Untitled
by Michael Wexler
They sat one to a row, avoiding each other for as long as possible. Some with walkmen, some with books, some with nothing but themselves. The man with the turban, asleep against the wall, drool carving a stream down his thick, black beard. It would reach the end in time, spilling off the outgrowth and making a waterfall into his lap. The lice waited anxiously to dance and play in the gusher.
There was the balding lady, with the tablecloth, writing slowly on a pad, inking out each deliberate letter with another year of her life. There was the bus driver. And the fat guy, the pig in aisle 8, sweating like a ball of lard. And him. Steve Chudnick, seat 22A on the bus to Akron, in a rush to nowhere and back and back to nowhere.
She got on near Pittsburgh. In some no name coal town where you could tour a mine. If she had only been a midget, it would have been ok. If she had only been a priest or a nun or an ugly little troll, none of it would have happened. But she wasn't. She wore jeans and a white t-shirt tucked in, no makeup and a necklace as she stepped up the stairs with her white ticket tongue depressor, peering down the throat of the mighty Greyhound. The lice were bathing and the bald lady was balding and the pig was pigging and any normal person would have taken their own row. For every seat was open but the four.
She stepped forward, walking past Rajiv, eyeing out a spot in the back, where all the Penthouse letters are. Maybe she wanted him to follow, to get behind the final aisle, where she would sit on his lap and pull up her dress and he could write one himself.
Dear Penthouse: I was recently seduced by an unnamed bus lover on the way to Akron. I know your readers will find this hard to believe but my penis is a daunting 19 inches. Wide. While most women scream and flee in terror at the sight of it, she was different, taking me by the hand, rubbing my randy stallion as I probed her steaming maidenhood, unafraid of the behemoth which had been roused.
She stepped past the wrestler, past Erma, picking up her stride toward the rear. Only the guy with the plastic cup could hear... Chudnick's heart notching higher, beating faster as she closed the gap, wondering if there'd be a hello, a slight jerk of the head, motioning him to follow. What if the jerk was wrong, too late, as she pulled her key chain mace, shrieking and blinding him for life. The other passengers would glom around, a freakshow version of the Fantastic Four, Rajiv unloading his warrior Hindu lice, the bald lady, stripping naked, blasting him with wrinkled nudity and wrapping him in her hideous dress, the wrestler flying off the top ropes and laying him out with a flawless sunset flip. Even Ivan Putsky would have been fucked. She would tell the bus driver and they would call ahead and when he got to Akron, guys with mirrored sunglasses would put him in a car. Everyone carried a key chain mace...to ward off the Chudnicks of the world.
He would look away, down to his feet, and wait for her to pass. This was Steve's decision as he scanned the ground, searching for a place to focus...the soda stain or the struggling beetle, stuck upside down, practicing backstroke for his swimmers card. Her feet hit down, one after the other and her necklace bounced to match the cadence and he wanted her to sit with him, to jerk off to her, to talk to her, whatever he was supposed to do. He wanted to but he was looking down and she was coming now, knock after knock....
And then it stopped; without another step. Was she putting her bags on top? She was on the wrong bus and just realized it? Dropped something, needed something, lost something, thought something? She was staring straight at him, she was onto him, onto his game? He wanted to look but couldn't, his eyes under the strictest of impossible orders to stay on the ground, his ears begging for the rhythm to please re-start. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. The little mouse ran up the clock. But there were no more boot sounds. It had stopped. She paused and sat down next to him.
Any normal person would have taken their own row. If she had only been a fat black lady, it would have been ok. If she had only been a priest or a nun or an ugly little troll, it would have been ok. None of it would have happened. But she wasn't.
