Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (15 page)

The next day, Tia walked to the Montgomery Greyhound bus station instead of catching the school bus. She had stuffed all that would fit into her backpack without looking suspicious: five skirts, five blouses, and stockings. Deodorant, a toothbrush, a washcloth, soap, and all the underwear she owned. She opened her clarinet case and laid her sheet music atop the clarinet pieces. She stashed her books under her bed and thought about how it might be her last time smelling the lemony Murphy oil soap that rose from the cool hardwood floor. She had thirty-four dollars. A bus ticket to Atlanta cost thirty-two.

She’d been in the station before, but never as a passenger, always with Roberta to drop off or pick up church members who didn’t want to pay the five-dollar cab fare. Now that she had two hours of waiting ahead of her, she had time to notice how outdated it seemed, the bus arrival and departure tables on the same corrugated plastic as corner-store menu boards; the seat in which she sat—huge and spoon-shaped, rendered in taffy-orange plasticine—must have once seemed like the height of space-age decor. Perhaps this was exactly
how it looked when King lived here, and she tried to imagine where the “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs would have hung, then realized she didn’t have to. All five blacks waited in one area, all three whites in another.

She decided to call Marcelle, who lived so close to school that she’d still be home.

“Mrs. Barnes, is Marcelle there? It’s Tia.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Barnes, Marcelle’s mother, was what people at church called “sick and shut in.” She had some ailment that wasn’t serious enough for hospitalization, but was serious enough that she stayed in bed all day. Marcelle said it was depression, and that nobody in her family wanted to admit it. Finally, Mrs. Barnes put Marcelle on the phone. Tia told Marcelle she was leaving.

“What are you going to tell them when they ask about me?” Tia said.

“Which time? When you don’t come home or when your face is on a milk carton?”

“Look, they didn’t lock you in a closet, so I don’t even want to hear it.” She’d expected Marcelle to be happy for her; it was exactly the kind of thing she thought Marcelle would have done.

“I’ll be down there in twenty minutes.” Marcelle said.

It took Marcelle nearly an hour. When Tia suggested they get some orange juice in the bus station diner, Marcelle refused. “Hell, naw! The longer you stay in the station, the more likely they are to remember your face.”

So they walked the periphery of the station grounds, Marcelle asking questions Tia should have known the answers to.

“You don’t know where your mother lives?”

“I told you, she lives in Atlanta.”

“Her and twenty billion other people.”

But Marcelle didn’t try to talk her out of it, and for that, Tia was grateful. When it was time to board the bus, Marcelle gave her forty-two dollars, all one-dollar bills.

“You were saving this for your prom dress.”

Though church members weren’t allowed to dance, and though Marcelle wouldn’t be a senior for two years, she was working on a way of going to the prom, stealing a dollar here and there from her zonked-out mother’s purse.

“What was I supposed to do? You only got like two dollars.” Marcelle tried not to show disappointment at giving up the money, but Tia could see it, and felt powerless, since she knew she was not about to refuse the money. “I got two more years to save,” Marcelle said, and with a wicked grin added, “Long as those SDI checks keep coming in!”

“Don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“She’s
my
mama!” Marcelle grinned as broadly as ever, then moved to hug her, but Tia pulled back.

“Like you said, they’ll remember us.”

Marcelle glanced at the white bus driver, talking about transmissions with a black lady midget. “He won’t notice,” Marcelle said, hugging her. “We all look the same to them anyway.”

W
HEN THEY
reached Columbus, Georgia, the bus driver took an exit and switched to low gear. The machinery of the bus fought against moving so slowly, moaning until it came to a complete stop in a Burger King parking lot.

“Fifteen minutes, folks,” the driver said. Before he could even open the door, people pushed impatiently down the aisle.

The driver stepped outside and lit a cigarette while passengers hustled into the Burger King. Tia did not want to spend her money quickly, so she stayed in her seat and watched the driver. He walked to the edge of the parking lot where weeds rose up in a growth of densely packed stalks. It seemed as though he were sizing up the weeds to see if the brush would make a path for him. Tia could see only the back of his head, but he seemed to be thinking,
I will leave
you all behind, and then where will you be? I will enter this here growth
of weed and disappear forever
.

