“Now, where in hell my spose to sit?” he said loudly. “Huh?” He turned to the driver. “Answer me that! There ain’t no seats back here!”
“Jest a minute,” the driver said. The Negro woman was now in the aisle, like a giant plug. Her jaw was loose. She was mumbling. The driver lifted down two shopping bags from the rack.
“I ain’t gonna stand all the way to no Atlanta!” the soldier shouted. “I jest ain’t gonna do it!”
“Hold on,” the driver said. “Jest hold yer hosses.” He waited until the woman took the shopping bags, then he allowed her to lead the way down the aisle. The driver’s eyes squinted; his face seemed more yellow as he scanned the faces in the rear.
“This is boolshit!” the soldier said. “Goddam one hunnid pissent boolshit!”
The driver turned harder. “Take it easy, soldier. This ain’t my idea. It’s the law.”
“The law …”
The man next to me watched in silence. His hands clenched and unclenched. “We crossin’ the Mason-Dixon lahn,” he said to me. “Or like we calls it, the Smith and Wesson lahn.” He smiled in a bitter way. “Some country, ain’t it?”
The driver told a thin, redheaded white woman to get up and sent her to the third-row seat vacated by the large Negro woman. Then he helped the redhead take down a cheap plastic suitcase, tied together with a stocking. The redhead took it from him quickly, shielding it with her body as if ashamed of its condition. The driver turned to me.
“Okay, sailor,” he said. “You’re goin’ to the first row and this soldier’s takin’ your place.” I started to get up. The pomaded Negro shook his head. “Some shit,” he said. I reached up for my sea bag. I said to the driver: “What’s this all about, anyway?”
“The South,” he said wearily.
There was a white man sleeping against the window in the first row. He was an older man, maybe forty, with thinning blond hair, a long nose, a bony face. He was wearing a checked sport jacket. A black raincoat was drawn tightly up to his chin like a blanket. He had his shoes off and there was a flight bag at his feet. I sat down and the bus finally pulled out. Soon we were back in the rhythm of the road. Dark forests. Distant houses. I thought about Harry Sparrow and Fifi. In bed together.
All I needed was another useless hard-on. So I shook Fifi out of my mind, and watched the road and the ease and skill of the driver as he moved the huge bus around slower-moving trucks. I didn’t know how to drive. I was from Brooklyn, where nobody I knew had a car. Including my father. We used the subway to go places. In boot camp, guys laughed when I told them this. You cain’t drahv? Shit, man, what’s yore p’oblem? I tried to explain, but they couldn’t believe it; most of them started driving when they were twelve, thirteen. I guess I admitted I couldn’t drive to avoid talking about the more terrible failure: The dark secret of my virginity.
Somewhere near Greeneville, the driver picked up a small microphone clamped to the dashboard. He glanced at his watch, then flicked a switch.
In a hoarse voice, he said, “Ladies and gennulmen, in exactly ten seconds, it’ll be January the first, nineteen hunnid an fipty three.”
I heard some applause, but when I glanced around most of the white people were asleep. It was hard to see the Negroes in the dark. Back home, everybody was celebrating, drinking and shouting while Guy Lombardo’s band played “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio. The worst band in the history of the world. The people were probably celebrating because they wouldn’t have to hear Guy Lombardo for another whole year. My father was probably down the block in Rattigan’s, somber and silent while the other men were singing loud and drinking hard; my brothers were banging pots on the fire escape and throwing snowballs at drunks.
And somewhere tonight, I thought, right this second, while this bus takes me where I’ve never been, right now Maureen is with her accountant. She’s at a party with him. Sitting on a couch. Tony Bennett is singing “Because of You” on the phonograph. She’s wearing her blue dress. Or maybe the white one. The accountant is holding her left hand. Or maybe the right. He stands up and she follows. The room is dark, a small lamp on in a corner, maybe thirty watts, maybe red. He starts dancing with her. She moves close to him. In the dark, does she think her accountant is me?
