The Bus of Dreams Read online

  The day I got my driver’s license, the boy from the pumping station asked me out. I’d gone to get the car filled up for a solo ride, and as he leaned across the windshield, removing some bird droppings, he said, “Wanta go out tonight?” His name was Tim and he was a high school student from Daytona. He drove a souped-up car with a lot of horsepower. He picked me up in a seersucker suit, with all the grease carefully removed from his hands and with his hair slicked back. My father didn’t recognize him as they shook hands and Tim escorted me out the door. “You drive carefully now,” my father said.

  We ate a pizza and saw a bad Western. Then Tim asked if I wanted to go for a ride. He pulled me close as we drove along a strip of unlit highway that cut Florida in half. The wind whipped through the palms, and the moon had never seemed so bright as it did that night. I threw my head back against the seat of the convertible and watched the sky until we ran out of gas.

  The car just sputtered and died somewhere on the strip, and there was nothing in sight. Tim and I sat, with our arms around each other, waiting for a car to pass. The highway was dark and the night balmy. We listened to the radio and he kissed me until an old couple in a jalopy came along. We flagged them down and they drove us, creeping along at twenty miles an hour, to the nearest gas station.

  It was midnight when I walked in the door. My father sat, staring at the television, a glass of Scotch in his hand. “I don’t want any explanations,” he said. “You will simply never be late again in your entire life. Is that clear?”

  “It’s clear, but . . .” I wanted to explain about driving down the road and the wind in the palms, but he raised his index finger up to his face.

  “No buts. Get to bed.”

  Tim later told me that my father drove to the gas station the next day and stared at him for a long time. As he handed Tim his credit card he said, “You’re the one who took my daughter out last night.” And he drove away.

  When he got home, he walked in and screamed at me, “What were you doing out all night with a gas station attendant?”

  My mother stepped in. “He’s a nice boy,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with her going out with him.” It was four in the afternoon, but she wore a bathrobe and had her hair in little pincurls all over her yellow head. Her hair had turned to some kind of straw in the Florida humidity, and all she did was sit home and put rinses on it.

  “You will not see that boy again.” He pointed at me.

  My mother wrapped her bathrobe more tightly around her. “Let her make her mistakes now!” she shouted back. “Let her find out what she wants before it’s too late.”

  He glared at her, then turned to me and spoke very carefully. “And you’re grounded for a week for being late.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and fled to my room.

  Later, my mother came and sat down at the edge of my bed. She patted my foot. “You know, don’t you?”

  I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway.

  “We haven’t been getting along for a while.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  “I think his career is falling apart.”

  I nodded again. I didn’t really understand all of this, but it seemed to me that something was falling apart. “Don’t leave him,” I said. “He means well.”

  My mother sighed, patted my foot once more, and got up. She still had the pincurls in her head. “You’re the only one who’s old enough to understand.” And she left.

  A few nights later I lay in bed and heard my parents arguing again. Their voices rose from the kitchen, and I went downstairs, planning to use the pretext of wanting a glass of milk before bed. I tiptoed down and heard my father saying, “I’m not taking any orders from Schlecter. I’m not taking any orders from anyone.”

  “No.” My mother spoke back to him in the kind of whisper that is really a shout. “And it’s costing you your job and everything else.” I peeked around the corner and saw my parents in what at first I took to be an embrace. My father had his hands pressed firmly on her arms, and my mother’s head was thrown back as if she were about to be kissed on the lips. And then I saw my father shake her as he’d shaken me the day on the road when I’d almost killed us both.

  He shook her and said, “You just don’t understand.”

  My mother struggled in his grip and finally broke away. “You’re drunk,” she said. I tiptoed back up the stairs.

  It must have been four in the morning when my father woke us. Trevor was already dressed. He rubbed his eyes and complained. He hated to be awakened, and Eleanore was almost impossible to wake. But I had only teetered on the brink of sleep that night, and waking me was easy. I was almost ready to go. My father shook me gently. “Come on. We’re going somewhere. But be quiet.”

