by Chris Lynch
Didn’t matter. I wasn’t feeling it. Wasn’t feeling anything, not even the rain doing its best to weigh me down.
PART TWO
LEAVING HOME
bloodletting
Something inside me popped. There was already a weepy leak that opened up inside me around the time I made the decision to go far away from home and everything I knew. But then, the night before I was leaving, Ray got himself worked up well beyond any state of melancholy, any abject dam-broken-open suffering I ever saw before. He paced around the house endlessly, noisily. He kept talking to people who were not there: Mom, Mary and Fran, even me. I was there, all right, in the house, but not in the rooms where he was having conversations with me. And even if I was there, in the same building with the man, I wasn’t there, in the same space as him.
“Go to bed!” I finally yelled from my bed, when I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t take it any longer.
“Go to Norfolk!” he yelled back, just in case there was any confusion about what was standing between him and sanity.
I could not feel guilty about this decision. I had been over it every which way, and it was the right move, every which way. If I dared roll it around in my head any longer, I would wind up just as demented as he was acting. I imagined us like a couple of those robotic vacuum cleaners, blindly patrolling the rooms, sucking up every particle of family history off these floors and crashing into each other over and over and over and over.
Breaking point, camel’s back, no return came at 4:47 a.m. I could tell the very instant that Ray lost consciousness after his mania of pacing and haunting his own house to the limit of his endurance. You could tell that, in a house like this, in a family like ours, when somebody finally went unconscious, even if they had stopped making noise an hour earlier. The breathing of the walls changed, and you just knew.
And when I knew it finally, I got up. I grabbed my full duffel bag, and I slipped through the house, between those walls, out through the front door quiet as a cat in slippers.
Like a coward. Like a reverse home invasion.
“What’re you doing?” came the big embarrassing bellow at my back. It felt extra conspicuous tearing its way through the neighborhood through the stillness of the predawn.
I tried to shush him by waving my hands downward the way traffic cops would tell you to slow down.
“You were just gonna leave like that? Keir? Like that?” He hadn’t adjusted his volume at all. Not that I had use for any of these neighbors anyway, but I was embarrassed all the same. Then I was embarrassed about being embarrassed, and then I was just fucking irritated.
“Just go back inside, Ray, please,” I shouted at him because he was seeing me off, wishing me luck and bon voyage in his own style, which involved great gales of noisy crying and spectacle-izing himself with such determination I had to switch him off, turn my face toward fresher air, and just get on with it. “You’re free,” I called, hurrying away from him, doing a shit job of making my voice sound jovial. “Go and have fun now, empty nester. You earned it.”
“I did!” he yelled back, doing a shit job of making either one of us feel better about this.
Every single particle of my existence, he took care of. It felt like murder now, what I was doing. Leaving him bloody in the street.
It felt necessary, though. I only wished I had the skills to do it without butchering the whole thing like I was doing.
But I lacked those skills, and who knew what others as well. I had to start figuring everything out. I had to start doing things right, which meant doing things differently.
“Keir,” I heard my old man call out, and knowing him, he was going to tell me I forgot something and needed to go back for it.
And that was the first thing I would be doing differently. The old me would have answered that call, but this one would not be going back.
Removing yourself from your life sounded easier than it felt once it got started. I didn’t doubt what I had to do, but I did doubt whether I was man enough to do it. From the moment Ray caught up to me fleeing the scene of the crime, I had the sensation like I’d been shot or something. I had a pain start stabbing me in the left side, around the kidney, and the faster I walked toward the bus station, the deeper it jabbed me. I kept touching back there, feeling and looking to see if anything was bleeding out of me, that’s how real it felt. By the time I got to the station, I had downshifted from power walk to stroll to shuffle, trying to appease the stabbing, jabbing pain. And I was favoring my side, hunched forward and left, so plainly that a kid held the door for me like I was some kind of old duffer. He wasn’t more than two or three years younger than me.
But he held that big heavy glass door, and I thanked him, and then I was through and officially on Greyhound’s ground.
Greyhound’s ground, and westward bound, was what I was thinking as I heaved my duffel into the belly of the bus. The pain had gotten bearable as I mounted the stairs, but not so bearable it would let me ignore it. I felt again at my side, certain that somehow I had gotten myself punctured. Nothing on my hand, nothing on my shirt. Nothing. I continued checking the spot as I went into the small, stale shop to get a couple of things for the ride. I did not appear to leave any trail entering or leaving the shop, and told myself how stupid this whole thing was and to grow the fuck up right now.
But in my seat waiting to depart, I scanned the terminal floor all over for any trace. Like a murderer leading the cops to his hideout by the trail of his own blood.
The puncture was going to have to seal itself rapidly, because this was the first leg of what would be three days, five different buses, forty stations, and two thousand miles of American experience that I sorely needed to experience. The very last thing I wanted was to leave a trail for any posse—real or otherwise—to follow all the way back to me. So if it wasn’t going to heal, it might as well just go the other way and bleed me right out, because that would be a more tolerable outcome than being found.
