Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (27 page)

But Beth sits on the sofa, staring at the TV. When the movie ends, she stares at the wall. I finish my letter and take a new sheet from the stationery box beside me to start another. Laura and Max start a game of Gin. Then, as dusk rolls in, Beth pulls herself to her feet and slowly climbs the stairs to the room she shares with me. I pause with my pen, Laura suspends her card shuffling, and we all look up to the ceiling. There're the feet, padding across the floor, one-two, one-two, one. There's the
oomph
of the bed. We keep looking up, hoping. Maybe this time she won't stay in that bed for twelve hours. Maybe her hair won't keep falling out every day.

"
I wonder if she'll ever feel better," I say.

"
I wonder if the Yankees are winning," Max says, but he's not wearing his joker face. "Just deal a new hand," he adds quietly.

3:35
P.M.
"Anybody have a birthday?" Bert bellows down the aisle in his New York accent as he positions himself like a comedian, the fare box area his stage.

We are stopped for a "time point" at a downtown corner. As distinct from a layover, which is actually written into the schedule, a time point means we've happened to reach a stop several minutes before our bus is due to depart. So, to prevent us from arriving at subsequent stops prematurely, he must take a recess here until it is time for us to move on. Towering, beefy, white-haired, red-cheeked, clownish, and in his late fifties, Bert is whiling away these extra minutes as he often does: "Getting folks going. Getting them to ease up a little."

Everyone looks toward the front of the bus: Little League boys, girls sucking Tootsie Pops, dreadlocked dads, one-kid-per-hip moms, leisure-suited retirees, the dozing, the listless, the fidgety, the gum-cracking, hand-holding lovebirds, sad-faced shoe-gazers. Beth and I perch on our front seats. Like the kids in the bus, she's laughing already, because she knows what's happening. Someone's bending the rules, someone so solid that he blocks the windshield and doesn't mind if he makes a monkey of himself if that's what it takes to get people relaxed and smiling.

"Anybody have a birthday or anniversary coming? Sir, you." He points to a young father halfway down the bus, a seemingly shy fellow who has hesitantly raised his hand.

Egged on by his daughter, who is leaning bright-eyed over the seat behind him, the man nods. His wife sits beside him, her lips curved in amusement.

"What's your first name?" Bert says.

"Domingo."

"Domingo. Domingo!" Then, as thirty passengers cohere into an audience, and kids slip away from their parents and gather around his feet, Bert lets loose with his song, breaking each note in two or three places, so his lyrics come out as a booming croak:

Happpppy birthday tooo yoouuuu,
Happpppy birthday tooo yoouuuu,
Happpppy BIRTHday, Dominnnngggggoooo,
HAPPPPPy BIRTHday TOOO YOOOUUUU.

The bus, laughing, bursts into applause. "You sing
terrible.
" Beth razzes him as she claps. "You need a tune-up." Domingo and his family are grinning, every child beams with delight, and Bert takes the applause like a pro, brushing away the praise.

"You do what you got to do," Bert says to me as the applause dies down. "You realize they need to smile, you go to work. You just get creative. There're no problems. There are only solutions." Mindful of his remaining spare minutes, he takes a breath and begins his next skit.

"Tell her about New York," Beth says to Bert earlier that day.

We're doing our stop-start bus dance down the city streets, which are, mercifully, no longer scorched by summer. Green leaves still flutter beside and above us, though the lawns have been singed to a lackluster brown, and in gardens sunflowers huddle over their shriveled brethren.

Before he retired, I learn, Bert had been a New York City bus driver for thirty years. He declares this history with a veteran's pride, then adds that when he relocated to this area, where the lower cost of living would allow him to spend his twilight years in more comfortable circumstances, he grew restless, searching for excitement. So now he drives part-time "just for fun." It's easier than in New York, since there are fewer pedestrians blocking crosswalks as his bus maneuvers through the streets, and only a handful of passengers, rather than a throng, flagging him down at every stop.

"But you know what I don't like about folks around here?" he says. "They're rude and crude."

"You
said
it," Beth chimes in.

"Like, people will get on Beth's case on the bus. I think it's so hilarious. Because she knows about four times as much as these people do. That's the truth, too.

"In the Big Apple, you get people like Beth on every bus, and nobody would say a word. You get races mixing, and it's no big deal. Old people, young people, everyone keeps their mouth shut. There's just more tolerance there."

"It's
here,
too," Beth adds. "For people that know how to
behave
"

"Not that New York was a piece of cake, believe me," Bert says. "And I'm not even talking prejudice or whatever. I'm talking the whole shebang, the whole grab bag of human actions. Because in New York, everything you can think of happens.

"Like when I started. Staten Island was more rural, more wild. And this kind of thing happened every day. I'm driving along at two in the morning, along swamps. Here comes this girl out of the woods with nothing on but shower slippers. Naked. Mud up to her knees. I'm all by myself. I pull over the bus—rrraahh! She gets on and says she and her boyfriend had a fight, they were parked in the woods there, and she left. She has no money, so what am I going to do? I let her on. She needs a ride! Rules don't mean anything in times like these. I mean, if someone gets on here with a dollar nine—"

"A dolla ten," Beth corrects him.

"Right. That's right. But if you only got a dollar nine, some drivers won't let you ride! But I'm not going to say no. I mean, what's she going to do? Naked, the middle of the night? Is it really that important to collect that fare? I think as a public service you're obligated to take the person if they have no money."

"Naked or not?" Beth asks.

"Any which way. Hell, I've given people money for breakfast because they just got kicked out of their apartment with no cash."

Beth says, "Tell her another naked story."

