“Better luck next time, darlin’.”
In the agent’s eyes, I must be doing a generic bunk: having emptied my pockets, I’m leaving town via plastic in the middle of the night. Oh well, I’ll look and act the part of the busted gambler—it’s no skin off my back.
It dawns on me that I should be composing a note of some sort to my erstwhile companion, in case she’s asleep when I stop by the motel to get my things (and I’m in no rush), so on the back of a Lamoille Canyon flyer, I write the following:
You’re one day away from California and I’m one day away from going crazy and maybe you are too. I think we’ve had enough of each other, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll proceed east under my own steam. Thanks for everything; it was, as they say, a noble experiment.
Oh, I could write reams more—there’s a whole dispenser full of flyers—but I figure these four sentences say just enough. No digs, no recriminations, no apologies. Without me, she’ll finish her trip with fewer hassles and less expense. Plus, she’ll be able to report the whole sordid tale to her sister—it’ll keep them yakking over several bottles of pinot grigio.
After a satisfying interval of looking around, during which he files away all kinds of writerly observations, should he ever have occasion to portray a bus station in Nevada, Budge looks at his watch. He has about three and a half hours to kill. He checks to make sure the ticket is in is pocket.
He walks very slowly along Idaho Street toward the motel. Not suprisingly, fatigue is catching up with him. He’s traveled more than six hundred miles today, argued, made up (sort of), argued again, and been abandoned at the casino door. Now there’s the pending trauma of a parting of ways—followed by a damn long busride.
It occurs to him that the most sensible thing to do would be to take a brief snooze in the room before decamping for good. Under the indefatigably blinking Caravan sign, he finds the right orange-painted door, #21, noting that no light shows through the adjacent curtained window. She must have turned in early. Gingerly, he inserts the key and tiptoes into the room. She’s in bed all right, fast asleep by the looks of her. There’s enough ambient light from the window for him to perceive the neatness with which she has arranged her things. Her bathrobe is carefully folded and her slippers are arranged side by side; tomorrow’s lingerie is already laid out on the back of a chair. His own suitcase, by contrast, was never opened—so much the better, he now realizes, for making a stealthy getaway. He tiptoes to the bathroom, empties his bladder (but doesn’t flush, out of concern for waking her), and gulps a little water from the faucet. Then he flops on his bed, fully clothed, not even removing his shoes. As he composes himself, he mentally reviews everything he’ll need to do to effect his departure, which turns out to be nothing more than leave his room key in some conspicuous place—atop the television, he decides—and grab his suitcase. Oh, and leave the Lamoille Canyon flyer with his handwritten note. Maybe leave it under the key.
I could have used one last fuck, but what the hell. The sooner I get out of here, the sooner I’ll get back to Matty, who won’t equivocate about having sex with me. Old fashioned good-ta-see-ya-again-sweetie lovemaking, with no caveats or limitations. If things are the same with her, that is—but why shouldn’t they be? I’ll contact her soon as I get to Boston. How will she ever be the wiser about my jaunt westward? Nah, she’ll be the same old Matty and I’ll be the same old Budge. She’ll prove to me that this is only a bad dream.
Two hours pass. Budge has always prided himself on his own built-in alarm clock, but the internal mechanism doesn’t wake him until 1:10 a.m., and when it does, it puts him in such a discombobulated and disoriented state that, for a few seconds, he has no idea where he is or why he is waking up. In his confusion, he falls asleep again only to reawaken ten minutes later, this time with greater clarity, as he realizes his pressing need to be at the bus station. He jumps to the floor, picks up his suitcase, jingles the room key out of his pants pocket, somehow remembering to take out the flyer from his shirt pocket as well, and slams them on top of the television in the same motion that he reaches for and yanks open the door. He doesn’t intend to jump and jingle and slam and yank, but that’s what happens. The clatter wakes the sleeper in the shadows of the far side of the room.
“Where are you going?” she rasps in a voice muffled with slumber.
“Out for a walk. Can’t sleep.”
I shut the door before she can get in another word. Along the length of the motel and its parking lot, I tread as lightly as possible. Not too fast either, so as to arouse suspicion from prying eyes—a parked cop, say, or a gregarious midnight gambler. Behind my back, I’m half-expecting her to open the door and call to me, maybe even come running after me. Would I stop if she came running in that nightgown she raised all the way to her shoulders the other night? If she grabbed me and said she was sorry and begged me to come back to bed with her and promised to make a new start? Yes, I probably would. But she doesn’t. I’m free.