I was done with that guy. I didn’t want anybody to find him.
solitaire
Springfield, and a young woman gets on.
When the journey began, we set sail with maybe ten of the bus’s fifty-plus seats occupied. Which was a surprise to me but probably should not have been at this prebreakfast time of day. Stopping at Worcester doubled our population, and Springfield is doing even better, filling us up with bodies at the expense of breathable air. Although nobody knows or cares, I’m still embarrassed that I thought Greyhound buses were all going to be cool and quiet, roomy and airy, based on the pathetic sample size that was my life.
Still, folks were largely groggy and muted until the young woman joins us, with her whole kitchen in a large plastic bag and two little girls clinging to the belt loops of her battleship-gray jeans. It’s hard to tell whether the girls are trying to cling tight to their mom or to keep her pants up for her, but both ideas seem to be good ones. This is a sinewy, carnival-midway-slim woman.
She soldiers on, struggling, banging and crashing her stroller and that giant green trash bag full of clangy noise until she makes it to the driver’s tiny ticket window, where she drops everything on the floor and simply leans forward with her forehead against the Plexiglas.
“Go find seats, girls,” she says without removing herself from the ticket window.
The girls tentatively make their way down the aisle as the driver barks at the woman to get her skinny ass in gear and present her ticket.
Her ass stays right where it is, wherever it is, but she does straighten right up to address the driver. “I prefer ‘narrow,’ ” she says, and I laugh out loud, but I am in a minority. Folks all around start barking at the driver to move, and the driver barks back that nobody is moving till narrow-ass finds her ticket and hands it over. It’s all getting tense now as the woman gets down on her knees to start rummaging through that great big Dumpster of a bag, which does nothing but irritate everybody on the now sweaty and angry bus.
I jump up and hea
d toward the front, passing the girls on the way.
“Here,” I say, reaching and taking the stroller from her. Because a gentleman doesn’t just sit there and watch. I must be the only gent on board then, because nobody else even offered. It’s a stroller that’s seen a lot of duty as a bumper car, and so it won’t stay folded up. It’s also no use to the five- or six-year-old kids she’s got with her, so I wonder what it’s even doing here, but I will just wonder that to myself.
She looks up at me for a couple of seconds, expressing nothing with her voice or her face, then dives back into the critical rummaging.
Just before I get back to my seat, after stowing the stroller in the cramped overhead space, a great cheer erupts from the majority of my fellow passengers. For an instant I actually believe they are doing it for me and my gallantry, my stowing ability, but it is obviously directed past me, to the front, where someone has located a bus ticket at the bottom of a big bag and against all expectations. The bus’s brakes hiss, we jerk into motion, and I have to grab a seat back to keep from falling on my face and definitely getting my own round of applause.
“Hey,” I say when I get right and catch on. “What are you doing?” I am addressing the girls, who have occupied my seat and the formerly vacant one next to it. They do not acknowledge me, but continue eating and looking out the window.
“What are you doing?” the mother asks, jabbing a finger into my painful side.
“That’s my seat,” I say, pointing at the window seat, where one girl is now willfully kicking at the seat in front.
“They’re all the same, mister. Go find another one.”
She throws herself down into the aisle seat in front of the girls. In the window seat next to her is a guy wearing a full Cleveland Cavaliers outfit, tank top, shorts, socks, headband, and he should have known better fifteen years and forty pounds ago. He got on in Worcester and started snoring before the bus even pulled away.
“There are no other window seats,” I protest. She looks straight up at me, expressionless as ever. “What are you, four?”
She has really sizable hair. Her face is rigid, but I can see traces of who might be in there, and I think I may have known her. I think I may have gone to grade school with her. But the girl I knew didn’t have a nose that took a severe left-hand turn halfway down the bridge. This nose has known knuckles.
“Actually, I’m the same age as you,” I say.
“My age is none of your damn business,” she snaps, and turns front again.
“Fine, what about my seat?” I demand.
The driver’s voice crackles to something like life over the speaker. “Please take a seat, sir,” he calls out.
“I had a seat,” I say, pointing.
“If you do not take a seat, I am going to have to stop the bus.”
My fellow travelers turn sharply on me. There are growls and worse, and I lean down close to the woman, as if anyone would think this is going to pass for sitting.
“I am going to sit in that seat,” I say.
“Right,” she says, loudly, theatrically, effectively. “I knew it. Another pervert.”
“Don’t say that,” I plead, waving her down.
The Cleveland Cav bursts up out of his seat, and I think I’m about to get a beating. He snarls, climbs over the woman roughly, and then pushes right past me. He stomps toward the back of the bus and throws himself hard into a seat near the bathroom.
“He doesn’t care that you’re a perv,” she says. “Nobody does. He just can’t stand the noise and the kicking and what all. Happens all the time, so I’m used to having an extra seat, but I will let you have it if you sit down and shut up.”
I am already leaning to climb past her into the window seat when she scoots over and snags it. “Y’snooze, y’lose,” she says as I reluctantly sit in the aisle seat.
