The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

  Beverly knows Robert and Andrea are watching her ignore Doug, but she doesn’t care. Now that she has decided to leave the copy center and go to school in public health, she can imagine herself working in a center for disease control. She knows Doug is exasperated. He stands next to her while she copies an entire book on how to grow a vegetable garden in a city apartment. “Don’t be discouraged,” one page reads. “You can grow fine tomato plants right in your window boxes.”

  Doug points to the line. “Isn’t that stupid?” He laughs. “You couldn’t see out the window then.”

  Beverly doesn’t say a word. Finally Doug says, “All right, so maybe I am a jerk, but I’m trying to apologize.”

  She turns to him. “You are a jerk and I don’t want your apology. I don’t want to talk to you or see you. Just leave me alone.”

  When Doug walks away, Steven puts his machine on automatic. “Hey, Bev.” He speaks loudly, hoping Doug will hear. “Can I see you tonight?”

  She looks at Steven’s small, frail body, the dark beard that hides his pockmarked face. He’s not so terrible, she thinks, but she just can’t stand him. “No,” Beverly mumbles, “I’ve got plans.”

  Steven turns away in a huff, and later, when Beverly is leaving, he hands her an envelope. “Open this when you get home,” he says to her. “It’ll explain everything.”

  Beverly breathes a sigh of relief when she walks into her apartment. She puts a Weight Watchers veal with peppers TV dinner into the oven at 425° with the foil peeled back. She runs a bath. She calls her service and there are no messages. She gives herself a face sauna with honeysuckle facial herbs. She pours herself a glass of wine and gently eases her way into the bathtub.

  Beverly often reads in the tub, so she dries her hands on a towel and opens the envelope Steven gave her as she left work. She opens it slowly, expecting to find a long letter explaining why she should not care about Doug but about him. Instead, what she finds is more to the point. What she finds is a color Xerox of a portion of the male anatomy. At the bottom he has written, “You don’t know what you’re missing, baby.”

  The next morning Beverly walks into the copy center and screams at Steven. She holds up the color Xerox so that everyone in the store can see. “What is this? Is this your idea of a joke?”

  Andrea is waiting on a customer, and she turns around. Doug is making copies at two machines, and he is stunned. Steven tries to grab the page out of her hand. “Of course it’s a joke. What’s your problem?”

  Beverly pins the Xerox to the bulletin board behind her. The place where she puts the pin makes all the men in the store wince. “This is no joke!” Beverly shouts. “You’re sick. I should call the police.”

  Doug smiles. He has never seen Beverly so passionate, so vital. Robert is not smiling. He rips the Xerox off the board. “The customers are aware of what is going on,” he says to them. “You’re all fired if you don’t get back to work.”

  “You should fire him!” Beverly shouts. “He’s sick.”

  Steven turns off his machine. “You can’t even take a joke. I’ll be back later.” He slides out beneath the oak counter.

  Just then Mrs. Grimsley comes in, checking numbers to make certain no one has butted in front of her. Everyone in the store is upset about Beverly’s fight with Steven. Robert is especially upset, because he is afraid he will lose business. When Mrs. Grimsley comes in, he decides to humor her. “How’s my Billy today?” she says. She is an old woman with dark sunken eyes who probably hasn’t long to live.

  Robert reaches across the counter. “How’ya doing, Mom?” He pats her hand. “Boy, have I missed you.”

  Mrs. Grimsley looks first stunned, then angry. She pulls her hand away. “Don’t you call me that. You have no right. Only my son calls me Mom.” And she walks out of the store, never to return.

  Beverly also walks out of the store, but she returns a few hours later. When she does, she finds a purple geranium sitting on the 2200. She hopes it is from Doug, but she knows from the handwriting it is from Steven. She opens the card and reads, “Please accept this geranium for your apartment as an apology. I am sorry if I upset you.” Beverly feels bad about having shouted at him. Sometimes she thinks, working here isn’t so bad.

  Because she took time off in the afternoon, Beverly agrees to stay late to finish up a doctoral dissertation. Doug decides to work late with her. It is dark out as they complete their jobs at different machines. They put on the radio and listen to a program of all Sinatra. Sinatra is singing “I Did It My Way.”