He stared at the ground, frozen, like a cube of deer, looking to the beetle for advice. The rodent answered back, sticking up a single leg in disdain, flipping Chudnick off for gawking at his plight and failing to lend a hand. Steve should have said hello right then and got it over with but he didn't. He should have siad hello right at that instant, right when he was wasting his time to think he should have said hello right at that instant. And even then it wasn't too late. If he had just said hello when he was taking the time to think he should have just said hello when he was taking the time or when he was thinking it wasn't too late. 'Cause then it would have been normal but every second that teetered by it became more deranged. Why had he let all this time pass before saying hello? Why wasn't he looking over at her? Why, in God's fucking name, was he playing with a beetle?
It was an hour before he recovered. She was reading a book. He was staring at nothing, throwing knives and bean-bags and flaming spears at himself, accolades for biggest schmuck on the bus. At least Rajiv had the balls to wear a turban in public. At least George the Animal was a big sweaty Ox...he had character. Steve Chudnick was a mutt. But it was this realization which gave him the unexpected power of the law of cars. In a power play, where a bastard fuck in a Mercedes is threatening to not let you in, in your decrepit 1979, un-air-conditioned, piece of shit brown Cadillac, you, by the law of cars, hold the unforseen power. You don't give a shit if you hit the Mercedes, but he, on the other hand, is weak, his Achilles heel the fact that he cares about this car and therefore will never win a contest of wills. It is the shittiest cars, the criminals and impoverished and constructively drug addicted, they own the roads and reign victorious in all merges and traffic battles. And in this tradition, Steve Chudnick gathered the power to say it. He exhaled, turned to his left, and in on fell swoop...she was gone...walking toward the bathroom...to freshen up.
What was she doing in there? Taking a shit, disabling the smoke detector, shaving her eyebrows, maybe there was a trap door through the toilet leading to the luggage compartment, hobos and drifters sacked out on suitcases, smoking joints and drinking saki. A guy in the corner knelt on a dog kennel and pressed a cup against the roof, laughing wickedly as the conversations and thoughts filtered down from above.
More likely, though, she, the girl, her, was on the toilet, taking a shit in that bathroom. But who takes a shit in a bus? Maybe she was writing on the wall, she was a shithouse poet, he had seen a few at the "cafe." A shit on a bus, he thought to himself, that's worse than a shit in a restaurant. Maybe she had shit her pants, it was possible, and he looked again at her seat, scanning the fabric for any sign of the matter. Nothing. No stains, no markings, no shit. Just the pocketbook which she had left, peculiarly alone, on the seat.
That's odd, he wondered, no one leaves their pocketbook on a seat. His eyes turned to the bag, as did the bus-driver's, looking back in his rear-view, as did Erma's, looking up from her notes.
Were they saying look inside, she's waiting for you, or take the money, we're the only ones that know. Loot the bag and we'll split it later. Maybe there was a note inside, "meet me in the bathroom." Maybe she just wanted him to keep an eye on it. Maybe a dildo. Maybe it was a bomb, a pocket book bomb, set to go off if the bus dropped below 60. Rajiv was asleep but George the animal was alert, looking over, his sweaty bald pumpkin head shining bright. Steve imagined how it would look as a jack-o-lantern. He wasn't the pumpkin carver type, but he could do something with this one, put a candle in it, a bag of candy on the steps and tell the kids to be nice and only take one.
She was still in the bathroom, either dead, stuck in the toilet and ashamed to call for help, or waiting. She was waiting for him and the note in the bag.
He took out his comb, a small black comb which he carried in his back pocket. It would have been cooler if it was a pick--but it wasn't. He would tuck his black 50/50 shirt inside, comb his hair and strut back there like the Duke himself. He would knock a soft knock and whisper through the door, "Honey, I'm home." Or take another route, "C'mon baby, it's me, open up." He could be Chong, he could be John MacEnroe, he could be Apache Chief from the Superfriends and get big as shit for no reason at all. He could be Samurai. Even if she was stuck in the toilet, it was no problem for Steve Chudnick, "Chud." He would stroll back in there, plunge her out, and take a lap with the American flag.
