There were three downtown bus stations large enough to contain lockers: Greyhound, Trailways, and the Proctor Street bus depot, which was on Grand. The number on the eye of the key read 33ab. The Greyhound station didn’t have that numbering system; neither did Trailways. The Proctor Street bus depot, which served independent group travel concerns and general leasing, was our last stop.
The depot was a dilapidated, barnlike building with wood floors that were neither sealed nor waxed; if they ever got swept it was no more than once every other week. The eleven ten-foot-long splintery wooden benches, provided for waiting passengers, were set too close for comfort.
Two large, middle-aged black women were sitting side by side on the far end of the frontmost backless pew. They had six or seven suitcases piled in front of them. Both women held their purses to their breasts like newborns that needed protection from a dangerous world.
In the far corner of the dowdy room stood a young white guy wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. I say white because that’s what I’m supposed to call the sallow-skinned, pock-faced, rail-thin predator. He was staring at those women with hunger for those purses. He reasoned, as I did, that someone clutching anything the way they did their handbags had to be hiding treasure inside.
On the back bench sat an ancient human being clad all in faded rags who was leaning sideways, maybe asleep. This person could have been either a man or a woman. The race was also a thing of speculation, but the napper’s place in the world was definite: He or she had been descending for decades and was very near toppling over.
Beyond the makeshift bleachers was a single window in the wall where ticket sales and group rates were negotiated.
A copper-colored man sat on the other side of the whitewashed plasterboard wall, gazing out through the aperture, considering something that had nothing to do with buses, winos, nervous women at the depot hours before their bus was to leave, or anything else that concerned his daily bread.
Evander and I walked up to the window. Looking at the man closely I had no inkling of his origins. He could have been anything from Choctaw to Mongolian, American Negro to Polish-with-a-tan.
“Hey,” I said.
“How can I help you, sir?” he said, surprising me with his courtesy.
“Where’s your lockers?”
“We don’t have lockers here. The bulk of our fares are onetimers, you know, and so if we provided that service mostly derelicts would use it to store their stuff.”
“That’s still money,” I suggested.
“The smell would drive our customers away.”
I wasn’t sure about the ticket clerk’s conclusions, but it was his bus station, not mine.
“Look here, man,” I said, taking on a verbal persona that wasn’t exactly me—or at least, it wasn’t before the accident. “You see this boy?”
The copper man turned his gaze on Evander.
“Five days ago he took LSD for the first time,” I continued.
This sparked interest in the dark, hooded eyes.
“He was supposed to pick up something for my sister, but he met this hippie chick just got to town and she put it on his tongue with hers. Three days later he comes in and we ask where’s the suitcase he was supposed to get and he says that he thinks he put it in a bus station locker where he met the hippie girl. He thinks! So now we been to every bus station downtown and there ain’t no locker fit his key.”
“Can I see it?” the shining, dreamy clerk asked.
I held the key out in my palm and he leaned over to get a good look at it. His posture suggested that he was peering over glasses but he wasn’t wearing any.
“That LSD must be some strong stuff,” he said to Evander.
Evander shrugged his big yellow shoulders.
“You were in the train station, son,” the clerk said. “The train, not the bus.”
“The train?” That was the real me looking at the kid who was so drugged out that his memory was more supposition than fact. I shook my head and then said to the clerk, “Thank you very much, sir. You’ve really helped.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“Yeah. You see those two ladies sittin’ on the bench?”
“Yes.”
“You see that skinny boy in the corner?”
I didn’t have to say any more.
The copper man nodded as he picked up the phone.
“I’ll call the police right now,” he said.
The train station was a step up in class. Big and grand, it was full of passengers of all types and ages. The main hall had dark red–cream-and-green tile floors that were mopped nightly. There were businessmen and first-class ladies, working-class couples, students, hippies, and every color under the sun. The wooden benches in the waiting area had backrests and were built-in and shiny.
The lockers were off to the side, and 33ab was in a secluded corner. A young white woman in a mauve dress suit was standing at a nearby midlevel square locker door putting in an alligator bag and taking out a red velvet satchel. When she was gone I had Evander stand in such a way as to block me from the casual glance. Only then did I use the key.…
The wadded bloody burlap sacks wrapped up in the graying white sheets contained more money than I had ever seen in one place. It was no wonder that Evander wanted to forget where he put it; that kind of money was likely to get a black man killed.
I closed the locker door and tapped Evander on the shoulder.
“You think you can remember where I parked the car?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“You sure now?”
“Yeah,” he said impatiently. “I ain’t trippin’ no more.”
“Here’s the car keys. The square one works on the trunk. Go get the laundry bag and come right back. And don’t kiss no hippie girls on the way.”
The aisle was wide enough for travelers to attend the light gray lockers from either side without bumping elbows. The floor in this area was plain concrete painted battleship green. I moved across and down from Evander’s locker and stood there trying not to look suspicious.
I would have succeeded if it wasn’t for the woman in mauve.
I suppose she saw in me what I saw in the white drug addict at the Proctor Street station. She brought with her a Negro station employee in a uniform that might have meant security. She pointed at me from the mouth of the aisle. The man squared his shoulders and walked my way. He was shorter than I, and slimmer. This didn’t give me much of an advantage, because the last thing I wanted was a fight.
“Excuse me,” he said, looking at my chin.
“What?” I didn’t want to seem too friendly, because your run-of-the-mill sneak thief usually puts on jocular airs to hide his intentions.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean, what am I doin’? This is a public station, idn’t it?”
“You heard what I said, man.”
He was a lighter brown than I, but our skin tones were similar. His features could have been Ethiopian, with a slender nose and high cheekbones. He was pumping himself up because I promised to be an uphill climb.
“That white woman bring you over here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came with my nephew,” I said, relenting with a lie. “We got to the locker and I remembered that I left my key in the car. My hip hasn’t been right since I fell three stories from my construction job, and so the one with the stronger legs went for the key. If you don’t believe me just ask the lady. She saw me with him. What am I gonna do? Come in here to steal her shit and then just stand around with my thumb up my ass?”
“No need to go cursin’ at me now,” the train station man said.
“No need to come ovah here actin’ like I’m a thief just ’cause some white lady told you I look like one. As a matter of fact … where can I make a complaint about this shit?”
“Don’t you go worryin’ about complainin’,” he said. “Just get your stuff and go.”
He walked back to the lady in mauve and slowly guided her away from that area of lockers.
All of this made me wonder what she had in those bags. But that was a mystery I was not signed on to solve.
A few minutes later Evander came back. I wasted no time shoveling the bloody sheet and its contents into the laundry bag.
Walking out of there, with all that money slung over my shoulder, I felt like every eye in the place was on me.