The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

  But he shakes his head. “I don’t. They make me sad. They make me think about something I don’t want to think about.” Then he tells her about one night when he was a little boy and he was tending sheep in the sierra. He says, “A jaguar ate one of the lambs and the people I worked for were angry with me. So they wouldn’t give me any food for a day. That night I stayed awake and I couldn’t sleep because I was so hungry. And all night long I listened to the crickets chirping.” Then he looks at her firmly, almost angry. “And I swore I’d never be hungry again. Whenever I hear the crickets, that’s what I think. I think how I’ll never be hungry again.”

  The night the terrorists blow up the electric company, Victoria is getting a manicure in the Turkish baths. She usually gets a massage or a manicure on Friday nights because there isn’t much else to do in this place on weekends; most of the clubs and theaters are on the hit list. But lately they’ve been bombing the electric company on Friday nights. They’d skipped a few Fridays, and since Sam and she aren’t talking much these days, she thought this might be a good evening for the Turkish baths.

  As the lights begin to fade, women grab their towels and scramble around. In the dark, the smell of eucalyptus from the sauna is sharp and makes her think of soothing, tropical nights. In the fading light, she can see the shiny backsides of women as they dash, scrambling for their clothes, laughing or cursing, annoyed with the inconvenience. The manicurists and masseuses look for candles. Victoria’s manicurist finishes her feet by candlelight. It isn’t until the next morning that she notices the manicurist’s thumb print, neatly embedded in the polish of her nail. She could probably run a security check on her with that alone.

  She leaves the baths, fed up with the blackouts and power failures, but this night it’s a little different. The streets are as dark as they’ve ever been, but police cars scour them, sirens piercing the night. In front of her a newsstand is in flames, burning to the ground. As she rides home in the colectivo, she sees other newsstands burn while stores with broken windows are being robbed. She’s never seen newsstands on fire before.

  She goes back to the apartment to look for Sam. The place is pitch black, and she is surprised to find him not there. When she lights a candle, she finds instead a note on the kitchen table. It reads, “This is some vacation. If you want to join me, I’ll be at the Poc-Na on Isla Mujeres.” Sam knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be a vacation. Victoria spends the night alone in the dark, waiting for Sam to return, but he doesn’t. A few times in the night she thinks she hears a sound in the hallway, and she jumps up, shouting, “Sam? Is that you?” In the morning, when the sunlight comes in, she feels better. She is surprised that he actually had the nerve to leave, but in the daylight it doesn’t really worry her so much. She figures she’ll catch up with him back home.

  The next afternoon Victoria has to go to the embassy to get her visa renewed. She’s also trying to get a pass to go into the sierra, even though she knows that the sierra isn’t part of her assignment at all. As she walks by, there is a demonstration in front of the embassy, and she stops to watch it. About a hundred students carry banners. Some wear costumes. One is the Big Bad Wolf with U.S.A. on his chest, gobbling a basket of goodies labeled CENTRAL AMERICA. Another is Uncle Sam, but as a skeleton. As cars pass, the drivers honk. At first she thinks they are honking because the students are blocking traffic, but the honking is too rhythmic, too systematic. It is almost like tribal drums she once heard on the Honduran border.

  She goes into the embassy, where the embassy people are walking around with their hands over their ears. The honking has been going on for a few days. They say it grows louder and louder and the police can’t seem to make it stop. The honking is driving some embassy officials mad. An official she’s been dealing with tells her he is sorry but he cannot get her any special permits and he doesn’t advise her to renew her visa. He says, off the record, “We think it would be better if you leave.” Then he confides in her, “A kind of torpedo, filled with dynamite, was shot into the embassy courtyard yesterday. Didn’t go off, but it could have.” White saliva is in the corners of his mouth as he speaks, and his hands tremble.

  In the evening she decides she needs to find Ramón. She goes to his usual places. She goes through Miraflores and down in front of Harry’s. It’s too early for him to return to his sand dune. He’d still be working the streets. He is, in fact, near Harry’s, begging for money. He is dirtier than usual. His hair is matted, his clothes shredded. He clasps his scorpion close to his heart. She waves him over and he comes, smiling, showing her a fistful of money he’s already begged that night. “You’re a mess,” she says.

