BUS TO NOWHERE

First stop: 7534 Chartreuse Court, Albany, NY.

A middle-aged woman stumbles onto the bus and makes her way towards the rear. Her hair, thinned and slick from malnutrition, limply hangs in her face like navy seaweed. She’s an apparition down the aisle, a bare-boned spirit sifting through the chairs, emaciated to prepare herself for the grave.

Without even looking in my direction, she takes a seat. Her head is still facing the floor, neck crippled by the weight of an invisible brick of shame. I watch the spikes of the woman’s spine jut out from her skin like a thagomizer, embedded, tiny scales. I shiver-- she doesn’t look human.

“Good evening, ma’am. Are you enjoying your night?”

I know her response before she can answer, but she decides not to speak at all. Silence begins to flood the bus from bottom up, thick and plasmatic, quickly filling the space between us like rising water in a tub. I start to choke, silently gasping for air, trying to catch just enough oxygen to expunge another sentence. The woman seems unfazed by the lack of breathing room.

“Kind of a quiet night tonight.” I say. “Almost no riders.”

Still, she says nothing. Normally I don't mind the quiet-- in fact, I’ve learned to enjoy it with the amount of skittish passengers I’ve had in my day-- but tonight it’s unbearably suffocating. It feels as though the bus is shrinking with each passing mile, reducing it down to a measly tin cube bursting at the seams, water cresting above the surface in a homicidal wave. I struggle to gulp down another bubble of air, wondering if perhaps it might be my last.

But then suddenly, a voice:

“It’s kind of warm in here, mind turning on the A/C?”

“Afraid that can’t be helped, ma’am.” I coughed out. “Vent’s busted. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s going to get warmer and warmer the longer we drive, so you ought to get used to it while it’s still tolerable.”

“Hmph.”

Dissatisfied, the woman presses her face against the grime of the window, a whole petri dish of germs transferring onto her cheek. With her gaze focused elsewhere, I’m finally able to assess her appearance.

This woman is undeniably poor-- she’s wearing a muted grey t-shirt that was like white in another lifetime, pairing it with Nikes that came out over a decade ago. And judging by the state of her shoes, she wasn’t wearing them to be retro; the soles were hanging off like leather tongue flaps and the laces were caked in mud. The only thing worth a dollar was the emerald-green cardigan that was woven so thick it gave off the appearance of flesh. Without it, this woman would’ve been a walking coat hanger.

“I like your cardigan. Where did you get it from?”

Her mother’s closet.

“Uhh, TJ Maxx.”

“Really? I didn’t know they sold Prada.”

They most certainly didn’t.

 “Yeah, me neither.” The woman shrugs flippantly, but I can tell inside she’s beginning to rattle. “I guess I just got lucky.”

I knew she’d lie, and she knew that I knew it. I watch her strip off the cardigan and place it beside her, the armpits drenched in sweat. I could tell she was avoiding eye contact, somehow fully aware of who I was and what stealing a glance would do, and I got a kind of sick enjoyment out of the prospect. Just like all my other passengers, I wanted this woman to hurl her guts across the dirty steel floor and be forced into looking her pathetic life in the face for the first time in over a year. I wanted her to shiver and cry and come to grips with grim Reality, to be scared of what she saw out the window, and perspire from both nerves and the heat exhaustion. But instead, she just stares at her tiny feet.

“You got a smoke?” The woman asks.

“Sorry, no dice.”

A growl escapes her lips-- she was getting antsy without her cigarettes. Knowing it was one of her many vices she couldn’t afford, I protectively slip my Marlboro Reds further down into my pocket and fight the urge to light up myself.

“So…are you going anywhere fun tonight?” I inquired as we turned down an aridisol road. “Nine o’clock is when the young kids hit the town. Although, you look a bit too old to be crashing the clubs.”

“Yeah. I’m just heading home.”

“Where are you coming from?”

The woman pauses to think. “My mother’s house.” She finally says, almost positing it as a question. “She’s elderly and I’m her caretaker.”

“Ahh, well I’m sure she’s very appreciative.”

That was another lie. I feel the heat start to radiate through the windshield as I careen further down the ashen wasteland. Typical New York, I scoff. The bus pushes fifty, then sixty miles an hour, withered trees with barren branches whirling by in a blur of crimson. At this rate, we were going to heat up extremely quickly despite driving further away from the sun. 