  The four of us shuffled downstairs, and I saw from the condition of the living room—the blankets and pillows tossed about, glasses everywhere, ashtrays filled with smoldering butts—that he’d probably been up all night. He moved through the living room with exaggerated precision and his warm breath blew against us as he helped us into the car. I sat beside him in the front seat. We were cold and he tossed dirty blankets from the garage across us. Oscar was barking, so my father let him jump in the back. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Eleanore said, sounding very much like my mother, “where’re we going?” Trevor pushed Oscar away, saying, “He stinks. I wanta go back to sleep.” My father started the car and tore down the driveway in reverse, running over the white Day-Glo painted stone at the edge. The car thumped. Then he shifted abruptly into first gear and screeched down the street. “Maybe I should drive, Dad,” I offered in a mature, adult way, but he shook his head. “I’m fine. I can drive. You be co-pilot.”

  We drove for what seemed like a long time and no one spoke. I began to grow bored. The highway was monotonous at night, and since I was co-pilot, I started to read the meters on the instrument panel. Our speed, our mileage, the gas gauge. That was when I grew afraid. The tank was only half full. I’d never known him to go anywhere with half a tank, and I knew he’d been driving much of the night. He was probably in no shape to be driving us anywhere now.

  But still he drove and I sat beside him, with a mission now. I was concentrating on the road, ready to grab the wheel at any moment. At last we reached a chain-link fence with a gate and a guard. The guard stepped forward and my father showed him a piece of identification. The guard nodded, opened the gate, and we drove onto a beach road. We drove for perhaps a mile before he stopped and told us to get out. We were on a strip of beach somewhere but we couldn’t tell where. I knew it was government property, because he had shown his badge, but that was all I knew.

  We sat on a dirty blanket in the sand and waited. My father said nothing. He just breathed heavily and kept looking at his watch. Then as day broke we saw something across the bay. It was tall and white and suddenly it was lit with floodlights. Eleanore and Trevor stood up and I leaned forward. My father smiled and checked his watch again. “Any second now,” he said. We waited a few more minutes. Then suddenly there was a roar, and fire burst out of the rockets. We pressed our hands over our ears as the engines charged. Then, gracefully, as if it had simply decided it wanted to go elsewhere, the spacecraft rose.

  The ship sailed straight up, white and flaming against the dark morning sky. It veered off above us, heading upward and away. My father, looking incredibly sad, watched it go. “Beautiful,” he said, “that’s really beautiful,” over and over until the ship was out of sight and the din of its engines gone. Then he handed me the keys, and with the great care he had taught me, I drove us home.

  When we walked into the living room, our mother was sitting in an armchair, her robe wrapped around her. She seemed haggard and washed out. She looked us over, and when she saw we were all right, she told us to go to bed.

  But it was already morning, and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. I put on a jacket and decided to go for a walk. I tiptoed past the living room, where my father was sitting up,
drink in hand, reading a book on the history of flight, but he heard me and motioned for me to come in. He put down his book and his drink. Then he clasped me by the arm. “Janet,” he whispered, “in your lifetime, soon, a man is going to walk on the moon.”

  “Sure, Dad.” I smiled and he smiled back, pleased that he had finally convinced one of us.

  Then he looked up and a tear slid down his face. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? The launch.”

  “It was beautiful, Dad.”

  He nodded and seemed content. I thought of wiping the tear away, but I didn’t. Instead, I let it keep sliding down his face. He still held his fingers tightly around my arm, and suddenly I wanted to get away from him. I shook myself free. I said, “I’ve gotta go.”

  He gave me a small salute as I went out the back door, which I let close gently on its hinges. I started to cut across the lawn to the street, but something made me turn back. I went around to the front of the house. When I got to the living room window, I peered in.

