by Ann Hood
“So am I,” came a voice from across the aisle.
Aida’s breath caught. She squinted to see who had said it. A boy, maybe nineteen years old, grinned back at her. He was smoking a cigarette. He had a dimple in his chin, like Kirk Douglas, and a good suntan.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” Aida said. If anyone knew she was only seventeen years old and running away from home, she would be hauled off this bus and sent back to Rhode Island.
“Then you shouldn’t keep saying it,” he said, smiling his white teeth at her.
“Hmmph,” Aida said, just like her seatmate. She folded her arms across her chest and focused straight ahead at the hats.
The boy leaned toward her. “I’m supposed to get married,” he whispered. “On Saturday.”
He smelled good. Like cigarettes and aftershave. Now that his head was in the aisle like that, she saw that he was as cleanshaven as a person could be and had short hair and no sideburns. She frowned. She hadn’t seen a guy with so little hair since her cousin Davy shipped off to Vietnam. She thought of Davy and made a quick sign of the cross, hoping the boy didn’t see her doing something so uncool. May he rest in peace, she thought, then dropped her hands.
“What are you?” Aida said, not bothering to whisper. “In the Army or something?”
“Not anymore,” the boy said, and sat back in his seat.
The Army? Aida thought. Ugh. She opened her book, The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass, and pretended to read. It was about a dwarf during World War II, and sad. Aida didn’t really like the book; she’d preferred To Kill a Mockingbird, which they’d read in tenth grade. And Lord of the Flies. Also from tenth grade. But books like that looked young, schoolgirlish, not the kind of books a person took with them to run away. In her overnight bag she had Siddhartha, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Rod McKuen’s book of poetry, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows. Stanyan Street was in San Francisco, and that was where she was headed.
“You ever read Lord of the Flies?” the boy asked. He was leaning toward her again, his head jutting out into the aisle, bouncing along with the movement of the bus.
“In high school,” Aida said, not taking her eyes from her book.
“That’s what Vietnam was like,” he said. “No shit.”
Aida swallowed hard. All spring, when she imagined this bus trip across the country, she always imagined meeting a boy. A boy with a guitar who sang Simon and Garfunkel songs as the bus rolled toward California. She and the boy would fall in love, and walk in meadows filled with wildflowers like in the Herbal Essences commercial. He would wear a flowing shirt, Guatemalan, or Mexican, kind of like Donovan. They would have their first kiss in a rainstorm. Aida sighed. Never, in any of her fantasies, was the boy she would fall in love with on a bus a Vietnam vet. Every day last year she had worn a black armband to school to protest the war. Baby killer, she thought, turning the page she had not read. Hawk.
“What are you running away from?” the boy asked her.
She glanced at him. His eyes were light, blue or maybe green; it was hard to tell in the dark. He had small ears. Usually, you didn’t see a boy’s ears because his hair covered them. This boy’s ears looked like seashells.
“Like I said,” he continued, “I’m running away from my wedding. How about you?”
“I’m moving to San Francisco,” she said matter-of-factly.
“No shit!” he said. “Me too. Guess we’re together for the long haul.”
He lit another cigarette. “Smoke?” he said.
Aida shook her head. “I only smoke clove cigarettes,” she said. This wasn’t true, but she had seen them in a head shop in Providence, where her sister, Terry, sold her homemade hash pipes. Terry and her husband carved the pipes themselves out of soapstone. One day, while Terry was dropping off a load of new ones, Aida had seen the small square packages of clove cigarettes, red and covered with Hindu signs and letters. Aida knew that if she ever smoked anything, it would be clove cigarettes. She had considered asking Terry to buy her a pack. Terry would have; she didn’t care what Aida did. Terry only cared about getting stoned. Her whole life revolved around scoring good pot, windowpane LSD, and magic mushrooms. She and her husband spent all their time at the pay phone in the gas station down the street from their apartment making drug deals. For this reason, Aida did not feel guilty for stealing their money.
