Boy, Snow, Bird(3)
I really wasn’t expecting that kind of hullabaloo. If there’d been more time I’d just have stood stock-still with my eyes closed and my hands clapped over my ears, waiting for a chance to take a step toward the ticket counter without being pushed or yelled at. Folks were stampeding the last bus with everything they had—it was as if anyone unlucky enough to still be on the station platform turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck twelve. I tumbled into the bus with a particularly forceful gang of seven or so—a family, I think—tumbled off the bus again by way of getting caught up in the folds of some man’s greatcoat, and scuttled over to the ticket counter to try to find out just where this last bus was going. I saw the rat catcher in the ticket line, long and tall and adamant, four people away from the front, and I pulled my coat collar over my head. I saw the rat catcher get out of a cab and stride toward me, veins bulging out of his forehead, looking like he meant nothing but Business. I whirled around and saw the rat catcher again, pounding on the bus window, trying to find me among the passengers. Okay, so he wasn’t really there at all, but that was no reason to relax—it’d be just like him to turn up, really turn up, I mean, a moment or two after my guard came down. I saw him at least twenty times, coming at me from all angles, before I reached the counter. And when I finally did get there, the guy behind it told me it was closed for the night.
“When do you open up again?”
“Six in the morning.”
“But I’ve got to leave tonight.”
He was basically a jerk. “Jerk” isn’t a term I make free and easy use of. I don’t go around saying He/she/it is a jerk. But this guy was something special. There I was, looking right at him through the glass as I wept desperately, and there he was, petting his moustache as if it were a small and fractious creature. He sold me a ticket five minutes before the bus left, and he only did it because I slipped him an extra five dollars. I felt a bout of sarcasm coming on when he took the money, but made sure I had the ticket in my hand before I said: “My hero.” I was going to the last stop, on account of its being the farthest away—the ticket said the last stop was Flax Hill, and I’d never heard of it.
“Flax Hill? Whereabouts would you say that is?”
“New England,” my hero said. “You’re gonna miss that bus.”
“Where in New England? I mean . . . what state? Vermont, or what?”
He studied me with narrowed eyes, selecting a nerve, the fat juicy nerve of mine he’d most like to get upon. “Or what,” he said.
He drew the blinds down over the counter window, and I ran. There were only two seats left on the bus—one beside an elderly man and one beside a colored woman who was sleeping with her head laid up against the window. The man smelled somewhat urinaceous, so I sat beside the woman, who opened her eyes, asked me if she should get up, nodded, and fell asleep again when I said no. She looked just about worn-out.
Across the aisle, a baby started screaming, and its mother bounced it up and down on her knees, trying to soothe it into good behavior. But the shrieking went on and on, primal, almost glad—this protest was righteous. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage. The kid didn’t like its blanket, or its rattle, or the lap it was sat on, or the world . . . the time had come to demand quality. This continued until the mother, who had been staring into space, suddenly came to and gave her child a particularly vicious look, along with a piece of information: “I don’t have a baby that acts this way.” The baby seemed taken aback, hiccupped a few times, and fell silent.
I held that talisman ticket of mine smooth between my hands right up until the bus pulled out of the station, even though deep down I knew there was no way the rat catcher could have figured out where I was. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that I’d leave the state. Maybe he wouldn’t look too hard. Maybe he’d just shrug and think, Well, that’s cut down the grocery bill. (Actually, I knew he would be murderously mad—I could almost hear him bellowing: “I’m a RAT CATCHER. No two-bit wretch runs out on me, even if she is my daughter!”) Don’t think of his face—Flax Hill, Flax Hill. With a name like that, it was probably the countryside I was going to. Moonlight, hay, cows chewing cud and exchanging slow, conversational moos. It was a scenario I felt doubtful about. But I was game. I had to be.
As pillows go, my bag served pretty well. I listened to the drumming of the bus wheels on the road, made a note that running away from home was as easy as pie once you’d made your mind up to it, and fell asleep with my limbs carefully arranged so as not to touch my neighbor’s.
2
it was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it—more rolled it, really—onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down. Next, just as you’d caught your breath, a boomerang effect made a snowman of you all over again. I could only see a few steps ahead of me, and about one step behind me. When a pair of headlights slid past my elbow, I got out of the road and began following the voices of two women huddled under a broken umbrella, mainly because I heard them mention their landlady. I had to find a landlady. Any landlady would do. I stuck close to the umbrella girls, even when the snow hid them from me for seconds at a time and I began to doubt that they were real, even when they took what they called “the shortcut” across abandoned railway tracks overgrown with grass and through a pitch-black tunnel—I retched and retched again at the smell of it. Dead things and rotten eggs. Insects dropped onto my shoulders, tentatively, as if wondering whether we’d met before. More than once I became certain we were being pursued by the very darkness itself. But if the umbrella girls could take it, so could I. A couple of times they stopped and called out: “Hey, is someone there?”