“The bus station,” I told the cabby.
“Greyhound or Trailways?”
Road block before I’d even begun my trip.
“Oh, Lord. I don’t know.”
“Where ya headed?”
“El Dorado, Arkansas.”
“Trailways,” said the driver.
“Please hurry. I have to be home tomorrow morning, and I don’t know the bus schedules.”
“Then we’ll agitate the gravel,” he said.
Elvis had used that same expression the night he gave me a ride home. The remembrance filled me with nostalgia for the lost girl of that magical time.
The cabby was nice enough to turn the meter off while I went inside to break my large bill.
I’d never been inside a bus station late at night, and hardly ever during the day. No women were there, and no one young. Spittle dotted the floor, and cigar smoke coming from a man sitting clear across the waiting room made it hard to breathe. A few other men, all in bedraggled clothes, sat reading or dozing.
“When is the next bus to El Dorado?” I asked the ticket agent.
“Departing one A.M., scheduled to arrive at eight in the morning.”
He took the hundred-dollar bill and studied it.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, my voice shaky.
“This the smallest you’ve got?”
I nodded.
His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get this bill?”
“My mother gave it to me.”
“Sure it’s not counterfeit?” the agent said, his face suspicious.
“Yes, I’m sure. Just give me a ticket and my change. The cab driver is waiting to be paid.”
“Don’t know if I can break it,” he said, fumbling in the cash register.
“Sir.”
He met my gaze.
“Please. My mother died unexpectedly.” My throat swelled. “I’ve got to get home.”
With that, he counted out my money and gave me a ticket. I rushed back outside.
“There is a bus,” I told the cabby, handing him the fare. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks. I was going to drive you myself, if there wasn’t a bus,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter about your age. Be careful, and good luck.”
My watch said ten after midnight. Taking a seat in the waiting room as far away from anyone as I could get, I ticked off the minutes until the bus would leave.
It crossed my mind that I had enough time to call Carmen. I looked around. A pay phone hung on the wall next to the rest rooms. I was halfway to it, change in my hand, when I had second thoughts.
She had done the unthinkable by keeping Mama’s death from me. I couldn’t imagine why she would do such a cruel thing. Maybe she was trying to protect me. She knew that I was quite literally trapped out here. There was no way I could come home hugely pregnant. Or maybe she’d feared such news would bring the baby on early, which it had. No matter what, news like that had to be given immediately to the next of kin. Because simply nothing made sense, I decided to catch her off guard by showing up without warning.
At twelve forty-five, my bus pulled in. I visited the restroom and then bought a soda pop and a sandwich to take with me. I was starving. The call over the public address system to board the bus for El Dorado, Arkansas, with stops in Texarkana and Magnolia, didn’t come until one o’clock, the time we should be leaving.
I took the first seat up front across the aisle from the driver. The man smoking the cigar was the only other passenger. He took a seat midway back. I thanked my lucky stars to see a compartment at the rear of the bus labeled “Restroom.”
The driver had collected our tickets and gone back inside when I noticed a black car pulling into the parking lot. My window on the bus was nearer the passenger side of the car, so I wasn’t able to immediately see the face of the woman who emerged from the driver’s side. As she circled around the rear of the car and headed toward the entrance to the bus station, her face came into full view. It was Oldenburg. In one hand she clutched a manila envelope. The papers.
With brisk steps, she went through the swinging doors, nearly colliding with our driver on his way back out to the bus. Reason told me she’d case the waiting room first, then check the ladies’ room. I had enough time to get away, if the driver moved fast.
He sprang up into his seat and turned the ignition key. The bus rumbled to life. Through the plastic window of the swinging door, I saw a distorted version of Oldenburg rushing toward the restrooms. I looked back at the driver. He was thumbing through paperwork.
“When do we leave?” I asked. “It’s already ten past one.”
“We’re going. Keep your pants on,” he said.
Shoving the gear stick into reverse, we crept backward out of the parking space and away from the loading dock. Just as he put the bus in drive, Oldenburg came flying out through the swinging doors, waving the envelope.
I could see her lips moving, but I couldn’t hear her over the roar of the bus’s engine. The driver, intent on negotiating the long vehicle out of the lot, appeared not to be aware of her at all.
I watched her shaking her fist as the bus pulled out. I watched her until we began our turn onto the next street. I watched for as long as it was possible to keep her in sight. Just before she slipped out of my line of vision, I saw her open the car door and crawl back inside. Pressing the lever on the side of my seat, I leaned back and tried to relax.
I had escaped.
The Dallas lights had passed by for only about a half hour when the driver turned hard and we pulled into another bus station. I sat straight up.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked him.
