth of blood plasma.

Jamie didn’t like any of it. If she let her eyes go too loose, checking out the tiles above, she started crying.

A man in a white coat was going down her row, jabbing everybody with a needle and getting their blood to shoot through a tube into a quart-sized plastic bag that sat on a scales beside each table. He came to Jamie, smiling like a leopard. She shut her eyes and thought about the beach. “First time?” the man said, and Jamie said nothing. “Give your fist a squeeze about once per second,” the man said.

“Ow! You nailing my arm to the bed, or what?”

“Relax,” the man said, doing things with tubes and tape. Jamie thought of the beach, the water filled with surfers in wetsuits in the wintertime, all of them waiting for a great wave to lift and carry them toward the deserted Santa Cruz amusement park. In a minute she let one eye sneak open and watched the blood fill her plastic bag as once per second she relaxed her fist and then closed it tightly. The blood was bright red at first, but it grew darker, nearly black, as the bag fattened. The scales tipped when the bag held a pint. She heard others around her telling the nurses, “I’m full,” “I’m full,” and when another nurse, a woman, came near, Jamie said, “I’m full.”

The nurse smelled of alcohol and talcum as she bent over Jamie’s bag of blood. She put the bag on a smaller scales that she carried with her and said, “Not quite full. Pump a little more.” Jamie didn’t see how one set of scales knew more than another. She opened and closed her fist several times. “All… right,” the nurse said, and Jamie quit. The nurse removed Jamie’s tourniquet and adjusted stoppers and tubes. “You’re going to feel the saline solution coming into your arm now,” the nurse said. “That’s just to keep the vein open.” She clamped and cut the tube that led into the blood, and carried the bag away to another room, where the plasma would be removed somehow.

Jamie thought her blood looked like good earth, rich and full and wet. “Used to take goldfish home from the carnival in plastic bags like that,” she told the departing nurse, who didn’t hear. She began shivering all over as the cool saline mixed into her system.

The man on her left said, “Fuck goldfish. Fuck ’em.” He was a bearded old guy and he was shaking like a machine.

The man on her right said, “Did you know this? Frogs fuck goldfish. That’s true. No fooling, now.”

“Hey,” Jamie said. “I can’t use that talk. Be a gentleman, how about.”

“How about if I whip it out and piss on you?” the man said. “How’s that for a gentleman?”

Jamie didn’t say anything. She decided to stab him with her nail file later on, on the way out.

The bearded old man on her left said, “Don’t pay no attention to these guys.” He turned toward her onto his side, careful not to disturb the needle in his vein. “Most of them,” he said, “are just wooden people.” His face seemed to be rotting: away on him. His eyes were shiny as a blind man’s.

Jamie said nothing, but the man wanted to talk “Most of the people you see are just wooden men,” he told her, his voice quaking as if he’d cry in a minute. “They’re dead people, walking around like the living.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I noticed that myself.”

“You have?” The man was excited. “Then you’re one of the living.” He licked his mouth convulsively. “There’s not too many of us. We haven’t got much time. Are you filled in on the whole story?”

“What whole story? Hey. You’re bothering me.”

“I’m not bothering you. I’m saving your life. Your life is the truth. Listen: The world was made in 1914. Before 1914 there was nothing. Eleven people are in charge of the world. They make up the news and the history books, they control everything you think you know. They wrote the Bible and all the other books. Most people are wooden people, controlled by remote control. There’s only a few of us who are real, and we’re getting fooled.”

“I can’t use this,” Jamie said. “I mean, I’m just here trying to get some lunch money.”

“The world is flat. It’s two hundred and fifty-six square miles in area, sixteen by sixteen. When you go someplace on a plane, what they do is, they just use their powers inside your mind to make you think like the time is passing To make you think you’re getting somewhere.”

The nurse came back wheeling a cart piled high with plastic sacks of blood. She read the label on Jamie’s and said, “Name please?”

“They do things inside your mind,” the man whispered to Jamie.

“My name is Jamie Mays,” she told the nurse.

The nurse showed her the name on the label—Jamie Mays— and Jamie nodded, and the old man whispered, “They’re putting new memories into us right now.”

The nurse hung the blood up next to the saline solution and adjusted the tubes and stoppers, and one tube turned bright crimson as it fed Jamie’s own blood, minus plasma, back into her. “New memories is what’s inside that bag,” the man announced calmly.

“Great,” Jamie said. “I was sick of the old ones.”

“In Malaya, I killed a little Chink. Supposedly Malaya. I broke his head apart,” the man said.

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie told the ceiling.

“There were machines inside his head,” the man said quietly.

“Everybody in this town — they’re all the same,” Jamie told the ceiling.

“That’s what I mean!”

“No — I mean — oh, forget it.”

“There was machine stuff inside his head. He wasn’t a real person.”

“Why don’t you quit? I can’t use that baloney right now.”

“Everywhere you go, it’s the same people. Don’t you see what’s happening to your life, woman?”

“Not exactly,” Jamie said.

“You’re going to see, all right. Something is happening to your life, and you’re going to see what it is.”

“I was afraid of that,” Jamie said.

“If you think you’re afraid now,” the man said.