The Mars Room(9)

We were surrounded by agriculture. I saw no human beings working in the fields. The fields were abandoned to machines and I was abandoned to Laura Lipp.

“If they hadn’t let him out she’d be alive. For some people reality is just too thin. For some people the light shines right through, a certain kind of person, a crazy kind of person, a person with a mental illness and I know about that—like I said, I’m here because I have a bipolar disorder—and I’m glad they have this AC pumping because the heat triggers my condition. Brings it on real fast.”



* * *



As the sun rose, the fog evaporated. Wind buffeted the big bushy oleanders on the highway divider, their peach-colored blossoms bending moodily, crazily, then restoring themselves, the wind then whipping their peach-colored heads around again.

The bus filled with cow stink, which seemed to wake up Conan. He yawned and looked out the window.

“The thing about cows is they’re dressed all in leather,” he said. “Head to toe, nothing but leather. It’s badass. I mean when you really think about it.”

“Poor woman had a child,” Laura Lipp said to me. “Kid’s an orphan now.”

There were eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway, trees that I had thought, in the dark of night, were black shadows of the apocalypse. Now they just seemed dusty and sad. In Southern California, the same exact leaves stay on the same trees for decades. Trees that don’t lose their leaves do something else: they collect dust year after year, load up with dirt and car exhaust.

“I heard about this steak they got now at Outback. The cows are given beer,” Conan said, as he watched the miserable-looking creatures huddled in the dirt, nothing but dirt, so that the animals, too, seemed like dirt, living dirt, organic breathing shitting dirt, no grass anywhere in sight. “Budweiser, to be exact. They force-feed it to the cows. Force-drink it. Makes the meat tender. But hey, are those cows old enough to drink? I want to try that steak. That’s what I’m doing when I get out of this bitch: Outback.”

A guard came down the aisle to make a routine check.

“You ever had a bloomin’ onion?” Conan yelled at him. The guard kept walking. Conan yelled at his back, receding up the aisle. “They blow that sucker open, batter it, deep-fry it. Damn, it’s good. You can’t get that anywhere else. It’s copywrit.”

We passed a ranch house with a tire swing. A clump of shaggy California fan palm, otherwise known as the rat palm, the unofficial mascot of the state. A sign in the yard, Elect Kritchley Fresno County DA. Elect Kritchley.

In the left lane, a road crew was working, one man holding a sign for everyone to slow and move right.

“I made your shirt, motherfucker!” Conan yelled at the glass. The man could not hear him. Only we could hear him. “London, quiet down,” a cop said through the PA.

“We make those road crew vests at Wasco. You glue on the reflectors.”

I began to see white airy things moving past the bus window. They were all over the freeway. They didn’t rain down, but hovered and whirled. White and fluffy debris let loose from a cargo vehicle up ahead of us. I didn’t know what kind of debris until we passed the source, a truck that held many rows of stacked metal cages. In the cages were turkeys, crammed so that they had to bow their long necks. The wind was pulling out their feathers, which flossed the highway in white flecks. This was November. They were Thanksgiving turkeys.

“You better check on this one!” Fernandez was yelling again about her seatmate, who was leaning over sideways.

“Hey!”

The woman was massive. She might have weighed three hundred pounds. She began to slide from the seat. She slid until she was folded over awkwardly on the bus aisle floor. There was a commotion, people whispering and tsking.

“That’s what I call a snooze,” Conan said. “Out cold. Wish I could do that. Hard for me to get comfortable on transport buses.”

“Hey!” Fernandez called up to the front. “You got to come deal with this. This lady is having an issue.”

One of the cops got up and moved toward the back. He stood over the woman who had slid to the floor. He yelled, “Ma’am! Ma’am!” When that did not work, he jellied her shoulder with the toe of his military boot.

The cop yelled up to the front. “Nonresponsive.”

They call themselves correctional officers. Real cops would not consider prison guards cops, but losers at the rock bottom of law enforcement.

The one at the front made a phone call.

The other was about to return to the front himself, but he stopped and faced Fernandez.

“I heard you got married, Fernandez.”

“Get a life,” she said.

“Let me ask you, Fernandez. Do they have special weddings, like they got special Olympics?”

Fernandez smiled. “If I ever have to marry a retard like you, sir, I guess I’ll find out.”

Conan let out a hoot of approval.

“Retards like me don’t marry fat ugly prison hos, Fernandez.”

He went up the aisle and took his seat. He seemed to have forgotten about the woman who was unconscious.

Laura Lipp went to sleep, which meant she would finally be quiet.

We rode in silence, with a human mound slumped on the floor of the bus, half underneath one of the seats.