“Are we almost there?” She whines. “I’m parched, and I can’t exactly take off more layers. You really don’t have a water or anything?”

I click my tongue with derision. “You know why you’re on this bus, don’t you? It’s a chance to come clean. A chance to get me to turn around and go the other way. We’re going somewhere worse than your slum of an apartment. Why do you still pay rent at that place anyway?”

“Can you stop? I need to get off.” The woman rises like a Halloween haunt, the realization striking life inside her shriveled heart. Her sheathed eyes are manic as she makes her way forward, two empty holes burned into her skull, large and black like the infinite night. “I need to go home right now. I think I’m gonna pass out. And how do you know where I live?”

“Sorry, Agatha. You can’t leave without presenting your case.”

“Case? What case? What the hell are you talking about?!”

“You know.” I coax, “Come onnnnn. I saw the way you looked at me earlier. You know what’s going on here.” 

Hope is nothing more than ancient lore to Agatha Winthrop now. She hasn’t felt it or seen it in years, bereft of what it’s like to consider a future, a life where suffering is fleeting, not perpetual. She is beginning to understand her hunch about me was more than just a hunch-- she sensed it when she stepped on the bus, and now, she has the verbal confirmation that it’s real. It’s making her sweat even more.

But she’s not going to bargain with me. She has no strength to persuade. Now that Agatha has realized what’s truly going on, she does not have the drive to convince me to go the other way. As I watch her stand there in awe, I realize she has staunchly accepted her fate, an acquiescence that almost suggests a desire for punishment, perhaps because it’s the only way she can swallow her sins. Nothing about her is even human anymore-- she’s a threadbare mess of table scraps left for night stalkers to scrounge.

“What would your mother think?” I ask her, “About what you’re doing right now? About stealing her clothes and living off her welfare? About using her savings to fuel your drug addiction and convincing the government she’s still on this Earth? All because you don’t want to split the money in her will? You’d rather sap it dry and then break the news to your brother, is that it?.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.” I scowl. “People like you make me hate this God forsaken job.”

As we stew in the final bout of silence, I realize Agatha was only lying out of habit earlier. After all, she’s been doing it to everyone in her life since her mother passed and now it’s become just another bad habit. She was never trying to fool me.

“We’re here.” I announce solemnly, bringing the bus to a halt. “Short trip, no? I hope the heat isn’t bothering you too much. Like I said, this thing is old. A/C’s been knocked out for over a year now. Can’t afford to get it replaced.”

“It’s fine. Thank you for the ride. See you later.”

“Goodbye.”

Agatha and I exchange a quick glance before she turns toward the exit doors. I watch her gait as she descends down the stairs, footsteps hardly a whisper, body too light to make noise if she tried. How strange it is that we always slip into niceties at the end of the ride. It’s almost like the tension never existed.

Ravens caw in the distance as the door rattle open, circling overhead in a bridal veil of black. Agatha turns towards me for a final glance, her parting gift of unanimity. I watch her slender frame dissolve into darkness so easily that it compromises the notion of her existence entirely.

Before heading to my next stop, I retrieve her crumpled cardigan abandoned on the bus seat and toss it into the trash.

Second stop: 993 Saltaire Street, Brighton, UK.

There’s a little girl hanging on the bus stop pole. She looks like a gingerbread creature, all licorice and icing sugar, so frail and sweet she’d be swallowed up whole.

“You getting on?” I ask impatiently. “‘Cause I’m not gonna sit here all night and watch you stare at me. I’ve got people to see and places to go.”

There’s a bout of silence. A tinny voice explodes from across the street.

 “You promise you aren’t gonna kidnap me?”

“Yes,” I chuckle, “I promise.”

Her mind made up, Suzie climbs into the bus with overexaggerated motions, stomping up the stairs as though they’re twenty feet high. Intimidated by the stretch of empty seats that must seem like a mile to an eight-year-old, she plops down directly behind me. 

“Hello, mister. Are you the bus driver? Sorry I took so long.”

She’s bold. No one ever takes the front seat. I can feel her eyes, teeming with an insatiable curiosity, rest on the back of my head.

