Golden States

  “Nothing. Well now. You don’t have to go all the way to San Fran to do nothing.”

  “No,” David said, and looked out the window at the passing scenery.

  The man said he was only going as far as Buellton and David said fine, though he wasn’t quite sure where Buellton was. The man turned on the radio, to a station that played a screechy sort of jazz. He tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat. David swayed his legs with the music, which was good once he got used to it.

  “You know, Almost Thirteen, I’m going to take you to the sheriff in Buellton,” the man said.

  “Oh.”

  “Just to keep you safe now. It’s a long way to San Fran. How much money you got?”

  “Ten dollars,” David said.

  “Now for what you want to go to San Fran? To do nothing, you say?”

  “Well,” David said, “not really nothing.”

  “I thought not.”

  “My girlfriend lives there,” he said, and his cheeks flushed.

  “Oh, your girlfriend.” The man found this funny. “What, you girlfriend move out on you?”

  “Well, yes,” David said.

  The man laughed, a deep dark sound with three descending levels. He slapped the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “And you going to bring her back, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” David said, uncertain about what was so funny but sure that the laughter was at his expense.

  “The world is full of love now, ain’t it?” the man laughed. “Every little traveler by the side of the road has got his heart full of love.”

  “Uh-huh,” David said, and laughed a little, in hopes of entering the joke.

  “Tell me, traveler, what you going to say to you girlfriend if you get to San Fran?”

  David hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. He was unable to cover the bafflement in his voice, which set the man off in renewed laughter. David thought with irritation that black people laughed too much.

  “You don’t know,” the man said, rubbing under his eyes. “You just going to ring her bell and take it from there.”

  David looked out the window, holding his pack.

  “Tell you what, traveler,” the man said. “We get to Buellton,

  I going to put you on a bus. Do my part for the lovers in this world.”

  “No thank you,” David said, without looking back from the window. “Just drop me off in Buel Town.”

  “No sir. I will put you on a bus or I will take you to the sheriff. You fussy about charity, I give you my name and address. You can send me the money back.”

  “No thanks,” David said.

  The man laughed, and said nothing more. David thought with pride that you had to be firm with some people. He hoped the man would buy him the ticket anyway, no matter how staunchly he turned it down.

  They reached Buellton, and drove its streets without speaking. The town appeared to be made up of nothing but motels and restaurants, strung along either side of a broad avenue that set the air shimmering with early heat. David was relieved when the man pulled over in front of a Greyhound station.

  “1 don’t want a bus ticket,” he said.

  “Yes you do. Come on in.” The man got out of the car and David, after what he considered a suitable pause, followed him inside. The station was so much like the one back home that he felt once again, with a swell of nausea, that he’d been traveling in circles. While the man went to the counter for his ticket, David studied a poster that depicted a smiling silver-haired couple, holding hands, seeing America by bus.

  The man brought the ticket over. “We hit it right,” he said. “Bus leaves in fifteen minutes. Here.” He thrust the ticket at David, who accepted it and said, “Give me your address, please, and I’ll send you the money tomorrow.”

  “Right, right,” the man said. “Come over here to the snack bar, we’ll have a cup of coffee.”

  He went with the man to the snack bar, which was nothing more than a folding table with a coffee urn, stacks of Styrofoam cups and a gray grease-stained box half full of doughnuts. A fat young woman with blotchy arms stood smoking behind the table, looking idly around as if she, too, were waiting for a bus.

  “Two coffees,” David said in a loud voice before the man had a chance to speak. He took the last dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it on the tabletop. He was hungry, and would have bought a doughnut, but all he had left was change. The man said, “What about a doughnut, too?”

  “If you want one,” David said.

  “Two doughnuts,” the man said, and laid another dollar on the table.

  “Help yourself,” the woman said. She filled two cups from the urn grudgingly, like a bystander who’d been asked a favor.

