Johnny Rolfe

Dear air:

That night I dreamed a dog lay in the road at the edge of a wood. The road was like the real road this bus is rolling down: hot, bright, cracked, dry, dead. The wood the dog lay at the edge of was soft, green, dark, and smelled good. The dog lay half in each world, its head and upper self in ours, the rest in the dark wood. We walked toward it, a few of my bus brothers and I. It looked at us. Its eyes were clear, its tail wagged, a healthy, happy-looking dog, but something was wrong. Someone’s ill health or bad luck lurked in the dream. A few men walked toward us from beyond the dog’s tail, inside the shadows of the wood. They were forms more than men. Their intentions weren’t clear, though they didn’t seem to mean us harm. Then came a light, high whine, from the dog, I guessed, but not from his mouth, which was closed. Then came my first glimpse of the faces of the men from the other world. They seemed eager, though eager for what I did not know. The rhythmic insistence of the light, high whine that came from inside the dog seemed to amplify the feeling that produced the look of what I thought was eagerness on the faces of these men who, I realized, in the dream, came from where our bus was taking us. We gathered round the dog, and then I saw it, the source of the light, high whine: the dog’s slick and bright pink penis, standing up from its lower thorax, hard and gorged with blood. As if sated, or drunk, the dog smiled, and from the slender hole at the tip of its cock came the gooey wet pups, about an inch apiece, one after another, ten seconds apart, eyes closed, two, three, four, five, six pups, seven pups, eight, ten, thirteen, a small, blind army of baby dogs. All the faces looked bewildered now. The weapons all came out at once, as if we all had guessed we’d have to kill someone to exit from this dream alive. I came up into waking life in time to see red-haired Jack Smith, a gash on his head, drag his whiny-wheeled red wagon down the wide aisle of the bus.

The wagon was loaded with bottles of booze. Smith stopped in front of my bunk. The new, wide, red, vertical scooped-out area of his forehead was level with my eyes. It’s poignant to see a fresh wound in the head of someone you’re beginning to care about. My heart went out to the wound and the stoic face of Smith below it, over which blood slid not alarmingly but steadily, and mixed with the coarse red hair of his beard.

“The trade was not made under the best conditions and I didn’t get exactly what I wanted,” he whispered. The sun was not yet up and most of the men were still asleep, though I saw our driver, Chris Newport, ease his wide girth out of his bunk at the front of the bus. “I’d have preferred food, water, tools, knives, guns, and, you know, fuel. No one wants what we have. Whose idea was it to bring jewels and gadgets?”

“No one’s idea.”

“You get laughed at when you bring bracelets and walkie-talkies to a trading post around here, and then you get punched, and then you get stabbed—at least you get one guy stabbing your forehead and you don’t want to hurt him too bad but you do have to make an example of him by hitting him hard with the sharp edge of the walkie-talkie you happen to have in your hand because you’d just been trying to show his friends how sleek and effective it was so they would give you food or fuel or guns, but they weren’t buying it, so you end up hitting this guy with it till he’s out and then you hit him some more so at least his friends who don’t want your walkie-talkie or your pearl drop earrings and are annoyed enough to kill you for showing up with nothing better will sit back for a minute and think about what to do next so you have time to lift the gun off the guy you’ve smashed and point it at his friends and kind of ease a wagonful of their booze out the door of their sad little concrete kiosk and on down the road. Like I said I’d’ve rather had water but I can see where booze could be a language I could talk to these guys in, but a language I don’t want to say anything to them in yet is this.” From his belt he pulled out the pistol he’d taken from the gentleman and threw it on my stomach. “You hold onto that and just remember once you start talking with it you may be committing yourself to parlez-vous twenty-four-seven, vingt-quatre-sept if you get my meaning.”

I was about to object to the gun on the top of my shirt when the first few bullets hit the back window of the bus. As our friends woke up, Chris Newport ignited the engine and the bus began to groan down the road, or what was left of the road. Bullets continued to hit the bullet-resistant back window while angry men rode the door and tried to break it down. Soon they fell off, and a plume of exhaust enveloped our pursuers, and the bus eluded them while they continued to express their frustration by shouting and firing their guns.

Moments later two big men—an army twice the size of Smith’s—appeared on either side of him and grabbed his arms. I don’t know their names. They’re among the fifty percent of men on this trip in the Early Release Convict Program, two tall muscle men in white underwear with no meanness in their faces, just tired and dutiful stares, big men doing a skilled job—put the cuffs on Smith’s thick wrists, the ordinary business of physical force and restraint.

Smith did not resist. A man named John Ratcliffe, who, like John Martin, belonged to the executive class, stood up from his bunk fully clothed and told Newport to stop the bus. “I’m placing Jack Smith under arrest for bringing unapproved contraband on board.”

“I’m not stopping this shit with a bunch of guys back there ready to kill us. I put thirty miles between us and the guys with the guns before I even think of stopping.”

“Fuck you,” Ratcliffe said, the universal epithet of impotence. His plum-colored blood ascended his peach face from neck to hairline. Ratcliffe is a soft and petulant man. He’s not old, but the skin of his face has already begun to loosen from the bone in preparation for the kind of oldness it is his ambition to acquire—the one that comes with a cook, a valet, a bodyguard, and well-defended water, food, and fuel supplies. His mother being the concubine of the Manhattan Company’s CEO, he’s a contender for succession, despite his lack of skill at anything.

I watched Ratcliffe scan the bus to see whom he might call on to outrank Newport. His eyes brushed past John Martin, whose knee I’d undone. I saw Martin give Ratcliffe a not-now headshake that bespoke an alliance I hadn’t known about, just as I hadn’t known Ratcliffe controlled Jack Smith’s underwear-wearing jailers. I also didn’t see anyone object to Smith’s arrest, a passivity that may not have been engineered by anyone, though it can also happen on this bus—and elsewhere—that man wakes man in the night and offers him something he wants or can’t say no to: food, drugs, strength, will, loyalty, friendship, threat, sex. The political landscape of the bus is as volatile as the physical landscape of the town we saw swallow its tallest building a few days ago, an event I described in a previous entry in this venue, which you may not remember since you don’t exist.

It has been our custom in the morning to throw open the windows and deboard, to let oxygen and smoky earth-scent replace the air of this close space that is dense with the smell of men who eat bad food and don’t bathe. But now, gunmen behind us, we rode on in the thick stink through the gloom of a damp day. Smith stood stock still in the aisle, as did the men who’d cuffed him and continued to pin his arms. Most men stayed in their bunks and dreamed or did nothing. A few sat in chairs and ate gruel. No one talked.

Newport stopped after noon. We got off and stood beneath a semi-tent of trees that didn’t quite keep the stinging rain off our necks while the two big boys brought Smith to the cargo trailer attached to the back of the bus by a steel armature. It surprised me that Smith didn’t fight but I assume his quiescence was strategic. He and I exchanged a wordless set of looks in which I asked if I should try to free him with the gun—the only firearm on the bus, as far as I know—and he said no, thank Christ, so he was set down on a hard chair inside the trailer, his legs shackled to its, his hands still cuffed behind him. His big wagon of bottles of booze was also placed in the crammed trailer, also shackled. We reboarded and rode on. Over the course of this day I’ve made my first ally and he’s been imprisoned.