“Yes,” I answer kindly. “As a matter of fact, I am the bus driver”

“Well then where are we going? This doesn’t look like the way to school.” Suzie lets her tongue peek out of her mouth like a tiny clam, gaping with fascination as her neighborhood morphs into an unfamiliar landscape. “My mom always goes left at the stop sign, not right. I don’t think I’ve been to this part of town.”

I smirk. “We’re not going to school, Suzie.”

“Well then where are we going? Are we leaving Brighton?”

She’s precocious, this one. I can’t help but laugh.

“Yes, but there’s more to it than that. I’ll tell you after a few questions, okay? Do you want to answer some questions for me?”
Suzie squeals with enthusiasm, clapping her hands like a circus seal. “Okay! Is this like the twenty questions game? I love sharing things about myself!” 

“Yes, it most certainly is. Although I don’t think we’ll get up to twenty questions.”

A spark of bemusement tugs at the slits of my lips. It’s not very often I get to deal with children, especially those as ardent as Suzie. No one ever seems to care for the bus driver-- they usually avoid me like the plague.

“Okay, mister. I’m ready.” She places her small, pudgy fingers on the back of my seat and watches me navigate through the brush of burgundy trees. Their barren branches dance amongst the ivory sky, swaying in the breeze like stiffened party streamers. It is time for the questions, but I find myself nervous to ask them.

“Well Suzie, do you know what you did to your brother last night?”

The alacrity drains from her ruddy face. She contorts her sugar-plum lips into a brooding snarl.

“I shot him with Papa’s gun. It was a real one, but that part I didn’t know.”

“And how did you shoot him?” I probe despite already knowing the answer. Suzie lets the silence buffer her reply, biding her time making patterns on the window with her fingers, drawing a flower in the grime.

“Come on, Suzie. You can tell me. I promise I’m not going to be mad.”

“Well… Will always runs around with those plastic Nerf things, and so I thought he left one in my parents’ room.” She explains. “We were playing cowboy shoot-’em-up and I wanted to win. I promise it was an accident, but my parents yelled and said I was a bad girl. A rotten egg. And they said rotten eggs get punished.”

 I nod contemplatively, slowly digesting her answer. Children her age were too daft to lie convincingly, especially to adults, which meant Suzie’s remorse was real.

“Is that true?” She prattles on, stealing the word from my thoughts. “Is it true you get punished for an accident? I thought getting in trouble was only for when you’ve done something wrong, and you did that wrong thing on purpose. I didn’t mean to do anything bad to Will.”

I’m stupefied by her candor, and for once I’m unsure how to answer her question.

 “Punishment is up to the punisher,” I finally say. “And they punish as they see fit. But it differs from person to person--everyone has different rules.”

“Well…what do you think?” Suzie sucks on her bottom lip, anxiously awaiting my thoughts. “Do you think I deserved to be punished? ‘Cause maybe Will was in pain for a minute, but I think he’s in a better place now. Mum said you go to Heaven when you die. Unless you’re a rotten egg.”

“She’s right,” I exclaim, turning on my blinker for a U-turn. “At least about what she said about death. Good children do go to Heaven. But she’s wrong about you being a rotten egg.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

                                                                    ________

    

It’s true Suzie shot her brother in the face but was too afraid to tell anyone. And it’s true she buried until her parents got home. She could’ve called 911, sure, but she’s a child who was scared. It was all an innocuous error, an innocent slip-up, but her parents were too mortified by the sight of their son drenched in a pool of rust, too petrified by seeing so much of something that was meant to stay inside his body, that they simply couldn’t understand. What they did to Suzie I’d rather not say.

I force the bus to take a sharp turn. Mountains that were once at the rear greet us with incisor smiles, their snow-capped tips scintillating in the sunlight. Clouds begin to break the further we ascend up the hill.

“Where are we going?” Suzie asks again. “Why did you turn around?”

“You’ll see soon enough.” I assure her, kicking my gear into cruise. Captivated by the scenery, Suzie now turns her poppyseed face towards the window, babydoll lashes blinking madly with wonder.

A pent up sigh escapes my lungs as we whiz past the welcome gates. It feels so good to go this way.