A glance at his watch reminds him that he needs to hustle, so he breaks into a fast jog. He imagines how he must look to passersby, for there are plenty of them, both afoot and in cars, along the neon corridor.
Man sprinting toward bus station, suitcase in hand. Winner? Loser? Whichever, undoubtedly the bearer of a racked conscience.
He makes it in less than five minutes, and the east-bound bus is waiting.
Chapter Thirteen
Ah, to travel snugly in the bosom of the ’Hound! It doesn’t matter how fleetingly or sluggishly America trundles past—I’m at a safe remove, with a tinted patch of side-window all to myself. Got both seats, too, so I can stretch my legs diagonally when blocked circulation demands, maybe even curl crossways when I’m ready to sleep.
Budge’s thoughts turn from the specific to the general.
To most citizens in our car-owning culture, bus travel is the least preferred method of conveyance. It is an accepted axiom that people who ride buses are the bottom feeders of the long distance routes—the very souls who put up with discomfort because they can’t afford not to. The incessant rumble and vibration, the diesel fumes, the stench of the chemical toilet, the proximity to strangers of questionable sanity … all this can be avoided by owning your own four-wheeled cocoon and contributing to the general gridlock of the nation’s highway infrastructure and shortsighted energy policy.
Well, I’m not a part of that now. For the next forty-eight hours or so, I’ll be somewhat above reproach, insofar as an American can ever be. I’ll get to where I’m going by spewing a fraction of the pollutants I normally would. I’ll sit with thirty or forty of my compatriots and breathe our common recirculated air. I’ll relax my limbs and loll my head as they do, inadvertently responding to every bump and jounce. I’ll put my faith in our Driver, who is professionally trained (and presumably urine-tested) to banish boredom. What is a bus, after all, but a moving platform on which to become a better human being?
Budge is happily writing in his journal with the overhead lens weakly spotlighting the page. He knows that a chapter in his life is now officially terminated, never to renew itself again. He doesn’t regret leaving it, but neither does he regret living it. He gave it a fair shot, he tells himself. It simply didn’t work out. Nor will he bother himself with the details of the upcoming divorce—que sera sera. He will agree and agree and agree until it’s over with, then sign his name at the bottom of the page.
If I’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that I firmly believe in my ex’s fundamental goodness. She’s not trying to take me to the cleaners. True, she convinced me to accompany her on a journey that didn’t pan out, but that was my fault as much as hers. She meant well, she really did, and she continues to lead the life of a decent law-abiding person.
This opportunity for positive rumination and detachment is salutary for Budge. With it comes sleep, snacking (in Elko, he loaded his pockets from a vending machine), some desultory conversation with his neighbors across the aisle, and plenty of opportunity
to gaze out the window as the dawn comes up.
Every couple of hours, it seems, the bus pulls into cities which warrant a ten- or fifteen-minute layover, during which he can get off the bus and stretch his limbs. The names of these cities are meaningless to him. They are American cities with proud concretions of glass, brick, and anodized aluminum in the background, while in the foreground can be seen squalor at its bleakest—spray paint on crumbling walls, broken windows, dented cars, trash blowing in the streets, and impoverished people going about their business of doing nothing or getting high. Each time, Budge climbs back into the bus with a sense of relief.
I don’t want to know where I am. I don’t give a hoot about my progress. Between cities, I let America unreel in a series of disconnected images—a man walking a dog, a helmeted bicyclist in high-visibility tights, a double-wide on two trailers, a truckstop heralded by tall signs, a derelict grain elevator, a stilled windmill, a concrete bridge over a river. At times, the pure pastoralness intrigues me—wide-open vistas that have very little to do with humanity. Within such vistas are man-made outposts, to be sure, but there’s so much space between them that they seem fragile and inconsequential. A prairie wind could set them a-rolling like tumbleweed, and if they all ended up in a gulch or gully, well, chalk it up to the transitoriness of all human endeavor.
It makes me understand why transportation and communication have become so highly developed in these United Sates. We live in a big land, under a big sky, and connection between us is tantamount to living with hope and without fear.
