I CAN’T ACTUALLY call it a waking dream that proved real, but definitely a visitation of the spirited sort sought me out that first night of our journey, in the most ordinary of dog bus circumstances. As happens in the monotony of night travel, passengers up and down the aisle had gradually nodded off until the bus was stilled to the sounds sleeping people make, Herman leading the chorus. While I dozed off and on, I was too keyed up by our daring escape from Aunt Kate and all she represented to really conk off. Somewhere in the long stretch beyond the Twin Cities to the even longer stretch of South Dakota, around three in the morning, I came to once again, with a strange little comet of light joining my reflection in the pitch-black window beside me. Blinking at its mysterious appearance there, I realized it was coming from inside the bus rather than up in the sky.
I sat up to look around, and across from us, where a couple who must have got on at a recent stop was sitting, a narrow beam of light poked down into the lap of the man in the aisle seat. The woman next to him was curled up kittenishly as she slept, while he was writing for all he was worth, just like I’d been during the day, but into a slick-looking hardbound notebook with sky-blue pages. While the rest of the bus was thoroughly dark, his fancy writing gear was illuminated by that tiny spotlight from someplace. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but as my eyes adjusted, I realized he had a penlight, about the size of my Kwik-Klik, clipped to his shirt collar and aimed down. This stranger kept on writing like a demon, his hand never stopping to change or erase anything, a lit-up page no sooner filled than he flipped to the next and was giving it his all.
Holy wow. This was too good to pass up. I nudged Herman awake with a start. “Hsst. Trade seats with me.”
“If it makes you happy,” he mumbled grumpily, and we switched in that clownish way when there is not enough room to maneuver. Herman at once slumped against the window and back into slumber. He’d have to sleep for both of us, I was not going to miss out on this. More wide awake than ever, I half hung over the arm of the seat, in a way designed to catch the man’s attention.
When the ceaselessly writing passenger felt my eyes on him and turned my direction to look, the flashlight dimly revealing our faces to each other, I whispered eagerly, “Hi. Do you do that a lot? Write on the bus, I mean.”
“Funny you should ask, man,” he replied in a heavy smoker’s voice, low enough not to wake the curled-up woman. “Got the divine curse.” Shoulders on him like a football player, he shrugged comically nearly up to his ears. “The old itch for which the only cure is pencil-in.”
“Wow.” I was impressed in more ways than one. His playful way with language reminded me of Gram somehow. Feeling an immediate kinship, I kept right on: “So are you gonna write all night?”
“Until the brain runs dry, let’s just say.” From the look of him, like he’d had too much coffee, that could be a real long while yet. He patted the open notebook on his lap. “Have to resort to tabula rosy here, because my machine is in the baggage.”
My silence must have told him I was trying to decipher that. “My typin’writer.” He grinned fast and friendly. “Old Hellspout.”
“Oh, sure.” Ceaseless writing gave me my opening, sort of. “I wrote a whole bunch myself, today. To my grandmother. She’s in the hospital, back in Montana. She had to have an awful operation, and send me away”—I nodded toward snoozing Herman in more or less explanation of the two of us together—“until she gets better.”
“That’s a tough go, buddy,” this man I had never seen before was all sympathy right away. Full face to me now, he took me in intently, yet with a sort of gentleness, as if we were old companions on the hard road of getting by. What he offered next could not be called encouragement exactly, yet I heard a kind of call to courage within it. “Life is what it throws at you.”
That fit pretty well with Hunch up and take it, I thought. Stranger that he was, he seemed to instinctively understand a loco time like this summer of mine, so much so that I had no qualm about getting personal with him. “Can I ask? When you’re writing like that, do you ever make stuff up, a little?”
Amused, he cut a quick caper with the pen-size light, pretending to write wildly in the air with its beam. “Anything goes, when you razz the matazz into one of those alphabet boxes called a book.”
Book! That was way beyond any number of letters. My excitement grew. “Ever write those Reader’s Digest ones? Condensed Books, I mean?”
“Phwaw,” he expelled air like a hair ball. “That’s a pregnant thought.” From his expression after that burst I couldn’t tell whether he was grinning or grimacing. He had a face like that, more than one thing going on at a time. In the glow of the penlight, his high forehead shown pale and his nose seemed to come down straight from it, but with a mashed look at the end, as if he’d been worked over in a fight. He had quick eyes, like a cat’s, as he met mine. I couldn’t be sure, but he might have winked in answering, “Condensation is only fog on the windshield for me. What I write, man, is as long as this highway.”
“Whoo, really?” About then the woman at his side stirred in her sleep. I couldn’t see much of her except quite a bit of bare leg. But emboldened by the dark, I asked, “Is that your wife?”