The obese camouflaged man in the pew across the room was still asleep. The agitated woman by the pay phone seemed to have dozed off, too, her head resting on the plastic-bound yellow pages. Nowhere in the enormous station was there a single excuse for getting up. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, and April didn’t want to offend someone who had so far done nothing but invade her space.
“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” the man said, sitting down beside her. “I was sitting over there watching you. You’re a very pretty woman. You probably hear that all the time.”
He must have noticed the look in her eyes, because he shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. It’s just you seem like a very nice person. You can tell even from across the room. But I should know better than to bother a pretty lady all alone in the middle of the night. Lord knows you meet enough crazy people when you ride the bus.”
“It’s okay,” April said, forcing a smile. “It’s all right.”
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “usually I don’t find pretty people all that worth talking to. They’re usually so dull. But there’s something about you. You see people all the time, walking around, thousands of them a day, and what do you know about them? Nothing. Not a damn thing. You live in the same city, walk the same streets, breathe the same air. It’s a shame we should all be such strangers. You shouldn’t need to know a person by name to say hello. You shouldn’t look at someone suspiciously just because he asks how you’re doing. Do you know what I’m saying?”
She nodded.
“It seemed to me there’s no good reason for you and me to be sitting all alone. Especially in a place like this.” He gestured with his hands toward the ceiling. “It reminds me of the church I went to when I was a kid.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” April said.
“One of those old-fashioned churches, so big and heavy it seems like it must’ve been built by giants. The kind of place where you really feel the presence of a higher power. Do you know what I’m saying? You feel like you’re in the hands of a mighty god. Not like these new churches you see around, with the neon signs and the vinyl siding. They look like dentists’ offices. What sort of god would hang out in a place like that? Do you know what I’m saying?”
April nodded noncommittally. She was wary of the direction the conversation was turning. She looked out the windows onto the dark platform, imagining herself climbing onto the bus.
“It’s these benches,” she said. “They look like pews.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.” And then, after a pause, he added, “I remember one time talking with a minister from one of those dentist-office churches. We were talking about sin. He asked me how I decided what was right and what was wrong. A minister, of all people.” The young man shook his head. “But that’s what happens when you preach in a building covered in vinyl siding. I remember saying I was surprised to hear him ask such a thing. He should have known it wasn’t for me to decide. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. I would have expected him of all people to understand that. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe in God?” the young man asked.
April looked off into the corner, where the young man had been sitting just moments before. He’d left no luggage there, hadn’t brought any over with him.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You should.”
He reached into his pocket, and even before he extended his hand, she was shrinking away.
He held out a roll of mints.
She declined.
“Nothing lonelier than a red-eye,” he said, mint clicking against his teeth.
After that, neither one of them seemed to know what to say, and April sat in nervous silence, waiting for whatever would come next. But aside from occasionally asking her the time and smiling mildly, the young man kept to himself, quietly reading beside her, apparently comforted just to have her near him.
Throughout the night, the station grew colder by degrees. Every time she awoke, April’s pulse set off pounding in her collar. But everything was always fine, her bag and the cookies still at her side, the others still in their corners.
Not long after daylight, just after the first new passengers arrived with the dense scent of the cool morning in their clothes, the station suddenly filled. Employees seemed to materialize at the ticket counter. An old lady with a loose cough settled in behind a coffee urn and a display of packaged Danish.
Among the crowd April recognized several faces from the night before. They seemed less angry now, but they still insisted on speaking brusquely to the clerk—a different one from last night—in order to convey their right to be irritated.
On the bus, April rolled a pair of jeans into a pillow and placed them against the window. Stretching her legs across the empty seat next to hers, she closed her eyes. It was worth a try, and for several minutes she could hear other passengers coming on board and pausing at her row before moving on.
She must have dozed off for only a moment. When she awoke again, the bus still hadn’t started moving. A boy with softly spiked blond hair was standing in the aisle staring at her. He must have been twelve or thirteen, his nose scrunched up as if he were trying to keep a pair of invisible glasses from falling off his face. A lumped, overstuffed backpack rested at his feet. He held a pile of poorly folded newspaper sections in his hands.
“Could you hold this for a thanks—” Without waiting for a response, the boy dropped the papers into April’s lap. She pulled her legs reflexively toward her chest, and the boy took that opportunity to flop down into the seat beside her.
“I was afraid somebody’d be sitting here. I kept telling my brother we had to get to the station, but he had diarrhea or something and he was in the bathroom for hours, and I kept telling him we’d miss the bus, but he said there’s no way he’d let me miss it. I like to show up early to get a good seat. I’m R.J.”
He’d already finished shaking her limp hand before she registered what he was doing.
“Your papers,” April said, lifting them for him to take.
“See that guy over there—?” R.J. pointed out her window to a hefty middle-aged man, bald on top, smoking beside a pickup, eyes fixed to his watch.
