“I’ll spell it out. Either Cam Wilkes’ unconscious mind is broadcasting his old pain to you and I’m picking up the ricochets, or you are broadcasting straight to me because you saw this poor bastard playing his trumpet for you back when you were a knockout, and this was an everyday occurrence for you then. That trumpet solo as far as you were concerned was nothing but a glorified wolf whistle. Things were so all-around easy for you in the love department that you didn’t even want to know, and now it’s haunting your unconscious, and consequently mine as your husband.”
“That’s cruel and stupid.”
“I knew you’d deny it, just like you’ve denied the memory itself.”
What Leon wanted Rachel to do was what he claimed was the least she could do: go and quietly tell Cam Wilkes that she was the Girl on His Bus and say she was sorry. Who knew? The apology alone might change everything. But the clincher would be for Wilkes to realize that this perfectly ordinary woman—(“Thanks a lot.”
“You know what I mean.”)
—was the one of his dreams. By being hit in the face by the discrepancy, Cam Wilkes would see how crazy it is to cling to the past.
“Look who’s talking about clinging to the past.”
“Let’s not get abusive.”
“Shock tactics, eh,” Rachel muttered.
“You could put it that way.”
“And if it wasn’t me?”
“But it was, Rachel, it was.”
The only person Rachel could remember on her downtown bus from Madison was the driver, whose mucal snuffling worked magic for getting people to move to the back. No Moondog Wilkes. But Leon was intent. That night he made her a nice canneloni, got her drunk on fifteen-dollar St. Emilion and stoned on a joint he had bought from the kid with the hawk, and next morning the first thing she remembered was agreeing to do it. Hal’s Theme certainly had blown her away the first time Wilkes played it for her that night on his lawn, if Hal’s Theme it was. Or was Wilkes’ playing just so incredibly affecting that the melody only seemed familiar? And what about music being the universal language? What if it wasn’t familiar but merely true? She longed too and who didn’t? Besides, wouldn’t Cam Wilkes have cut as odd and unforgettable a figure seventeen years ago as now? These questions, along with disembodied gestures and blurred faces from her years of riding the Downtown bus fromMadison, floated through Rachel’s mind all that next day until it came time to drop in on the man whose mind and life by one weakness of hers or another it had somehow become the least she could do to acknowledge destroying.
As Rachel and Leon approached Cam Wilkes’ house in the Subaru, Rachel saw that thrust into the piled earth around the edge of the crater in the front lawn was a neat but marginless placard of the sort carried by meet-thy-doom and health food fanatics. “Calling all Villagers!” it read.
HERE WITNESS what going outside can do to you or your lawn. Life does not have to be this way, gaping and leaking loneliness like a hole in the mind. Join PAGO and see the World as it was before it blew up in your face, immediate but orderly like a bus transfer in the hand of a beautiful girl.
Cam Wilkes Founding Member and President Millpond Chapter, PAGO International.
Leon was ringing the doorbell by touching the exposed wires together. The response was a lively trumpet rendition of the Rosemary Clooney favourite, Come On-a My House. After a few pleasantries with Wilkes, whom they found lying on a bus seat in the living room, Leon stepped onto the patio, as previouslyarranged, for a “breath of air,” and Rachel sat down on the seat near Wilkes, who had straightened up.
“Cam,” she said.
“Yes, Rachel?”
“First, I’ve been meaning to give you this—” and she handed him his flesh-coloured workglove, which he looked at without recognition. “I’d have let Leon bring it along to a PAGO evening, but—”
“Thanks. I really need one of these.”
Wow, Rachel thought. For somebody obsessed by the past he sure has a bad memory.
“No, Cam,” she said kindly. “It’s yours.”
He buried his face in it.
Rachel watched him for a moment. It struck her that he had regressed since she saw him last.
“Cam,” she said, “I have something to confess.”
“You don’t have to say it, Rachel,” Wilkes replied, looking up. “Not to me. I understand.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and I’m not hurt.”
“You’re not?”