“Clove cigarettes?” the boy said, sucking on his Winston. “Interesting.” Then he sat back in his seat and didn’t say anything else until the bus stopped somewhere in Ohio.
AIDA LOVED THE BUS STATIONS. They were dirty and gray and smelled like pee, every one of them so far. Usually a janitor was mopping the floor. Usually people were sleeping on the benches. Usually, the ladies’ rooms were out of toilet paper, or a toilet had flooded, or someone had left poop without flushing. Aida loved getting food from the vending machines: cheese sandwiches cut into perfect triangles, slightly stale and tasting of cardboard; watery hot chocolate that was tepid at best; M&M’s; Fritos.
Aida stood in front of the row of vending machines, making her choices. Across the room, a fat man with a wandering eye mopped the floor and sang, “Hit the Road, Jack,” in a booming baritone. She spotted a cheese sandwich and carefully counted out three quarters. Just as she reached to put in the first coin, a hand stopped her.
The Vietnam vet.
He was tall and broad-shouldered, like someone on a football team.
“Let me buy you some real food,” he said. He jerked his thumb toward a diner attached to the bus station. Through a plate-glass window, Aida could see uniformed waitresses, slouched and weary, pouring coffee for the passengers from her bus.
“I like these sandwiches,” she said.
“Ah, get one next time. We’re here for an hour anyway.” He tugged on her arm and she followed him, lagging behind so he didn’t get the wrong idea. He wore khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. She could see the white of a T-shirt poking out behind the collar. She wondered how he could wear long pants and long sleeves in July. Wasn’t he sweating to death? Maybe he was wounded, she thought. Maybe he had scars. This made her like him more, and she quickened her pace to catch up.
He slid into a booth, red ripped vinyl with big strips of green masking tape over some of the rips and puffs of white filling popping out. The table was sticky, and the ashtray was dirty. The vet lit another cigarette.
“Those clove things you smoke,” he said, “do you get high from them?”
Aida rolled her eyes. “They’re cigarettes,” she said.
The waitress came over. She only had about five teeth in her whole mouth. Except for her great-grandmother, Aida had never seen a person walking around without teeth like that. She couldn’t stop staring.
“You gonna kiss me or order some food?” the woman said.
“Oh, uh, pancakes? And chocolate milk?”
The vet ordered three eggs and home fries and bacon and ham and a short stack of pancakes. “And chocolate milk,” he added, winking at Aida.
Winking was smarmy. She hated winking. She pretended not to notice.
“So,” he said, after the waitress walked away, “you going to college or something out there?”
Aida brightened. “Yes,” she said with too much enthusiasm.
“You have friends or something there?”
“An uncle,” she said. This was maybe true. Five years ago, her uncle Carmine had walked into the house and announced he was moving to San Francisco. He had seen on television that people there believed in free love. “I’m going to get me some,” Uncle Carmine said. He tied a plastic daisy to the radio antenna on his Dodge and drove off. No one had heard from him since. Mama Jo said novenas to pray for his safety, and once asked Aida to call Information to see if he was listed. But he wasn’t.
“He’s, like, seventy years old,” Aida said. “But he’s cool.”
Their food arrived and the vet started eating like he hadn’t had anything in a million years.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “But I walked out of our double shower and this is what I was wearing. Walked out, bought a ticket to San Francisco, and here I am.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it himself.
“You left the bride? At her shower?” Aida said. The maple syrup tasted funny, like kerosene. She scraped it off her pancakes.
“I’m terrible,” he said. “I know. But I just couldn’t stay.”
Aida understood this. That’s why she was running away. She couldn’t stay in that house, in that town, for even one more minute.
