Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  “I can’t believe I’m really going to be crossing the plains,” he says as the door closes with a hiss, the driver shifts gears and the bus begins backing heavily out of the bay. “I feel like a pioneer.” Seconds later, his voice drops. “This is the first time I’ve been this far west and, well, Chicago’s at least a real city; but when you think of what we’re going to have to pass through to get to the coast, it can send a shiver up your spine, don’t you think?”

  Ziggy has already got into the habit of nodding amiably. Lennie was pleased to learn he came from Detroit. “Well, then you know what it’s like to live in a city,” he said. “I guess the idea of all those empty spaces scares me a little.” He laughs nervously. “You know, it’s pretty spooky to think we’ll be traveling through John Wayne country.”

  “I doubt that we’ll run into Geronimo out there,” Ziggy says. Pronouncing the name, he remembers the Indian he encountered on the street in Chicago.

  Lennie lowers his voice. “It’s the cowboys I’m worried about.”

  The guy isn’t putting on an act, Ziggy has already decided. It sure looks as if his seat-mate is genuinely terrified to be traveling through the empty middle of the country to the coast. Why didn’t he fly then and avoid all the hazard of the wild west? Probably for the same reason Ziggy is on this bus, why everyone else here is riding the ’hound: because he doesn’t have the money. Well, they have that in common anyway.

  “Jeez,” Lennie says, leaning closer to whisper, “did you see that soldier who’s sitting right behind the driver? The look he gave me . . . I know exactly what he was thinking: this piece of scum burns American flags and laughs about it. I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with G.I. Joe, I tell you. He and the driver seemed to be whispering something together when I got on, and they just clammed up when they saw me.” His restless eyes search the bus. “Well, I survived the trip from New York even though there were at least a couple of potential serial killers aboard. I mean, judging from their sweet faces and icy stares. And a pair of really grim missionary types in white shirts got on looking like they were part of the Mormon Tabernacle Firing Squad. I don’t know, though, the little old lady who kept coughing into her handkerchief could have been the most dangerous of all of them. I’m sure she had the Black Plague, if not something worse.”

  Ziggy half-listens to all this. It’s apparently enough for Lennie, who seems to feel he’d found a confidant. Jesus, Ziggy thinks, and he’s going all the way to California.

  A little more than an hour into the trip, though, Lennie suddenly interrupts himself and declares, “I’m beat. I haven’t had any sleep for the last three nights,” and in seconds he’s snoring, his head slumped to one side, actually looking at peace for the first time. Ziggy’s more than ready for some peace of his own, now that he can give himself over to the luxury of just looking out the window, not having to respond, not having to pay even minimal attention; and for a time he lets himself be lulled into a pleasant state between sleep and wakefulness during which he moves through space and time without taking either into account. He’s on the island watching Big Al’s white boat nose its way to the dock, there’s some kind of celebration at Connie’s and he’s in the center of it; he’s on the phone with the monsignor, who wants him to be head of the East Side Homeowners’ Association . . .

  Now he’s at the Museum of Science and Industry, on an elevator that’s lowering him and others to the coal mine beneath the streets of Chicago and, amid the chatter and laughter of his fellow tourists, his breath suddenly comes fast, his heart pounds in his chest. This is a museum, he keeps telling himself, everything’s under control; but his head is filled with all those stories his mother used to tell him about her life in Scranton before her family moved to Detroit: the uncles who were trapped in cave-ins, the one who died and the one who was crazy by the time they’d brought him back to the surface; about the underground fires that burned for years, the dirt that never came off the miners’ skin, the fear that was always there. Take it easy, he tells himself, breathing deeply. Everything’s under control.

