by Clint Kelly
Bill didn’t hesitate. “Roxie’s not been feeling too hot this week, but I’ll ask.”
“Good, yeah, you do that, you ask her. If the meatloaf goes up in flames, I’ve got backup. Cod fillets and chips from the market. Deep-fried, tempura-style. I’ll check back with you.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Gourmet.”
I was down two steps when I turned. From the rear of the bus came raucous laughter. I couldn’t forget Tsunami’s threats against my friend. I spoke low enough only Bill could hear. “And don’t say anything else to those guys in the back. I think they’re trouble.”
“Yes, Mom,” Bill said, sounding more like his old self. “I’ll give ’em money for ice cream and tell ’em they’re just misunderstood.”
I made a face. “Not a word, Bill. I mean it.”
Bill chuckled. “I’ve got instant phone access right here to Emergency Dispatch. They’re just punk roosters struttin’ the barnyard.”
Still I hesitated.
Bill snorted. “You gonna leave or do I need to call the transit police?”
I shook my head and left.
9
Ruthie, things have settled down. Time to think. I’m leaning toward the theory that if by definition I’m not precisely crazy, I’m at least certifiably looney.
Talks to himself? Check. Hears voices? Check. Increased isolation? Check. Collects cats? I’m working on that last one after commuting with the Siamese. I almost brought home a pigeon today.
When I returned to the apartment from Kids Safari—where there were no kids and the donated clothing was more junk than wearable—I put the Bibles in the storage closet and canceled our magazine subscriptions. And I was a pope’s nose from tossing that plaque in the trash. You know the one with Joshua’s declaration that “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Willingly serve Him is one thing, Ruth Anne. Be yanked around by Him is quite another. Blue-eyed felines, OK; bombs in backpacks, not OK.
That plaque would have gotten pitched too, if your fingerprints weren’t all over it. That’s why the closet’s still full of your clothes. Your fragrance, your body, your eye for detail. You’ll never guess the one garment of yours I hang on the shower rod in the bathroom next to the sink—the thing I see every time I shave and brush my teeth. Remember that pretty pink linen top you wore, the one that was just a tad snug around the rib cage? The time we were late for the play at the Paramount and you managed to get it all catawampus with your arms pinned inside until you couldn’t move and we got to laughing so hard you had to change your slacks?
I never bargained for crazy, sweet girl. And you not even here to coach me through it! God knew from the get-go that I’d be no good without you. Doesn’t the Good Book say He’ll never give us more than we can bear? Does He even read what He wrote?
I’m sorry. Maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe it’s simply a good, old-fashioned assault by the Devil to take me out. Discredit me. Ruin my testimony. Force me to join the NRA.
A couple of other things happened today. I cleared the air with Bill and I talked with Greta.
Don’t ask me how it happened. I got home. I took in the paper. I made soup. I called Greta.
Her cell went to voicemail. (Why do people have cellphones if they’re not going to answer them? To screen the calls of single, older men looking for consolation?)
It took fifteen minutes for the fashion-school staff to track her down. “Who did you say you were again? Students aren’t really supposed to take personal calls on the school phone.” Finally, she picked up. I think Greta took the phone to satisfy herself that the call had not been placed from a ledge on the fortieth floor of the Columbia Tower.
“Hello, James Carter. Are you stalking me?”
“It’s pretty hard to stalk when you’re on Social Security and your car is a bus.” When all else fails, go glib, I always say.
“Most of the world doesn’t own a car.” Her pragmatism sounds a lot like someone else’s I know. “Look, James, my guy and I had a huge blow-up this morning, my head is splitting, and the class midterm coming up in Seeing What Others Can’t See promises to be a bear. What did you call about?”
I swallowed. I don’t know what I called about. This crazy wants company? She’s young, full of unfolding life. What does she need with an aging, mad uncle?
When I said nothing, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Voice soft like yours, Ruth, when you saw I’d had a bad day.
“I saw you on the news. I came to the hospital but you were doped up with happy pills. James, that was awful. It scared me. You scare me. I don’t want to know if it was one of your premonitions. Was it one of your premonitions?”
