America: Gone To The School Of Greyhound (cont.)

But the more time I spent beside this “flatlander from Missouruh,” as he called himself, the more I realized there was nuance to his observations.  If his adjectives were weak, his memories were strong.  Soon I was benefiting from his encyclopedic knowledge of cliffside highways in Colorado and red rock canyons in Utah.  Whenever I mentioned things I’d read about the southwest that he hadn’t already known, he was happy for the learning.  As night fell somewhere between Tulsa, Oklahoma and Amarillo, Texas, I decided I couldn’t have asked for a better seatmate.

I closed my eyes, trying to lock in the day’s events.  Though the trip to St. Louis had offered few memorable moments, the trip from it was saturated with them: The mean-spirited driver (“don’t talk to me” had been his only announcement) kicking a passenger off in Joplin, Missouri for no good reason.  Small American flags flapping from gas pumps, and massive ones wrapped around the pillars of a liquor store.  Passages from the Gospels on roadside sandwich boards, allowing for enlightenment whether you were coming or going.  The old man, all jowl and belly, sitting down beside the matronly woman with a churchgoer’s posture, asking her if she would behave.  She would try, she answered, but could make no promises.  The teenager with a half-moustache and yellow teeth, fleeing his “redneck” northern Michigan town so he could hang with his Native buddies on their reserve.  And the wild-eyed but well-behaved teen beside him, who disappeared in Oklahoma City – ferreted out, someone said, by drug-sniffing canines and escorted away in manacles.

In the bathroom of the Amarillo, Texas, station, I was intercepted by a tall black man with a scarlet gouge on his cheek, a man who had known hard times, and wasn’t done with them yet.

“Buy a doughnut off you?” he asked, his eye twitching slightly.

Was that a euphemism?  Would my well-being at one-thirty a.m. in the Amarillo bus station men’s room depend on knowing what “doughnut” really meant?  Then I clued in.  Tired of what had passed for food in the Greyhound stations, I had gone to a mini-mart and bought the component parts for peanut butter sandwiches.  He had seen the bag.

“Don’t have any doughnuts,” I told him.  “Just apples and sandwiches.  You want one?  No charge.”

“What kind of sandwiches?”

“Peanut butter.”

“No jelly, huh?”

“Sorry.  Just peanut butter.”

“That’s all right,” he smiled.  “Peanut butter is ALRIGHT.  Cool and THE GANG!  Cool and THE GANG!”

Pushing off from Amarillo, our driver, a Latino woman with not-yet-perfected English, came over the mike to read us the riot act.

“Let me emphasigh,” she said.  “Don’t be smoking on my bus.  You be smoking on my bus, I will catch you, and I will throw you off my bus, and you can wait in the desert for the next bus.  And guess what.  It’s not coming for nine hours.”

She was back a minute later.  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I know about the tornado warning.”

Tornado warning?

“If I have to, I’ll pull over.”

My inner voice hadn’t said anything about a tornado warning.

But it also hadn't said anything about the surreal light show.  A patch of clouds, invisible in the night sky, was suddenly ignited blinding white, then electric blue.  No lightning bolts, at least that I could see.  No thunder or rain.  More silent flickering of white, then electric blue.  And blackness.

I awoke to the high desert of northern New Mexico, the early morning sun burning through the overcast, spilling light on everything in the shadeless landscape, the rusty mesas where I half expected to see John Wayne sitting astride a horse; the black and green lava rock poking through the earth at improbable angles, glistening as if freshly born; the geysers of dust blown four stories high by the wind; the rumbling freight train which would dwarf any town through which it ran, but seemed like a dinky toy in the enormity of the desert.

My flatlander friend loved this place, he said, even if his deceased wife had dismissed it as nothing more than “a million acres of kitty litter.”

Soon he and I would be parting ways.  I was about to suggest we exchange addresses, when he got to telling me a story – about how, in his youth, he and his buddies would go into town and, for kicks, harass the hardware store owner.  Their favorite tactic had been to bargain him down to twenty cents for a twenty-five cent screw.

“We were worse than a bunch of Jews,” he said. 

I tried not to feel wounded, telling myself that my newfound friend hadn’t really understood what he’d said.

We left New Mexico for Arizona, entering a pine forest – in the desert – that I’d read about, but hadn’t believed existed until now that it surrounded me.

At last, we were there: Flagstaff, Arizona.  Seventy-eight miles from the Grand Canyon, as close as Greyhound could take me.

I hit the ground, and hauled my backpack from below.

It had not been the easiest of trips.  And certainly not the most comfortable.  But it had been an education in people and landscapes, a window on worlds I could never have imagined.

 “Hey, Inny,” I said.  “I want to thank you.”

“I’m too transcendent to need your thanks.”

"I don't care."

 “Then make it quick.  I’ve got a backlog of people to torment today.”

“Thank you,” I said, praying I would not be commanded to return home by pogo stick.

Page 2 of 2   Previous Page

All contents copyright ©2006 Pology Magazine. Unauthorized use of any content is strictly prohibited.