They were all looking at it now. A brown bag with one of those patterns your grandmother would know. It could have been blue once and the shit in question was in the bag and that's why it was brown. How many other people on the bus had shit in their bags, Steve wondered? Maybe everyone travels with a shit in their bag and he was just raised in a fucked up family that never taught him the proper etiquette. It was pathetic and dysfunctional that Steve did not have a shit in his own bag and seeing that the bathroom was occupied he had little hope of remedying the situation. Shit.
The bus driver smiled and looked back yet again. Why did he keep looking? Maybe Steve was giving him some sort of gay "I want you bus driver" signal without even knowing.
Bus drivers, on those giant bouncing seats with miniature fans and views of the tiny cars and little people constantly in the way, blocking their bus from getting where it needs to go, on time. On fucking schedule. Hour after hour on the open road, how many times had they fantasized about being monster buses, instead of passenger buses, down and dirty in the bogs of a lawless road warrior world. A world where service was no longer a priority and they could womp freely about the roads, crushing and dismembering little boys and girls at will, squashing families like a giant frogger.
Oh man, Steve had never thought about it but it made perfect sense. There was a race of people even more twisted and malformed than security guards. It was the bus drivers.
They were all looking now, the bus filled to capacity from a number of its stops. He stretched his hand out slowly, tentatively, ready to open the bag and retrieve his note. Something was angling out the side, it was bulging, helping in the act. The bus driver glaring back, craning to see, Erma having stopped her writing, George the animal sweating even more, making a lake which intersected nicely the sleeping Rajiv falls.
Steve Chudnick smiled, tilting his head for the overhead view, reaching his paw inside and feeling for the slip. The little piece of blue lined paper, folded, unevenly, with hearts for dotted I's. Seconds went by, maybe more and then it stopped. The Duke, sliding out a little note and raising it in victory. Their eyes shifted though. They were looking past him toward something else, something more intriguing. He turned to see, his poor smiling head, meeting not with any image but with the closed fist of her swinging hand. It hid him like a wrecking ball. She had punched him in the face.
She grabbed the note, apparently not for Steve after all, zipped the bag and sat back down. Erma chuckled in her ratty seat as a drop of blood trickled down his eye. Before he could react, before he could dissolve into oblivion or cry or wince or mince or just be the biggest asshole in the world, it screeched to a halt. The bus had stopped and she was getting off.
The girl stood up, took three steps forward, twisted just her head and glared back at him. Steve was coughing, pleading to get it out, trying to say something. He choked on the word, stuck like a big beef bouillon cube in his slimy, lame esophagus. The silence was loud enough to turn the dungeon keeper, rapist, monster truck bus driver from the dulcet breezes of his kick ass mini-fan. Loud enough to spin the weight of George the Animal Steele 180 degrees, to jolt Erma, and loud enough to wake Rajiv from his epic slumber.
All the eyes of the bus shifted onto Steve. He couldn't see them but if he could he would have seen the laser kaleidoscope of doom, more powerful than the Star Blazer's cannon, a hundred different shades of hazel, 32 blue, 26 green, brown pink yellow purple, 10 with colored convex amplifiers, brrowing holes though every side of his chair...his organs spilling out on the sticky rubber floor, the beetle chuckling and rolling in his bile. The only audible thing on the bus was the beating of his panicked heart...and only the guy below heard that.
If she would have only turned and walked away it would have been ok. If she had only gone. But she didn't. She swiveled the rest of her body to meet her head, making one straight line, and walked back toward him like a stick figure turned assassin. She was opening the pocket book. Steve Chudnick was a nice guy. He was a cool guy. He was a "good guy" but at the moment it mattered little. She stepped up close and leaned in on his face, her breath drifting down like mosquito netting on his senses. She drew closer, bending over at the waist, the pores on her skin opening and closing like heart valves or swallowing throats, her mouth descending lower toward his head.
He looked out the window, the emergency window. If only he could have stopped it all, if only he could have pushed out the glass and escaped in one continuous motion and ran.
The world had paused, tossed in the air like a tennis serve and waiting at its apex to be swatted.
She whispered in his ear, turned and left.
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