The uniformed driver stands in front of gate 10 and wrings his hands. “The bus is full,” he says, then puts his palms up like two little stop signs. It is Thanksgiving morning and the gritty-eyed travelers still waiting to board grumble with frustration.
“It’s overbooked,” he explains with a shrug. “The next bus leaves at five.”
Frustration boils over and grumbles rise into shouts and curses. There is a commotion near the head of the queue, people screaming, elbowing one another. I watch one girl in particular from my seat on a bench at gate 11. She is not like the rest; no anger, no obscenities, just a wide yawn which she covers with the back of her copper tan hand. She looks Mexican; at least I think she looks Mexican, with these prominent cheekbones I can’t stop staring at. Maybe she doesn’t understand that the bus she is waiting for is overbooked.
“Your bus is full,” I sit down next to her. I speak slowly and with caution. I figure she doesn’t speak English.
“I know,” she says in perfect English. She rests her feet on the suitcase beneath her.
“Mine won’t be,” I point to Gate 11. Only a few people sit on a long, lonely bench. One guy is real shifty looking. He is wearing a PennState hat and has a tattered green duffle bag cradled in his arms from which he has been removing prescription bottles and popping pills. His face is pockmarked with broken blood vessels, all buggy eyed and confused, breathing heavily. I wonder if he has looked in the mirror recently.
“Where are you headed?” she asks after an uneasy pause, during which I pull two mini bottles of rum from my coat pocket and pour them into my half finished Coke. I offer her some, and she takes the bottle and sips.
“Erie,” I say. “My parents still live in that beat old town.
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, it pretty much sucks,” I tell her straight. “There’s like a foot of snow already.”
She nods and scrapes at her black finger nail polish with a set of keys. Glossy flakes fall to the floor. It reminds me of the scratch-off lottery tickets my grandma used to play. The last time I was in Erie was the day before she died. I’d been putting off visiting her in the hospital. It’s something about that antiseptic smell and seeing all those human bodies falling apart. To me, once the doctors admit you to the hospital for the last time you are already dead. My mom had called and said Grandma wasn’t doing too well, her vitals were vanishing. She said I needed to stop thinking about myself and make a trip up to see her before she passed on. When I got to the hospital she was in and out of consciousness propped up in the ICU with all those tiny plastic tubes projecting from her veins, trying to shrink the tumor bulging inside her brain, painfully slowing the inevitable. She was floating in and out of consciousness, talking a lot of nonsensical gibberish. The nurse said that the tumor was pushing against the prefrontal cortex and that was why she wasn’t able to speak very well. But before she slipped away she was able to hand me a scratch-off and guaranteed it would be a winner. It wasn’t.
“Where is your bus headed?” I ask the girl, jealous at those nails for being more interesting than me.
“You mean where is my bus headed without me?”
“Yeah, well, your next bus leaves at five. That’s what I heard the other driver say.”
“I heard him,” she says. “My ears work just fine.” Her voice is tired and growing distant, but she smiles. There is vulnerability in that smile. “I’m headed to St. Louis to see my cousins.”
“For Thanksgiving?” I ask.
“That was the plan. I won’t get there until midnight now.”
I tell her I’m sorry then pull a couple books from my backpack, pick one up and flip through the pages, then pick the other up and flip through its pages and make a couple notes in the margins with a pen. I want her to ask about one of them so we’ll have more to talk about. Maybe she’s read one of them in high school or something.
“You were staring at me earlier,” she says instead.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I watched you,” she says. “I was wondering what a white boy was doing waiting around a dumpy bus station.” She looks down and examines a small stain on her jeans and rubs at it with the palm of her hand, those chipped nails sticking straight up.
I look around and notice that the only other white guy is that creep in the stained white PennState hat with his opiate care package. I turn back and look her in the eyes. They are big and brown and don’t say anything, except, in a way, they are trying to say everything. They seem to scream: I’m cold! I’m tired! I’m lonely! All the human vulnerabilities are there, and for a second I feel like I’ve known her forever. I wonder if my eyes say the same.
“I don’t own a car. This dumpy bus station in my only way home,” I explain.
“I’ve never met a white boy who didn’t own a car. You sure you’re white?” She reaches over and scratches the skin of my arm with her nails like it might scrape away and reveal a different color beneath.
She laughs. So I laugh too, you know, to even things up. But I’m not really sure why we are laughing because I can’t tell if it’s a joke. Maybe we are laughing for different reasons. She keeps scratching at my arm and we both keep laughing.
I hear someone calling for boarding at Gate 11. It sounds distant and for a moment I consider missing my bus to stay seated with her on the bench.
“That’s my bus,” I stand up and wave awkwardly.
“Bye,” she says and waves back with one hand bending her fingers like she is crinkling up a paper ball. She goes back to picking at her nail polish then covers a yawn of gargantuan proportions with her palm.
I pause before getting on the lonely bus and look down at where she scratched my arm. Red marks streak up my skin in a way that tells me I’m no winner.
—
T.C. Jones is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the director of the Jam2Jam literary and art series based in Pittsburgh. His stories have appeared in the Monarch Review, The New Yinzer, and won the TAR Award for Fiction in The April Reader. He is currently working on a collection of short stories examining Rust Belt Culture which includes the short story “Scratch-Off.”
