THE BUS TO ST. MARY'S

The woman constructed an equilateral triangle out of the floor and the length of her calves, sitting with her feet widespread and connected knees. Her ambiguous pose and short skirt almost made Blair decide to stand. But he was unsteady and feverish, and the only vacant seat he could see was next to her. As the bus lurched in a shaky start, he sat down. She scooted aside, whether to make room or to avoid him he wasn’t sure. He furtively positioned himself on the bench, which was near the front of the bus and facing the aisle, slightly sideways in order to watch her, wondering as he did so what caused the odd angling of her fidgety legs - sexual yearning, or the long heels of her comfortless shoes. 

An old woman across the aisle was speaking to her as Blair sat down. “I always keep this cord around mine. That way I can never lose it.” She received no answer from the woman, so she turned to Blair. “That lady over there just had her cane stolen at the mall.” She pointed at another old woman sitting farther down the bus - a woman with thinning curly hair treated with copper-colored dye, weary eyes, and the sorrowful smile of one accustomed to making the best of things. When Blair glanced at her, the left side of her face trembled in a tic.

“They’ll steal anything,” the first old woman went on. “That’s why I got this cord.” She shook her bony hand at Blair. Wrapped around it was a white strap attached to the top of her cane. She shook her head; the twisted pile of white atop it trembled. “Ever since they took my first cane at the casino. Stole it right out from under my nose. A fine cane it was, too. Steel with a bronze handle. After that, I got myself a plain wooden cane and I use this cord. That way I never set it down.”

            Blair didn’t want to get involved, but felt that some response was expected. “Terrible that someone would steal a cane,” he said. But as his words came out, he felt more terrible than the thief, for he realized he must be infectious. He wished he could draw his words back into his mouth, but it was too late.

            “Terrible isn’t the word for it,” she objected. “It’s dirty. It’s sick!”

            In Blair’s imagination, his viruses floated, unretrievable, in a poisonous mist toward the old woman who scarcely had the strength left to stand. He imagined her veiled in the cloud of his contagion, inhaling his disorder as she innocently went on talking about theft and her cane. He could see her in the future, dehydrated and feverish as he was, without the resilience of youth to see her through, fading, and finally slipping away. To her bodiless spirit, he sent regretful confessions, full of remorse for being the medium of her death.

            The woman, seeing that Blair’s mind had turned elsewhere, addressed the victim. “Next time get yourself a wooden cane. And nothing fancy. Something unattractive that no one’s going to bother to steal. And be sure to put a cord on it so you never set it down.” Her voice filled the cavity of the bus. Even the passengers in the farthest seats were listening, soberly judging both the criminal and the crime.

            “Must have been someone desperate done it,” the victim replied, straining from the effort of boosting her smile, the left side of her face convulsing again. She tugged on the cord that signaled the driver to stop. “Least I can still get home. Not like some poor women, who’d be helpless.” As if to prove it, she stood up while the bus was still in motion, and nearly toppled over at the first jolt. But she grasped the metal bar in front of her just in time to manage to keep to her feet. 

            Several people were waiting at the stop outside. The driver opened the door, and his hand shot out at them from behind the screen of his big-backed chair with a crisp gesture of command. “Wait please,” he bellowed. “Someone’s getting off.”

            Her first steps were trembling, infantile. But soon she gained confidence, keeping her hands all the time close to the metal bars provided for passengers to hold. 

“I’m just thankful it wasn’t someone needs her cane more than me,” she announced to no one at all. As she haltingly descended the steps at the exit, she once more turned her eyes inside, staging one last fragile smile for her audience to show that she was unbeaten, casting her eyes here and there as if hoping to find her stick or its thief on the bus. Blair thought her eyes lighted a moment too long on his. He looked away quickly, and she disappeared. The woman in the skirt parted her thighs abruptly, stood, and strode past Blair to the seat vacated by the robbed woman. She sat down there and reestablished her legs in their triangular configuration. Blair fretted over whether she had moved to escape him, or whether she merely preferred a forward facing seat. An uneasiness arose in him that she might have noticed his sidelong glances, or that, in his dreamy state, he might have fallen asleep without noticing and leaned toward her, even rested his shoulder against hers. Perhaps she had seen his shivering and wanted to stay clear of his fever, or perhaps she sensed some deeper, repulsive disorder of his soul. Blair pulled his coat tighter around him and, just to avoid staring at her legs, turned to watch the new arrivals file in.

            A woman with an egg-shaped torso and the bearing of one accustomed to either dominate or scorn those around her led the way. She wore a faded, shapeless dress with vertical pink and white stripes. Her head and limbs protruded from its billows ghastly and pale, rounded to caricature by fat. She had the look of immeasurable age of one puffed beyond the commonplace, and could just as easily have been in her twenties as her forties. Her small eyes seemed about to sink below her face, swallowed by expanding jowls or receding of their own volition from a world she disdained.  

“He’s paying,” she informed the driver, sharply.

A man in dirty clothes and baseball cap followed her. “Three,” he said, and he dumped a handful of coins into the fare machine. Behind him, keeping her distance, was a pregnant girl, perhaps thirteen. 

