The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

A few nights later Cindy did notice. We’d gone to the old Alcyon Theater, where our feet stuck to the floor in caramel and sour butter. We always dipped our hands into each other’s popcorn and laughed at the lovers who snuggled in the back. We shouted and shot popcorn rockets at the screen until the ushers tried to toss us out.

  But this time we took up our row and never watched the screen. Instead, we watched the second row, where Bucky and Sally and some of the other boys sat. Cindy slowly munched on her popcorn, her eyes fixed on the second row. We watched them doing things to Sally and when they got up and walked back, Cindy poked me in the ribs and I saw Hank, his body ramming against Sally the way he’d rammed the sleeping cows. When they passed us, we whistled. Hank looked at me as though I should’ve known all along.

  I turned to Cindy. “Let’s go,” I said. We got up in unison. We were maybe eight and we got into our cars and drove swiftly to the beach. In the parking lot, I saw Hank’s car. We got out and followed the sound of the water and their muffled voices, and we snuck up on them, real slow. It was a hot July night and the beach just stank of the fish, and the flies swarmed around us and we could see the movement of bodies, like gentle waves, lapping the shore.

  Cindy called out first. She said, “Bucky, why don’t you go back to California and stay there? We don’t need your kind here.”

  And from somewhere the boys—there were maybe five of them—came forward, as if they’d just walked out of the sea, their bodies all wet and shiny, and Sally was nowhere to be seen. But Hank stood there, acting as if he didn’t know me. And then Bucky came up. He walked straight up to us and caught Cindy by the arm. He said, “Why don’t you tell them what I did to you, Cindy. Come on. Why don’t you tell them. You remember, don’t you? You remember what I did.”

  When Miss Guerney called the meeting, all the girls wanted to know why. We were told to report to Miss Guerney’s homeroom one morning in July. Just the girls. I knew why. When Cindy told me she was going to tell, I hadn’t told her not to.

  We shuffled in the summer heat and in the stink of the beach, which reached all the way to the schoolroom. We lined the back of the classroom and the room was filled and hot. Miss Guerney had bad breath and huge breasts and nobody had ever wanted her and we all drew back when she talked to us because she spit her bad breath in our faces. In the front of the room sat Sally Sherill, and beside her, a tall, stiff gray-haired woman in a trim pink shirtwaist dress. The woman clasped a handkerchief in her fingers and from time to time she pressed it to her eyes.

  Miss Guerney told us to be quiet and said that a bad example had been set. She said this bad example needed to be corrected. “There have been rumors and they have gotten back to me.” She said that girls had to preserve their bodies and that what one girl had done was bad for everyone.

  Then she had the bad girl Sally, wearing a yellow dress, stand up. And Sally stood and told us all. “I’ve done things,” she said, her strong doglike face set firm. “I’ve done some things I am ashamed of.” I felt my head starting to turn from the heat in the room and I watched sweat crawling down people’s backs. Some flies buzzed overhead and I could smell the stink the summer had brought. Sally’s face started to crack, then shattered in front of us as if somebody had thrown a bottle into glass.

  Instead of going right home, I rode to the beach. It was the last time I went down to the lake that summer. Some of the workers who’d volunteered to rake the alewives were burning them in little fires. I walked past the fires of burning alewives, who’d been killed, they said, by lamprey eels that sucked their insides out. I picked up fish by their tails and tossed them over my head. I stripped down to my underwear. One of the workers called out to me, “Hey, what’re you doing?” as I swam, the viscous water sticking to me like tar, in the lake I knew so well.

  Shining Path

  RAMÓN keeps his scorpion close to his heart. He keeps it in a box under his shirt and pulls it out only when he is asking for money. He doesn’t show it to his friends anymore. Not since Pablo and Juan stole his rat from him. Now he guards the scorpion, pressing it to his heart.

