The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (20 page)

“His was a journey of
faith,” Horatio Fortesque says. “The Thompson twin, I mean,” he adds. And then,
“As was yours,” and he pats Jim Leafman on the arm.

“It’s a nice story,” says Lorre.

“It was a nice story,” Jack agrees.

“But then, all stories
about journeys are good.” Edgar considers his glass for a few seconds and,
sensing that there’s more to come, the others remain silent. Then:

“Back when I was a
youngster we lived in Forest Plains,” Edgar says, his voice slightly wistful
and distant.

Jack says, “Forest
Plains? Where’s that?”

“I checked the mapbook
once and it turns out there are several,” Edgar says. “This one is in Iowa,
about an hour west from Cedar Rapids.

“My first job — clerk
and then teller at the local branch of First National, long since closed — was
in Branton, a small town around 30 miles due north from home. There was a
twice-daily bus went from the Plains straight into Branton, stopping on Main
Street, about three minutes walk from the bank and then at the railroad depot
where it turned right around and went back to the Plains. Same thing happened
on an evening.

“In the morning, it left
the Plains at seven forty-three and in the evening it left Branton at six
eleven — funny how you remember the small details,” Edgar says, shaking his big
head slowly. “It arrived in Branton at a little after or a little before eight
thirty in the morning and I’d usually be back home around seven at night.

“My dad bought me a car
— an old Mercury, 1960 model, canary yellow with tail-fins and a bench seat you
could’ve sat a football team on . . . and still had room for the cheerleaders.”
Edgar slaps his knee. “Jeez, they just don’t make cars like that anymore.”

“More’s the pity,” Cliff
Rhodes says, the words coming out so quietly that Fortesque and Greenblat
exchange frowns. But before they ask him to repeat it, Edgar is up and running
again.

“But that didn’t happen
until I’d gotten through my probation period — one month — so’s the bank could
decide whether they wanted to keep me on. They did and I got the car, but for
that first month I used to ride the bus. In and out. Every day.

“The trip in was completely
different to the trip back home. The light for one thing — morning light is
just so clear and the meadows and the distant clumps of trees . . . and the
little collections of houses, collections too small even to call them villages:
Green, Hammerton, Poppleton, Starbeck —  I remember them all.

“But the evenings, well
. . . they were different. The light, as I already said, was just one thing.
Then there was the tiredness of the people for another. Folks have just lost
their spark after a day at work. I felt that way myself — just a little and I
was only nineteen years old. But the other thing was that there were different
people on the bus every now and again.”

“Why should that matter?”
Fortesque asks.

“Oh, it didn’t matter
exactly,” Edgar says, “But the regular commuters, well . . . they get to know
each other. There’s a silent acceptance of each of you by the others — what’s
the old saying? Misery loves company. You know?

“So the bus in on a
morning had, for the most part, the same folks on it as the bus back home at
the end of the day. Oh, there were a few folks going to do some shopping in
Branton — the Plains isn’t exactly what you might call Fifth Avenue, though
there is a mall there now, around four, five miles outside of town — but back
then there wasn’t diddly. And there might be a couple of people going to meet a
friend or visit someone. But, like I say, most of them were commuting to work
and commuting home. But even these occasional users would be on the bus in the
morning and the bus in the evening — they just wouldn’t be on it day after day.
You know what I’m saying?”

Jim Leafman watches his
friend over hands tented at his chin. “Go on,” he says at last, reaching for
his beer.

“Well, my first day on
the bus going home, there was one passenger who stood out from the rest,” Edgar
says, after a big sigh. “A boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. He was . .
. he was, you know . . .”

“Give us a clue, Ed,”
says Jack.

Edgar sniffs, turns his
beer around on his coaster. “He was not the brightest button in the box, you
know what I mean?” “Special needs,” says Cliff Rhodes.

“Educationally
challenged?” offers Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.

