Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He picked the Albany bus because it was the first scheduled out of the terminal. Ekko took a window seat four rows back and watched as the passengers entered, speculating who would sit beside him, an attractive girl with long blonde hair got on and he looked at her with interest, but she passed him by, he turned and saw she had chosen to sit beside another woman

.A fat old woman carrying a bulging mesh bag was helped aboard by the driver and waddled down the aisle. Luckily, she too passed by. But almost immediately after he felt the slight jar of someone plumping down beside him.

It was a middle-aged man with a square face capped by thick black hair, he wore eyeglasses with heavy frames of black plastic, above which black eyebrows all but met at the bridge of the nose. In the lapel of his dark gray suit there was a Kiwanis button, the man smiled and looked at his watch, a small square of gold much too delicate for his thick, hairy wrist. "We should be rolling pretty soon,” he said.

"Yeah, I guess so."

Apparently the man was determined to make conversation. "I went into the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, but Lord! the service is so slow. I decided to pass it up. I didn't want to miss the bus."

"It is kind of slow sometimes."

"I like to travel by bus." the other went on. "Get a chance to see the countryside."

"You won't see much this trip," said Ekko. "Not at night."

"No. I suppose not, but even so. I like it a lot better than going by plane. You traveling all the way to Albany?"

"If I don't decide to get off before.

"The man raised his black eyebrows. "You mean you don't know where you're going? You just came for the ride?"Ekko shrugged. "I felt like taking a ride on a bus. This bus was scheduled to go, so I bought a ticket and got on board."

The other laughed a deep bass gurgle of a laugh. "What's so funny?"

"You young people.... You're wonderful! You felt like taking a ride on a bus, so you..." He could not stop chuckling. "Tell me, why a bus?"Ekko grinned, he warmed to this open admiration, the man was such a complete square, a regular nine-to-fiver, probably with a fat wife and an acne-faced teenaged daughter they were worried might go too far with some boy, he expanded. "It's like this: you're walking along the street"— he remembered his duffle bag in the rack above— "say, like you're taking laundry to the laundromat and you decide you're fed up. You suddenly get the idea you can't stand the rat race. Understand?"

The man nodded.

"So you just like decide you want a little change."

"I get it, and because you happened to be in Park Square, you took a bus."

"That's right." said Ekko grinning.

"And if you happened to be down by South Station, you'd take a train? Or in East Boston, a plane?"Ekko looked at him suspiciously, but his face was bland and guileless, he shook his head. "Naw. I don't care much for trains or planes, but I like to ride on buses, especially at night. On a bus it's dark at night, they turn the lights off so the driver can see the road. Things can happen in the dark."

"What kinds of things?"Ekko looked at the square. "Oh, all kinds of things."

"Like what?"

His eagerness was pathetic. "Well, like take the time I took the eleven o'clock out of New York for Boston. I got the window seat like now, and next thing you know this chick comes aboard and sits down beside me, well, I was dead on my feet, hadn't slept for days. You know how it is in the big city."

"Sure do."Ekko smiled to himself. "I look around and see there were plenty of other seats, so I figure she wants company. You could see she was a high-class chick and goodlooking, she's wearing one of those coats that comes down to the ankles and when she takes it off. I see she's really built. So when she sits down. I say something like. 'It's a nice night for it.' You know, to get friendly and start the ball rolling. But she just says 'M-hm,' and she opens this book of poetry and starts reading. So I says to myself, 'Okay, lady, if that's the way you want it.' and I close my eyes for a little shut-eye, then in a couple of minutes the lights go off and we start rolling and I fall asleep. But you know how it is on a bus, you don't really sleep. You just like doze off and on."

"Sure. I never really can sleep on a bus."

"So once when I wake up, the broad is fast asleep with her head back on the cushion and her mouth open a little, and this little wisp of hair is across her face and every time she breathes out she like blows it away and then it falls back. So I twist around to kind of watch it and I fall asleep, watching, and then I feel something touching me and I kind of half wake up and it's the chick, she's curled up facing me and she's touching me in her sleep. Right where it counts."

The square was now excited. "So what did you do?"

"Well, I hitched up closer to her and I got this long coat she had on her lap to kind of cover us."

"And then?"

"What do you think? I put my hand on her boobs, and when she didn't wake up I like hitched closer and put my other hand up her dress."

"And then what did you do?"

"What could I do? We were in a bus. I couldn't try to put it to her right then and there, we just held each other like that and I fell asleep that way."

"And in the morning?" The guy was dying.

Ekko grinned. "Nothing. When I woke up, we were just pulling in to Boston and she was gone, she must’ve got off at Newton, anyway, that's why I like to take a bus ride every now and then."

"So nothing happened?" the man said regretfully. "You never saw her again?"

"Naw."

"I think maybe you dreamt it."Ekko grinned in the darkness. Let him suffer. "No, I didn't dream it."

The other sat silent and made no further comment, after a while Ekko dozed off. It seemed only minutes later that he was awakened by the bus driver announcing that they'd be arriving in Springfield in ten minutes, the man removed a small overnight bag from the rack overhead, and then sat down again holding it on his lap.

"Springfield," the man said. "That's where I get off."

"Oh, Springfield already?"

"Uh-huh. You know, you had me going for a minute,” he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, all that about taking a bus ride just because you felt like it and not knowing where you're planning to get off." He chuckled. "You young people are always trying to let on that you do whatever you like, just the wav you feel, but it's only a lot of talk. You go someplace because that's the place you want to go, just like anybody else. You're on this bus right now because you were planning to get on this bus."

Ekko tensed up. "How do you know?"

The man laughed his deep gurgle. "Because I saw you. I saw you get on the train at Charles Street. I was right behind you, and I saw you. You were carrying a canvas dufflebag and it's up there on the rack, and I saw you get out at Boylston and head right for the bus station. No strolling along the street and suddenly deciding to take a bus ride on the chance that some girl might sit down beside you so that you could feel her up."

"Were you following me?"

"No, but I was right behind you, then when we got to the bus station, I went into the cafeteria, and you went to the ticket booth."

"Must’ve been some other guy," Ekko muttered.

"Oh, no, it wasn't. It was you. I noticed you particularly, because I could see you was wearing a wig, and that moustache is phony, too. I could spot it in a minute on account I'm a barber and hair's my business. You bald or something?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty naked there," he said sheepishly.

The bus came to a halt and the man rose. "You get head colds all the time, do you?"

"Naw, it's just that the chicks don't go for baldies."

The man laughed. "Well, there's passengers always get on here, maybe you'll have better luck the rest of the way." He waved genially and headed down the aisle.