Unlimited Pass

Douglas A. Martin

I was traveling nowhere in particular, to see the world.

He had been good to me for a while. He would hold me, close to his chest, taking my hand, kissing me once on each cheek, smiling. In the middle of the night, he’d bring me things to drink in bed. The way the night light would stream in, it was clean and pure in his kitchen in his house.

I was thinking quietly about this direction of my life. I was dreaming of being able to get even further. Night after night, I’d wake up the next morning in his house. I knew I had to go. I packed as many of my things as would fit into the one brown canvas bag I’d come with, carried on my back. I was going to leave him and that house behind, except for what I could hold inside.

I’d worry about all of the little things later.

I would drive through America on a bus, see the country, watch the yellow leaves dropping down along the road, falling as expected.

He got on the bus somewhere in Nebraska, Omaha, or Iowa. Hello, my name is Brad, the sticker on his bag said. It’s still light enough to see everyone’s face, and the middle west blurred into more cornfields. I’d been riding the bus for a couple of days so far. The pass I had would allow me to go anywhere I wanted, ride as long as I liked, within thirty days.

We’ve all gotten off to stretch our legs, but when it’s time for the bus to pull out again, the boy with the sticker on his bag sits down with me. I’ve got the window seat. He takes this seat beside me again and again after the rest stops, while the coach is being cleaned out, while the bus is getting refueled. We will be woken up like this off and on all night long.

I go between shutting my eyes, staring out the window, and looking down and a little over at his arm beside me every once in a while, his left hand, wrist.

The moon has begun to reflect off the roofs of tin barns, as the lowering sun glints across sheets of copper. He is right there beside me, when the light falls. I think I can actually feel the heat coming off his body, in these reassuring waves, if I just feel closely, move closer. The tendons in his wrist are flexed and pronounced, while he goes through the bag he then stows under the seat. He gets a book. The bandages wrapped around my own wrists go glowing more white in the overhead light that he starts to read by. I can make out what it’s called if I turn closer to him, around in the seat, but I don’t want to do anything to disturb him, to give him the wrong idea. The lights in the bus switch on and off. He could be leaving anytime now. Further up the road, I’ll let him think I’ve gone to sleep finally, shutting my eyes, leaving him alone. He might move quietly to another seat.

He must be about my age. He’s unlacing his shoes. He’s not going anywhere for a while.

The man in the house that’s fading further and further in the wake of the bus gave me this watch I glance at, gave me this bracelet of wooden beads, once gave me these same butterflies I’m feeling in my stomach now, because the boy’s hair up and down his left arm is catching the sun, similar.

Before I left, the man in the house said he wanted me to stay. Please stay. He said he only wanted to make me happy. He said he just wanted me to be sure.

The two of us would become this island for each other out here in the middle of America.

The boy next to me clicks off his light, puts the book down by his feet, turns more toward me now in the dark, perhaps to say something finally. He’s only trying to get one last view over my shoulder, before settling into closing his eyes. I’m watching him swallow with his eyes closed. A little later he’s stirring in the seat. He turns his head to look a little up and down the aisle, opening his eyes. I’m not pretending to be asleep.

I want him to know I’m aware of him. The muscles in his neck swallow, as he moves the rest of his body about under him, opens it out more, more closely toward me.

Nobody is looking. He can’t be sure, but it looks that way, like everyone has finally nodded off, when he opens his eyes again. I do slip into the pretense of closing my eyes to sleep, though I’m all keyed up, with the nearness of the smell of his body like hay, with just almost being there with him, an idea of only a little further to go, still, as I let myself slide down a little more in the seat.

I’m afraid it might be too obvious, but he lets his hand touch my leg, lightly at first, and I don’t say anything. The bus is full. He won’t move to another seat now. Nobody will see us. It’s night. We don’t want to wake anybody up. I can hear nothing really but my heart and the occasional cough over the surface of the road, this leg as smooth as still water.

I get comfortable in this alertness, making me feel more alive, as the dark sheets around me. He thought I might need this. It’s like he’s telling me to look away, as the copper teeth of my fly zip down, open, and I’m that close to being in his hands.

I slip down further. The other passengers are sleeping. Even the dogs in the fields are still. It’s darker inside than it’s been all night so far. He is there next to me, leans more over into me, touches this part of my body he approaches again and again. He knows there is barely enough room for what’s about to begin, but he’s going do it anyway, go ahead, try.