“Beth,” he said. “She’ll do fine. She’s real pretty and nice. Studying to be a nurse.” He shook his head again. “She’ll be fine.” He motioned the waitress for more chocolate milk, holding up two fingers like a peace sign. “We dated in high school, and then I got unlucky in the lottery. Number three, if you can believe it, and got sent to Vietnam instead of Carnegie Mellon, where I was supposed to go. And you know, when you think you might die, you do crazy things. Like say if you manage to live and come back, you’ll marry somebody. Then you come back and you’ve changed a lot and the girl doesn’t even seem like someone you know. She’s talking about getting shoes dyed lavender to match bridesmaids’ dresses and seating arrangements and whiskey-sour fountains and all you can think about is the way you were walking along this gorgeous mountain pass and the South China Sea is glittering in the sunlight and all of a fucking sudden you’re getting shot at and people are dying all around you and you don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing halfway across the world anyway.”
The waitress banged down two glasses of chocolate milk.
“You’re saving democracy,” she said to him, air whistling through the gaps where teeth were supposed to be. “That’s what you’re doing over there.”
“Right,” he mumbled.
Aida stared at him, hard.
“What?” he said.
“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him. But she didn’t really want to hear the answer, so she got up, banging her knee on the booth, and walked back to the bus.
DURING THE STOP, passengers got off and other passengers got on and everything rearranged itself. Aida grabbed an open window seat. She had not had a window seat in three days, and wasn’t part of running away seeing things? Wasn’t the bus pass called the “See the USA” pass? Here was Ohio, Aida thought happily. I am watching Ohio go by. The vet took the seat next to her.
“This is lucky,” he says as he stretches his legs. “Isn’t it?”
The bus pulls away and Aida stares with determination out the window.
“Ohio,” the vet says. “I think it produced more presidents than any other state.”
Aida finds this hard to believe. “What about Massachusetts?” she says, watching the rolling hills. “What about Virginia?”
“Can you name the presidents for those states? Let’s try, okay?”
She looks at his open, hopeful face. Does he really expect her to play car games with him the entire way to San Francisco? She remembers how on that car trip with Aunt Francie, she had to play Travel Bingo, keeping her eye out for cows and stop signs and other ridiculous things. The Bingo cards had little red see-through shades that you pulled down when you found an item. But reading the cards and scanning the back roads for mailboxes and silos had only made Aida more queasy.
“I hate games,” Aida tells him.
“This isn’t a game,” he says. “It’s more of a challenge.”
Aida sighs. “Look,” she says, “you need to know that I’m against the war. I hate Richard Nixon, and I’ve been very active in the antiwar movement.” She thinks of that black armband, how much she loved tying it on every morning.
“I’m glad to know that,” he tells her. “I’m also against the war. You have no idea.”
Aida tries to figure out the ethics of falling in love with a vet. It seems wrong, even if he is also against the war.
“I’m Bill,” he says. “Bill Henderson.”
Aida blurts her own name before remembering that she was going to change it to something like Heather or Juliet. Aida is old-fashioned and ugly. She adds, “Aida with an A,” to make it special somehow.
Bill nods at her. “Like the opera,” he says. “I-ee-da.”
He has given her a gift and he doesn’t even know it. I-ee-da, she thinks. An opera. She would have to look that up in the library when she got to San Francisco.
“Well,” she says finally. “There’s Jefferson and Monroe and Washington. They’re all from Virginia.”
She can feel his knee against hers. He has rolled up the sleeves on his shirt, and she can see the light blond hair on his arms, the beginning of a five o’clock shadow on his fine angled cheeks.
“The two Adamses,” he says, “John and John Quincy. They’re Massachusetts. And Kennedy, of course.”
Ohio rolls by, but Aida isn’t watching.
THEY NAME ALL the state capitals. The states themselves, alphabetically. The Seven Dwarves. The Seven Deadly Sins. Aida wonders if he will kiss her. Or even hold her hand. Bill Henderson is a tragic hero. She knows that loving a tragic hero is morally right. He tells her his middle name is Warren. In her mind she says his name over and over: William Warren Henderson.
