While Waiting For the Bus

When he was sixteen he moved to Arizona from Montana, thirteen unlucky rungs down the ladder of longitude - 47 degrees north to 34 but 70 degrees to 110 on the mercury, and he was so miserable that he pointed his sneakers north and ran away from home. Later, he drove trucks all over the West, nearly died on an icy road, but he saw the most beautiful things, and came to know the landscape as the saying goes - a hardened blue vein on the back of his hand is the Rockies, and he points, this is where he jackknifed on the road and fell into a ditch, this is the rest stop he stayed at for three days because the snow came down and down, this is the place in the mountains where he never felt so small or so alive. In a lull in the conversation he pointed across the street and said, "I don't understand the point of those tanning salons" and I said I was wasn't crazy about them either, and he said, "When I lived in California, people would go in tanning salons just a block away from the beach." In summers he would go to San Francisco the sky would be polished smooth like a piece of glass that washes up on the beach and everywhere people would show their shoulders and keep their lights on late; he slept in someone's yard at night and I wondered what stars would swing over him in their slow arcs as the music from the clubs down the street kept him from sleep, so that often he would go and join them forgetting until 3 or 4 AM in a flash of bodies and a crush of lights, until fall, until revolving, until dispersal. In winter, he says, Arizona is a good place to be unlike Montana, where the frost would sometimes form on the inside of the house, and the tap had to be kept running all night so the pipes wouldn't freeze. The day it snowed in Tucson, he walked around outside like it was a spring rain. "I've been walking everywhere," he says, "Even though I'm not supposed to walk." When he left the hospital he wore a back brace, punishing and dark under his clothes, leaning on a walker to inch forward; I told him I was sorry, he said, "I'm not - I got rid of all that. My legs have been getting me anywhere I need to since then." He told me, "I'm just waiting for June - then I can go back to California." I asked, "It'll be better then?" He said, "Yes. It will." But then he says, "I've been streetin' it." He says, "I've been panhandling." He tells me, "Tonight I'm going to sleep on the front steps of the Department of Economic Security." The bus comes nearly half an hour late. I board; he doesn't. Even in his existence there is poetry, but he is 60 years too late to be a beatnik, to hang with Kerouac and Ginsberg as they too traversed the West with a couple quarters in their pockets. Too bad that America has grown long impatient of scraggly men riding boxcars, sleeping under blankets on bus stop benches while exhaust is the air of the chrome slush of morning cars exhaust is the bones exhaust is the mind, a hard fleck of magnetite pointing the compass needle West - there, a bay is plated in gilt there, oranges and broken bottles wash up on the shores. There is the matter of the promise we broke - but could we have guessed that its halves are so often held together by the hands that shake the most?