“No, and I accept your apology immediately, so you don’t even have to open your mouth. All is forgiven.”
“Thank you, Cam. Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome.”
Well, thought Rachel, that was easy enough. After a silence she asked, “Did you know from the start, Cam?”
“Yes I did.”
“Did you recognize me?”
“I recognize them all, Rachel.”
“All—?”
“That’s right. The first law of magic. Like attracts like.”
“You lost me.”
Wilkes shrugged. “They tend to marry.”
“Women—?”
“Often women. The women tend to marry men. Though not always.”
“Right—”
“Sex, I suppose. The male and female genitals really do seem made for each other, don’t they? And of course, conventional expectations.”
Rachel resolved to cut bait and go for a straight confession. Maybe it would sound like a recap, and everything would sort out.
“Reproduction must count for a lot—” Wilkes observed, reflective.
“Cam,” Rachel said. “I was the Girl on Your Bus. My parents weren’t meant for each other. My father was in another world, and then he was always away. Finally my mother left him. Life was grey at home, like poison fog. I never noticed anything around me. I still don’t. I’m sorry. I never intended to hurt you. I didn’t realize you were playing your trumpet for me. I don’t even remember you, or your trumpet.”
In one movement Wilkes swept to the floor some scattered bus tokens and an empty potato chip bag and moved downthe seat towards her saying, “You’re not telling me you’re sorry for not joining PAGO earlier, with Leon, Rachel. You’re telling me that you were the Girl on My Bus.” He took her hand softly in his. “I suspected it was you from the day I watched you and Leon move to the Millpond—” He bowed his head and paused as if to swallow tears. “I was hurt, terribly. But I accept your apology. Of course I do. And I forgive you from the bottom of my heart.”
“Thank you, Cam.” Rachel remained silent for several minutes while Wilkes sobbed. She hoped this would be cathartic for him, because the difference between herself then and now had better not have been enough to do the trick.
Finally Wilkes dried his eyes and said, “Rachel.”
“Yes, Cam?”
“I also have something to confess. But before I do, I want you to promise you won’t tell anyone what I’m going to reveal to you now. Not even Leon.”
Assuming Wilkes was about to share a confidence relating to herself, Rachel agreed, uneasily.
Some confidence. A paranoid song and dance was what it was. About how in the years following his disappointment, with money from inherited ChemLawn shares, Wilkes had bought from the township an abandoned bus yard on Highway 303 and there set up house inside the original Downtown 16 from Madison, with plants, propane, water from a shed on the property, and snow when that froze. Before long, however, Mortprop Investments, who wanted the property for building the Millpond, was putting pressure on him to sell: flattening the tires of his buses, hiring a child with an air gun to sit on the shed roof and pick off gulls, etc.
“But why didn’t you just accept their offer and get your bus towed someplace else?” Rachel asked impatiently. “They were buying the land, weren’t they, not your buses—”
Cam Wilkes stroked his trumpet as he spoke. “I can answer that in one word: agoraphobia. Going anywhere, even towed inside
my bus, was inconceivable. By that time I was pretty … far gone.”
Finally, by paying massive kickbacks to the mayor and council, Mortprop Investments got the township dump site instead, and then the township threw Wilkes off his own property for violating zoning laws by living on it. By that time the Millpond had been built and Wilkes had met Della when her car broke down on the 303. He married her, bought this bungalow, and settled down. Unlike Della.
Squinting, Wilkes pointed his cigarette at the near wall. “My bus yard is one and three-quarters mile in that direction as the crow flies. To me it’s hallowed ground. Precious memories. When Della left I found I couldn’t live without my Downtown 16 from Madison, so after a lot of soul-searching, I had it dismantled and brought here. It’s all around you, Rachel. In fact, right now we’re sitting on exactly the same seat that you used to sit on when we rode it together.”
“Oh really?”
“Do you know why I have that bus with me here today?”
“So you can have my seat?”“Close. So I can sniff your seat.”
Rachel jumped up. “That’s gross! Leon!”