Edgar nods in a Tony
Soprano way, takes a drink. “Right, those. You got the picture. So this kid, he’s
sitting right at the front of the bus staring at the road ahead and at the
countryside on either side. All the way from Branton to Forest Plains. I got
the seat right behind him so I was able to watch him all the way. And every
time we stop — like to let someone off: nobody gets
on
those evening
buses — every time we stop, the kid turns around and makes this noise —
wmmgmmm!”
Edgar says, hunching up his shoulders and making his hands clawlike. “And I
swear he’s trying to tell me something . . . something about the fields and the
sky, the far-off trees, the trucks on the Interstate below us when we get into
the Plains.

He swings those manic
arms around, sometimes banging his hand on the bus window, making that noise.”
Edgar makes the noise again, and then again. And then he lifts his glass, takes
a drink.

“We get to the Plains
and everyone gets off,” Edgar says. “Everyone except the kid. I held back
because folks had gotten to standing as we got close to town and so there was
no room for me to stand up. But when I did stand up and made my way to the open
doors, the kid stayed behind. I looked at him and then looked at some of the
other passengers and nobody paid him any attention. And you have to remember
that this was my first day, right.

“So that was it. Next
day exactly the same.”

“What happened to the
boy when you got off the bus that first night?” Greenblat asks.

“He stayed on,” says
Edgar. “The bus closed its doors and the kid swung right around to look out of
the front window and the bus set off again.”

“Back to Branton?”

Edgar gives Jim a single
nod. “Back to Branton.”

“No other passengers
getting on?”

Edgar shakes his head. “Not
that first night. There might be one or two every so often, but most nights,
the bus would go back without picking up any new rides.”

“So the next day,” Jack
says, glancing around to see how the drinks are going. “What happened then?”

“Same thing,” is what
Edgar answers, and there’s a little chuckle in his voice. “I get on at Main
Street, kid’s already there at the front looking around at the folks getting
on. And again, I sit in the seat behind him.” He shrugs. “From there, the
journey home is exactly the same. The same fields, the same sky, the same
Interstate. The same stops, the same flailing arms and hands, and the same
wmmgmmm!
every time. When we get to the Plains, we all get off but the kid stays.
Bus moves off and heads back to Branton.

“Next day, same thing.
And the next. And the one after that. Same thing the following week. And the
one after it and the one after that one. And then —”

“And then you pass your probation period,” Cliff Rhodes says, “and
your dad buys you the Mercury.”

“Canary yellow,” says Jack.

“Tail fins,” adds Jim Leafinan.

“And the big bench seat,” says Horatio Fortesque, getting into it
now After a few seconds silence, the little Peter Lorre-look- alike says, “Cheerleaders,”
making the word sound dirty.

And they all laugh.

“And that’s it?” jack asks.

Shaking his head, Edgar says, “Not quite.”

“More drinks!” is what Jack Fedogan announces then.

“And more music.”

“More Brubeck,” Fortesque says. “And —” He passes a twenty dollar
note across to Jack. “— This round is on me.”

There’s shuffling then,
and leg-stretching, and visits to the restroom. But nobody speaks. When the
music starts again — Brubeck, Desmond, Wright and Morello getting to grips with
Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out Of You” — it’s a relief in that it eats the
silence.

Minutes later, the table
re-assembles and Jack says, “So, not quite?”

Edgar nods. “Nothing
else happened while I had that job. I never took the bus again, and, a little
under eight months later, I got my first adviser’s job down in Miami.” Edgar
shrugged his shoulders. “Left home and moved to the coast.” He looks across at
Jim Leafman and says, “Moved to the Apple in the spring of ‘84 — which is
fifteen, sixteen years after the Branton clerk job.”

“And the Mercury?”

“Ah, that went to that
great wrecker’s yard in the sky,” Edgar tells Jack. “Transmission died on me in
‘71. My dad died on me in ‘76. I asked my mother to move down to Florida and
then to New York but she refused each time.

She visited me a couple
times in Miami — she hated Florida, the heat — and then New York but she just
couldn’t get to grips with that either. Too big, I guess. I went out to see her
— birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas — but we kind of distanced ourselves from
each other.