“Sit here Lucy,” the egg-lady commanded, pointing to the seat beside Blair. The girl complied, flipping her hair in a gesture of defiance. Blair looked straight ahead to keep his breath away from the mother of an unborn child, and found himself staring at the egg-woman’s belly, still heaving from the effort of getting on board. The three newcomers remained in a cluster, avoiding each other’s eyes. They seemed anxious to keep some space between each other despite staying together and in spite of the crowding of the bus. Blair guessed that the egg-lady was the mother of the girl. They had the same straw-like hair, though the older woman’s was shorter. The man between them was harder to place. He resembled neither. He had curly dark hair, a dark complexion, the worn, dirty nails of one who works with his hands, and he looked about thirty. He could have been either a father or a boyfriend, but of whom was perplexing. He looked uncomfortable. Like a fulcrum, he seemed to both support and be weighed-down by the women he stood between. His eyes darted around the bus as if seeking refuge. 

Across the aisle, her bony arms and walking stick visible beyond the borders of the egg-lady, the old woman started talking to the new arrivals. “The woman just got off had her cane stolen at the mall. Seems like nothing’s safe at al these days!”

At the next stop, a woman got aboard pulling two children behind her, a boy of about five and a girl slightly younger. They pushed past the working man and the egg-lady, who would not move back and relinquish their places next to the young mother-to-be. The mother and her children stopped in the pocket of space in the aisle just past the egg-lady, the mother anchoring herself to a metal bar.

“Hold on to me,” she said, as she gathered her chicks away from Blair as if sensing danger. The two clung to her with both hands, turning faces with big frightened eyes on Blair, the sweaty stranger.   

Blair loosened his coat. He felt extraordinarily hot. Perspiration ran down his back, wetting his shirt. In his mind, he sorted the people around him, an inverse triage in which he selected the fit so that he might face them and leave the weak untainted by his breathing. But the crowd was disordered. Wherever he found the strong, those with the resilience to fend off his contagion, weaklings hid behind. Nowhere could he breathe in blamelessness, so he tried to limit his respiration. That, however, proved to have a reverse effect. The longer he held his breath the more forcefully in the end it expelled itself. He tried hanging his head and breathing toward his feet, but that made him dizzy, as though the weight of his head might tip him over. Burning with fever and unabatable guilt, he faced again the belly of the egg-woman, hoping that her substance would act as a barrier to his germs.

She glowered at him. He imagined that she expected him to offer his seat to her or to the children, who were having a hard time concentrating on hanging on and were constantly in danger of falling. But the thought of standing nauseated him. Someone nearby smelled of stale cigarettes and sweat. Blair wanted air. He made a feeble attempt to open the window, but he couldn’t make it budge. The bus was air-conditioned and cold; the air was foul. Blair felt weak. He wanted to lie down, but if he were to slump even slightly, he would encounter the shoulder of the girl. He didn’t dare look at her, but in his mind he replayed her arrival. Her appearance on the bus had seemed almost miraculous. Neither her condition nor her defiance had obliterated the vivacity of her youth or her mysterious, vernal beauty. Blair slipped into a daydream in which his head rested on her ripe belly and he felt the cool comfort of her hand upon his brow. With a start, he realized he was staring into the frowning face of her mother. In a few years, he imagined, the girl would look just like her, the seams of her beauty swallowed by disillusion and fat. The egg-woman continued to frown at him until they came to the hospital, the end of the line.

“Exit from the front,” the driver barked.

Most of the passengers were already standing before the bus had come to a halt. Blair was as impatient as anyone to get off, but he felt too weak to risk standing in the crowd. He waited. The workingman touched the girl’s shoulder, and she drew away. “I don’t need your help,” she snapped at him. Then she whipped around at Blair. “What are you looking at?” she demanded. Blair turned his head away in time to catch the old woman shaking her head and making little “tisk-tisk” sounds with her tongue.

The workingman abandoned the girl and made his way angrily toward the door. The egg-woman, sour, pushed behind him. “Come on Lucy, get off your ass girl,” she drawled. “You know we ain’t got all day.” The girl lifted herself awkwardly and joined the queue to the door. She was followed by the mother dragging her children, who was being distracted by the old lady, who was still shaking her head and saying, “You can’t be too careful these days. A lady got off the bus earlier, they stole her cane.” 

Blair looked up and caught the high-heeled woman staring down at him as she passed. For a moment, he thought she was going to speak to him, but her lips compressed and she turned her head and was carried away in the current of the crowd. Blair watched as the rest of the passengers from the back of the bus filed past. He felt anxious to get out of the bus and reach the hospital, where recovery, he felt certain, lay waiting. In the confusion of his fever, his certainty mingled with his daydream of the girl. He saw himself lying in a bed, pillowed on a nurse’s white uniform. His ear resting against her stomach, he distinguished a double heartbeat as her small gentle warm hands stroked all the pain away.

©Allan Gaede, 2005

Beginning in the 1970's, Allan Gaede visited various religious and
alternative communities around the world, arriving in India in 1981 and spending much of the next fifteen years at the Osho Commune in Pune. While teaching English in Japan in 1998 he returned to work on a novel that he had started and abandoned some 25 years before. That novel and another are now complete. Both are unpublished, but a short story of his can be found on the online journal Kimera. He lives now in Sedona, Arizona, working, meditating,
singing, hiking, and writing.

Email: satmarga@hotmail.com