“Love is gross,” Cam Wilkes said sadly.
As soon as Leon came back into the room he wanted to find out if Rachel’s revelation had worked. Pretending he had just seen something unbelievable outside, he tried to get Wilkes out onto the patio. Wilkes would have none of it. “Lawn yesterday, patio today,” was how he put it, shaking his head.
“How’d it go?” Leon whispered to Rachel when Wilkes went to the kitchen for coffee.
“Go? Leon, the man is crazy!”
“It might take a little time.”
When they got home Rachel tried again, before the light got turned off, in the small pool of time where once they would have made love. “Leon, I’ve been thinking about Alex Silver, your high school hero.”
“Why? You’ve never even met him.”
“Listen to me. Alex-Al, Al-Hal. I’ll say it again. Alex-Al, Al-Hal.”
“A breathing exercise.”
“It doesn’t suggest something?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just call him Hal.”
“Oh, you just call him Hal! I see! What’s his real name?”
“Rather not say.”
“No? Any reason?”
“Rather not say.”
“Leon?”
“Yes?”
“I give up.”
“Good. You’re way more useful to me as a set of—” “Don’t say it.”
“Say what? Ears. Why do you always assume I’m a sexist jerk?”
——
In her bed in the Dream Centre, Rachel looked at her watch: 3:05 a.m. This wasn’t going to work. How could she be expected to sleep on an iron cot in a strange room with stereo snoring, electrodes attached to her head, and a humming machine keeping track if she did? It just wasn’t conducive.
She pulled the electrodes off, felt guilty, got up, had a pee, glued the electrodes back on the way Silver had showed her, and eased back into bed. Funny. He’d assured her he’d be checking all through the night.
Plumped her pillow and lowered her head onto it, uncontrollably to remember further events of that heat wave and what, God help us, followed.
——
In the continuing summer heat the level of the millpond fell two feet, leaving a stretch of yellow-green, stinking muck borderedby a six-foot band of crushed stone. An unfortunate dog who crossed this foulness for a drink before breakfast one morning died at noon the next day after violent convulsions, and people were advised over loudspeakers mounted on slowly moving cars with Mortprop Investments on the doors that if they must go out, under no circumstances to allow their pets off the concrete sidewalks and Permawood walkways. As the heat, so continued the explosions of garbage bags. For those whose lawns were the heart and soul of their weekend it was a difficult time. Many people stayed inside with the air conditioning turned up high and watched baseball. Quite a few conferred with their lawyers about suing Mortprop Investments for the cost of restoring lawns and driveways. But most who lost a part of their lawn simply called Sod Your World and had the bill sent to Mortprop Investments, who were paying up while publicly acknowledging nothing.
Rachel’s mother began to urge her to sell and move back to the city.
“We can’t,” Rachel told her when she phoned one day. “Leon says it’s a buyer’s market.”
“It’s a buyer’s market because it’s dangerous to live there. By the way, your friend called.”
“What friend?”
“You know the one. It’s not as if you had—”
“Gretchen Molstad—?”
“That’s her. She’s looking for you.”
“Did you give her my number?”
“I couldn’t find my book. I told her you live out in the sticks somewhere. She said she was very disappointed to hear that. Maybe she’ll call again. Now there’s a girl who always has nice men friends. Of course, she’s got spirit.”
“So long, Mother.”
On Leon the continuing adventure of physical life in the Millpond made little impression, for he had concentrated his attention on getting Cam Wilkes to leave his house. All Leon’s jobless energy, all his Hal-haunted loneliness, all his ambitions to make his mark on the life of Cam Wilkes, came to be focused upon this task. Like a bad psychiatrist, Leon was so intent on returning Wilkes to the world that he was blind to the chaos raging on all sides out there.
“Hey Leon,” Rachel pointed out. “The problem is not that Wilkes won’t leave the house, the problem is that he is out of his mind.”