  “Nobody gives me a thing if I’m clean,” he answers with a laugh.

  “What’s going on,” she asks, somewhat somberly.

  “Same as always,” he replies, taking her arm. He points to the hill that overlooks the city, the hill where the police won’t go. The night before, he tells her, he saw torches in the shape of a hammer and sickle. “Only this time it’s a little bit more.”

  Then he says, “I have to talk to you, but not here.” He takes her by the arm and leads her down the street to a block where some of the light has been restored. It is a gray, cloudy night, and great humidity hangs in the air. He leans his face close to hers and whispers, “When you get back home,” he says, “you’re going to tell your paper about all of this.”

  She nods. She tells him she’s going to tell her paper about all of it.

  Then he says, “Listen, something is going to happen here. Something very big.”

  “What? What’s going to happen?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not sure. It’s just that there’s been a lot of talk. You should leave,” he tells her.

  She thanks him for the warning. “Sam left,” she tells him.

  Ramón smiles. He is just a boy, no more than fifteen. He reaches up and cups his hands around her face. He holds her face in his hands and runs his hands over her cheeks. She feels as if he is looking at something as distant and bright as the moon, but it’s just her face. She feels the calluses on his hands; they’re coarse, like animal paws. He puts his mouth close against hers. “Take me with you,” he says. “When you leave”—his mouth is very close to hers and she can feel his breath—“when you leave, take me.”

  She stares into his eyes and he stares back into hers. His eyes are bright and filled with a kind of fire, which she realizes is coming from the streetlight behind her, but they give him an unreal light. He grips his hands tighter around her head and she shakes her head in his hands. He brings his lips to hers. His lips feel chapped, but his mouth is wet and warm. Victoria pulls back. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t take you with me.”

  She starts to explain, but he steps back. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and walks away.

  The next evening Victoria goes for a massage at the baths. The masseuse rubs hot oil and salt on her hands and tells her that she had to flee Argentina ten years ago and now she thinks she’ll have to leave again. Victoria’s muscles seem to stiffen more and more, no matter how much the masseuse tells her to relax. She has her hands pressed firmly around Victoria’s neck when the lights go off. Victoria thinks of the picture of the hanging dogs Ramón showed her.

  She dresses in the dark and heads out into the night, looking for him. He will tell her what’s going on. She wanders the streets, looking for him, but she doesn’t find him and she can’t find a cab to take her to his sand dune. She notices that this time, for some reason, the city seems darker. It is strange that it’s so quiet. There are no cars honking, no sirens piercing the night. There is no smell of burning nor the sound of shouting. It’s too quiet, she thinks. It’s as quiet as a country road in Vermont. A city this size should never be that quiet, and certainly not after bombs have gone off. The people who walk the streets do not look afraid, but their faces are dark and quiet as the night.

  That night Victoria drinks a glass of brandy to help
her sleep. She lets a candle burn and some time in the night she feels the candle go out. Cold air blows down her neck. As she moves in and out of sleep, she thinks someone is touching her hair. She dreams someone is putting his lips to her cheek. Her legs feel a chill. When she wakes at dawn, stretching like someone who has just made love, she realizes she has no covers on. Except for her T-shirt, she is naked. As she reaches for the covers, she feels the draft from the open window. She sees her clothes, lying all over the floor. It takes her another moment to assess the situation. Her eyes scan the room, looking for something, but she’s not sure what. It takes a while longer for it to sink in. Her camera is gone from the top of the dresser. So is all her film.

  She dresses quickly and hails a cab to take her to the sand dune. Her heart pounds as the taxi zips through the deserted streets where no lights shine. She climbs the dune, up ten rows, and across four. She walks along the row where his house is, past the sick people, past the dog biting at his testicles, past the man with no hands who lost them for love. She walks back and forth but doesn’t find Ramón’s house of straw.