At night, he lets her put her head on his shoulder, his own windbreaker rolled up beneath it as a pillow. Aida whispers, “I’m running away.” She expects him to say it too. This can be their private ritual. But he is already asleep.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the bus pulls into St. Louis. She is too tired to get up and walk around and he promises to bring her one of the vending machine cheese sandwiches if they have them. Aida watches through half-open eyes as he goes into the bus station and walks directly to a bank of pay phones. She sits up straight. Is he calling Beth? An image of the cover of Cherry Ames: Student Nurse comes to her. Does Beth look like that? Does she have adventures? Bill feeds change into the phone and wraps the cord around his hand as he talks. He looks pained, she thinks. Maybe he’s telling Beth that he has already met someone new.
After he hangs up, he disappears into the station. Aida holds her breath. What if he is getting on a bus back? But soon enough he appears again, and walks outside, straight to the bus. When he sees her watching him, he holds a cheese sandwich up for her to see. Aida exhales. This is what it is like to have a boyfriend, she thinks, wondering when they will kiss and what it will feel like.
THEY ARE DRIVING through Kansas, which is flat and long. This is the west, Aida tells herself. She is out west now.
“Middle name,” he says.
“Don’t have one,” Aida tells him. “My sister is Teresa Josephine. The Josephine is after our great-grandmother. But I’m just Aida. Like the opera,” she adds.
“Date of birth,” he says.
“I’m a Cancer,” she tells him.
“Whatever that means.” He laughs.
“I have the same birthday as Ringo Starr.”
He elbows her lightly in the ribs. “Come on,” he says.
Is she imagining it, or is his arm pressed closer to her than it was? Maybe she should hold his hand.
“July seventh,” Aida says, and wiggles a bit so that everything of hers is just a little closer to all of him. He doesn’t move away.
“I’m October ninth,” he says.
“What? That’s John Lennon’s birthday!” Aida says. They are like half the Beatles, she and Bill Henderson. Surely this is a sign.
“That makes me a . . .”
“Libra,” she says. She wishes she had brought her copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs with her. Then she could read it out loud to him, read all about Libras and how well Cancer and Libra got along together.
“That’s right,” he says. “The Scales. Indecisive, right?” He laughs sarcastically. “Beth would agree with that, I guess.”
At the sound of Beth’s name, Aida’s s
tomach hurts.
“All she did was yell at me last night when I called. Yelled that I woke her up. Yelled that I walked out. Yelled about all the electric can openers and fondue pots and yogurt makers she has to return if I don’t get my ass back to Pittsburgh.”
“Well,” Aida says, her mouth suddenly so dry she can hear her tongue smacking as she talks, “did you tell her you’re not going back to Pittsburgh? That you’re on your way to San Francisco?”
Bill shakes his head. “Boy, can she yell,” he says. He says it like it’s not a bad thing, but something marvelous.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS are snowcapped and purple in the distance. Aida can’t stop looking at them. She slept the night with her head on his windbreaker again, the windbreaker rolled up against his shoulder. Sometime during the night Bill had reached for her hand and held it lightly. Now, as the bus pulls into Denver, where they would have to change to a new bus, he is still holding on. Aida turns from the mountains and looks right into his eyes. She puts a spell on him; the spell will make him kiss her in Denver. If they see three particular things, the spell will work. She chooses the things: a man in a cowboy hat, a pregnant woman, and someone asking for change. Satisfied, she lets Bill tug her to her feet. He doesn’t let go of her hand as he guides her down the aisle and off the bus.
She expects Denver to be cold with those mountains so close. But instead it is hot and humid. Aida worries that her hand will start to sweat and Bill will get grossed out and get on a bus going east. But he drops her hand altogether in order to open the door for her to step inside. The bus station is bustling, and crowded. To her delight, there are lots of men in cowboy hats. Lots of them. She is one-third on her way to her first kiss.
As she stands beneath the departure board, peering up, Bill comes behind her and casually puts his hands on her shoulders and massages her sore muscles. Aida thinks that she can stand there like that forever. She doesn’t ever want him to stop.
But he does. He points to the board and says, “Gate Eleven.”
Aida turns to follow him and almost walks into a hugely pregnant woman.