“That’s my brother Franklin. I don’t think he can see me waving. You can wave, too, if you want. He’s not even looking. See, we’re directly in the middle. Twenty-second row. Twenty-one in front of us, twenty-one in back. If we get in an accident, we’re the least likely to get crushed.”
April swallowed the news in bewilderment.
The door of the bus creaked shut. The air brakes released. They started to move.
“Would you mind taking—?” April dropped the pile into R.J.’s lap, and he commenced flipping through the sections.
“I was just reading about this train crash where all these people died. The train just like fell off the tracks. I mean, have you ever seen train tracks? They’re like just these little pieces of metal. I’m surprised trains aren’t always falling off.” He paused and pointed out the window again. The bus passed a billboard upon which a jet was rising majestically over a palm-tree-lined beach, ESCAPE IS NOT AS FAR AS YOU THINK spelled out in bamboo lettering.
“I’ve never flown before,” R.J. said. “It’s like a hundred times safer than riding in a bus, even though it’s the plane crashes you always hear about. Probably because they’re so bad when they happen. I mean, a plane crashes, and you’re pretty much … well, I mean, what good is a life vest when you’re about to crash into a cornfield or something? Most people get hung up on that and forget how rare it happens. People die like every second in car crashes.”
April rose up slightly in her seat and scanned the other rows. There wasn’t a single empty seat. She watched the posts of the guardrail flick by as the bus merged onto the highway. The rain had picked up again. Cars passed on the wet pavement, and t
he sound was like paper tearing. The grassy median seemed to draw nearer. April imagined she could feel the bus losing its traction. She thought of herself back at the station, lying on the pew. She thought of being home, of Inez’s new blackout blinds, which sealed the bedroom off from every ray of sunlight.
What in the world was she doing here?
“I’m going to try to sleep now,” she said.
“There’s a report in here that most people die because they don’t buckle up,” he said, tapping her on the knee. “And this bus doesn’t even have seat belts. We should write a letter to the company.”
April closed her eyes, trying to will away the sound of his voice. When that didn’t work, she focused on the splashing of the passing cars. She wondered if the bus had caught up with the storm from last night, or if another storm had met them coming from the opposite direction.
R.J. tapped April on the shoulder. “There’s also an article in here about all these buildings that are blowing up and nobody knows why.”
“If you read too many newspapers,” April said, massaging her temples, “you start to think the whole world is on the brink of disaster.”
R.J. crinkled his eyebrows at her in disappointment. “My sister Samantha says what’s wrong with people is they don’t read the papers. That’s why they’re going out of business. People don’t know what’s going on anymore.”
The sky had turned purple. Rain was lashing at the window. April stood up on unsteady legs. In her stomach, she thought she could feel the tires start to skid. She reached into the overhead compartment, removing a book from her bag.
She blew through an entire page before realizing she’d finished even a paragraph. The words came and went like passing cars. Somewhere in the back of the bus, a man was talking so loudly it seemed he must have wanted everyone to hear. Pages vanished like the words themselves. The man in the back of the bus accused the driver of being drunk. April wondered whether the man himself was drunk. He grew louder and louder, until April could no longer hear the scratching.
“If this was a boat, we’d be on the bottom of the sea!” the man hollered. “If it was a plane, we’d all be wearing life vests!”
The clouds and the rain had grown so thick April could no longer see the highway on the other side of the median. Hazy lights swam past unattached to anything. The bus had slowed, as had the traffic surrounding them. Everyone around her was holding on to something, everyone but R.J.
“Afraid of a little rain,” the man in the back snickered. “Worse thing you can be when you’re driving is afraid.”
“Please keep your voice down,” a weary voice crackled over the loudspeaker.
April clenched her book to keep herself from standing and yelling at the man to be quiet. She couldn’t understand why nobody else, nobody sitting back there with him, hadn’t already told him to shut the fuck up.
“Say the word, and I’ll go up there and take over. If not me, somebody, anybody. I’ll send my eighty-year-old grandmother up there. Blind in one eye, but I’d sooner trust my life to her.”
“Please keep your voice down.”
“Look up, ladies and gentlemen!” the man in the back of the bus thundered, his voice carrying the fever of a revivalist preacher.
“Look up into the sky above you! You can’t see them, but somewhere above the clouds rich people are coasting along with their feet up, munching on complimentary peanuts!”
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you off the bus.” The loudspeaker fuzzed and then went dead, a much less measured tone this time.
April started another chapter without realizing she’d finished the previous one.
“He’s right,” R.J. said after a long silence. “If I died right now, I’d be pissed. I mean, if you’re going to die, shouldn’t it be for something good? I want to die doing something fun, but it almost never happens that way. I mean, we could die right now. Look at it out there.”
She was better off not seeing.
“Where are you going?” R.J. said.