“Go,” Tia whispered, looking out the window. “Go.” She was rooting for him, knowing she would be the only person who understood what he was doing and why, until she saw him unzip his pants and loose his urine in a series of arcs so elaborate he seemed to be spelling out his name.

Everyone returned with Whoppers and Cokes. The driver yawned, making motions for dawdlers to hurry onto the bus. He sat in his seat, looked at his watch, then closed the door. He had already swung the bus into a slow reverse when someone in back told him that one man was inside the Burger King, still waiting for his food.

“Fifteen minutes,” said the bus driver. “I’m no joke, folks. I say fifteen minutes, that means fifteen minutes.” He turned out of the parking lot.

“Lordy, lordy. Buses sure have changed,” said the white woman across the aisle from Tia. “
No
kind of manners.” Tia was about to agree until she realized that the white woman was talking to herself.

The bus had just made the turn out onto the service road when the abandoned passenger came flying out of the Burger King with his bag of food.

“He’s just back there, Chuckie.
Wait
for him!”

The bus driver continued at a slow crawl toward the interstate
sign. The abandoned man crossed the road, and a car he’d dodged honked madly. Once he’d gotten on the right side of the road, he caught up to the bus just a few yards from the door. The driver braked and the bus halted with a hydraulic sigh.

The man, exhausted, stopped running and lowered his head to catch his breath. Just as he’d made it inches from the door, the driver kicked into drive again.

“No he
didn’t
!” one woman squealed.

“Girrrrrl. We should report this one! Report his ass to the Greyhound people!”

The abandoned man began running once more, and the whole busload of passengers were either pressed against the windows or standing in the aisle. “Run! Run! Run!” they chanted to the man who was already running. The bus driver stopped for the man once more—another tease—and drove off again. This time the passengers began yelling at the bus driver, cursing him while he checked his rearview mirror as if to make sure they didn’t hit him. “All I can say,” hollered one woman, “is that you is wrong, Mr. Bus Driver. I don’t know who you or Mr. Greyhound is, but you is both
wrong
!”

Tia could feel herself smiling from the excitement of it all. It was different from church, where everyone felt something she wished she could feel but didn’t. She thought she felt God the most when she was quiet, or when she wondered whether there was a God at all. But here on the bus, everyone was rooting for a man whom none of them knew, but there he was, real and running. When everyone began banging the windows as if to break them, she banged on them too, yelling, “Run! Run! Run!”

The third time the driver stopped, he opened the door and the man boarded the bus to wild cheering. Whatever food he’d bought had fallen out the bottom of the bag. He heaved, trying to stare at
the driver murderously, but tears streamed down his face. As he made his way down the aisle, people applauded; men clamped him on the shoulder as if to affirm his manhood.

In his delirium, perhaps, the man passed his original seat, and when he’d gotten to Tia’s row, he sniffed up his tears and sat next to her. Another shock of excitement hit her, as if she were sitting next to a celebrity. But he soon feel asleep, his head nodding off on her shoulder, and when a rivulet of drool, thin as spider silk, trickled onto her collar, she hadn’t the heart to nudge him awake.

T
HEY APPROACHED
Atlanta; her insides jumped when she saw the skyline. She tried to figure out why it hit her so hard. They were just buildings. But in each one, someone worked, someone sang, someone complained; someone shuttled away the trash, the storehouse of banalities, secrets, and cravings. When the lights were out, she thought, surely some couple would creep up or down a stairwell, stopping on a landing to embrace. The buildings breathed and exhaled possibilities; that was why a skyline like this one could stop your heart. As the bus entered the city’s center, threading its way in, the skyline seemed to whisper,
You too are possible
.

The nearly abandoned man’s celebrity had faded by the time people stumbled out of the bus and into hot, gleaming Atlanta. Tia stood in the Atlanta bus station as streams of people with destinations whizzed past her, bumped into her, crowded around her. She found a carousel of phones and shrugged off her backpack, set down her clarinet case. Atlanta had two separate phone books, A through Μ and Ν through Z, each over a thousand pages. When she found the right phone book she counted twenty-two Dunloveys, no Ros-alyns, but four R’s.