  When Victoria leaves her room in the morning, she heads for Ramón’s sand dune. Sometimes she thinks it’s a miracle she ever finds his straw hut. There are hundreds, thousands, just like his on the dunes, and the dunes are all alike, stretching for miles. But Victoria’s been here enough and she knows. She knows to tell the driver to drop her off across from the fruit stand where the old woman with the blind child sells bruised mangoes and plantains. She walks straight up the dune past ten rows of houses, then she turns left and it is the fourth house. Though sometimes it is the third or the fifth house. It all depends. It depends on what has happened the night before. On who has come or whose house has been washed away by the rain and mud.

  Or sometimes the people just disappear. Ramón has told her that you can get up in the morning and the people are gone. They’ve taken whatever they have and they’ve taken their straw mats and the cardboard that makes up their house. But sometimes they’ve left their house behind and sometimes even their belongings. And when this happens, no one ever talks of them again and it is never long before someone else just moves in.

  Though she’s been to Ramón’s house many times, Victoria is always surprised when she gets there. The people know her now and she knows them, but still she’s shocked. She hasn’t gotten used to the naked children covered with sores, bloody from scratching. Or to the man whose two hands and half his nose were chopped off by a machete in a lover’s quarrel. She hasn’t even gotten used to the dog who’s scratched all the fur off his belly and his testicles and who keeps biting at them.

  She kneels down in the dust and finds Ramón asleep in his hut. It has been dry for weeks now and the dune has no caked mud on it. A thin layer of dust coats everyone, everything. It makes Ramón look as if he’s dead. It makes everyone look as if he’s being buried alive. Ramón’s dark smooth skin is coated white. Flies swarm around his eyes, crusty with sleep, and he swats the air in his sleep. He sleeps with the pile of rags he has collected pulled over him. On his brow there is a fine line of sweat, and she can tell he’s having a bad dream. But after a few moments he looks up at her, serenely at first, then startled. He is late for work.

  He grabs his sponge and bucket and fills the bucket with water from the well. He takes off his ragged T-shirt and puts on another ragged T-shirt. These are the only two shirts he has, and she’s never seen him change his pants. He rushes back to the well and throws water on his face and his hands. He’s told her that this dune is better than the last dune he lived on because here there is a well.

  “Where’s Sam?” he asks, wiping his face on his T-shirt. She tells him Sam is sleeping. He winks at her. “You getting along?”

  Ramón has told her at times that he is in love with her, even though she’s old enough to be his mother. He has told her he wants to be first in line when she leaves Sam.

  They say that when this place was conquered four hundred years ago, Pizarro asked the Inca leader where the best place would be to put his city, the seat of his empire. And the Inca leader showed him this spot by the sea. If you ask the campesinos, they will tell you the Incas played a big joke on the conquerors. You do not have to spend much time here to see why.

  It is a desert where nothing will grow. The sea blows hot and humid and it brings no relief. There are no trees, no grass, and when the wind comes down from the sierra, the town is covered in sand. It is not the pale, golden sand of the Arabian deserts. This desert has the dust of a dirt road—a muddy, gray sand—and the people have dusty, gray faces.

  Victoria knew all of this before she came here, but she knew nothing of the sky. No one told her until the plane landed that they called it pelo de burro, hair of the donkey. They call it that because it is always gray, the gray shade of a donkey’s hide, and because it looks overworked and burdened. Sam was depressed when they arrived. He said they should have gone to Mexico or even Haiti. But Victoria is a photographer
and she’s made her reputation on ugly places.

  At the intersection where Ramón works, Victoria finds a spot to sit in the shade. She sits down as he gets his bucket and sponge ready. A few weeks ago someone stole his bucket and he had to save for a week before he had enough money for a new one. He is glad when she comes with him so that she can watch the bucket.

  Victoria takes out her notebook and sets up her camera. For the past two weeks she has been photographing Ramón. She could easily have completed her assignment weeks ago, but she decided to do a human interest feature on Ramón. This is one of the things she and Sam argued about the night before. Sam says she’s not here to do a human interest piece. She’s here to do a travel piece on the pueblos jovenes. What they call the young villages. They are called young villages because the people who live here are considered to be moving up in the world. Each village has a well and a small fenced-in sandlot where children can play.