  I put my eyes to the glass and saw my father, looking right at me. I waved and made faces. I jumped up and down and pressed my nose against the glass, but he didn’t see me. He just lay on the sofa, staring straight ahead into space.

  The Bus of Dreams

  RAQUEL had been in Panama City for five weeks when she saw the bus with her sister’s picture painted on the back. At first she thought it was a mistake, but then she knew it couldn’t be. So she ran after the bus. She ran until she coughed in its exhaust, but it was no mistake. Teresa had disappeared three years earlier, and Raquel had come to find her, but she didn’t expect it to be on the back of a bus.

  Every day as she went to and from her job in the Zona, where she worked for the colonel and his wife, Raquel rode the buses. She tried to ride a different bus each day, ever since she saw Teresa’s picture. She asked people when she got on if they knew the bus she was looking for. Raquel showed the drivers Teresa’s snapshot, taken when she was Queen of the Carnival. Some smiled and said she was beautiful. Some said they wanted her picture on the back of their bus.

  But then one driver who had kind dark eyes looked at the picture and nodded. He’d never seen the bus with Teresa’s picture painted on the back, but he told her she had to find the bus dream man. He would know. In Panama every driver owns his own bus and every bus is different. When a man buys his bus, he takes it to a bus dream man. The bus dream man is a painter and a witch. On the back of the bus, he will paint the owner’s secret desire. He paints objects of love, places that will be visited. He paints hopes, but never fears. And in the windows, he will put the names of the women loved. They say that the dream man in naming the dream brings the owner closer to finding his dream. They say that when the bus driver dies, he drives his bus right into heaven, where whatever the bus dream man painted comes true.

  Raquel had never crossed the Isthmus of Panama before she came to the city, and she’d never been to the city before she began looking for Teresa. Teresa had been Queen of the Carnival just before she ran away. When Teresa was Queen, she’d worn a huge plumed headdress and a long feathery robe with green wings. She was a parrot. A sequined, feathered parrot. Because Teresa was so beautiful, their father had borrowed money from friends and from his sister in Colon. He took everything he had, which was very little, and put it into the dresses for Teresa’s coronation.

  Their father had taken all his savings and all the money he borrowed and bought cloth and shoes from the Americans, and their mother had sewn every sequin and feather on the gown herself by hand. They had painted her deep green eyes with stripes of red and blue like a parrot’s eyes, as if she were the great bird of the jungle. Raquel had been her lady-in-waiting. She’d dressed as a smaller green bird, and she sat beside Teresa on the float that carried them through the streets of their town.

  One day after the Carnival was over, Teresa said she was bored and that a friend of hers had a car. So Raquel and Teresa and the friend drove to San Lorenzo, the fort that perches above the Atlantic where Henry Morgan the pirate had invaded Panama. They drove through the U.S. Army base and the jungle and they drove along the edge of the fort that sits high above the sea. They watched the parrots fly wild through the ruins. Teresa had looked into one of the dungeons. She gazed deep into it, and Raquel saw her sister tremble and turn pale.

  On the way back from the fort, two soldiers, wearing camouflage gear and carrying rifles, jumped out of the bushes and waved the girls down. They spoke broken Spanish and asked for a ride. They said they were on maneuvers and had to walk all the way back to the base. They showed them their guns and told jokes that made Teresa toss her head back and laugh. The soldiers told her she was very beautiful. She should be a star. For weeks Teresa sat, doing nothing in the house. Then one day she disappeared, leaving a note. It said she was going into pictures and she’d return when she was famous.

  The first time Raquel saw her sister’s picture on the back of a bus, she wondered if it was there because Teresa was already famous. She thought it should be easy to find a famous person. She showed her snapshot to everyone she met. She showed it to the bus drivers and policemen. She showed it to the colonel and his wife. Raquel had been fortunate to find work in the Zona. She had gone to hotels, looking for work as a maid, and one of the hotels had given her the name of the colonel and his wife. They hired her because she was a good cook and because she was quiet. Mrs. Randolph told Raquel when she hired her that it was important to be quiet. Raquel had been lucky to find this job, and she knew she’d be just as lucky to find Teresa.