Nobody is going to see. I’ll keep quiet, while he goes down in the seat where it is so dark, to bring me out slowly, slowly, whispering that his hands are cold.

Bit by bit, inch by inch, he does the same for himself with his free hand, wading us both out into the dark that changes colors, as light lightly swims through, over his hair lit the color of the earlier sunset, spilled across my lap.

We’re drowning better in the absence of names, as he kicks his bag back under the seat, to keep going. I think I whisper even lower than his first gesture, yes. We swim through his hands, as he holds onto us both tight.

He whispers into my ear, tells me to turn my head more to the side, look out the window. He won’t abandon the strokes until it gets light again in his hand. Don’t mind him, while he does it. Look at the night out there, full of this expanse of blinking stars.

Under a black sky out in the country, we are together. It’s warm. Once we get to the city, we’ll never see stars like this, not this many, not this bright. Look, there, out the window. Those stars are on fire. I know that. Some people say they are all already dead, but I won’t believe that. We don’t let ourselves believe that. No way, he agrees.

Look out the window, he whispers, as we keep sliding through to another state, past farms and farms and farms on this bus. Again, from my ear, his mouth goes back down on me. He has the hands of a boy who has worked a farm.

Look how bright and beautiful the night is now, this pitch of the sky that lasts, that goes on and on, forever, never dropping off.

There, now, he utters, as he comes up again for air.

While he keeps going down, working over me, I look up and out the window.

He is giving me the sky now—the sky, like this, filled with all the stars, those bodies up there, like us down here, those private lights, this raising of contact and stakes, this burning. There’s all the time in the world. We can go anywhere we want.

I’d follow him through the terminal at the stops at a safe distance, so as not to lose him, only idly allowing myself to wonder how many like me he’d already taken and kissed, just how often, if he’d done all this before in the restrooms, outside around the corners, if he’d ever led someone like me off around the west with his glance, or if I’m the first. He doesn’t speak except for directions about how to keep seeing the sky, taking it in. The driver can’t see a thing. He’s watching the road. Our feet under the seat in front of us lock together.

Before I left the house, I climbed up on the copper roof and from up there surveyed my place, took stock up that high. I could see the pool in the backyard, the trees that went orange and red all around me, their tops on level with my eyes. There was the grape arbor he was having made, added on. The bottom of the pool was covered with mirrors.

I’d dive. I’d dive into the sky, the clear clouds all overhead reflected in the bottom of his pool. Tonight, it’s like that again.

My thoughts go around the back of his head, his sunburned neck, the light grazing of his teeth, cheek, and jawbone, the slickness of his accrue.

For some seconds he just holds me in there. I go up into the night sky while he keeps repeating the strokes in my lap, goes back and forth. Sometimes he dives his mouth down and then back up. There are slight variations, depending on the road by the lights of billboards for exits, how much he is able to move and not be too obvious.

A cell phone rings. A Walkman in front of us is loud enough to make out a throbbing bass line.

He might could cradle my head while I sleep.

Where will we land if not on each other’s jeans, shirts, late summer, fall jackets.

He holds out his hand. One of us will have to let go soon, make our way back in the coach to wash up as much as possible.

He sinks himself back into his jeans, comes there.

I begin to sleep just as we are passing what look like peach trees. In fitfulness, jarred by the bus, I dream the two of us getting off and going through the orchard, the fallen fruit rolling heavily around under a damp mulch in the night and our bodies, and the leaves.

The door accordions open, and it’s that coldest part of the morning light, a light jacket my blanket. He could slip me out here again.

He fastened my jeans back for me, while I moved my hands into a caress I had hoped he would allow, before he raised his head. After that, we moved a bit away from each other, as it began to rain. Once he gets off, I’ll never see him again.

I got off the bus at the side of the road, the next stop, holding a picked buttercup there up under my own chin. The bus lets me out near a whole field full of them. I can’t see if anything changes when I hold it there, can’t recall what I should know about myself now for sure. I only know that my hands still smell like him.

I’m following the road, looking for where to pick up the next bus, grabbing at another of the yellow buttercups, as they’re coming up and along in clusters, taking the stems up in my fists. When found again, I’ll want nothing more than to be in a bed beside a whole vase of these. I’ll be ready for him to lay me back down.