4

Monday passed without incident. No voices. No neon graffiti. No Stella and Doomie. I could relax. Maybe my assignment from Planet Nutso was at an end.

Besides, I couldn’t hide out forever. It wasn’t that the mission or Kids Safari couldn’t get along without me. They could, although I believed my sense of commitment carried an extra something because of Ruthie’s influence. However, when I called the directors of both programs to say I needed a few days off, there had been no hesitation to grant the request.

Sure, I’m only a volunteer, but that doesn’t mean I could get sloppy or complacent, however cheaply I worked.

Tuesdays, I always spent the morning making brown-bag lunches for eighty homeless kids at day camp, then I served hot lunch at the mission to about three hundred “kings of the road,” and a queen or two. I know the stereotype about transients all being a bunch of drunken bums and strung-out drug addicts, but truth be known, a good many were victims of layoffs, foreclosures, business reversals. They have fallen beneath the wheels of a series of unfortunate adventures.

It felt good to get out of the apartment, stretch out the kinks, and get my mind off the strangeness of last week. One thing I was especially glad of. I had not confided in my good friend, Bill Pensky, the driver. He knew nothing of my “impressions,” although he gave me a long, funny look after Doomie and Stella went skipping off hand in hand.

“Did I just see you be nice to the Unabomber?” he said after the two eccentric youths exited the bus.

“All I said to him was ‘Change your name to Greg Littleton, stop acting creepy, and wear cologne. In exchange, you get the girl and a personal tour of Chinatown.’ You’d a thought he’d won a prize.”

On this Tuesday morning, the sun blazed like a summer sun should.

I actually whistled a happy tune under my breath and wished Greta, her pickup man, and the McCutcheons well.

Ruthie’s words came unbidden. “Rejoice in the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it.” I can do a little rejoicing, Ruth Anne, as long as the Lord keeps His distance. Blasphemous as it seems, right at that moment, God struck me as a bit toxic.

The only passenger I recognized was Cigar Man, a customary five inches of unlit stogie projecting from his mouth like a miniature submarine. Bare feet, cracked at the heels, with toenails yellow from age and fungus, everything shod in aged black sandals that may have survived the Peloponnesian War. Droopy white sweatpants and thin white windbreaker circa the nineties completed the ensemble.

“Watch out for Papa Ganoush back there,” Bill warned on my way by the driver’s coop. “He’s selling raffle tickets for a chance at a five-thousand-dollar prize at twenty-five bucks a pop. Runner-up gets three days at the Pile Driver Motel on Pounding Headache Bay. Somewhere in the Southwest where I didn’t even know they had water. Buyer beware!”

No sooner had I taken a seat than Cigar Man pointed his Cuban submarine at me and shuffled his way down the aisle to where I sat, more than halfway back. “Is your lucky day,” he boomed, oblivious to transit’s no-solicitation rules. “Big raffle, big prize! Five thousands of the dollar for first place. You buy? Twenty-five dollar, two for fifty dollar. You buy?” He stood there immovable, legs sunk like concrete piers into the seabed of the bus floor. The stogie wobbled from one side of his pink, wet mouth to the other.

I debated with my reputation, the one that said I was incapable of refusing raffles or Girl Scout cookies. My reputation remained secure. “I’ll take one, the winning ticket if you please.”

Cigar Man eyed me quizzically. “How I know which one the win? You think what, that my raffle is ragged?”

“Ragged?”

“He means rigged,” Bill called from the front. Then he yelled out his side window and honked three quick blasts on the horn. “Move it, darlin’. You’re blockin’ the intersection!”

“No, of course not.” I tried to explain that it was only a joke, but the more I talked, the more he looked convinced I should be locked up for raffle fraud.

A twenty and a five resolved the issue. He seemed relieved when I accepted the first ticket he offered. “You, good luck!” He stalked back to his seat.

You’ve got to love the bus. I’ve been jabbed in the eye by a swinging purse, had toes mashed by an electric wheelchair, been kicked in the head by a woman in mid-epileptic fit, and been handed a nosebleed by a slap from the business end of a king salmon fresh out of Pike Place Market. In comparison, losing twenty-five dollars to a man in a cigar was small potatoes. If I won the trip, I could always forfeit.

“Sweetie…listen…sweetie…listen…”

“Sweetie” apparently had no intention of listening. The one-sided cellphone conversation in the seat ahead of me continued in that vein with no sign of abating. Occasionally, the woman in bright red lipstick and hair to match snared the phone between shoulder and jaw and rooted around in the bottom of a silver clutch purse. Probably looking for an air horn with which to bring “Sweetie’s” diatribe to a close. Finally, she simply clapped the folding phone shut, dropped it into her purse as she might a dead mouse into a garbage can, and unconcernedly began retouching stylishly long, red-lacquered nails.

At Third and Union, three people entered through the front door and five from the rear door to my right. Two were in ties, three in dresses, a couple of others in preppy sweaters and khakis. Professionals and students. With all the anarchists in town for the World Bank Summit, it made safer sense to leave the car at home and take the bus.