Yet as the bus lumbers eastward, this wide-openness compresses, which inaugurates quite another feeling on my part—that our land and its resources are in fact running out. I shift my posterior, eat a candybar, take a leak at the back of the bus, and return to my seat. Through the window, there’s just more and more of everything. I’m beginning to feel enmeshed in the twenty-first century’s grid, that locus of corporate aggrandizement and curtailed individualism. Oh, I could practically foam at the mouth here, and pity myself for being born a century and a half after Henry David Thoreau, and concoct a warning recipe for the ultimate doom of the American way of life, but I won’t. I’m content to merely sit on my duff and watch it all go by. I’ll even yawn, just to prove how nonchalantly I view the spectacle. I say live with it, love it, be a part of it, but always retain the ability to dissociate completely.
Between philosophical musings and catnaps, Budge weathers the long ride. After thirty-six hours, Chicago, South Bend, Toledo, and Cleveland have been passed, and the route now skirts Lake Erie, where the juxtaposition of vineyards and heavy industry causes the now-stale author to ponder a non-sequitur.
What if they somehow confused wine-making with steel-making? Got the formulas mixed up—created a girder of Merlot and a barrel of Cor-Ten. Note to conceptual artists: this may be the cusp to build a career on. Confound, confuse, stir it up good! Just remember to give me credit—a footnote will do.
Budge realizes that his ruminations are losing steam, so he abandons his journal. Having left his laptop in the suitcase stowed in the bus’s luggage compartment, he can’t compose an email either. He’s truly idle; he has nothing to think about anymore. He’s just an anonymous passenger returning by a roundabout route. He hasn’t shaved or washed up (or brushed his teeth) or had a decent meal in two days. The view has become meaningless, the stops are meaningless, his fellow passengers are meaningless. His whole life is drained of meaning, and he rather likes it like that.
After Erie, the bus vectors into New York State along Route 17, which joins I-88 as it approaches Albany some five hours later. Next, it’s a straight shot across Massachusetts on I-90, and with each passing mile, Budge gradually puts the meaning back into his life. As the bus gets closer to Boston, he starts thinking solely about Matty Klein.
Mainly, it’s hunger pangs. Boy, have I missed her cooking! Missed her in other ways, too. No woman ever fell into the sack with me more gratefully and lovingly. Maybe I’ve overplayed the geriatric card. Maybe—given a woman’s longevity—I shouldn’t be concerned about Matty’s age. And maybe, too, I shouldn’t complain about her house, or how anal her neighbors are, or what her subdivision looks like. I have to admit that it sure looks good from here.
The density of greater Boston gathers around Budge’s window as the trip’s momentum dwindles to squeals and sighs. The bus negotiates a series of sharp turns; then, with a wheeze of finality, it slides into the terminal on Atlantic Avenue, halting parallel to its brethren. Relieved, our author descends, and the first thing he does is head for a pay phone. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, so he figures Matty ought to be in, and if she is, she’ll accept the collect charges. He hears it ring twice before she picks it up—her bell-clear question mark!—and the automated operator chimes in with a spiel that includes a sound-byte of Budge’s self-recorded name.
It sounds so goddamn dumb. Rhymes with sludge. Oh well, gotta live with it.
“Yes, I’ll accept,” she says. “Hi honey!”
“Hi sweetie-pie. Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”
“Wonderful to hear yours, too! I haven’t heard it for so long.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry for not checking in earlier. I’ve written you a few emails, but haven’t had a chance to send them.”
“No problem at all, sweetheart. How’s Boston?”
“Boston is great.”
The rest goes quickly. Opting not to revisit his alma mater—as expected—Budge waits within the terminal for the next bus southward. En route to Maryland, he exhausts the battery in his laptop, which he wisely remembered to take out of the suitcase, filing impressions of his recent adventure. Surely there’s enough material for a book, although at this point he doesn’t quite know how to begin crafting it.
Once the battery is dead, he just sits and stares out the window as he is conveyed back to Annapolis, whereupon his old Corolla, spared the wasted mileage, will take him the rest of the way—back to his woman, his cat, and his home.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Peter Svenson
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2865-3
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Distributed by Open Road Distribution
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
Wrongful Reconciliation Page 15