  They turn down the bright fluorescent lights, which make them look pale green, and now the lighting is amber. Doug works on a screenplay about corruption in the police department. He reads parts of it out loud to Beverly. They agree that it sounds like all the police films they’ve ever seen.

  Beverly is making seven copies of a dissertation on the abandonment/castration complex in men and women. As she is completing it, Doug comes up behind her. He puts his hands on her shoulders and kisses the back of her neck. He turns her to him. The green lights of the machines flash on and off. The amber lights are soothing. He takes her in his arms and pins her to the machine as he kisses her. She presses her body against Doug’s and remembers what it was that made her like him in the first place. She feels the even, rhythmic pulsing of the 2200 against her spine. She prays it won’t break down.

  The Banana Fever

  NONA does not have long to live, they say. It must be true, because she sits on the porch all day, gazing toward the jungle. Her fingers clutch the edge of the rocker or begin pointing frantically in all directions. She must see things out there. But now she is reduced to skin and bones. Her face is wrinkled and dry, and she has the faint odor of urine about her. And when I lean close to try to understand what she is muttering, her breath smells like cattle breath. Days, I sit at her side, reading to her from the newspapers that Lucinda brings once a week from the city. Though nearly mute and paralyzed, her eyes widen at certain words. Fire, revolution, execution. She must remember when she hears those words, but then she has lived almost a century here. This house, with the blue bougainvillea that stretches across the roof, has been her only empire. And her lands that extend to the edge of the jungle, to the point where the banana growers dwell.

  Once a day Dr. Márquez comes and takes Nona’s pulse, looks into her eyes, taps her knees. He is the one who tells me she is dying. Sometimes he says it standing beside her, and I watch her eyes widen. She is old, he says, letting his hand fall on her silver hair. He too stares out to the place where the banana growers dwell. Blue and red parrots flutter back and forth through the coconut palms. Toucans call and orange beaks are seen as they fly past. Lucinda brings out the lemonade and slices of meat on bread with butter. She puts the tray down and pours lemonade into the glass that makes a cracking sound as the cold liquid pours in.

  “You waste your days, child,” Lucinda says. “Tell her, Doctor. She wastes her days sitting here beside an old woman. Here she can learn nothing.”

  Though I have trouble remembering the specific events, and though it has been so long that Nona has been confined to that chair, I knew her once by the rustling of her skirts. Always blue or yellow taffeta skirts, even in summer. She would move through the house and I always knew where she was, and she was never far. And at night I knew her by her deep sighs in the dark corridors of the house when she would come to my bedside and shake her head, wondering what to do about me. One day a messenger rode to the house. He handed her a note, which she read and tore into tiny pieces. She served him dinner. Then she went upstairs and put on black, all black, and she moaned in corners quietly to herself, and never again did her skirts rustle or did she come and stand at my bedside at night, shaking her head. And she never spoke Jorge’s name and he never came home that Easter, so that was how Lucinda and I knew he had been killed. But Nona never said.

  It is siesta time now and the doctor has left. He always comes just in time for some lunch and leaves for
his siesta. The village is quiet; all the shades are drawn. We live in this house without men, and all of the women, even Margarita, sleep alone in their beds. Sometimes they return. They come down at night and sit around the kitchen table. Once a year or every two years. I am allowed only to look at them and then I must go to bed. They are like the cowboys I have seen in the Westerns that play sometimes in the town nearby. Lucinda says it is a sin, what has been happening. It is siesta time now and I sit on the porch beside Nona. Everywhere there is the scent of bananas. When I sleep, I can smell the bananas, and when I have nightmares, they are filled with the tarantulas that hide in the bunches. Santiago has a scar on his back where a tarantula on the banana plantation bit him and the foreman took a knife and dug into the flesh to remove the venom. I have seen tarantulas walk out from under the porch when the sun goes down. Nona sits on the porch, under the awning. The town is white in the glow of the porch, and everything is a brilliant white, as if on fire, and there is the scent of bananas. But during siesta time we no longer hear the sound of chopping.