Not answering me, he called out, “Fort Worth.”
“Why are we stopping here?” I repeated as he got up and started down the steps to exit the bus.
He looked up at me like he thought I didn’t have good sense.
“Pick up passengers, of course. And let some off. This’ll be a quick one.”
The two passengers joining us boarded quickly, and within minutes the driver was back in his seat, starting the engine. Just as we were heading out, I saw the black car barreling into the lot, the horn blaring in the garish lights of the station. Oldenburg leaped out and ran toward the bus, waving the envelope above her head.
This time the driver saw her and braked. He reached for the hand lever to open the door of the bus.
I rushed down the aisle and into the cubicle restroom. Inside, I slid the latch on the door and held my breath.
“Where is she?” Oldenburg’s brassy voice demanded.
“Who’s that?” the driver asked.
“The young woman. Is she on this bus? She’s trying to skip town without signing these papers. She has to be stopped.”
“Ma’am, you can see there ain’t but three folks sitting in here. What kinda papers you got? A warrant for somebody’s arrest?”
“No, no! Adoption papers, if it’s any of your affair. She’s refused to surrender her baby for adoption.”
“Well, if that don’t beat a hen a peckin’.”
She challenged him. “Are you sure there’s no one else on this bus?”
His voice dropped. “There is another passenger in the restroom, but it ain’t—Stop, ma’am. You can’t go no farther down this aisle without a ticket. And you sure can’t go charging into that restroom.”
“Is it a woman?” Oldenburg asked. “In the restroom?”
I was done in. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the driver say with a chuckle, “Not to my way of thinking.”
I could imagine Oldenburg’s perplexed face in response to that. After a beat, she said, “Oh, well, why didn’t you say it was a man? Sorry to hold you up, sir.”
Sounds resonated back to me of her going down the steps of the bus and the door closing. I waited until we had been moving for quite a while before coming out of the restroom. Thrown one step backward for every two steps forward by the rhythm of the bus, I made my way up the aisle and fell into my seat.
In a while, the driver looked over at me.
“How old are you, girlie?”
“Seventeen.”
“Right. You’re a girl still, by my way of thinking. I knew you weren’t no woman.”
He lowered his voice. “Are you the one that dame was ahuntin’?”
“What dame was that?” I replied.
He smiled.
We bumped along in the night through stretches of oilfields and scattered clumps of pine forests. We traveled down Main Street in every little town on the road and picked up passengers in most of them. We sailed over asphalt and bounced over gravel and potholes. Sleep was impossible.
My reflection rode beside me in the window. I watched her smooth her hair and tuck it behind her ears. I struggled along with her to get comfortable on the hard seat. It was as if Carmen were sitting with me. I longed for her to be real so I could ask her why she hadn’t called to tell me about Mama. But she remained only an illusion, reflected in the window by lights turned low for sleep that would not come.
Mama’s ghost flitted in and out of my mind—her every gesture, her arched eyebrow of disapproval, her infectious laugh that I’d heard too seldom, her soothing words of comfort when I was distressed. She had never been sick a day in her life. Had a stroke taken her, as it had taken her own mother before her? Or had there been an accident? The paper surely would have made a front-page story of a car wreck. But no matter the details, the biggest question remained—why Carmen hadn’t called to let me know?
I had just managed to doze off when a loud pop sounded from under the bus, followed by sounds of flapping. We swerved. The driver wrestled with the wheel as we wobbled to a stop in a clearing by the side of the road.
“Must have lost a tire,” he said, rushing down the steps and jumping off the bus.
A male passenger sitting in back got off with him, and from the window I watched them squat to check the tires, then stroke their chins. In a few minutes, they got back on the bus.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the driver said, “we’ve had a blowout. Fortunately, we’re only two miles out of Texarkana, so we ought to be able to limp on in if we take it real slow.”
And slow it was. It took us almost thirty minutes to get to the station in Texarkana. Once there, the driver told us to get off the bus and wait inside.
“How long will take to get us back on the road?” I asked the ticket agent.
He looked up at the clock on the wall behind him.
“Maybe upwards of an hour,” he said, looking past me at a customer in line to get a ticket.
It was already going on four thirty. The funeral was at ten. I wanted someone to erase from my brain the indelible reality of Mama’s death. I wanted someone to hold me and tell me everything was going to be all right. But there was no one to do either. So I took a seat and waited, and waited, and waited.
At seven that morning, they called us to board the bus. One more stop in Magnolia made it ten forty when we pulled into the Trailways station in El Dorado.
I was late for Mama’s funeral.