“Here, sailor,” the driver said, and passed me a pint bottle of whiskey without taking his eyes off the road. The dark-brown glass of the bottle was cool in my hand. There was no label.
“Thanks,” I said, unscrewing the cap and taking a belt. “Happy New Year.” I didn’t much like whiskey, the way it burned when it went down, the way it stayed in you so that you reeked of it for days after you’d drunk it. In that, at least, I was like my father. We both preferred beer. But I drank from the unmarked bottle anyway. It was a New Year’s gift. A long way from home. I felt it open like a warm blossom in my belly.
“Yeah, happy New Year,” the driver said. “An’ gib some to the gent nex’ to you, swabbie.”
The man next to me was now awake. He nodded in greeting as I handed him the pint. His hands were very thin, with veins standing up like blue ropes.
“Thanks, buddy,” the man said.
“Thank the driver. It’s his whiskey.”
“Maybe we oughtta git off this thing. All we need is a drunk bus driver.”
“He doesn’t look the type,” I said.
“They never do.”
The man took a second belt of the whiskey, then gave it back to me and I passed it on to the driver, thanking him.
“Hi,” the man beside me said. “I’m Jack Turner.” I told him my name and we shook hands in a cramped way.
“Where you headin’, sailor?”
“Pensacola.”
“Why, hell’s bells, so’m I.”
“You Navy?”
“Yeah, bo’,” he said. “Seventeen years, man an’ boy.” He dug into the bag at his feet, found another pint bottle and cracked the seal. “Three more years and I’m done. The Big Two-Oh. Twenty years in this man’s Navy. Then it’s back to the world.”
I waited; this was the first Old Salt I’d talked to man-to-man. In boot camp, the salts were all ball-breakers: yelling, shouting, marching us around the grinder till we dropped. Maybe it was because Turner wasn’t wearing a uniform. I don’t know. But he seemed okay.
“You must’ve seen a lot of the world,” I said. “In seventeen years, I mean.”
He handed me the bottle. Four Roses. I took a swig, but held it in my mouth for a while before letting it go down.
“Yeah,” he said. “I been some places. Seen some shit. But places ain’t the world. Not the real world.”
The whiskey was spreading out of the core of my stomach now.
“What is?”
Turner glanced out the window into the darkness. “A woman. Kids. A house. A car … All that boring shit. That’s the world … Pass that bottle on to the driver. He’s a good ole boy.”
I tapped the driver’s elbow and offered him the Four Roses. But he shook his head no and smiled. I handed the bottle back to Turner.
“You don’t travel in uniform?” I said.
Turner laughed. “Hell, no. Not if I got money to pay my way. Maybe hitchhikin’, the uniform’s an advantage. But you got the money, peel that sucker off,” he said, pinching the sleeve of my blue jumper. “I’ll tell you why. People see a sailor, they always laugh. They think sailors are crazy and crazy people strike most people as funny. And you know sumpin? They’re right. Sailors are crazy. You’re out on some leaky tub, with all that goddamned ocean around you. For weeks, months, years, like we was in the war. I mean years. Nothin to see all around you but ocean and sailors. Crazy goddamn bad-ass sailors. All goin crazy. Some goin queer. Until finely, they come home to port, crazy and horny, and they go ape shit. Truly fucking crazy-ass apeshit. You ever see a sailor walking along sober on a Saturday night? You ever see one in church? Or in a lib’ry? Fuck no. You see sailors fallin down in the street, you see them laughin and pukin and rollin in piss and sawdust. You see them gettin locked up. And you know somethin? Nobody ever gets mad. They see jarheads doin this shit, they get pissed off. They see some army guy grab a girl by the ass, they want t’ lynch him, even if he aint a nigger. They see some flyboy gettin fucked up in public, they write to the gahdamned newspaper.” He took a belt from the bottle. “But they see a sailor with blood all over his whites, fallin on his ass in the gutter, with a hooker on his shoulders and puke on his fuckin shoes, and they laugh.”