OF COURSE IT WOULD BE ON A BUS.
That’s when the moment would come.
Only he and I would understand.
THE FIRST TIMES WE FELT LIKE WE WERE people in the wider world—the first times we felt untethered, independent—were the times when, nickels in hand, we would stroll off toward the bus stop, to wait for the Bexley bus.
It makes me grin, now. The Bexley bus didn’t go anywhere. It never left the town. It just—for a nickel, in the 1950s—made this continuous, languorous, irregularly shaped loop through our little town that had no manufacturing plants, no industries, no tourist attractions. The bus never left the Bexley limits.
Bexley, small as it was and is, is surrounded on all sides by the City of Columbus. Head in any direction and you’ll end up in the bigger town. But the Bexley bus never headed far enough in any of those directions. Just when it seemed that the bus might lurch a foot or two over the line and step out of town, the driver would steer a sudden right or left, and the loop would continue, as always.
That’s why our parents, when we were seven or eight, permitted Jack and me to ride the Bexley bus alone. We weren’t going anywhere. The Bexley bus had as much in common with a ride at Disney World—not that there was any such thing as Disney World, or even Disneyland, back then—as it did with conventional municipal public transit. It looked like a bus and felt like a bus and smelled like a bus—but it didn’t go anywhere.
Which made it perfect for two boys wanting to be out of the house and on their own for the first time. Jack and I would walk to the bus stop on East Main Street, wait for the bus with the “Bexley” sign in the tall front window, listen for the pneumatic sound of the rubber-edged door creaking open…and then we were on.
Up those narrow steps, drop the nickel into the slot—the clatter of our nickels clanking into the glass-sided collection bin next to the driver’s seat was, to us, the exhilarating, almost breathtaking, sound of newfound freedom. A quick and high-pitched hello to the uniformed driver (what must he have thought every morning as he put on that freshly pressed gray uniform and cap, knowing that all day long he would have only a handful of riders, all of them going nowhere?), and we were on our way.
Many summer afternoons we were the only customers. We would pick a seat halfway back. Even when we were the sole riders in the middle of the day, even when we each could have had half the coach for ourselves, we sat together, side by side, as if this was a crowded-to-capacity commuter bus in a huge metropolis, as if seating was difficult to find and valuable beyond measure.
So there we’d be, two little boys on a worn-leather bench seat, riding up Roosevelt Avenue, riding up Cassady, knowing every stop. We’d talk…that whole ride we would look out the window (as if we were going to see something we hadn’t seen before), and talk with each other about what was out there, feeling silently thrilled that we were doing this. The Shell and Sohio gas stations would pass in and out of our line of sight, and Soskins Drugstore, and the Eskimo Queen ice cream stand and the high school with its football stadium out back and the Kroger grocery store and the stone front of the Bexley Public Library…
The driver would call out the stops, just for us. I wish I had a movie of it now. We felt we were out in the world, yet the world, by design, was so protected. Nothing was unknown. The Drexel movie theater would pass in and out of our window, and the Feed Bag lunch counter, and Seckels 5 & 10 Cent Store, and the houses—all those Bexley houses, with all those trees in front—and when the meandering loop was completed, when we were right back where we had started, the driver would pretend not to notice we still were there.
By pretending not to notice, he didn’t have to ask us for another nickel—we could continue to ride the endless loop. He seemed just as glad to have the company—just as glad to have someone, as opposed to no one, onboard. Even if it was only us. We rode that bus together, on our own, or something like it.
CHUCK HAD A BUSINESS FRIEND WHOSE company owned a bus—one of those semi-luxurious tour-type buses that take people to parties or sports events.
On the first weekend after the doctors in Columbus were able to bring Jack back to consciousness—after they had stabilized him (such a cold and ultimately misleading word) and had run him through the tests and determined that he was full of cancer, including in his brain—Chuck had implored his business friend to lend him the bus and its driver.
Jack’s family had gathered. Jack—he was awake now—wanted to go see Lance Armstrong’s doctor. He had read the book—he had been inspired by Armstrong’s victorious battle against cancer. The doctor—Lawrence Einhorn of the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis—had agreed to give Jack an appointment at the beginning of a weekend, even though Dr. Einhorn was supposed to be going out of town.
Jack was in no shape for a car ride over to Indiana—he was coming straight out of the hospital in downtown Columbus—and an ambulance, everyone agreed, was best avoided. So Chuck—more serious and determined than I have ever known him—remembered his business friend with the bus.
The Bexley bus had never strayed beyond the protective boundaries of our quiet town. Now Jack was headed out of state, final destination to be determined.
I HAD HEARD SCREAMING.
This was just before the Indiana bus trip; this was when Jack was still in Columbus, in those first few days after he collapsed. I couldn’t figure it out. I knew he wasn’t the one screaming; his voice, from his hospital bed, was coming through the phone at the same time the screams sounded. He had been telling me about the preliminary diagnosis: cancer in his brain, cancer in his lungs, cancer in his liver. This, out of nowhere. To a guy who never smoked, to a guy who watched his diet like some sort of punctilious nutritional accountant, to a guy who tried to go for a long run every day of his life.
“What is that?” I asked him. I was still in Florida, waiting to find out what was going on.
“The noise?” he said. He was groggy from the sedatives they’d given him before the biopsies.
“It sounds like someone got shot or something,” I said.
“Someone did,” he said. “That’s my roommate.”
They’d put him in a room with a man who’d taken a bullet to the head. No single rooms at the hospital in Columbus were available; there was just a curtain between Jack and the gunshot victim. Jack had to hear that he had cancer, and absorb what that meant, while sharing a cramped room with a guy who was yelling from the pain of a shot to the skull.