"Sure. Another time the only thing the girl had on was a bandanna—on her head. So I call up on the radio and tell my boss and he says, 'Tell her to take the bandanna and put it like a pair of underwear.'"

He cracks up. Beth follows his lead.

"It teaches you to be ready for anything. And to know that whatever the problem, you'll figure it out. As long as you're not too rigid. There's always a solution."

I glance at Beth and am startled to remember something about her—no, about her and me and what we used to do together, in the days when we lay behind the lattice under the house, half mesmerized by the silvery threads of the spider's web. It rewarded us for exploring in the diamond-shaped shadows, for surviving all those silly adult lessons on shoe tying and table manners; it threaded us together, too. I am saddened that I've forgotten it until now.

"What?" she says.

"Nothing," I reply. "Only, when we get home tonight, there's something I want to do."

"Okay, everybody," Bert says, standing in what I'm coming to think of as the Time Point Club. "Who's got a dime? I'll give you the time."

A boy in a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt pitches a coin high in the air.

"Thanks for the dime. Four-fifteen's the time."

"Hey," says the boy. "You rhyme."

"I rhyme when I'm fine. It keeps my ears from getting grime."

The boy laughs.

"You, the girl in the pink sweater."

Bert holds his hand out toward an elderly woman. She blushes, flattered.

"Beautiful sweater. Beautiful hat. Tell me the truth, am I getting fat?"

"No," some adults call out.

"Yes!" the kids squeal.

"Hold it, hold it. We have another passenger here. Don't be shy, step right up. I don't bite, Beth don't bite, we don't bite, this bus's all right."

The whole bus has come alive. Bert is working the room.

"Any other birthdays?"

"Mine," says a little girl who's scrambled up to sit near him.

"And you have a tooth missing, right?"

She nods.

"Somewhere out there is a tooth fairy for you. She will have the money and put it under your pillow, too. There you go, I said it in a poem, so it has to happen. Requests?"

"Sing some more," Beth says.

"Well, it's not so far away that we have turkey day." Then he belts out:

Ovvvver the riiiivvver and throuuuugh the woooods
To Grandmaaaa's houuuuse we go.
Sheeee maaaakes the best cookies
And sheeee's the best lookie
And thaaaaat's whheeeere we'll goooo!

"You sing terrible," Beth says again under the applause. "You need a tune-up real soon."

As Bert spins Beth and me through the city, he continues his tales at each stop. "In New York, on Halloween, they mess up the outside of the buses with eggs. They throw them onto your windshield. So it was a Halloween day, and I had maybe ten passengers, and I'm making this turn. It was in a bad section, and I see kids duck behind a parked car, then peek over the hood at my bus. I knew they were getting ready to hit us with a good dozen. So I turned the steering wheel hard and fast, hoping they'd miss the windshield. And as we swung past them, they stood up and I saw they didn't have eggs, they had
bricks.
I shouted, 'Get down!' The people went to the floor—and then it sounded like shotgun blasts—
bang, bang, bang
—and those kids took every window of the bus out! Finally, blocks away from it all, I pulled the bus over. There was glass everywhere. I went over to each rider and said, 'It's over now, you can get up,' but they wouldn't. They thought we got shot out, but I saw it coming, so we were safe.

"You got to look, and then you do a quick study, and then you act. The power to observe is the power to learn."

I click on my pen and open my journal.
The power to observe is the power to learn.

"Why are you writing?" Beth asks.

"So I can remember," I say.

Bert waits extra long at a light, as a woman with a walker slowly crosses the street.

"Now that I'm older and getting stiff," he says, "I have more compassion for people moving down the sidewalk slow. I can't hustle myself across an intersection fast enough for the light anymore. When you walk in someone's moccasins, it gives you compassion. You can't figure out how to treat someone without a little compassion."

I write,
Compassion.

"You with the Census?" asks a man with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his forearm.

"No," I say.

"It's too early in the school year for finals," the man adds.

"It's not a test" I pause. "Not that kind of test"

We roll down country roads. I point out Jesse on his bike, speeding beside pastures off to our left. Beth moves to the window across from her and looks out. "He's going to the
high
way," she says.

"Jesse rides his bike on the highway?" I ask.

"How else can he get where he's going?" she says.

"Some places have buses everywhere," Bert says. "Or subways or cabs. Not around here. All we got is buses, and they don't go out to the distant towns. So we're used to seeing Jesse on the road. He's something you just expect to see." We watch until Jesse passes from view.

Minutes later, Bert turns the bus into a corporate parking lot: another time point. The bus has cleared out except for us. "Now I can tell you a few harder stories," Bert says, unfolding his large frame from his seat.

"When you first start, you think you got to do everything by the book. Like one time, I'm pulling away from a long ramp after I picked up about a dozen people. And just at the end of the ramp, a guy flags me down. So I let him on, and he immediately goes to the back of the bus, and he's got a
chain
in his hand, and he starts beating the heck out of a guy in the bus with his chain! Then he gets off, and someone says, 'He was chasing that guy before we got on.' So I said, 'Why didn't you tell me to keep going?' He says, 'Because you're supposed to stop, right?'

"It's ridiculous, you know? The rules got to have a little give. Jesse knows that, right, Beth? If there aren't buses, you find a way. You got to be willing to improvise."

Be willing to improvise.

He continues. "Then there's the school trips in New York City. And you learn, they'll pop this roof hatch, and the smaller and thinner ones'll climb out there onto the roof and run off. So what I did when there's school runs with a hundred kids on the bus? You drive as fast as you can and tap the brakes, right? That makes the kids standing up have to do this"—he grabs onto the straphangers—"and there's no time to climb out, because they're holding on for their life! See? That's the way you did it. Rock 'em all over the place.