  Sam tells her she’s spending too much time with Ramón and that she’s forgotten what she’s supposed to be doing in the first place. Sam may be right, but Victoria doesn’t care. She watches Ramón as he prepares his bucket with soapy water. “You know what I want?” he says. “I want a bus. I want to drive my own bus.” He has told her this before. He has told her that when the revolution comes, he wants his own bus. For now the revolution is still mostly in the sierra, but Ramón says that when it comes to the city, he wants his own bus. He wrings out the soapy sponge. Then he looks up at one of the hills and smiles. “Last night they took the light away.”

  She nods. Last night several electric pylons were blown up. Ramón always seems happy when this happens.

  “I saw them on the hill with their torches.” Then he kisses her on the forehead and dashes into the intersection. He waits for the light to change. When it changes, he jumps on a car that has stopped and quickly soaps down the windshield so that the driver cannot see. If the driver doesn’t give him fifty soles, he won’t wipe the soap away. Victoria thinks this isn’t fair, but he says lots of things in life aren’t fair.

  If the driver gives him the fifty soles, Ramón sometimes pulls out the scorpion and sometimes the driver will give him more. He used to stand at the intersections, eating fire. He says he prefers earning his money this way.

  The first time Victoria saw Ramón, it was near an old outdoor market on the outskirts of the city. Whenever she gets to a new place, she spends a few days walking around, just to get the feel of it. The day she arrived she went up the hill to the market, which isn’t far from the sand dune where he lives. Outside the market, a garbage truck, obviously overloaded, had dropped several carefully wrapped plastic bags that came from the richer parts of the city, where the hotels are. That is the only part of town where they can afford to wrap up their garbage.

  She stopped to look. Old men, dogs, and small children were ripping the bags apart, and by the time she got there, everyone was eating. Victoria had done a special on garbage in America, and this was good garbage. She could see that right away. The people and the dogs scrambled in the bags and came up with chicken bones, soggy bread, rancid meat, while women snatched up pieces of cloth to wrap their babies in.

  In the midst of this pile, a young boy caught her eyes. He was filthy, but he had deep dark eyes. He clasped a ragged shirt to him, which he later added to his pile of rags, and when no one was looking, he devoured a chicken wing, bones and all. Then he glanced at her, a strange look of contentment in his eyes.

  Even though she didn’t have her camera with her, the image of him stuck in her mind. The next day when she returned to the market, he was there, almost waiting for her, it seemed.

  When Ramón finishes work that day, she heads for Harry’s. Ramón says he’ll meet her later. He doesn’t like Sam and he doesn’t want to see him. Harry’s is a fast-food place in Miraflores where they serve good steak and eggs.

  When Victoria gets to Harry’s, Sam still hasn’t arrived, but Harry comes over to her table. “Have you seen Sam?” she asks, and Harry nods. “Left in a huff about an hour ago. I don’t know if he’ll be back.” She shrugs as if she doesn’t really care. “I’ll catch up with him eventually.”

  Harry is a Jew who left Germany in 1939. Now, he complains, he’s going to have to leave this place as well. Harry is in his sixties, but he wears a denim leisure suit. He combs his thick gray hair forward across his bald spot and lacquers it down with hair spray. He looks like a cockatoo and he is lonely because his wife and three daughters have moved to New York.

  When Sam walks in, he pretends he doesn’t see her at first. He says hello to Harry. Then he looks surprised to see Victoria. He waves at her, making his hand move in a round motion as if he’s polishing glass. She smiles and eats her steak and eggs. It is a huge order and it’s more than she can eat. Sam pulls back a chair and sits down. He picks up a piece of the steak, so Victoria motions to the waitress to bring another fork. “Well, they haven’t got the lights back in this part of town,” he says. She doesn’t know why he says this. It’s obvious the lights aren’t back.

  “Did you buy more rugs today?” Sam spends most of his day buying rugs and handicrafts. He has a partner on the West Coast and they want to open a boutique.

  He ignores her question. “Ready to go to Mexico?” He runs his fingers through her hair.

  “I need a little more time with Ramón. I wanta make sure I’ve got a day in his life.”