  The Indians are everywhere. They speak Quechua and Aymara and they have come down from the Andes. They have taught me to speak their languages. They tell me stories about how creatures from another planet named Lake Titicaca, “the jaguar pounces.” About the chain of gold that reached from the Island of the Sun to the Island of the Moon and was severed and dropped into the sea, never to be found, when the Spaniards arrived. They tell me of Atahuelpa, who offered a room filled with gold in exchange for his life, and when his men produced the gold, filling the great hall, the Spaniards tied him to four horses and sent them running in four different directions. Since then, the Indians say, they have been docile in the face of the conquerors. They perform their chores and work steadily all day long at the banana plantation, but underneath I know they are restless. They are tired of being servants. I have attended their ceremonies where they ask the sun to bring back the old ways. They have these ceremonies deep in the jungle at the sites of old cities. The cities are in ruin, overgrown with moss and thick lianas. Someday this town we live in will be just as overgrown. Already it is in a state of decay. When I used to ask Nona about my parents, she would shake her head and sigh. Poor child, she used to say. When I asked the Indians at one of their ceremonies, they told me that my parents were a swamp and I was born of their mud the way all frogs and natural creatures are born. That is how I know that I am illegitimate, because they have invented a myth for my benefit.

  I have often wondered why I am here. Why I was left behind when the others went. “Because Nona needed you,” Lucinda said. Lucinda remembers almost everything that ever happened around here. She is almost as old as Nona and a Quechua. “Long ago,” Lucinda says as we sit on the porch in the shade, “some men came to this part of the forest. They brought machetes and guns. They drew lines on the ground with their machetes and made borders. The next thing we knew there was a road that seemed to go nowhere, but on that road machines came; they puffed and the Indians all believed that it was the end of the world because monsters had returned. And then they planted. It has never been the same since.” And when I ask her what it was like before, her eyes grow dim. “It was quiet,” she says, “always quiet, like at siesta time, and the men were home.”

  Miguel arrives in the afternoon. No one knows where he came from or how long he will stay but only that he has come home for a while. Margarita rushes downstairs and embraces him. Tears fill her eyes. “It won’t be long,” he says to her.

  He kisses everyone hello. He looks at Nona. “I don’t remember her being so bad,” he says. He holds her face in his hands, but she does not seem to recognize him. I stand in the doorway, watching him move slowly from room to room. He closes the shades. He looks around. He has grown suspicious, it seems. He asks if they have been here to inquire after him. We shake our heads. They stopped coming long ago, we tell him. They used to come once, twice, a week, but we did not know anything and if we had, we would not have told them. Miguel travels through the house like a hunted dog. He is careful; he stays close to the corners and keeps his eyes on the exits. He is larger than I remember him. I remember him being shorter and plump, but now he smells of sweat and his body is covered with hair. He has grown dark and sullen. He is only seven years older than I, but he seems as old as Nona and Lucinda. It was two years ago that he rode off. Messages came from time to time. Perhaps more were sent, but they were intercepted. The messages were always short and they never told us where he was or when he would return. Once a messenger rode to the house on horseback and told us that Miguel was dead, and Margarita cried the entire day until the next day, when we found out from the priest it was not true. It had been a trick for us to lead them to him.

  “So, little cousin,” he says, “you’ve grown up, I see.” I blush and move back into a corner of the room. Margarita stares at me. It seems as if it is the first time she has ever looked at me. At lunch we all sit down together at the table. Nona sits at the head and Lucinda feeds her. Food drips onto her chin. She does not speak; she only stares. Since her last stroke, she gives no sign of knowing any of us, except for the slight dilation of her eyes that comes from time to time. Miguel sits across from me. Absently, Margarita runs her fingers over his arm.

  “So,” Lucinda says, “when will you marry?” Margarita lowers her eyes. Everyone knows that Lucinda is often thoughtless about the questions she asks.