“Can’t they get you something better?” I asked. “Something with a little privacy?”
“This isn’t so bad,” Jack said. “Most of the time I just tune him out.”
Not angry even at a moment like this. Getting the diagnosis from the doctors, cooped up in a hospital room with a man shrieking from a gunshot in his head…Jack was Jack, even with this.
But then, that should have been no great revelation. The first of us to have no mother, then the first of us to have no mother and no father—first to be parentless—and, all these years later, I can tell you exactly how many times we heard Jack complain about that:
Zero.
Never. Not once.
So, in the hospital room with the soundtrack of excruciating pain in the background, he told me to wait before I came to Ohio. He was going to Indiana, he said. His voice, sedated as it was, was laced with hope. Lance Armstrong’s doctor had agreed to see him. And Chuck had come up with a bus.
THE NEXT TIME I HEARD HIS VOICE, I barely recognized it.
He’d always done such a good job of keeping whatever unhappiness there was in his life inside. I was all but unfamiliar with what he sounded like when he was scared and full of sorrow.
But there it was—once more on that most antihuman and unsatisfying form of one-way discourse, the voice-mail message taker.
It was on the day of the bus trip to Indiana.
I know what he said word for word, because—like that first message from Chuck—I’ve saved it. Not that I can stand to listen to it; it’s been there for almost a year now, and Jack’s gone, and I made myself play it a minute or two ago so I would get it right as I type this. I never want to lose his voice, but I can hardly bear to hear it.
This is what he said that afternoon, after leaving Dr. Einhorn:
“Greene, it’s me. Oh, man. Bad news today, buddy. Give me a call when you get a chance. I’ll talk to you later.”
The sound of that wounded voice….
“LITTLE HELP?”
Two words we’d been hearing all our lives. As kids on the baseball diamond behind Cassingham Elementary, we’d say the words or we’d respond to them, depending on whether we’d let the ball slip away from us, or someone else had, on a different part of the playground.
“Little help?” Meaning: Give me a hand—toss the ball back to me. The ballfield shorthand of American boyhood.
We’d sense a ball skittering past our feet, and then, from out there on another patch of grass, we’d hear the call of someone’s voice. “Little help?” We’d bend to retrieve the ball, look to see from where the voice was coming, and throw it back.
Later, when we were grown men walking together through Bexley, there would be times when we’d hear it once again. The words were like long-lost echoes, reminders of something we’d almost forgotten about. We’d be walking, in our twenties and thirties and forties, down Powell or Stanwood or Remington, and the words would arrive from a front yard, like a faded postcard found and delivered after being stuck for decades in a crack in the post office sorting room. We’d be walking—men, by then—and the sound would reach us:
“Little help?”
We’d see a ball in the street, and one of us would kneel to pick it up. There’d be a kid in one of the yards, waiting.
When you’re older, it’s much more difficult to ask. When life’s troubles get more serious—when your problems go beyond the fleeting inconvenience of an errant baseball—you tend not to say what you need, not out loud. You almost never can bring yourself to say to someone: “I have a problem, I need help.” The instinct to do that has been trained out of you by life.
It used to be routine, when the problems were easily fixable.
“Little help?”
We could use some now. That’s what I thought, as I got ready to return Jack’s phone call. We could use a little help right now.
EVEN ON THE WORST DAYS—THE DAYS when you learn that nothing will ever be the same again—the mundane necessities of existence require tending. No one had eaten since early that morning. In Columbus, Jack, Chuck, their wives (Jack and Chuck married twins, twins from Cleveland—I know, what are the chances?), Jack’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, who had come in from her job in New York, Chuck’s older daughter…all of them had boarded the bus for Indiana, and now it was the middle of the afternoon and they were on their way back home, and they hadn’t eaten. Not that anyone felt like it.
But they had to eat something, so the bus had stopped at a restaurant by the highway and everyone except Jack had gone inside to order carryout sandwiches to bring back. If you hadn’t known, the whole thing might have looked from the outside like an excursion to Ohio Stadium for a Saturday football game.
I reached Jack while the rest of them were inside the sandwich place.
Dr. Einhorn, he said, had been lovely. Kind, and thorough, and willing to spend as much time as Jack needed. Jack had brought his X-rays from the tests in Columbus with him, and the results of all his lab work. Dr. Einhorn, Jack believed, was the man to go to when you were seeking miracles. Look at Lance Armstrong.
It was with sadness and realism that Dr. Einhorn told Jack and his family that if Jack would begin radiation and chemotherapy immediately—and he meant immediately, Monday—he might have a chance to live for a year or two. This was a level and a type of cancer that was not going to go away. The doctor wished he could say otherwise, but he couldn’t.
“He’s really a nice guy,” Jack said. “You could tell that he knows exactly what he’s talking about.”
I didn’t have any words. I could hear voices; the others were getting back onto the bus with food for the rest of the grim ride back.
And here is what Jack said to me to sum up what he had just been told. A month before, he had been working hard at his job every day, he had been laughing with his friends and family, he had been making plans for vacation trips, and running and working out to keep himself in shape, he had been a man on top of the world. It hadn’t even been three weeks since he had laughingly said to me, on my birthday: “You think fifty-seven is bad, wait until we’re seventy.”
Now he had been told what he had been told, and here, in a clear and steady voice, is what he said to me:
“I got dealt a hard hand.”
That was it, and the other voices became louder as the rest of them made their way up the aisle of the bus.
“This isn’t a good time to talk,” Jack said. “I’ll be back at home tonight.”
I said I’d be there soon. We hung up. I thought about the Bexley bus, aboard which there were never any surprises, never any unexpected turns.