I so badly wanted to tell her no, that the young lady in the backpack handed me a three-by-five card with the message, “There’s a bomb on my back. Please help me,” in neat block letters formed by a light, feminine hand.
“Ah, you see, it’s, well, complicated,” I stammered.
“Of course. Everything about you is complicated.” She sighed. “James, please don’t take this the wrong way, but my life right now has no room for this level of drama.”
“Understood.”
I tried, Ruthie, I really tried to keep the hurt, the disappointment, the loneliness, the anger, the fear out of that one word. I failed. But before I could mumble my apologies and end the call, her voice came from a distance not explained by the half-mile that separated us just then.
“Let’s have one last meeting. I owe you that. You did an incredibly brave thing. At some level, our brief acquaintance has been a suitably strange introduction to a beautiful and complex city. I should hear you out. Want to hear you out. Tomorrow night? 6:30, at the Pike Place Market pig?”
My belly roiled with gratitude, apprehension, the finality of the meeting. Even the oh-so-public choice to meet at the iconic brass statue of Rachel the pig.
Goodbye, Greta. “OK.” My cotton-dry mouth managed to give her one more out. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, it’s what you do for a gentleman who shares his umbrella with a lady.”
There it was again. The smallest measure of flirtation. It had to be the Paris effect.
“Thank you, Greta. Thank you.” I hung up the phone. Well, Ruth Anne, what do you make of that?
~*~
The following morning, despite my reservations, I boarded the 17 at the usual stop.
“Bill.” I took my time moving past him.
He returned the nod without making eye contact. “Mr. Carter.” He checked his side mirror and cranked the steering wheel to get around the bread van delivering to Third Street Deli.
I waited.
He made a show of checking the big mirror above the coin box. “There’s plenty of seats. Take your pick.”
Cranky old sot. Did he still harbor resentment for my misstep at Crusty Jake’s? It took all my concentration to order each of my 190 pounds to stand their ground. “Forgot to tell you yesterday, Big Pearl says she’s ready for her ride anytime.”
“That’s nice.” He stomped the brake pedal and waited for a stringy bike messenger to deliver an expletive-laced explanation to a cabdriver as to why it was physically impossible for them both to occupy the same exact space at the same exact time. Bill was uncharacteristically no comment. Most days, he would have snapped open the folding front doors and sorted out the two combatants in no uncertain terms—“My civic duty to intervene.”
Instead, Bill swung the bus into the oncoming lane and cautiously past the dueling shouters.
I sighed and turned down the aisle.
Before I took three steps, Bill said, “You tell her if I didn’t have my Roxie, I’d have my Pearl.”
Without looking back, I said, “You could tell her yourself.”
“Too shy.”
“My eye.”
“Sit.”
With that, the day was back on track. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my rendezvous with Greta that evening.
I sat alone th
ree seats back of the driver’s cage. It was almost as if a dull roar rose from the writing in the bus—the ads, the Metro signage, the NFL team logo on the shoulder of the guy’s jacket in the seat opposite, even the posted legal regulations that let us know any trouble on the bus would be video and audio taped.
On the plus side, there were no messages scribbled, stuffed, or carved into the back of the seat ahead.
“If you want to drink, that’s your business. If you want to stop, that’s ours.” I studied the Alcoholics Anonymous ad above Jacket Man. Rearranged the letters. Waited for key words to glow. Searched for hidden meanings. Nothing. And nothing from the adjoining ads for day care, a tattoo convention, and low-income housing either. They were just ads.
My relief took me a stop out of my way, although Bill held the door extra long at my usual stop. I met his reflection in the mirror, his one eyebrow arched in question. I shrugged and shook my head.
When I did get off at King Street, an odd stop for me, he asked, “You OK?” which interpreted was, “Are you sure you didn’t suffer a concussion in the explosion?”
I had to stop being so predictable. “Yeah, fine. Just such a nice day to walk.”
His silence said, “So why’d you get on the bus for all of four blocks?”