  All at once he’s jolted awake and for a moment he has no idea where he is. Bathed in panic, he gradually orients himself—he’s on a bus moving west, that much he remembers; but, as he looks at the man sleeping beside him, he’s aware that he hasn’t been able to shake off the chill that he’s brought with him from his dream. He turns to the window and stares at the unfamiliar surroundings. It’s near sunset but the sun is nowhere to be seen. They’re well out of the city by now, even the near suburbs are behind them; and the shape of the land—flat, immense, seemingly endless—has begun to assert itself, making the scattered houses look like pieces from a Monopoly game. The landscape they’re passing through is presided over by brooding skies where enormous pyramids of cloud loom over the flimsy dwellings of humans that emit pinpricks of light. They’re out on the real prairie now, aren’t they, just like the pioneers, as Lennie said. It suddenly occurs to Ziggy that he’s here with a bunch of strangers, headed across the country, on a bus that will carry him through unknown territories—and all at once he’s scared. Why the hell has he put himself into this situation?

  You’re going to pay, that Indian said. Nature is going to take its revenge on him, even though as far as he knows he’s never been within a mile of a buffalo. The guy was certifiable.

  Outside, the huge purple clouds that look like celestial bruises are poised above a landscape that’s incredibly flat and as boundless as the ocean; he finds himself missing the tidy rolling hills around Ann Arbor, he even thinks fondly of Jackson with its prison where his friends did hard time. All those places to which he had at least some connection are sliding into the east behind him, farther away with every second. At the same time, something warm and unpleasant is twisting slowly upward in his chest. Possibly it’s the result of the hot dog with sauerkraut he ate in Chicago, but even that digestive discomfort seems to carry a spiritual ache. As Lennie’s snores punctuate the indistinct murmur of other strangers, Ziggy is stabbed by a sudden sharp intimation of his own mortality—don’t they always say heart attacks are sometimes confused with indigestion? What if he were to die somewhere out on this prairie, far from the neighborhood, from the church, from Connie’s, from all those familiar streets he’d left behind?

  You made this bed, he tells himself; you’re going to have to lie in it.

  To the old Polacks, everything that happened to you was the result of something out there bigger than you. Call it God, call it luck, whatever. To his mother, he knows very well, a glass of milk couldn’t get knocked over on the table without portending some kind of doom, and God forbid if you should find a dead bird in your house. But, after all, why wouldn’t they think that way after their experiences in the old country, where most of the men spent their days looking up the smelly ass of some old plow horse, hardly daring to take an occasional furtive peek at the sky that could dump a hailstorm on their pitiful half-acre and wipe out their whole crop; or, if God or the Devil happened to be in another mood, withhold its rain, killing more slowly but just as surely the potatoes or beets or whatever the hell it was they were trying to grow? Then when they came to this country his family wound up in Pennsylvania, spending their best hours in narrow tunnels picking away at coal hundreds of feet under the earth until a lot of them must have been willing to give up their firstborns for a glimpse of the sky every now and then. How could they have done that, spent the day in those damp, cramped spaces under the earth, breathing air that might be poisonous, or combustible, their lungs getting blacker all the while; finally after their backbreaking hours down in the mines, being carried up on the elevator to the surface, where they stumbled home exhausted to eat a meal they probably couldn’t taste; how could they, waking up the next day, get themselves ready to go down again into those places where they all knew so many people who’d never come back?

  It’s true, they didn’t call the shots. Even in America, they didn’t call the shots. But in America you could m
ove if you decided to, you could leave the coal mines for the car factories of Michigan and it might even turn out that, in one of those factories, you got a chance to do something else, something it turned out that you were good at, and you made things happen for yourself and your family; so that after a while you owned a couple of buildings in the neighborhood, you had the place on Harsens Island, you had cars, you could buy nice clothes for your wife and kids, and if you wanted to, you could get a block of tickets to a Tigers game and treat your friends—you could spread out a little and not live the cramped life to which you might have thought you were destined.

  Sometimes in those days you felt as if you could breathe it all in. Stepping into Dubois Street on a summer morning in your favorite cream-colored jacket and freshly pressed pants, lighting a cigarette as you faced the high brick wall of St. Connie’s across the street, you wanted to take it all into your lungs: the tobacco, the street, the neighborhood, the city itself. Because even as you were wishing it could all go on forever, in your heart you already suspected that it wouldn’t.