The first R. Dunlovey’s phone was busy; the second, she found out from the answering machine, belonged to a gaggle of college students. On her third call, a black man answered the phone.

“Yeah,” the voice said. “Who is it?”

“I’m looking for Rosalyn Dunlovey.”

“I’m asking
who you is
, not who you
want
.” In the background she heard children. Something smashed, and the phone on the other end tumbled and fell.

When things settled down she said, “This is Tia.”

“Well, Tia, there’s a Rosa here, but no Rosalyn. How you know Rosa?”

Tia had never heard her aunt Roberta call her mother Rosa. Her mother would have been Roz, not Rosa. And kids. What if her mother had other children, and hadn’t bothered to visit Tia now that she had younger children? Tia didn’t want to think about it. She preferred the image of her mother on an anonymous street corner, doing—she didn’t know what her mother would be doing—to that of her mother living a real life without her. Then, for the first time, it occurred to her that her mother might be dead.

“I’m sorry. I have the wrong number.”

“Wait a minute,” the man said, suddenly buttering his words, “you sound good. Rosa ain’t gone be off work till ten. Why don’t you come—”

Tia hung up. She closed her eyes. She did not know why she’d expected there to be fewer people, less noise, less ugliness when she opened them again, but she had.

S
HE DECIDED
that she’d leave the bus station and call hotels from pay phones elsewhere.

“What’s your price range?” one hotel desk clerk asked.

She told him.

“Ten dollars?” He whistled, high and arch. He’d been the only one to stay on the phone after she’d announced how much money she had. “What you’re looking for is a
motel
. You’re looking for, like, a roach motel.” The clerk laughed, and when Tia did not, he said, “I was just kidding.”

Tia pictured her aunt Roberta in the kitchen, singing along with the gospel station on the radio. About now, she would notice that Tia was late coming home from school.

“O.K.,” the man sighed, gathering patience. “Are you trying to find a job here or something?”

Yes. That was it. She was looking for a job. She obviously would have to start looking for a job. “Yes, I am. Do you have one?”

“Doll, I got two jobs, but they’re mine. How old are you?”

Tia told him she was fourteen.

“You like a runaway or something?”

“More like a run-a-to,” she said, proud of her wit, but the hotel clerk didn’t even break a laugh. She called the places he told her to call: the YMCA said they didn’t have rooms, just a swimming pool; the shelter told her to come on down, but she thought anyone so willing to take her would be more than willing to ship her away. Finally, she’d booked a room with the Atlanta Dream Youth Hostel for fifteen dollars until their desk clerk told her to bring two forms of ID.

“I don’t have an ID.”

“Well, we can’t give you a room. You need two forms of identification.” Tia wanted to know why, and the clerk told her, “To prove that you are who you say you are.”

“But I told you. I’m Tia Townsend.”

“But we need pictures. Like a driver’s license. Or a passport. We need picture identification.”

“Why do you need a picture?” Tia asked. “You’ll see me when I get there.”

B
ESIDES
, the youth hostel was in Decatur, too far away to conduct a search for her mother. By nightfall, she had walked around most of downtown Atlanta and ridden five MARTA buses. She plopped down in a hard McDonald’s chair to rest before ordering food. It had rained during the day, and though she’d folded newspapers into a tent over her head, she was soaked. She’d slipped in mud taking the shortcut over the small hill on her way into the McDonald’s, and she was too tired to go to the restroom to change. She knew her hair was a mess, and when she reached for her comb, remembered that she’d given it away to a homeless man. “But I’m homeless, too,” she’d protested. The man argued that he was
profes
sionally
homeless.

Only the day before, her aunt Roberta forced her to pray for two hours straight after they’d come home from church, and most of her half hour of silent prayer included thinking of a way to get to Atlanta. Now that she was in Atlanta, she prayed, her head bowed over the table’s yellow Formica.

Then she felt someone staring at her. When she lifted her head, she saw that the man doing the staring wore one of those nylon running suits that swished with every movement. She tried to stare back, hoping he’d realize his rudeness, but his gaze was unflagging. He gurgled up the last bit of drink with his straw, then grinned as though he were proud of this accomplishment, and she should be too.