  Sam nods. He’s heard the same line for the past two weeks. “I suppose I should be jealous.”

  She shakes her head at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Sam chews on a T-bone. “So why’re you taking so long? You’ve always just been in and out of these places before.”

  Victoria shrugs and runs her fork through the egg yolk. She’s not sure she herself knows what the difference is. It was a few years ago when she came up with the idea as a joke, and her magazine thought it was a great notion, something no one had done before. Victoria suggested doing travel pieces on ugly places where nobody wants to go. On burned-out fishing villages in Mexico, on flea-bitten towns in North Africa, on the slums of major cities. She was surprised when the idea caught on. Victoria is now the world’s leading expert on places nobody wants to visit.

  When she proposed the slums of Lima, some people on her magazine were thrilled. Among the well informed, the slums of Lima are the best, or the worst, depending on which way you look at it. Until now these trips have always worked out for Victoria and Sam, because while Victoria visits ugly places, Sam buys for the shop he plans to open. But on this trip Sam has been jittery since they got here. He points to Harry and leans forward. “He told me nobody’s changing money. He says all the tourists are leaving.”

  Victoria rubs her eyes. They bother her because of the exhaust from the cars on the intersection where Ramón works. “We’re not tourists.”

  “Listen, they’re very organized,” he says in a low voice. “Do you know that last night all eight pylons were blown simultaneously? All at once. Like clockwork.”

  “Sam, if you want to leave, you can. I don’t want to keep you here.”

  “I could never leave you, baby.” He gives her a kiss on the forehead. “I just wanta get you out of town.”

  That night, as they’re making love, Victoria gazes out the window. She sees two dark eyes staring in. She thinks it is Ramón, coming to tell her something, so she jumps out of bed and, rushing to the window, flings it open. No one is there, or if anyone was there, he’s gone. Sam lies with his head flung back against the pillow, arms shielding his face. “Vicky, what’re you doing?” he says. And then “Come back to bed.”

  The next night Victoria and Sam take Ramón to a hamburger joint for dinner. They order good American food—hamburgers, fries, Cokes. They sit by the window and, while street urchins press their noses to the glass and rub their stomachs, talk about how good it feels to eat hamburgers. Ramón chews slowly, his eyes darting constantly from Victoria to Sam. He is always almost silent
around Sam. Victoria has to sit with her back to the window in order to eat and Sam keeps shooing the children away, but they keep their noses pressed to the window.

  Ramón has brought her a picture. It is a picture of dogs hanging by ropes from trees. He points to the picture and tells her that they are hanging the dogs up in the sierra. They have hanged dogs in other revolutions, Ramón tells her, so why shouldn’t they hang dogs in this one. He tells her he has seen the dogs hanging. They twist and yelp and sometimes they take a long time to die. She puts her hand to her throat and thinks that if you gave her a choice, she’d rather die quickly at thirty than slowly at eighty.

  Victoria looks at Ramón, who has cleaned himself up for this occasion. He is wearing a shirt he must have borrowed or stolen from someone. His jet-black hair is slicked back, and the white dust has been removed from his skin. Victoria wonders how she’ll tell him when she’s leaving. She’d like to say to him “I’ll write you,” but it’s difficult to write to someone who lives on a sand dune.

  When they leave the hamburger joint, Victoria feels stuffed, disgusted with herself. There is the taste of oil in her mouth. They pass peasant women, their breasts exposed, begging and pointing to crying children. The women are saying their breasts have dried up and they have nothing to feed their babies. Ramón looks at the women, but they seem to bother him, and he walks on. So does Sam. But Victoria stops. She gives each of the women a hundred-soles piece. When she catches up with Sam, he is annoyed. He says, “You’re not going to save the world that way.”

  When they pass Harry’s, Sam goes in to order a beer while Victoria says good-bye to Ramón. Something has made him gloomy, so she bends to kiss him on the cheek, but he seems to be listening to something. She listens too and then she hears it. She hears crickets, chirping in the night, and she smiles. “I love crickets,” she tells him.