But Leon was like a man in love, consumed by his object. Sensing this, Wilkes refused to go anywhere. Leon had read that agoraphobics feel safe in cars, so he rented a Lincoln Continental at a weekend rate. Saturday morning he pulled into Wilkes’ driveway crooning with anticipation. But in the end he had to be satisfied with joining Wilkes in the living room to admire the car through the picture window. They removed a strip of aluminum foil.
“Leon, we can’t afford to rent Continentals for the weekend!” Rachel cried when she found out what he had done.
“What was I supposed to do? He sure wasn’t going to go for a ride in a Subaru!”
“Buy him a bus pass!”
Rachel should have worried when she saw the light bulb flash on over Leon’s head. The next morning he went to a bus company and rented a bus and driver for eight hours.
It worked. To Leon’s joy, no sooner had the bus driver, a taciturn red-haired youth, pulled into Wilkes’ driveway than Wilkes came floating out of his house, waving like the Queen to the three or four people gazing blankly into his crater and at his sign. Reaching for the bus, he hesitated—that red hair—but after a carefully rehearsed if stilted greeting from the driver and a loud hearty welcome from Leon, he came on board, explaining, “Ninety-five percent of agoraphobics are terrified of buses, but thanks to the Girl on My Bus, for me they’re counterphobic. Especially empty.”
Wilkes and Leon sat together near the back, Wilkes in the window seat, where he looked out upon the world with quiet interest. When, however, Leon casually suggested they head downtown on the 303, Wilkes did not appear to hear him. Later he declined to get out of the bus, even to “stretch his legs,” and after an hour asked to be told when they had reached Hillock Rise, because he “had to be getting back.” Given x number of years indoors, an hour’s bus ride, Leon felt, was a plenty big step for one morning. He told the driver to return to Hillock Rise. But they had trouble finding it, and they were still searching when the bus was pelted by sod from an exploding lawn.
“Oh, oh, oh,” Wilkes whispered, sliding down in his seat.
The same afternoon, with a few hours left on the bus and driver, Leon dropped back to take Wilkes for another ride. Thistime Wilkes refused, arguing that he had already gone for a ride. The next day Leon rented a backhoe for two hours and drove it right up to the edge of Wilkes
’ patio, but Wilkes just stood behind the screen door smiling and shaking his head. “Watch out for the gas line!” he called. Leon then phoned from a Millpond McDonald’s and told Wilkes excitedly that he (Wilkes) had won a free lunch and could he come right over and eat it for the photographers? “Be sure to thank the whole staff,” Wilkes told him, “when you convey my regrets.”
“He’s just being perverse!” Leon shouted at Rachel one night from the tub. “When you first met the guy he was all the way out on his front lawn digging that phony hole, but now he says it’s the explosions that are keeping him in!”
Rachel came to the bathroom doorway. “Leon, why are you so obsessed about this?”
Leon sank to his chin. His knees rose hairy through the bubbles. “No use trying to explain,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I feel a very real responsibility to get the guy out into reality, it’s that simple. This should be a straightforward matter. In a sane world anybody would see immediately that there are some things a person just has to do. There would be no talk of ‘obsessed.’ So would you lay off, please?”
Leon seemed to Rachel at that moment like a lover who has enrolled in a watercolours class in order to be close to his beloved but become so engrossed in the art of watercolours that when she gets bored and stops showing up he fails to notice. “Leon? One more question? What’s this got to do with Hal?”
“Who?”
“Hal. You do remember Hal—”
“I told you what it’s got to do with Harry: Nothing. I figured out—”
“Leon, did you say Harry? Hal’s name is really Harry? Is this true?”
A pause, Leon preparing an offensive, reaching with studied calm for the loofah and soap. “So you see now,” he said, slow and teacherly, “why I couldn’t let you get hold of it.”
“Because Harry was your father’s name!”
Leon’s father had died of a heart attack about five years before it occurred to Leon that, after eighteen years of living in the same house with the man, he knew next to nothing about him.
“That’s right.”
“And you thought I’d assume Hal was the dad you never really knew.”
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