I donated our car to the mission two weeks after Ruthie went to heaven.

At the moment, I half expected to see Greta again. Half hoped I would.

I spied a slender slip of a girl with long, stringy hair the color of burlap. Long-time bus riders are people watchers and become quite adept at guessing occupations, destinations, even simple backgrounds. Those you couldn’t parse out as well, you made up stories about. Matching tan shorts and short-sleeved shirts with high-top laced boots were undoubtedly animal wranglers headed for Woodland Park Zoo. The pretty athletic one in the pink scarf must have charge over the flamingo exhibit. That fellow in dark glasses, orange leather shin kickers, skin-tight brown leather pants, and piercings from nose to navel was either a curator at the Experience Music Project rock music exhibit or lead singer in The Limping Wombats band playing at the Tractor Tavern.

She entered through the back door, standard custom in the Ride Free Zone, where no money changes hands. She was in a pale denim skirt and jacket, the kind we used to think was too far gone for charity, but now fetched twice the price at the department stores. The ensemble clashed with the black patent-leather backpack she kept tight to her rather than shrugging it off into the empty seat beside her. She was a ball of jitters, legs and feet never still, head whipping side to side, eyes watchful. She turned wide, fearful eyes, strafed the handful of people seated at the back of the bus. I’d seen drug jitters before and this wasn’t like that. She thought she might be being followed, accosted, or apprehended in some way.

She saw me staring and I recognized her panic. She got up, moved toward the front of the bus, twice glancing back to see what? If I would follow?

Take her backpack.

My throat filled with bile. I was cracking up. I needed to get away to someplace warm and forgotten where the only modes of transportation were mules or dugout canoes.

Take her backpack. Hurry!

You want me to steal her backpack?

Take it and get rid of it.

Rip it from her body and steal it?

Take it off the bus and throw it as far from you as you can.

I can’t do it.

Hurry or people will…

I didn’t wait around to hear any more. I did not want to have a conversation with myself or voices or impressions or angels or pepperoni pizza. I wanted to be left alone.

The girl in the black backpack jumped when I stormed past her.

“What’s up, pard? You don’t look so good.” I thought Bill could calm me down, but it wasn’t happening. My breath came in short gasps. I was sweating like Aunt Betty’s pig. Could they now control my body without my consent? Was I their robot?

Who are they?

“God help us, here comes the Gestapo.” Bill points.

Out the bus’s front window a knot of protestors marched at us down the middle of the street. The protest leader, in thick green pea jacket, a black kerchief pulled over his lower face and nose bandit-style, shouted orders still too far away to be understood even though Bill’s sliding side window was fully open. The protestors’ signs were clear enough: Stop U.S. Domination! Killer Bankers Go Home! Uncle Sam’s Not My Uncle! The anarchists were on the move. Matching them step for step, flak-jacketed Metro police in helmets brandished riot shields and batons. In the street ahead of the bus, other police officers rerouted traffic and motioned for Bill to take a hard left onto the detour.

Bill braked to a halt in the middle of the intersection. He ripped the transit phone from its cradle. What was meant to be a private conversation was carried through the bus by Bill’s agitation rising in volume. “Seventeen to Base, Seventeen to Base. We’re being rerouted by Metro police onto University eastbound. Can you verify?”

Through the window, the rerouting officer nodded and wildly motioned for Bill to make the left. Bill, Operator of the Year and twenty-year veteran of Metro Transit, was not about to comply without verification from Base. He listened intently to the person at the other end of the line, face dark with barely contained anger. Bill’s heart medication must’ve been doing double time. He slammed a meaty hand against the steering wheel. “Well, it would have been real nice had someone informed me at the beginning of shift that that man and his troublemaking pals were going to interfere with my Tuesday! This is what comes of having a liberal city council.”

Horns blared from behind the bus. The rerouting officer stormed the 17.

“Cheese Louise,” Bill huffs. “I’m not the problem. They are! Hang on, folks, we’re going left.”

Take her backpack now. Get rid of it now. NOW!

I turned and threw myself at the girl in the backpack. My sweaty hand slipped on slick patent leather. She screamed and jumped back, trying to scramble out of reach.

Half the passengers erupted in a pandemonium of yells, screams, and shouts.

Young men came at me, faces twisted in alarm.

My fingers closed firmly around the straps of the backpack just as the girl fell between the seats. She slid from the straps like quicksilver.

In a split second I was up the aisle, screaming, “Open the door! Open the door!”

To my eternal gratitude, Bill didn’t hesitate. He released the front doors and I flew down the stairs and out, shaking off the advancing detour cop, twisting and dodging like a man half my age. “Down! Everyone get down!” I bellowed. How they ever heard me over the clamor of city and protestors, or why they listened, I’ll never know, but like wheat before a giant scythe, the people on the street went down.

With a giant, hammer-throw swing, I launched the backpack into the center of the intersection at Third and University. Though I fell forward, a thundering blast lifted me from the pavement and hurled me thirty feet backward onto the sidewalk. I vaguely remembered the sound of shattering glass and my head cracking against pavement before blessed darkness took me and did not let me go.