“I didn’t snooze. I was up very early, as a matter of fact. And I got myself a window seat. That one right behind you, where a little lady is right now sitting on my jacket.”
“You’ll get your jacket back,” she sighs, sounding bored with me.
“And my food?”
“What?”
“They’re eating my sandwiches.”
Her face makes its first attempt at expressing itself, and I think she’s going to laugh, before she fights it off. “You complain a lot,” she says, folding her arms, closing her eyes, shutting me out. “It’s no wonder you got no friends.”
That was rude. I am carefully thinking of how I am going to express how appalled I am without making her laugh. But before I can assemble it, my seat back starts thumping. And thump-thump-thumping. And giggling.
I turn to peer through the space between the seats. “Could you not do that, please?”
The thumping stops, the giggling doesn’t. I turn frontward again just in time for the thump-thumping to resume and the stabbing side pain to rise sharply.
I growl and start turning.
“Mister,” the woman says, low and serious, “if you do not leave my girls alone right now, I am going to start screaming and bring holy hell down on your head.”
I work up a wild fury, feel my face flush and my muscles tighten all over, my breath quicken.
And I exhale, uncoil, and settle as low down into my thumping, thumping seat as I can get.
After stewing for several angry miles and realizing these children’s legs were never going to tire, especially since they teamed impressively to trade places every few kicks, I gave up altogether.
“I’m just sorry I didn’t bring you a sandwich too,” I say, unaware whether the woman is asleep under those eyelids or not.
“Next time,” she says.
Her eyes remain closed. Which is good, because I’m staring. She looks just like her. From school. Except for the nose, and the remarkable wiriness. Could be her.
I have no business even thinking this, since the last time I saw the girl, we were twelve. I loved her. She could be in there somewhere, though, behind the nose that I can’t stop staring at. I hope not.
“Are you staring at my fucking nose?” the woman snaps from what looked like a dead sleep. I nearly topple into the aisle with the surprise of it. “Ha!” she says then, covering her mouth with one hand and pointing at me with the other. I have to say, she flips from enraged to amused impressively.
“No,” I say, “I was not, I assure you.”
“You’re staring at it now, though.”
I surely am. For the life of me, I’m glued to the thing now. “I am really sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean anything. I’m just . . .”
“A total rube who’s never been anywhere or seen anything, and so you stare, like you’re invisible and nobody’ll notice.”
“No,” I say, almost happy to be the offended one now.
“No? Sorry, it’s just that you seem like a total rube who’s never been anywhere or seen anything and that’s why you’re socially awkward and friendless.”
She’s really getting under my skin now, making these assumptions and insulting me based on nothing at all.
“And I can understand now why somebody wanted to punch you in the nose.”
I didn’t want to say that. No matter what she had said, that was not something I meant to say, and not something that was okay to say. I’m about to grovel for all I’m worth when she cuts me off by giggling.
“You can understand because you want to punch me in the nose?” she says, leaning a little closer, closer, practically flattening my own stupid nose with hers.
“Absolutely not,” I say in a confession-box whisper.
We stay sort of suspended in each other’s ether for several seconds. I hope my ether doesn’t smell as sour as hers, but it quite possibly might.
“Good,” she says, smiling on. “Glad to hear it.” She gracefully backs away into her space by the window, and I continue watching her, thinking about who she is, where she comes from, how she learned to smile like that when most people would not be smiling.
“You’re amazing,” I say, just as involuntarily as I said that other thing I said.
She laughs, of course. She digs around in an inside pocket of her jacket and pulls out a squat, flat bottle of vodka. As she unscrews the top, she says, “And you are an easily excitable boy.” She tips her head back and takes a short drink off the bottle, then offers it to me.
“Oh, thank you so much,” I say, “but I don’t drink.”
She wobbles her head comically side-to-side-to-side and says, “Why would anybody not take a small sip of kindness off a stranger?”
Fair enough, it is a funny place to start saying no, to a person I’m starting to feel I never want to say no to.
“I’m just not a drinker,” I say, because that is the truth. This me, who slipped off one layer of skin as he left home and stepped onto this westbound bus, is not a drinker. Truth.
“What, you think I’m dirty or something?” she says, and I am halfway into matching her jokey smile when I realize her face is showing no such thing.
So much for new purified me. I tentatively reach over to take the bottle, if she will let me have it. She does, and as her tragic magic smile reappears, I take a swig from her little white spirit of kindness. I lower the bottle and drink in her sweet expression.
“You want me to drink more?” I ask. “Because I’ll drink more if that’ll make you happy.”
“Nope,” she says, snagging the vodka right away from me.
She takes a more sizable slug from the bottle before tucking it away again.
“I take it back,” I say. “I can’t imagine anybody wanting to punch you in the nose.”
She is nestling down into her seat and turning away from me to look out the window or more likely to sleep. “Nobody punched me.”
“Good,” I say, like I have achieved something.
“I just got thrown down some stairs.”
After several seconds of trying, “Oh,” is all I can say.
Which is probably for the best, since even that much provokes a “Shut up now,” in response.