He perches on their armrest with a brown unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. Hey kids! Daddy’s collecting money for the next rest stop, where I’ll grab us all snacks to share. No? Well, need some gum? I got Doublemint at a dollar a stick? Shoe shine, fifty cents?
When they stop talking to him, his mega-smile drops and he stares with hunger, moving to the next row, puts on his mega-smile. It’s a terrifying performance—perfect, stellar.
It’s a population of misfits, changing at each stop as they discharge riders and take on new ones. An ex-con with a ginger-blond mustache whose last meal was behind bars. A woman with a beehive hairdo carrying a parcel of dried meat. A pretty child in a watermelon-print sundress who keeps asking questions but whose mother never answers, paging through a magazine with empty eyes. And the obese man, taking up the last row by the bathroom, with three chins and deep creases in his flesh, aromatic in an ancient way, stinking ethereal, more beautiful than hell.
They doze on each other’s shoulder, conscious of hands moving under the seats, reaching for a wallet in a backpack. They stamp at the ghostly fingers the way you scare roaches.
Sunrise behind them, and they’re passing another town in Iowa. This place, a blink of fellowship, people and buildings and animals—folks meandering around this fine morning, sunlight caught in their hair like dewdrops, all believing that where they are is where life begins and ends, even if they know better. The gravity of any location pulls citizens to its heart, organizing people by abstractly spiritual geography.
The speed of the bus isn’t grand but it has the effect of slowing down any activity it passes, so a farmwoman lifts a crate into her truck sluggishly, and the man trudges the field at a funereal pace, even the dust kicked up by his boots billowing in languorous, illuminated clouds.
They drive into the falling sun.
At a diner in Nebraska, they break and grab a quick breakfast: sliced ham and scrambled eggs. She tries to get Jamey to eat, but he plays with his food like a girl who thinks she’s overweight. She pushes a forkful of fried apricot pie to his mouth, and he almost retches.
Back on the bus.
They drive past white crosses.
Past an Indian reservation.
Past floodlights at night shining on giant tractors, working through late hours.
They drive along barren highway and then a town begins: a gas station first, then raggedy houses, a grocer, then a liquor store, a stationery, a diner, a gun store, culminating in a church at the midpoint, then de-escalating with a ladies-wear store, a barber, raggedy houses, the other gas station…
Wyoming!
They make it to the Wagon Wheel Motel, its name written in neon script above the office. The Wagon Wheel offers a daily newspaper delivered to their door, a hot breakfast every morning. A bar with wagon wheels for lamps, and a motor court with picnic tables.
They register as Buck and Esther London, names they came up with on the bus while looking out filthy windows onto clean land. They take number 186 from this single-story horseshoe of rooms.
Home sweet home.
The room has faux-wood walls, and an Aztec-patterned comforter, 1950s bedside tables. Ashtray with the Wagon Wheel logo. They brush their teeth and fall onto the bed, and wonder if they are in fact different people than when they left New York three days ago.
Jamey looks around the room from his horizontal position and can taste the smoke of thousands of cigarettes. He can feel a lady in a nylon peignoir cutting corns off her feet, right there. A man watching game shows in pinstriped boxers as he flosses. Salesmen must have looked in this mirror. Rodeo contenders would have prayed. The old lady held the shower walls as water pummeled her frail body, then set out in an apple-green Pontiac Catalina for a last Thanksgiving at her son’s house.
“What are we doing?” Jamey asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought maybe you had a plan.”
“My plan was to get away.”
They lie in silence.
They meet the old cowboy who lurks around the motel. His name is Don, and he runs his hand through white hair under his hat then replaces the hat. He wears dark glasses too. He has a peg leg, and gets violently drunk every night, and does motel chores all day. He shoots a couple rotgut whiskeys, runs to the loo, vomits, comes back for more, patting his mouth with a gingham hankie.
“Lost my leg in ’Nam,” he tells them one morning in the parking lot, and runs a hand through his white hair.
Later they overhear him at the bar telling a Canadian couple it was a mountain lion tore off his foot.
The air! The air is so different. She breathes it, and the novelty doesn’t fade. This world brushes her arms, touches her face, like something getting to know her. She can’t help but smile at the clouds ringing the knees of snowcapped mountains, or at the constellations at night. She hadn’t known that stars do twinkle, that squirrels eat mushrooms, that birds fill a dusk with song. This place is a surprise, pulled out of the big American road map like a Cracker Jack prize.
Thickets of grass and wildflowers bend with the wind.
Jamey looks at ravens weighing down the branches of a tree so heavily it seems they’re in the wrong tree, since everything here is calibrated.
The breeze moves different trees differently—aspen leaves wink and tilt like sequins—the cottonwood flutters. The young aspens don’t have white bark yet. The rose hips look like red marbles.
He can’t imagine the moment he and Elise will say goodbye to each other.
He didn’t know he could have this volume of feeling, this intensity—sadness lights every cell like adrenaline. Stabs of it run through his loins, bolts of grief up his arms.
Just watching her now, spreading peanut butter on bread at the motel-room table, the way she looks at what she’s doing, licks the blade, her shoulders rising as she cuts the sandwich in two—who dreamed he could love someone this much?
“You could do fine without me,” he tells her.
“Shut up,” she says without looking away from the TV.
She hates seeing him like this: skinny, ghostly, his tooth cracked.
He still has the basic face he brought to every occasion—the mask that can outlast anyone’s prying except hers. She could tell, from the day they met, that he hadn’t given up. His act was to pretend to care, but to pretend so badly it looked like he didn’t care, protecting the dear and tender truth that he did care. He wanted to love somebody.
Don mentions they need a dishwasher at Dragon City, a random Chinese joint down the highway; their regular guy shot his sister in the hand last night and is in jail.
“Maybe I’ll go down there?” Jamey says.
“Make an extra dollar, why not, I say,” Don says.
“Why do you need to work today?” Elise asks.
“Got to make as much money as possible.”
“Why?”
“To live on.”