19

The voices ceased today, St. Swithin’s Day, in the year AR 5.

I guess more accurately you could say that they faded into the upholstery. That’s not to say that now the Number 17 is just a bus. It is in fact a public conveyance filled with the stories—the messages, if you will—of people’s lives.

I can’t tell you how I know the voices ceased. Closest I can come is to call it a “lifting.” My shoulders ride higher; my heart beats steadier.

For too long I chose to ignore them, like a man sitting in the middle of a library failing to notice all of the books. One day the books began to speak to him. It is pretty hard to long ignore a clamorous collection of talking books.

To his dismay, the man soon discovered that there were other books, a city filled with books, and that his life was so much the richer when he read them. More agitated, more challenged, more involved. And lo and behold, he discovered his life was a book also, and when people read it, they learned and were entertained and had their thoughts provoked. Sometimes they were angered, other times puzzled by the choices and the unfoldings of his life. The books of our lives, he discovered, were meant to be read, and the real poor among us are those who never bothered to read them. Or worse yet, defaced them or burned them or banned them from their lives. Randy was dirt poor because he refused to read Greta’s book with comprehension and in the end banned it because it revealed too much about the reader.

God wants us to read one another. With discernment. It was Bill who reminded me that it was Plato who said, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”

Ruthie is a book I cannot get out of my system. You read and reread good books like that, and after every reading you come away stronger, fitter, deeply stirred, more informed, and comforted. Give me a good Life of Ruthie any day and I will lay my head down that night somehow improved.

He is not crazy who carries on a conversation with wisdom, dead or alive.

And so God said to me, “Here are a few good books you may have overlooked since Ruthie died and you stopped reading.” I am grateful He insisted.

Twice I have made pilgrimage to Bill’s grave. So far I can’t shake the guilt I feel, but I can pay honor to a simple man of great loyalty. I’m glad there was no memorial ceremony. Too final. I want to remember Bill forever at the wheel of a bus, the guardian of a community on wheels.

I’ve gone back to see if another chapter has been written in some of the other books. Bea, Gloria, and Carl McCutcheon moved out of the Bayview and into assisted-living facilities, where Gloria leads the Sunday hymn sings, Bea accompanies on accordion, and Carl sings bass. They sent me the nicest card, to which Bea appended: “Home is where the house is.”

I’m happy to say the FBI and Ruby Webster don’t come around anymore. I can’t shake the feeling I’ll show up in a cold-case file one day but Ruby got what she was after. She talked to me at length, and then wrote a sensitive two-part story under the heading “God Rides the 17.” It’s up for a Pulitzer, and in it, Bill gets his due.

I received the nicest call from Patty Newfeldt, the young woman whose bomb-loaded backpack earned me some notoriety. She’s now climbing the corporate ladder at The Space Needle Restaurant and plans to name her first boy child after me.

Big Pearl goes by the stage name Downtown Diva and cleans up singing for the tourists at Westlake Center Plaza. She no longer sleeps in doorways, but I do continue to shower her with Juicy Fruit gum. She’s sweet on Duke, the steel drummer, and stays at a halfway house for alcoholics in the International District. Tsunami, Marko, and the boys are doing a life stretch in the federal pen at Monroe for Bill’s murder. Tsunami, the trigger man, is in for the duration. His buddies may be out in a dozen years or so. I do not want to read their stories, but God is pretty insistent I go to that prison and help them write a better ending. I have no idea how to do that, and even less desire, but God says only the ignorant stand and watch a man die in his sin and lift not a finger,

The freckled young man, his lady, and their baby over on Fairhaven, the ones who prayed for milk, have moved. New address unknown. The broken-down car at the curb remains, but the dry cleaners went out of business.

Doomie and Stella mostly ride the Twenty-Nine now, and that’s where they found Jesus. Chaplain Bart, a former bank robber who served his time, now evangelizes fellow riders. Metro police investigated, but as long as Bart wasn’t threatening to blow anyone up, transit officers were content to let it be. The Littletons continue to raise support to fund a year of riding Greyhound coast to coast, preaching the gospel.