“Then — it must have
been the fall of ‘99 — mum got sick. You remember, Jim?” Jim Leafman nods and
glances down at his clasped hands resting on the table. “I went home most
weekends, stayed with her, and for a time we had hopes. But —” He shrugs
matter-of-factly. “- It wasn’t to be.

“We got what mom called
her marching orders in the January of 2000. Three to six months, they gave her,”
he says, his voice sounding a little cracked. “As it turned out, she lasted
barely three weeks.” Edgar takes a sip of beer while the others watch him. When
he starts speaking again, his voice has regained its former strength.

“I lived at home for
that three weeks, the plan being to take her out, spend time with her — say
goodbye, I guess — but, after the first couple of days, she went down fast. I
tell you, that couple of days were wonderful . . . particularly the first one,
when I took her to Branton. And, at her request, on the bus,” says Edgar,
pointedly, and then he takes another drink.

“Everything went fine.
Didn’t recognize anyone and barely recognized the countryside we drove through
— so much building in just thirty-some years. Mom had a fine time in Branton —
seeing where my dad used to work, visiting the cemetery out on the Canal road
where her own mom and dad are buried — but she was tired when it came time to
catch the bus back home.

“We got on over at Main
Street, standing in line with the suits and the skirts, reading the evening
papers the same way people just like them read evening papers up and down the
country. It was busy when we got on but there was a seat free where, at a
squeeze, we could sit together — a seat near the front of the bus, behind an
intense-looking middle-aged man who was turned in his seat and, with his arms
and hands tucked up clawlike around his chest, was staring into the bus
interior.”

“The same guy?” asks
Cliff Rhodes.

“The same guy.”

“Jee-zuzz,” says Jim
Leafman, the words partly eaten up by the big sigh that surrounds them.

“I don’t think my mom
noticed him right off but I did. The same actions exactly as he was doing
thirty years before, the same turning around, the same flailing hands and arms
and the same banshee-like wail —
wmmgmmm! —
each time the bus stopped
and he turned to address his subjects.

“I couldn’t believe it.

“Then, we got stuck in a
jam — guys out doing maintenance work on the road up ahead shifting the two
directions of traffic into just the one lane, lights controlling that — you
know the kind of thing.”

Everyone did and several
of them took the opportunity to take drinks. Edgar did the same.

“Then,” Edgar says,
setting his glass down on the table again, “the guy turns around just as we
pull to a stop again and
wmmgmmm!
—”He flails his arms around. “—
wmmgmmm!
he says, saying it like he’s trying to tell me something. So I say to him
something like, ‘I know, damn traffic!’, something like that. And that’s when
the driver leans around and says to me, ‘That’s the first time I can recall when
someone actually said something to him.’ The guy himself chuckles and turns
back to face front looking out of the window. And I say to the driver —” Edgar
shrugs. “I say something like, ‘Oh, really?’ I mean, what the hell do you say
in response to something like that? And that’s when I see the driver is an
oldish guy, over sixty . . . and I recognize him. It’s the same driver as the
one used to drive the bus back from Branton all those years ago. And up to that
very second, I hadn’t even realized that we’d had the same driver on each of
those trips back in the sixties.

“So I say to him, ‘He
always on the bus at this time?’ And the driver nods as he settles back in his
seat. ‘Rain or shine. He looks forward to it,’ he says to me, keeping facing
forward. `Don’t know how he’s going to take it when I retire,’ he says.
`Retire?’ is all I could think of to say. I mean, what’s strange about
retiring, you know? But it was the implied significance of it that puzzled me.
And the driver leans back out, arms resting on the steering wheel as we wait
for the lights to change again, and he says, ‘He’s my son.’ And he looks across
at the
wmmgmmm!
guy, who’s jiggling his head side to side excitedly,
waving his arms at the windows, and he says, ‘Sure wish I knew what he sees out
there that excites him so.’ And that’s when my mom decides to join the
conversation,” says Edgar.