“That’s what he thinks, the dickhead.” The newspaper van revved and so did the teamster, bouncing slightly in his seat, as the stoplight took agonizingly long to change.
The instant it did, we shot across the street and along the arches of the terminal driveway, directly toward the warning sign at the far end, reading in red letters of descending order EXIT WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER.
“Hang on!” shouted the teamster, and whipped the van around the curb into the exitway, jamming us to a halt, nose to nose with the bus.
By reflex, the wide-eyed driver of the bus had hit the brakes, and even more so the horn. “Here you go, kiddo. Have a nice trip,” said my Good Samaritan daredevil at the wheel, giving the Greyhound driver the finger. In the blare resounding in the arched driveway, I could barely be heard thanking the van-driving teamster as I leaped out and he gave me a little bye-bye wave.
Peering down at me through the broad windshield, his eyebrows dark as thunderclouds, the bus driver at last let up on the deafening horn as I edged through the slit of space between the facing vehicles and popped out at the bus door. With faces watching curiously in every window above the ever-running streamlined dog, I wildly pantomimed that I needed in, until the driver, keeping his hand dubiously on the door lever, cracked things open enough that I could make myself heard.
“You left me! In Minnesota, I mean Minneapolis. My jacket was holding my seat like always, see, but I stayed in the bus station a minute too long and when I ran to where the bus was, it wasn’t there and—”
“That’s yours?” Looking more upset than ever, the driver fished my jacket from behind his seat. “You should have kept better track of it, junior. I didn’t see it in time or I’d have turned it in back there before we started.”
As I gulped at one more near miss, he pointed a further accusing finger at me. “And technically, if a passenger misses the bus, it’s his own tough luck.” I was so afraid of exactly that, I couldn’t form words. “It says right in the regulations,” he kept on reading me the dog bus version of the riot act, “it is the passenger’s responsibility to—”
Just then a sharp blast of horn from the van made him jerk his head around, glowering back and forth from me to the motionless teamster, unbudging as a bulldog.
In exasperation, he yanked the bus door open. “Okay, okay, step on and show me your ticket.”
7.
TO MY INTENSE RELIEF, I found the autograph book safe and sound in the jacket and simply huddled in my seat with an arm wrapped around them both as if they might get away again, until the bus finally trundled out of the last of St. Paul and its troublesome twin and the tires were making the highway humming sound. Naturally the other passengers had gawked for all they were worth as I scrambled aboard and ducked into the first vacant set of seats—where I was sitting before was occupied by a mother with a fussy baby, I saw with a pang—so I wouldn’t be pestered by a seatmate about the whole experience. From the tone of remarks that followed my adventurous arrival, I could tell that my fellow riders were divided between thinking I was lucky beyond belief in catching up with the bus the way I had or a menace to society for missing it in the first place. I wasn’t going to argue with either point of view. And until dog bus life settled down a great deal more, I would stay quiet and still and have nothing to do with anybody.
I reckoned without the elderly couple across the aisle from me.
“Tsk,” first I heard the woman. “It just makes me want to take and shake him. Imagine doing what he did.”