I liked leaving Bill in a quandary. His unasked questions could stew in their own bewilderment. Caped crusaders were mysterious by definition.
I was suddenly close to giddy that no one except Bill had spoken to me on the bus. Maybe this was my day to buy a lotto ticket. “What’d Roxie say about dinner?”
“Said she’s got choir practice all this week and we should make plans for Labor Day.” The look in his eye was wary. “But I can come.”
That Roxie. A regular phantom. “Just us guys then. Friday night, seven o’clock?”
“Sure thing. Can I bring somethin’?”
“Just yourself. Oh, and maybe some crusty bread to go with the meatloaf. I’ve got rocky-road ice cream for dessert. The good stuff. You know where I’m at?”
“Yeah, it’s that apartment building not far from Jake’s with the fancy curlicues along the roofline.”
“That’s it. The Elliott Bay Arms. 3D, that’s me. I think the Olympic trials are on the tube Friday night.”
“Got it.”
I sat on a bench in the pocket park and breathed in the city. I basked in the sun and in no longer being singled out. Once again, I could keep my head down, pay my rent, volunteer, secure my cemetery plot, stay out of the paper, and slip silently from sight when the end came.
God could see I was an unwilling player in His game of Stop That Tragedy and had moved on to someone better suited to spontaneous acts of random craziness.
I scowled and told my thoughts to shut it.
A purple pigeon with green iridescent neck feathers bobbed next to my shoe and pecked a morsel from the crack between the anchor bolt of the bench leg and the cement pad to which it was bolted. I stared at the bird, my focus boring in as if it were one of those 3-D hidden-image puzzles. The shimmering green in a field of plum, the constant number of bobs per second of that glorious neck, the soft coo of contentment in finding a forgotten crumb.
What’s it all about, Jimmy?
I jerked to my feet, scattering pigeon and contentment in every direction.
Had I a few drinks under my belt, I would have careened down the street in the direction of Kids Safari. As it was, I ran until my breath came in short, labored bursts. My thighs burned, my calves protested, but I could not outrun my pinball thoughts. If I stopped, those thoughts would coalesce into a clear and present statement of fact, a fact I did not want to face. So I pounded downhill toward the waterfront, arms and legs flailing in a failed bid to escape the facts.
If only I could get inside Kids Safari and talk to a kid…
The Charlie’s Produce truck just missed me, the driver lay on the horn, and I was treated to a chorus of chaotic honks. I slumped to the curb and out of the box of fragmented intellect that was my brain came:
Driver Shot, Metro Bus Plunges off Aurora Bridge
Macabre though it may be, it was not a new thought or a warning or a tip-off. It was an old thought spread out before my conscience like the front page of the November 27, 1998, Seattle Times:
In the worst bus accident in Seattle Metro’s twenty-five-year history, the driver of a southbound Route 359 express bus was shot twice as the bus began crossing the Aurora Bridge over the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
The shooter, Silas Garfield Cool, 43, shot the driver, Mark McLauglin, 44, and then himself. Both died. The bus plummeted fifty feet into the Fremont neighborhood, killing one passenger, Herman Liebelt, 69, and injuring thirty-two others.
The bus crossed two lanes of traffic, burst through the guardrail, and landed on the roof of an apartment building before tumbling to the ground. Had the bus traveled a few hundred yards farther, it would have dropped more than 160 feet into the ship canal.
No clear motive for the shooting could be determined, although there were signs that Cool had been experiencing emotional problems and had become severely withdrawn.
Ya think? Had Cool been living by himself, heard voices, and snapped? Was I about to snap? I, who at the age of ten could not for the life of me memorize John 3:16 but had memorized one-hundred-forty-three words of pure tragedy for review now when I most needed help. Charming, God, absolutely charming.
The hole in my heart made itself known, and I slowly got to my feet amid a fit of coughing and heavy breathing. I placed one foot in front of the other and bit my lip the rest of the way to Kids Safari, random thoughts pinging through my brain like shooting stars.