“To visit a friend,” April said curtly. “But right now I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
“And if you ended up dying on your way to see this friend, how would you feel? I mean, wouldn’t that suck? Or maybe you wouldn’t mind. I mean, maybe this is a good friend, and you have to die sometime, right? But what if you’re driving to the store for like bread? I mean, can you imagine dying for a loaf of bread? Maybe if you’re starving, it would be different. I’m going to see my sister Beatrice. I don’t even like Beatrice. Maybe if I had to choose, I’d rather die before I went. At least that way I wouldn’t have to stay with her. She bakes sugarless cookies and reads books about Jesus. Her husband can’t talk about anything except what a great baseball player he almost was. I’d hate to think the last thing I ever did was something I didn’t want to do. My mother died of cancer, but there was nothing anybody could do about that. For a couple of years, she couldn’t even leave her bed. But my father—I mean, he died when I was little. He’d always wanted one of those little trees. You know the ones I mean? The little miniature kind. So one year my sister Phyllis got him one for his birthday—she had to order it from like, I don’t know—and then he died of a heart attack before she could give it to him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” R.J. said. “The tree died too.”
April had no brothers or sisters. She’d barely known her own father. But hearing R.J. talk about his family made April think about Fitch and Holmes and Myles. In the months since they’d gone their separate ways, they’d e-mailed every once in a while, but it was hard to know what anything they said really meant. They had jobs in Portland. At least Holmes and Myles did. Holmes was pulling espresso. He was seeing somebody, a guy who did PR. Someone stable, professional. Myles was working at a bookstore. A manager. Shiny, clean new books this time. And Fitch was assembling a new band and living off his parents. Until he got “settled,” as they called it, which they were still willing to believe might happen someday. The three of them talked about the weather, the food, the music, the people. Everything about Portland was fabulous. But it was the things they didn’t say that made her wonder. No regrets, no mention of McGee. April knew all those years together couldn’t be so easily forgotten, no matter how much they wanted to put Detroit behind them.
But she was guilty of the same sort of silence. She’d told them about Inez; school hadn’t even started yet, and Inez was working so hard that April rarely saw her. About herself, though, there was much less to say. She was doing freelance stuff when she could, websites mostly. She hadn’t told them she was going to see McGee. Maybe she was afraid they’d try to talk her out of it.
In her e-mails, she always left out how much she missed everyone. Not because she didn’t want them to know, but because every time she caught herself bringing it up, she couldn’t help sounding nostalgic, as if she wished things could return to the way they’d been before, the five of them together again. And in a way, she truly did wish this, but she understood it was no longer possible. And anyway, she knew no one else would agree.
They’d started out wanting to save the world. Then they’d scaled back, settling for saving the city. But they couldn’t even do that. Maybe they’d gone about it the wrong way. April wasn’t sorry they’d tried. But then again, for her the cause had always been the smallest part. She’d believed in McGee more than she’d believed in politics. The five of them could have organized a bowling league and April would’ve been satisfied, as long as they did it together.
Whenever she caught herself thinking this way, April tried to tell herself that missing the past didn’t mean she regretted having chosen to leave with Inez. But sometimes she couldn’t help feeling Inez was unhappy with her—as if, having won April away from her friends, she’d come to discover the prize was less enjoyable than the fight.
And was that why she was on this bus now? April wondered. Not for McGee but to force Inez to fight for her again?
A commotion woke her, a screech and a shudder. April looked outside. It took a few moments to understand they were at a bus station.
“Where are we?” she asked.
R.J. had turned to face the back of the bus. “Police.”
With a start, April spun around. There was a cop standing at the last row.
“Up,” he was saying, “now.” He was gesturing at one of the passengers, his other hand hovering at his hip, just above his holster.
At the front, another cop, a woman, was talking to the driver. Quietly, impossible to hear over the chatter of her radio. Suddenly the female cop looked up, meeting April’s eye.
April ducked behind the seat in front of her.
“What are you doing?” R.J. said.
Beyond the edge of the seat, April could see the cop up front coming toward them. Slowly, studying everyone as she passed. As if she were looking for someone. Or something. April’s first thought was Uncle Xavier’s package. When the cop reached her, April felt as pale as the mist on the window.
But the cop passed her by.
“What’s wrong with you?” R.J. asked.
“Nothing.”
In the back of the bus, the two cops together raised a short man in a lime-green sweatsuit to his feet. Together they dragged him backward down the aisle.
“This is unconstitutional,” the man hollered as he struggled to grip a seat back. “I have my rights. I paid just like everyone else. You can’t do this. Hey, what’s your name? Give me your names. You’re all witnesses. We have to stand up together.”
As he passed April’s row, the man’s flailing arm smacked R.J. on the back of the head.
“I’m going to sue your ass off. I want my money back. Driver. Driver—”
The man fought to free himself from the cops’ grip.
“Is it my fault you can’t drive?”
At the top of the steps, the man attempted to lunge at the driver, but the cops held him back.
The driver’s hands were shaking as he levered the door shut. Not until he’d released the air brakes did April feel sure the police wouldn’t be back for her.
Angels of Detroit Page 29