  Still, even if it should turn out that in the end you lost it all, that the cops raided your house, your friends went to prison and wouldn’t talk to you anymore because you escaped their fate, that your response to getting off relatively lightly was to turn into a boozer who couldn’t keep track of your own money, let alone what you were supposed to be handling in the numbers, since you were too busy running from the bears in your closet that only you could see; and then later you were preoccupied with making ashtrays at the rehab place and finally, when all of it was gone and you were more or less sober again and working at crummy jobs the monsignor got for you—the monsignor, who used to get so oily and complimentary when he needed a donation from “one of the parish’s most distinguished members”—when all that happened to you, the old babas could be counted on to cluck away about how all this was God’s punishment, it had all been foreseen and there was nothing anyone could have done about it. But Ziggy knows that’s nowhere near the whole story: he’s made choices, good ones and bad ones. Sure, there was luck of both sorts, but he had some say in the matter.

  And now he’s going to California because he wants to find out what really happened all those years ago. That isn’t asking for much, is it?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sleep isn’t easy to come by on the bus: hunched to one side, his shoulder jammed against the window, Ziggy squirms and wriggles, trying for a comfortable position, but nothing is right for his neck, his back, his knees. Well, what did he expect after all? The good news is that it’ll only be a couple of days of this. Still. He breathes deeply, trying to empty his mind. It’s not going to help to think, to remember. Eyes closed, he surrenders to the steady, hypnotic buzz of the engine until he could be anywhere, nowhere.

  He must have fallen asleep because he comes awake sharply with a cramp in his leg. With great care he eases the still painful limb to a more comfortable angle and leans forward to rub his calf. Outside it’s raining, a deluge in fact, now that he’s had a better chance to get his bearings. Thick drops slap the window and even from inside he can tell that the rain is being driven by a ferocious wind. Meanwhile, alongside him, Lennie is sleeping, apparently along with everyone else in the bus. It’s pitch black outside and Ziggy has no idea where they are on the map, somewhere in Illinois presumably, headed toward St. Louis. In the long corridor of the bus, people have turned off their lights and all he can make out as he peers over the seat-backs is a dim, churchly quiet. Is it possible that he and the driver are the only ones awake to the drenching fury of the storm they’re passing through? In a few moments the sounds coming from outside change: a clattering drumbeat against the window signals that it’s started to hail, and hard. The bus continues to hurtle through the wet, black night like a spaceship bound for some distant star, and Ziggy’s glad he doesn’t have to be at the wheel, driving through this stuff. But shouldn’t the guy at least slow down?

  He’s still listening to the hailstones popping against the window when, abruptly, he feels the bus go weightless under him, taking his stomach with it. Jesus, he realizes, his breath snatched away from him, we’ve gone into a skid. Instinctively, he shuts his eyes for a beat or two but when he opens them, hoping to escape from a bad dream, he’s back where he was, the bus fishtailing beneath him, struggling to recover stability. Everything is happening too fast; at the same time, things seem to be moving in slow-motion. By now the passengers have been jerked out of their sleep and startled cries punctuate the rattle of plastic bottles, the thud of duffels and the bang of countless other items violently released from confinement. Ziggy’s hanging on to the arm of the seat, his mouth forming soundless words as, after long breathless seconds, the big vehicle finally regains traction and, to his immense relief, is moving forward once more, at a slower pace now.

  “What’s happening?” Lennie asks. “What’s going on?”

  Ziggy shakes his head, a cigarette already in his hand even before he’s decided he needs one. “Don’t know,” he says. “But we’re in a hell of a storm. Must have been hail on the road.” That skid—it came out of nowhere, they could have been killed. When they brought the news to Maggie, he’d want to let her know somehow that he was sorry, he shouldn’t ever have left on this harebrained mission. He glances outside, where hailstones fly like comets through the stormy air and skeletal streaks of lightning dance on the horizon, illuminating an empty plain.

  “We had ourselves a little unexpected adventure,” the driver’s voice comes over the public address system. “But everything’s under control now.”

