He stepped up onto the Greyhound bus, showed the driver his ticket, and walked down the long, narrow aisle to the only open seat in the very back by the tiny bathroom; next to the open seat was a beautiful blond woman a little older than him.
Jamming his small olive-green bag stuffed with his few precious possessions into the almost-already-filled space above the seats, he cleared his throat and sat down next to the woman. Her skin was tan, almost dark, and she had gray-blue eyes which drove a delicious shudder down his spine. She might have been half-Black but he couldn’t be certain. Her perfume—something with a tinge of vanilla—wafted through the air in a lovely way, slicing against the nastiness of the bus and, especially, the bathroom two feet away which created a mixed stench of piss and stale sweat.
“Hello,” he said, gazing into her slate-gray eyes. Her blond hair was cut a few inches above her shoulders. She wore a thin yellow dress which ended almost at her copper ankles. She might have been 35. He was not yet thirty.
She smiled cautiously at him, swallowed visibly, and said, “Hi.” Then she averted her eyes, looking out the window. Two seats, in the very back of the bus, just him and her. Outside it was sunny and hot, cerulean sky with sporadic, puffy cumulous clouds. Then long, wide, open green fields forever, rows and rows of growing corn, far as the eye could see. The highway knifed through all this color like a murderer defiling his unfortunate victim.
It was early September, 1999.
“Where you heading, if you don’t mind me asking?” he said, feeling foolish the second the words came out.
She looked at him for a while without speaking. He worried that he smelled bad. He might. He’d been on the road for almost seven months, ever since he dropped out of Oberlin, in Ohio. Full scholarship to study History. Some called him a “genius” when it came to understanding and deconstructing the past. His father had died a decade prior of a sudden heart attack, and his mother had finally succumbed to a rare Melanoma two years ago; he’d helped caretake along with his younger half-sister.
After his mother’s death he dropped out of college and hit the road. He had inherited some money, not a lot but enough to live on if he were careful. Since then he’d been aimlessly drifting around America, hitchhiking, taking trains and busses, staying in random small towns sometimes for a few months here, a few weeks there, working shitty minimum-wage jobs when he needed to bolster his savings. A middleclass kid, he’d devolved into a vagrant, a vagabond, a restless wanderer of the country.
“I’m heading to the South,” she said, vaguely, her voice carrying, he thought, perhaps a strange and ironic edge filled with equal parts curiosity and irritation.
He sighed, looking away from her. Staring out the window a moment he said, “Well. I don’t know where I’m going, honestly. Maybe Philly or New York. I might like to try the city for a while instead of the small rural towns.”
She faced him with a questioning glance. Her eyes widened a little bit. Her forehead was big, wide like the green corn fields outside, and he liked that about her. He didn’t know why, he just did. Her arms were tanned and long and thin. Her hands were thin and delicate-seeming and the fingers were long and graceful like some kind of wondrous spider who weaved webs of gold. He wanted to know more. He didn’t know exactly why he was so drawn to her—beyond the simple sexual attraction—but he was.
“Are you for real?” she said, with a side glance at him, her brown lips parting into a beautiful, sunny smile. The smile made him feel expansive, as if he were out there in the fields stretching out all his limbs as much as he could, or as if he were floating out in darkest empty space. She created an imaginary bed and allowed him to lay down in it, safe and warm and calm.
“What do you mean?” he said.
She chuckled, shaking her head, the smile still there. “I mean, you’re just, what, on a random bus going to a random place and you have no real goal, destination, purpose?”
He smiled back. “Well, I never thought of it exactly like that but…yeah, basically.”
“C’mon.”
“What?”
“Where is your family? Where do you live? Where are you from?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” he said.
She looked faux-serious. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”
He grinned. “Touche.”
“So?”
He launched into it: His parents’ death, dropping out of Oberlin, having some cash from the inheritance, being estranged from his half-sister, caring for his mother until she died, having essentially no other family to speak of. He was originally from Seattle, Washington but had grown up in Boise, Idaho. He had been a smart, precocious kid, had skipped several grades, but had never truly enjoyed formal education.
“I was always reading books outside of the school curriculum. Adventure books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, anything by Jack London, Hemingway, you name it. I had this restless spirit. But I wanted to make my folks proud so I got a full ride to Oberlin. I hated it there. Stuck-up, pretentious rich kids. Still, I excelled and focused on the History department. Then Dad died. And Mom got sick. I dropped out not long after that. And here I am.”
She was rapt in attention now, eyeing him carefully, slowly playing with a long blond strand of hair, curling it with her long copper fingers.
“Fascinating,” she said, quietly and sincerely, gazing into his eyes so deeply it felt as if she were rubbing his very soul. “I have to say I’ve never met anyone like you.”