Where had that voice in my head come from?
What would I say to Greta tonight?
Why was I having Bill over for dinner? I couldn’t make meatloaf to save my soul.
10
The closer I came to Rachel the pig, the more I regretted it.
The evening was mild and Elliott Bay dotted with water taxis, cargo freighters, tour boats, and a departing Alaska cruise ship. Ferries plied the waters between, giant motorized seagulls sleek and white and solid in their ownership of Puget Sound. Bathed in slanting, butter-yellow sunlight from behind a bank of low-lying clouds, the scene belonged on canvas.
I belonged in custody. What was I doing meeting this young woman, and then what? Unburden myself? Tell her about my latest audible from Coach Almighty? She didn’t need me, and certainly not my schizophrenia. She was being kind, but this would be the end of it. Needed to be the end of it. I was too old to seek validation from someone younger than half my age. Too old to need the flattering of a pretty stranger. Too rattled to say what I had no clue how to say.
As usual, the market teemed with summer shoppers in search of fresh produce, discount jewelry, and impossibly bright bouquets of gladioluses, irises, daisies, and tulips. Hand-held cameras were everywhere, recording the moments. One large contingent of Asian tourists gathered around Rachel, Her Porkness, in jaunty straw hat and purple scarf, were art directed by a frenzied slip of a man festooned with several cameras about his neck. They faced down a single camera on a tripod while their director set the timer and scrambled to join the circle. Shouting something in unison Japanese that sounded like “Shelly has stinky socks,” they waited in frozen grins for a red-light flash signaling the moment had been suitably memorialized, whereupon they erupted in excited chatter and moved on.
In their wake stood Greta in lemon-yellow blouse and pale blue windbreaker, a brass pig in front, a flying salmon tossed by the sure grip of an aproned fishmonger to the rear.
I did not know how to greet her, but I think I bowed slightly and said, “I’m glad you came.” It sounded like a bad line from a cheesy romantic comedy where the crowd freezes, sound muted, and the only two people on earth whose souls match realize they have, against incredible odds, found one another.
We each gave an awkward laugh.
“We should have agreed on a v
erifying sentence like ‘I hear the brass ham is especially tender this time of year.’”
I nodded. “Whereupon I would respond, ‘It is especially good with a metallic maple glaze.’”
We laughed again, more comfortably this time. We walked away from the roar of the main market to a quieter, less-frequented alcove of homemade whirligigs and leather goods.
I handed her a stick of clover honey from the honey vendor’s. “Thank you for coming, Greta. I just needed to talk to someone about this wild episode in my life. It’s hard not to read things into it. I’ve spun this whole wacky scenario in my head about messages from God. I’m afraid that for a divine purpose way beyond me, He’s decided to use me to accomplish I don’t know what.” I ended with a limp and impotent shrug that said it all. I was pathetic.
“And you always thought what you feared most was being a pawn of evil,” said Greta between licks of honey. “Instead, you are a pawn of God. You didn’t want to go over to the dark side. So you were totally blindsided when the great temptation in your life became to ignore God and run from His bidding.”
I stared at her. How did she know so much? How had she figured me out?
I nodded, relieved I was no longer the only one who knew what I was going through. “I think that’s it. The bus is a curse because it is the source of the messages I seem powerless to resist. Then comes the police, the questions and endless speculation, the media attention and more questions…”
Greta tried a sage-honey stick and moaned softly at its taste. “And now you’re questioning God. Why would He force you to do these things against your will? It’s not that you don’t want to help people; you just want to do so through normal channels. Kids Safari. The mission. You’re no Captain America. You’re low-key, low-profile, low-down James Carter.”
“Hey!” She’d gotten a little close to the bone. I liked the male heroic ideal as much as the next guy. What I didn’t want was all the public attention, all the expectations placed on you when you become pinned in the limelight. And I was no 007. Strictly a lover, not a fighter. Let me work quietly, behind the scenes, one kid, one down-and-outer at a time. Don’t involve me in suicides and bombings and God only knew what else God had up His sleeve.