  “Do you think everything’s really OK?” Lennie asks, looking around the bus, where lights have been turned back on. “I mean, shouldn’t we stop and wait for this to be over?”

  Ziggy takes a deep drag, pulling the hot smoke down so far that when he exhales, his hand is trembling. “I guess the driver’s a trained professional,” he says. “He’ll know how to handle this.” To be truthful, he’s not so sure Greyhound’s standards are very demanding. What do they pay these guys anyway?

  Lennie peers out. “Wow,” he says, “it’s pretty intense out there.” And it’s true: there’s been no letup to the pounding on the window, and Ziggy’s hope is that nothing this strong can last very long; but the fact is, they might be heading right into the center of this storm and who knows how much territory it covers? What he does know is that there’s a lot of country out there. In the past few minutes the lightning outside has become more or less continuous, though the hail has receded, replaced by fierce pellets of rain that sizzle against the window.

  Everybody’s talking at once, but in a moment of relative quiet Ziggy hears the word “tornado.” “What’s that guy saying?” he leans over to ask the person in the seat in front of him.

  The heavy man has a deep voice, a bit of a drawl. “Guy up ahead’s got a radio. Says there are tornado warnings.”

  Ziggy tries to put things into perspective. “I guess they must get a lot of tornado warnings around here.”

  “Yeah,” the man agrees with a snort. “That’s because they get a lot of tornados.”

  Ziggy leans back. Beside him, Lennie is staring into the blackness outside.

  “At least I gave it a try,” he’s muttering to himself. “I could have stayed back east. It would have been a pretty good life, I guess. But I never would have known, would I?”

  “Hey,” Ziggy tries to reassure him, “if there’s a tornado we’re in the safest place we could be. Maybe the wind can pick up a cow, or maybe even a car, and move it, but did you ever hear of one that picked up a bus?” He doesn’t know whether he believes this but it sounds convincing to him. In The Wizard of Oz, he remembers, there was a house flying around in the storm. But that was a movie.

  “I don’t know,” Lennie says. “Think of all those windows, all that glass. In a tornado it would be like hundreds of knives flying around in here.”

  Thanks, Ziggy thinks. And I’ve got the window sea
t. But to his relief, the bus has slowed to a crawl. At least the driver’s being careful.

  Still, what the hell have I got myself into, Ziggy can’t help wondering, and did I really have to do it?

  You’re going to see Przybylski.

  Yeah, and when I find him, what’s supposed to happen?

  You can ask him if he really fingered you back in the fifties.

  And that’s going to change what?

  Look, you decided all this already. You’ll find out what it all means when it happens.

  There are times when thinking about things is no comfort at all.

  The bus continues moving at a reduced speed for almost a half hour and the storm outside shows no signs of abating, but now there’s an unmistakable stir among the passengers in the front of the bus.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Ziggy asks the big man who told him about tornado warnings.

  “There’s trouble ahead,” the man answers gravely. “Seems like there are flash floods. I guess there’s talk of a bridge being out.”

  Jesus, this really is a storm. “What would that mean for our schedule?” Ziggy asks. “I mean, do you think we’re going to be late getting into St. Louis?”

  “You can’t always meet your schedule,” the man says. “I know that from experience. I’m a bus driver myself. I drive tour buses back east in New Jersey.” He laughs quietly. “I know, I’m taking a busman’s holiday. So I don’t have any timetable to meet. That’s more than I can say for our driver.”

  His tone suggests that he knows something. “What do you mean?” Ziggy asks.

  “I talked to the guy, though I wouldn’t exactly call him sociable. He’s on a tight schedule, and he’s got his own reasons for that. He’s divorced and he’s trying to see his daughter before she leaves for school. After that, she goes to live with her mother. That’s why he took on this route, he told me.”

  From what he’s seen of their driver, Ziggy isn’t surprised by this information. The thin, balding man in his forties who looks like a ferret that’s suffering from permanent heartburn struck him as someone in a hurry. “You think there’s any real chance we might not be able to keep up with our schedule?”