  David dumped three packets of sugar and two of powdered cream into his coffee. The cream lingered at the top, a granulated crust, which he stirred away with one of the Popsicle sticks piled next to the sugar. The man asked him if he wanted glazed or powdered sugar. He said he didn’t care, and the man knew somehow to give him glazed.

  They took their coffee and doughnuts and sat in two blue chairs. The man carried David’s pack for him, since he couldn’t manage it with the coffee and doughnut.

  “To love,” the man said, raising his cup. David, suspecting a hidden joke, just drank his coffee. For the first time, it didn’t taste bad.

  “Just what is this girlfriend like?” the man asked. “She pretty?”

  David nodded, and started on his doughnut.

  “My boy, now,” the man said, “has got a girl six foot tall. No fat. But I mean, tall. ”

  “How old is your boy?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Eighteen in August. He joined the merchant marine.”

  “Oh.”

  “He lived with his momma back in Chicago. Your girl six foot tall?”

  “No,” David said.

  The man laughed. “My boy’s girl is pretty too. You sure your girl is pretty?”

  “Uh-huh,” David said.

  “Love, love.” The man shook his head. “Look here, here comes that bus.”

  David got up and put his full coffee on the seat. He hoisted his pack. He told the man thank you, and the man nodded. David took a bite of his doughnut and was embarrassed again.

  “You do me one favor,” the man said. “You get to San Fran, call your momma and tell her you all right. Call her collect. Even if it make her mad. Understand?”

  “Yes,” he said impatiently.

  “You don’t do it, I going to come get you.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Okay. Now go get the girl.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  The man laughed, a last falling triple chord, and David turned and got on the bus with the half-eaten doughnut in one hand and the pack dangling from the other. Through the window he could see the man’s broad flowered back as he left the terminal. To have an eighteen-year-old son, the man must have been older than Dad. It was then he remembered he hadn’t gotten the black man’s address, or even his name.

  He fell asleep on the ride to San Francisco and when he woke the landscape had changed as completely as if the bus had crossed over into another country. They were riding through farmland; pale green leafy something (lettuce?) stretched in shining rows on either side of the highway, and a single spoke of black earth followed the bus along between the rows. Green hills rose on one side. The highway ran parallel to a railroad track, and in a thrilling parody of collision the bus passed a train going the other way. Through the windows of the train David could see the hills beyond, flickering like an old movie.

  He stretched his arms and legs, without thinking, and it struck him as a good manly thing to have done. In front of him the top of an old man’s pink, bald head rose over the next seat. It amazed him to think that all this went on every day, while he was living his life in Rosemead. The thought came as a surprise: he could live somewhere else. He had always known that, but never quite believed in it. Suddenly he saw how he could go and l
ive in another country, where the soil was dark and the hills unearthly green. He could go to a new place and get ahouse there, with light coming in the windows at unfamiliar angles and strange plants growing in the yard. If you went to a new place like that you could learn everything about it; it wouldn’t have the hard unknowable center that home did. If you moved far away you could stand outside of things long enough to get a good look and to thoroughly understand before you started getting all snarled up in them. Content with this thought, he propped his legs on the empty seat beside him and fell back into a deep sleep.

  Several times he roused to see that the bus had pulled into a station. Dull and disoriented, he made sure they weren’t in San Francisco yet. When the bus started up again its rocking would lull him back to sleep.

  He woke finally to find that the bus had pulled into a big station where everybody seemed to be getting off. People were crowded in the aisle. He jumped up so fast he nearly left his pack behind. As he stood in line with the others, waiting to be let out, he looked through the window but all he could see was the smoky aluminum flank and leaping blue dog of the bus parked beside theirs. The bald man from the seat was gone. David stood behind a fat woman in a dark blue dress with white dots, which fit so tightly over her hips the dots were stretched into ovals.