  Raquel liked her job in the Zona. She liked leaving the slums of Panama, where she lived in a small rented room. She liked the ride into the Canal Zone. The Zona was lush and green, and the American servicemen who lived in it lived in beautiful houses. They lived on the top of the hill and they had a view of the Canal and the jungles.

  The house of the colonel and his wife was dark and cool and the garden was filled with trees. Pomegranates hung from the low branches and so did lemons and oranges. Raquel picked oranges from the trees and ate them for lunch. In the middle of the garden was a pond with goldfish, covered with dry leaves that fell from the trees, and the first thing Raquel did when she went to work for the Randolphs was to clear the leaves off the goldfish pond so that Mrs. Randolph could sit in her clean white blouse and poke her finger at the noses of the goldfish. Mrs. Randolph sat and stared, her finger stirring the water in endless circles that hypnotized the fish so that they seemed to have no choice but to follow the circles of Mrs. Randolph’s finger.

  Sometimes Mrs. Randolph talked to Raquel. Sometimes she didn’t. But Raquel never talked to her unless Mrs. Randolph wanted to talk. Sometimes Mrs. Randolph just sat in the bedroom with the shades drawn, sipping long cool drinks. But sometimes Mrs. Randolph would ask Raquel to tell her about where she came from. And Raquel told the colonel’s wife how she came from a village in the Interior where the buzzards clung to the trees and the men carried their machetes to bed with them. She told Mrs. Randolph how the heat was so strong it never left their house, even on a cool spring night. How the mosquitoes coated the rooms of their house like wallpaper, and how the people drank and bathed in the same river that was their sewer.

  When Raquel told Mrs. Randolph these things, the colonel’s wife would close her eyes and drift back into her darkened room for the rest of the day. But once Mrs. Randolph asked Raquel what she’d like to have if she could have anything. There were many things she wanted. She wanted to marry the young man she’d left behind in her town, the one whose mustache didn’t grow and who wanted to be a teacher. And sometimes she thought she wanted to nurse the sick and other times she wanted to have five children. But Raquel considered Mrs. Randolph’s question carefully, and finally she said, “I’d like to live in a house where the breeze blows through.”

  Mrs. Randolph closed her eyes and said, “There are other things in this world besides living in a house like this.”

  One day Raquel told Mrs. Randol
ph why she’d come to the city. She told Mrs. Randolph how her father had married the woman he loved when he was sixteen years old. Her mother had borne him twelve children, and eight had died of disease. Teresa was the oldest and her father’s favorite. She told Mrs. Randolph how her sister had run away. Shortly after Teresa ran away, her mother died. Every morning her father went to the fruit plantation where he worked, and after Teresa left and her mother died, he walked with the hesitant walk of one trying to find something he thinks he has lost.

  In the evenings he came home and sat on the front porch, drinking rum and carving small animals out of wood. He’d sit, surrounded by his battalion of small animals. He carved dogs and cats and small sheep and cows. He also carved animals he’d never seen, except in pictures. He made an animal with a long neck and another with a long nose. He made a huge, fat animal with a horn in the middle of its head. He did not believe these animals actually existed, but he told Raquel that if he were ever rich enough, he’d travel to the place where these animals lived.

  One night as he sat on the porch, surrounded by his animals carved of wood, Raquel asked if there was anything she could do for him. He gazed down the empty, dusty streets of their town. Then he looked up at her with his sad gray eyes; Raquel feared the look would enter her and she would walk with his hesitant walk.

  Raquel had taken a room near the old French quarter that was not unlike her room in the Interior. She had imagined when she came to the city that she’d have a room that overlooked a courtyard where the bougainvillea worked its way to her window and, when she opened her window at night, the breeze from the sea would blow in the scarlet petals of bougainvillea and the night air of her room would be filled with the scent of fresh flowers.