  Victoria retraces her steps, certain this is the right dune because the old woman with the blind child was selling her mangoes at the foot of it. She’s certain she counted ten rows up and over four. What she does find is a young woman with two small children, living inside a house of straw where Ramón’s should have been. Or maybe it was Ramón’s house. She can’t tell; they all look alike.

  She asks the woman about him and the woman laughs. She’s fat, with missing teeth, and she holds out a withered hand, asking for money. Victoria gives her the change in her pocket and the woman points across the dunes, into the sierra, but from where Victoria is standing, all she can see is more dunes. Dust settles on her skin. She doesn’t wipe it away.

  Summer Share

  THE HOUSE is the same as I remember it. Still white and set back from the road. The pink and purple rhododendrons still flower, first the pink, then the purple. I go into the back porch and find the key, which is in the same place where we’ve left it, under the second flower pot. It always seemed like such an obvious place that no thief would look there. I am the first to arrive, and it is my job to open the house.

  When I walk in, my first weekend this summer, I can tell that someone else has recently been here. A cup of coffee sits in the sink, and when I go upstairs to put down my things, there is the imprint of a body on my bed. I take the same bed as last year and the year before that and before that. The bed I shared with Robert. I smooth out the imprint on my bed, which feels almost cold. It is not Robert’s. It is as if an old woman or a child has lain down here. Or perhaps a dog. But a dog wouldn’t make coffee for itself.

  By the time I return from the fish store, Marilyn and Jed are sitting in the lawn chairs, sipping lemonade. Jed is talking about Sally, the woman he was with in the house last year. “She wasn’t anything like Francesca,” Jed says. “Was she, Patsy?” Nobody in my whole life except Jed calls me Patsy. Though I’ve tried for the past three summers to have him call me Patricia, he won’t. I’ve learned to live with this as I’ve learned to live with other things in the house.

  Cindy arrives a little later and goes to work on the garden. It’s really her garden, even though we’ve all tried at times to lend a hand. Cindy planned how much we could plant and cut the garden back almost to the potato field. She’s the one who put the marigolds between the rows and who empties the dishes of beer we leave out to kill the slugs.

  Cindy gets the hose and begins to go to work. It’s a week since anyone has done anything, and yet in the middle of her weeding she pauses. “The garden’s been weeded,” she says. “Somebody weeded it.”

  “Naw,” Jed says, “you just did an extra good job last weekend.”

  “I don’t know.” Cindy sticks her finger in the soil. “It’s been watered too.”

  “The guy who cuts the lawn probably did it,” I suggest.

  She tucks the hose under a zucchini plant. “I think I’d like to be a horticultural therapist.”

  “What’s that?” Jed says. “You help the plants work out their growth problems, need for space and attention?”

  Cindy looks at him and frowns. “You’re a jerk. You help people work out their problems through working with plants. It’s very nurturing.”

  “Must be a big field.” Jed laughs. Nobody gets it for a few minutes. Then we groan. Jed and I go into the kitchen to start dinner. He opens the fish I’ve bought and sniffs it, holding the fish up to the light. “What’s this?”

  “Flounder,” I say, watching him stick his nose into the fish.

  “Flounder should be gray, not blue. It’s spoiled.”

  I shrug. I did take my time getting back. I took the long way, past the horse farms near the beach, the way we always liked to go. “They said it was fresh.”

  “Stinks.” Jed is a bit of a gourmet, but he’ll make do. He washes the fish and rubs it carefully with lemon and garlic. It still smells fishy and now some of it has turned from blue to a suspect shade of green. “We won’t tell them,” he mutters. “They’ll never notice.”

  Arthur comes in time for dinner, and we’re all a little disappointed. Arthur is a chain smoker and he never lets a meal go by without getting into a heated discussion about U.S. imperialism. Arthur is planning a trip to Nicaragua, and none of us is trying to dissuade him from going. Arthur has brought his girlfriend, Angeline. This is totally unexpected, though he swears he cleared it with Jed. Jed is in charge of guests, and all guests must be cleared.