  He was sorry to have missed the approach to San Francisco. He wondered whether they’d gone over the Golden Gate Bridge. He had crossed it once before, a couple of years ago, when he, Mom, and Lizzie came up to visit Janet at Berkeley, but being with the family like that blunted it, made it less important than the house and yard in Rosemead. He’d been looking forward to seeing it fresh, by himself, on its own terms.

  The driver, who stood outside the door, helped the fat woman down the bus’s steps. He pantomimed helping David, without actually touching him. “Easy there,” he said when David jumped down onto the concrete.

  At the other terminals the buses had just pulled up outsidea numbered glass door, but at this one they parked under a great rippled aluminum canopy, thirty buses or more, some headed according to the signs for places as remote and unknown as Tampa or Calgary. David held his pack at arm’s length, dangling, so it bumped against his leg. The place was full of people, most striding along with purpose but some loitering, leaning against posts or squatting on the floor. He saw an old man with a belly like a basketball, wearing a paisley shirt and a pair of green plaid pants held up with a rope, the frayed ends of which dangled from beneath the shadow of his belly. David giggled and looked nervously at the people around him, who hurried along as if nothing unusual was happening. The man in the paisley shirt ambled in a circle, belly out and head reared back, smiling. David hurried along too, and almost bumped into a black man in a trench coat. The man stood with his hands buried in the pockets of his coat, whispering to someone, and David was a moment in realizing that no one else was there. He was still another moment absorbing the fact that the man was a woman, with enormous breasts that strained against the buttoned face of the coat and a tuft of curly black hairs growing down from her chin. Her eyes put out invisible rays, which David crossed into. She registered him with the oiled, automatic click of a machine switching functions. Her eyes squinted and she said in a loud clear voice, “King of the Jews, thinks he’s King of the Jews, but he’s not long for this world, I can tell you. What’s he think he’s got in that pack? Bread for the millions? He’d got nothing in that pack I can tell you but worldly goods, goddamned worldly goods—” David stood rooted for a minute, then walked carefully and quickly away, waiting several paces before looking back. The woman had turned to watch him, and when his eyes met hers she hollered, “Worldly goods and a ticket on the next train to hell. You laugh, you think the devil’s just a baby story, but he nail your ass quick enough, yes he will.”

  David ran. He didn’t stop until he reached the ticket counters, where the presence of men in official Greyhound jackets promised protection and sanity. The woman did not follow him.

  He got in line at one of the counters, to ask directions to Janet’s street. There were three people ahead of him. Through the swinging glass doors he could see the street. It was just another street, with a Burger King and a men’s store (20% of al hatha shirt—that was all he could see from where he stood). The clock said five-thirty. He had not expected the trip to take so long. He wondered what Mom was doing right then. She had probably called the police. The police might even be looking for him, at that moment, in San Francisco. He wished he hadn’t written anything at the bottom of Janet’s letter.

  When he reached the counter, he asked in a low voice, “Can you tell me how to get to Bush Street, please?”

  The man at the counter, who was small and pumpkin-colored, with slicked-back gray hair and a thin gray mustache, looked wide-eyed at him and said, “Say what?”

  “Bush Street,” David repeated, slow and loud, as if speaking to a foreigner.

  The man looked so intently at the ceiling that David glanced up there too. “Bush Street,” the man said. “Don’t know no Bush Street. Where’s it at?”

  “I don’t know where it is,” David said. He started to add, “If I knew where it was at I wouldn’t have asked you, would I?” but he held it in. Still, he was pleased with himself for having thought of a comeback.

  “I mean, what’s it near?” the man said.

  “I don’t know,” David said. “It’s just in San Francisco somewhere.”

  “Oh. ” The man smiled up at the ceiling, sharing the joke with it. “San Franc/sco.” He folded his hands on the countertop. He had long fingernails. “Do you know where you’re at now, pal?”

  David’s knees went weak. What if he had slept through San Francisco and ended up somewhere so far away he could never get back from it? “Yes,” he said weakly.

  “You’re in Oak land,” the man told the ceiling. “You come in on a bus?”