  “When this is finished,” Miguel replies. His answer to that question has always been the same. Always, when this is finished. It is four years now that Margarita has waited. She never seems to tire of waiting. It suits her, delays, hesitations, virtuous waits. Margarita lives for the day when Miguel will marry her the way she lives for the hereafter. It is the certainty of the coming of both that allows her to enjoy the waiting. Nona stares at Miguel and I believe she must see him now. Her eyes roll nervously in their sockets and she smiles a thin smile. “Grandma,” Miguel says, observing her changed expression. “Does she know me, Lucinda?”

  Lucinda shrugs her shoulders. She hopes that Nona does not recognize this man, who for her is a bandit, who eats at her table with his gun and holster strapped to his waist, bullets crisscrossed on his chest. His skin is hardened from the sun and the rain and he looks older than all of us. Around his neck, he wears a small charm that I have not seen before and that Margarita begins to touch. She fondles the charm and I can see that it is a gold banana.

  “What’s this,” she asks, tugging on it. She has never seen the charm before, and because I know Margarita, I know that she is worried that another woman gave it to him. Miguel brushes her hand away. He reaches for the lamb shank on his plate and picks it up. He bites down and slowly chews the meat. “What is it,” Margarita repeats and Miguel tucks the charm into his shirt.

  “It’s to keep the banana fever away,” he says.

  Margarita is afraid because she has heard about the killer bees and she has heard that they are moving north. Two hundred miles south, they killed a man and two cattle. One hundred miles south, they killed a horse and a child. They are aggressive and they attack whatever moves. They attack in a swarm, and five stings can kill a man. On the porch, Margarita sits beside Nona while Miguel sleeps upstairs. He has been sleeping since he finished lunch on the previous day. We all agree that we have never seen anyone sleep so hard or so long. While she sits on the porch, her eyes scan the hills, searching for the killer bees that she has not stopped talking about since Lucinda heard new’reports in the town this morning. I know that in her mind she sees the swarms coming out of the hill, attacking her, Nona, Miguel. While Nona rocks, Margarita tells her about the bees and where they are coming from and what they can do.

  All the time she talks, she does her lace work. She has been working on the lace for her wedding veil for three years. The dress she completed two years ago. It took her four years. When the dress and veil are completed, she says, she will marry Miguel. Even if it is not yet time according to him. Sometimes whe
n I watch her, with her pitch-black hair and pale skin, she looks as if she were making her shroud. It has taken so long. First there was the weaving, the blocking, the cutting. It is as if when she completes this gown and its veil, she will die. The material is so white and clean and she has been working on it for years now, so I believe she will be buried in it. She will die as she came into this world. As pure and white as the dress she has worked on steadily these past six years. The dress is so white and Margarita so pale that they all seem to blend into the town, which during siesta time is white as if on fire.

  She works slowly today and I can tell that she is anxious because Miguel is home and because Lucinda has told her more stories about the killer bees. As she works on the veil, she pierces her thumb with the needle. Blood oozes from the thumb and a droplet touches the lace. Margarita screams. She screams not because the lace is spoiled—she knows it will wash right out—but because it is a bad omen. She dips it in a glass of cold water at her side and it leaves no stain, but still she cries. “I will have to make another one,” she says, wiping her tears with her handkerchief. “Look, Nona, I have to make another. This one will bring us bad luck.” And then she begins to cry again because of the blood and because of Miguel and because Nona, they say, is finally dying. She cries because she has pricked her finger and she is afraid she will never marry. But mostly she cries because the heat of siesta time stings her flesh like thorns.

  Margarita stands with her ear pressed to the door, listening. “If he goes,” she mutters, “if he goes this time . . .” Her voice trails off, filled with her sadness. If he goes, what. Won’t she wait as she always has? Margarita’s waiting is like Nona’s being alive: something that seems to be a fact of life, something that will always be here, like the coconut palms and the blue bougainvillea. Santiago leaves the kitchen and we are able to look inside. They are seated in a circle. The room is dark and they have set up a shortwave. Impulses come through the short-wave, a steady beeping sound from somewhere in the jungle. They are out there, I hear them whispering. I hear the beeps and Antonio is writing them down, deciphering the code.