  My room has always been my room, the large master bedroom in the front, but then I always shared that room with Robert. We liked that room because it had bigger windows and was far away from the bathroom. It’s true you have to pass through the big bedroom to get to the little bedroom, so there’s not much privacy, but we managed.

  “I guess I’ll move into the little room,” I offer.

  But Arthur won’t hear of it. “No, it’s your room.” He holds up the schedule as if it were the Bill of Rights. “We’ll stick to our schedule.”

  “I really don’t care,” I go on, but he won’t hear of it. Then I think of it. “Someone’s slept on top of my bed.”

  Jed shrugs. “Maybe someone stayed out last week.”

  “No one stayed out,” I say; I know because scheduling is my task.

  “And the garden’s been weeded,” Cindy mentions.

  “Maybe it was Goldilocks.” Arthur giggles.

  “And there was a cup of coffee in the sink.”

  “Well, that could’ve been left,” Jed begins. But I cut in: “It was fresh coffee.”

  “I’ll talk to the realtor,” Marilyn says, since she always deals with the realtor, and we leave it at that.

  We sit down to a candlelit dinner of flounder and pasta. Arthur has surprised us by bringing four kinds of pie. Blueberry, cherry, rhubarb, and peach. He lines them all up on the sideboard beneath the picture of the woman who lived in the house fifty years ago. Her eyes follow us around in the dining room as if she’s making sure we’re taking care of things.

  Arthur is plump and smokes between courses; Cindy waves the smoke away with her hand. “I don’t think people should be allowed to smoke in the house,” she says, but everyone ignores her. Arthur’s smoking drives Cindy mad, but we can’t do anything about it. He’s got seniority over everyone but me, so unless we all decide to get rid of him next year, there isn’t much we can do about him.

  Cindy’s the one who’s allergic to everything. She made us purchase spring water because she says she’s allergic to the pesticides that have sunk into the water table. She won’t let me put Open Pit Barbecue Sauce on the special barbecued chicken I make almost every Saturday. I have to cook her chicken on a separate part of the grill, but sometimes I cheat and give her a piece with Open Pit on it, and so far she’s never been able to tell the difference.

  “So, how d’ya like the fish?” Jed asks Arthur.

  “Delish,” Arthur r
eplies, pulling a bone from his mouth.

  Jed looks at me and winks. “You like flounder.” Arthur nods and keeps eating. Jed starts to talk about how when he lived in Mexico his maid made this great fish with garlic and green olives.

  Arthur begins to boil. “Hope you paid her minimum.”

  “I did,” Jed says, “for there.”

  “What’s that? Two cents a day?” Jed is an account executive for a large insurance firm, and though he’s a good cook, he is, according to Arthur, a lousy person. Not that he isn’t a nice person. He’s your average nice, considerate person, and that’s all that really matters for a summer share. But Jed has no conscience, according to Arthur, who works for a public interest law firm. Whenever they are out on the same weekend, we just hope we can get through dinner without an argument.

  We can’t. They begin to argue. Jed says he was giving a poor person a job, and Arthur says so do multinationals in the Third World. Cindy can’t stand conflict, so she begins to do the dishes. I talk to Marilyn about an auction being held the next day. But then I decide I am tired and want to go to sleep. “Excuse me,” I say, “but do you want me to move into the small room?”

  Arthur won’t hear of it, though Angeline bumps him in the arm. “We’ll sleep outside,” Arthur offers. “We’ve got our sleeping bags.” Angeline doesn’t want to sleep outside; that’s clear. She makes a joke about getting AIDS from mosquitoes, which no one thinks is very funny.

  “I hate it when people sleep outside,” Cindy says as she clears the table, but she doesn’t say why.

  I go upstairs to go to bed and find that the imprint on the bed is still there, though I distinctly remember having smoothed it out.

  There’s a bird who lives in the roof somewhere, and he drives me crazy. He makes a terrible sound that no bird should make and he wakes me at five in the morning. I’ve heard him before, but this morning he seems louder than usual. His sound isn’t a chirp or a song. Rather, it’s a relentless call, repeated over and over.