Miss Francis married the CEO of one of the largest repo outfits in North America. At last count, she had rescued and retired thirteen mixed-breed dogs to her spacious kennels near Gig Harbor. Jessie kept Lily and is assisting Miss Francis with socialization twice a week at the doggie academy.

Greta has been swept off her feet by a fellow student in Drawing from Real Life class who kicked off their relationship by painting a six-by-eight-foot portrait of Greta in her leopard-print coat. It hangs, I am told, in the Fred Astaire Dance Studio, where they take Thursday night salsa lessons. The Hispanic family across the hall from Greta’s are pregnant again and have switched from parakeets to keeping betta fish, also pregnant.

Shirl and Richie parted ways, still friends. She’s finishing high school, while he’s hard into physical conditioning to qualify for the Longview Washington Police Academy.

The Eye Doctor is said to continue collecting his favorite body part. The most vivid accounts of his nocturnal habits come from the men in the city drunk tank who seem to have run-ins with the mad surgeon on a frequent basis.

Tai Chi Man, Knitting Needles Lady, Semper Fi, Rainbow Man, the Chairman’s Harem, Roscoe, Virgil, and the rest of the 17 family continue to roll, rain or shine. Elaine drives them, Cigar Man sells them raffle tickets, Timer accuses them of tardiness, and every Thursday, someone poses the ubiquitous Question of the Week. This week’s question, asked by Tall Man: If bacon were outlawed, what would the B in BLT stand for?

As for me, God is good. I still have my routine, my heart’s still holey, the molar’s still loose, and near as I can tell, my buying habits continue to have little or no impact on the chief indicators of consumer confidence. I bought ten turkeys for the mission last month, all north of twenty pounds, and national consumer confidence actually fell a tick or two. A tenth of a ton of farmed fowl and my country cares not. I need cinnamon rolls. Stat.

This afternoon, Chase Lafferty called from The Antique Trunk and said he had something new he wanted me to see. I told him I was tapped out until the first of the month, and he asked what else was new. Come.

I waited for him to finish with a customer, then with studied nonchalance continued perusing the barely worn image etched into a nineteenth-century Mexican peso.

“Next!” It was more command than invitation, as if uttered by St. Peter after a long day at the Pearly Gates.

From a red-satin-lined rosewood box, likely Victorian era, he extracted an object wrapped in soft gray felt. He pinched the felt between his fingertips and slipped it from what was beneath.

The craftsmanship of the figurine was breathtaking. About the size of a newborn kitten, it was as fragile and exquisitely detailed as a Fabergé egg.

In golds and soft blues was Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing amid a smattering of field flowers, contemplating the wonder of that which occupied her virgin womb. Beneath her feet were the words: “Oh, my soul rejoices in God, my Savior, my King, and yet my Son.”

While Chase went on about the Spanish influences and the court of this king and that and how ironclad the provenance, I gazed at that young girl great with child and realized what an amateur I was in the message department. She got the word not on a crowded city bus but in the small town of Nazareth and delivered by an angelic being. Her response? “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

Doesn’t that beat all? For starters, how could God become a man, cross the plain between heaven and earth, and immaculately enter the womb of a woman He had made? Thankfully, she was also greatly troubled by the angel’s message and I’m sure had a lot of questions. I get what that little holy gal went through. She inspires me.

It rained today. Tradition says that if it rains on St. Swithin’s Day, forty more days of rain will follow. Give me a break. It’s Seattle.

Well, I’d better get this soup bone to Lily before she thinks I eloped with Natalie, the Russian elkhound.

Oh, and, Ruthie? I’ve got my eye on a spaniel that I think would be perfect for the apartment. And I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, I’ll keep her off your mother’s heirloom comforter.

“Do you know what I can get for this little gem at auction?” Chase gently allowed the gray felt to settle softly back over the shoulders of the porcelain Virgin Mary.

I looked into his eyes, shiny with excitement. “Surprise me,” I said.