  “Uh-huh,” David said. “From Buel Town.”

  “And you’re going to San Francisco.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You got off too soon, pal. San Francisco is the next stop. You better go see if that bus is still there.”

  “Oh,” David said. If he went back he would have to pass by the man/woman in the trench coat again.

  “Hurry up, now,” the man said.

  “Is Oakland very far from San Francisco?” David asked.

  “No, but it’s too far to walk. Go on, now. See if that bus is still there.”

  “Okay,” David said. He started back the way he had come, and paused at the archway that opened onto the big metal-roofed hangar where the buses waited. He spotted the woman in the trench coat. She was pacing back and forth between a trash can and a pillar, as if they were goals she had to keep touching. At the trash can she stopped a moment, shouted something at it, and heeled around back to the pillar.

  David checked the ticket counter. The pumpkin-colored man was writing out a ticket for a bearded man in a checkered cap. David caught his breath and ran across the wide linoleum floor, out the double glass doors, and into the street. The backpack bumped wildly against his legs.

  He figured he could get from Oakland to San Francisco one way or another. When the man at the bus station said, “too far to walk,” he meant too far for him, an old man, to walk. David could probably walk it. Or hitch a ride. He’d done pretty well so far.

  A harsh late-afternoon whiteness hung in the air, sparking on the bumpers of cars. He could not decide which way to go, or who to ask about which way to go. People walked by: askinny black man whose chin stuck out a foot beyond the cavity of his chest, two Mexican men in shiny shirts with landscapes printed on them, an old orange-haired woman in sweat socks and rubber beach sandals.

  He went into the Burger King. Again he waited in line, this time with people who were ordering hamburgers. He got to the head of the line, where a young black girl was taking orders. She had her hair in corn rows, and wore a red badge that said hi, i’m YOLANDA on the breast of her striped apron.
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  “Hep you?” she said, her pencil poised over an order pad. “Excuse me,” David said. “Could you tell me how to get to San Francisco?”

  The girl looked up from her pad and smiled. “Why sure, honey,” she said. “Just click your heels three times and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’ ”

  David giggled, a dumb high-pitched sound he sucked back in. “No, really,” he said.

  The girl shook her head. “That’s like asking me how you get to France. I got some work to do here, these people are hungry.”

  “Oh,” David said. “Sorry.”

  “Start out that way,” the girl said, pointing right. Her fingernails were purple. “And ask somebody you see how to get to the Bay Bridge. Got that?”

  “Uh-huh,” David said. “Thank you.”

  As he left he heard her saying, “Must think this badge here says in-for-mation. Hep you?”

  He got himself back on the street and headed to the right. The street stretched on and on, a daylit version of the one at home only wider, longer, more full of what looked like trouble. Nearly everyone he passed was black or old, or both. A man lay curled in a doorway, wearing a dirty orange Snoopy sweatshirt. In one store window a pair of swan-necked mannequins wore frothy bridal gowns; in another, old shoes were stacked like firewood. They were mostly men’s shoes, big dusty brownor black oxfords. The words shoe repair floated across the window in reflecting gold letters, and as David passed by he could see his own face cut out in the shape of an R, hovering over the pile of shoes.

  He hoped the Bay Bridge was ahead of him. He knew he should ask somebody but they were all so absorbed that he just kept walking, clutching the straps of his backpack, following the route pointed out by the glossy purple fingernail.

  By the time the sun started to go down, he decided he’d better ask for directions. It wasn’t sunset yet, but the light had dulled and the shadows gone long and blue. The street had curved around out of the region of stores and bars and coffee shops and become a neighborhood of motels. A skinny black woman wearing high heels and a dress as silver as a sardine kept pace with him for a minute, then got ahead, striding on her long brown legs. For the first time in his life, his legs were tired. He had always thought he could walk forever. That had seemed like his ace in the hole—he never got tired. He’d figured that if worse came to worst, he could always just outlast everybody else.