7

Riding the Green Tortoise

Inside the bus there were no seats. The floor was covered with mattresses, and the luggage storage racks had been turned into bunks. By the time I stepped on board these were occupied. The only open spot on one of the mattresses was one next to the pregnant woman—the last place I wanted to be. She had laid out a blanket for herself and her daughter, whose name turned out to be Everest. The little girl was already curled up with a stuffed pig and a bottle of juice. On one side of us, a man picked out a Bob Marley song on a guitar and on the other, a man with a long orange beard was reading Siddhartha with a flashlight. Bumpy as it was navigating the road in a vehicle that appeared to have little in the way of shock absorbers, I couldn’t have imagined reading on a bus like this without getting sick, and as it turned out I was right. We were not yet out of San Francisco when he reached into his backpack and took out a plastic sack.

“My trusty barf bag,” he said. “I never go on one of these trips without it.”

So much of my early childhood had been spent like this—in the back of some old vehicle or other, staring out the window for hours at a time in a cloud of smoke with a never-ending soundtrack from a scratchy radio. Over those years with Diana and Daniel (Indigo, Julio, Ocean, Charlie . . .) I’d gotten good at endless hours on the road, and in the days and then months since the accident I’d reclaimed the skill of turning my brain to a blank, letting the hours wash over me. This served me well on the green bus. Out the windows—not that we could see much, with all those sleeping figures in the luggage racks—cars whizzed past on the highway. I took in the names on the exit signs. Now and then the lights of some city, but fewer and fewer of those the farther south we went.

Some people on a long trip like this might be looking forward to their arrival at some destination. But I was headed nowhere in particular. When there’s no place you want to be you’re in no rush to get off the bus.

A night passed. My fellow passengers paid little heed to any discernible rhythms—when the sun came up, when it went down. There was always someone playing a guitar or a harmonica, always someone sleeping, someone smoking, someone holding forth about astrology or hydroponic marijuana cultivation or the hidden messages you divined by playing Pink Floyd backwards. The Wall.

There was no bathroom on the bus. Just as well, considering how difficult it would have been, making one’s way over the bodies on the mattresses to get there—so Gary or Roman, whoever was on duty at the time, pulled over every few hours. Sometimes we stopped at a gas station but when possible, at some scenic location, where those of us who chose would step outside, execute a few sun salutations, snap a picture, buy a snack, visit the restrooms, and get back on the bus. Early on, my fellow travelers appeared to recognize that I had no interest in conversation. They referred to me as “the Thinker,” but I was the opposite. I didn’t want to think about anything.

The fact that I had no money proved less of a problem than one might think. There was always someone willing to share a bag of chips or half a banana or a handful of nuts. I wasn’t that hungry.

One night, asleep on my section of mattress, I felt something warm on my leg. A hand. Then another hand on my belly. Warm breath in my ear. Then a tongue.

Turning around, I was face-to-face with Artie, one of the half dozen guitar players. “Hey babe,” he said. “Feeling romantic?”

In another circumstance, I might have had a lot to say about how totally unromantic it was for a man to start pawing a woman in the middle of the night on a crowded bus with no air conditioning, somewhere in the Arizona desert. I might have reported him to the bus driver, Gary, if the other bus driver, Roman, weren’t doing roughly the same thing with a different woman.

As it was, I just looked at him. I imagined I was a conure, bearing down on him with my beady eye. That was enough.

We passed through Tucson. Then a very long stretch of highway with nothing but cactus and dirt on all sides, and the occasional burnt-out vehicle, and one time, a falling-down roadside stand with a sign out front that said FRESH BEEF JERKY. If there had been anyone with whom I felt like sharing the thought, I might have observed that this struck me as a contradiction in terms, but none of the sleeping or stoned figures around me were likely to get it.

My main companion on the trip turned out to be the person I’d most wanted to avoid—Everest, the five-year-old daughter of the pregnant woman, Charlayne. (“I named her that because I was high when I got knocked up,” Charlayne told me. “You might call it an in-joke.”) Charlayne slept more than most people on the bus, unlike her daughter, who just about never did. Everest asked a lot of questions. I seemed to be the only person prepared to answer them.

She wanted to know if Gary was the boss of us, or if Roman was. “Nobody’s the boss,” I told her. Nobody was in charge here, that was for sure.

She wanted to know if there would be kittens in Mexico, or bunnies, her two favorite animals. She wanted to know if there were other kids where we were going. She wanted to know my favorite color. Most girls liked pink, she told me. But hers was yellow.

“I’m getting a baby sister,” she said. “My mom’s boyfriend wasn’t too happy about that. But he’s not around anymore.”

She wanted to know if I had any kids. I shook my head.

“Don’t you like kids?”

“I like you.”

“If you had a kid I bet you’d like her a lot,” she told me.

“You’re probably right.”

“So why don’t you have a kid?”

No answer.

“Maybe you’re scared it might hurt to have a baby,” she said. “Maybe you just need more time to think about it.”

It hurt, but not the way Everest was talking about.

She seemed so determined to stay on this subject I might have moved to another spot on the bus if that was an option, but there was no other space on the mattress. We were jammed together like sardines in a tin.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind someday,” Everest said. “You might really like being a mom. You never know.”

Only I did. It was something I’d known since the day of the accident. I was never going to be anybody’s mother ever again.