Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.
“You got a transfer?”
“Hey, I’m sorry. If you need fare or something—” He stepped back.
But the driver motioned him on. “This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on.” Clap-clap: the bus rocked forward.
An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.
A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.
A couple—he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom—were making a point of not looking at him.
Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.
Where am I—but wouldn’t think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the brillowy ball.
He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.
She blinked.
He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.
They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.
He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.
After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct, was “Three Stars says the Times.” On the next, R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckles on blades.
On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.
Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, grinning and hanging his neck from slung shoulders.
ECK N W’S
S R OGS
ND
T E G TA Y
announced the next marquee. He looked at broken store windows—in one was a pile of naked dummies. The street widened and once smoke rolled by so that he could make out no letters at all upon the final marquee of the strip.
Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights in his own body sensation cast in the nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It’s the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.
He looked out the window.
Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):
E
M
B
O
R
I
K
Y’
S
Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with canvas. A crack in another zagged edge to edge.
Kid pulled the frayed ceiling cord, then held on to the bar across the back of the seat before him till the bus, a block later and somewhat to his surprise, stopped. He jumped off the back treadle to the curb and turned; through the dirty window, he saw the couple, who had not looked at him when he’d gotten on, stop looking at him now. The bus left.
He was standing diagonally across from the five, six, seven, eight story department store. Uneasily, he backed into a doorway. (People with guns, hey?) He felt for his orchid—looked at it. It was a very silly weapon. People shooting out the windows? Several, higher up, were open. Several more were broken. Across the street a gutter grill waved a steamy plume. Why, he thought, get out here? Maybe the people in there have all gone and he could just cross the street and—the skin of his back and belly shriveled. Why had he gotten off here? It had been in response to some unnamed embryo feeling, and he had leapt out of the bus, following it to term. But now it was born: and was terror.
Cross the street, motherfucker, he told himself. You get up close to the building and they can’t see you out the windows. This way somebody can just aim out and pick you off if they’ve got a penchant for it. He told himself some other things too.
A minute later, he walked to the opposite corner, a sidestep for the fire hydrant, stopped with his hand against the beige stone, breathing long, slow breaths and listening to his heart. The building took up all the block. There were no show windows down the side alley. Save from the front door, there was no place from the store he could be seen. He looked across the avenue. (From what letters still remained on that broken glass, it must have been a travel agency. And down there…? Some kind of office building, perhaps? Burn marks lapped great carbon tongues around the lower stories.) The street looked so wide—but that was because there were no cars at either curb.
He started down the alley, running his hand on the stone and occasionally glancing up for the imaginary gunman to lean out a window and blast straight down.
There’s nobody in there, he thought.
There’s nobody coming up behind me—
At the end of the block something—moved? No, it was a shadow between two parked trucks.
“Hey,” somebody said directly across the alley in a voice just under normal. “What the fuck you think you doin’, huh?”
He bruised his arm on the wall, and came away, rubbing it.
A thick shoulder pushed from behind a metal door across the alley. “Don’t get excited.” Half of Nightmare’s face emerged. Kid could see half the mouth speaking: “But when I count three, you get your ass over here so fast I wanna see smoke. One. Two…” The visible eye rose to look somewhere up the department store wall, looked back down. “Three.”
Nightmare caught Kid’s arm, and the memory of traversed pavement was battered out by bruises on his back, knee, and jaw—“Hey, man, you don’t have to—” as Nightmare snatched him through the quarter-open doorway.
He was in four-fifths darkness with a lot of people breathing.
“God damn,” Nightmare said. “I mean Jesus Christ.”
He said, “You don’t have to break my head,” softer than he’d started to.
Somebody very black in a vinyl vest laughed loudly. For a moment he thought it was Dragon Lady, but it was a man.
Nightmare made some disgusted sound. The laugh cut off.
Nightmare’s scarred shoulder (it was the first thing Kid saw as his eyes cleared of the dark) hid half of Denny’s face as the door had hidden half of Nightmare’s. The other faces were darker. “You don’t think so?” Nightmare still held Kid’s arm. With his other hand, he grabbed Kid’s hair—”Hey!”—and marched him around 180 degrees: Kid’s face came up against wire, behind some dirty glass, and behind that was—