The bus sits idling in the parking lot, the heavy chassis shaking gently in the heat like a panting dog. There is no shade, and the glare makes the metal window sills hot enough to burn fingers. The old, cracked leather tops of the scratchy cigarette-stinking seats are hot enough to bring sweat to the palm of the hand.
While the air conditioning works, the driver says loudly, several times, as he gets off that he doesn’t like to turn it down too much below the outside temperature. He probably hasn’t turned it on at all for the last fifty miles.
Most of the windows are stuck at an opening of about two inches. They may get new tour buses with on-board TVs and laptop jacks and nice upholstery in other places. Out here, they get whatever aging survivors that the local services can afford.
Drin steps aside for the driver, nods once, and steps up into the entirely different smells of the interior.
Nobody pays much attention as he walks along the center aisle, turning his shoulders sidewise and ducking away from the occasional extrusion of luggage festooned along the overhead racks. He thinks one of the boxes at the back may be a chicken coop in disguise, judging from the smells that fill the whole bus, although the animals in it have long since gone into some sort of stupor. He hopes the owner, a skinny middle-aged lady sitting equally stunned beneath it, has figured out some way to give them water during their mutual trip through hell.
Old ladies of every size and color sit scattered in little tired groups among the hot seats, fanning themselves with paper fans, holding water bottles, looking sick with the unendurable heat, but also looking as if they’ve lived through this kind of thing many times.
He passes various younger faces too, most of them bearing the crooked teeth and acne scars of poverty. Many of them are sprawled out asleep or close to it. Some of the girls are clearly prostitutes who just got out of jail, heading back drearily to start over somewhere they didn’t much like to begin with, their eyes alert and hostile no matter how bad it gets on the bus.
A trio of sullen pale faces curled up in exhaustion are both too wealthy and too aggressively noticeable for any of them to be the person he seeks. The trio chose to put impressive amounts of disposable income into elaborately clean-lined curls of tribal tattoos and a lot of piercings, rather than into personal transportation. He considers, moves on. If they are bug boys in current modern disguise, they are too advanced for him to identify their equipment.
Near the back doors, Drin sees long legs sticking out in the way, wearing ragged jeans and clumsy thick boots that flake off chunks of mud. He smiles a little to himself. The tall skinny slacker of a dude is wearing a beaded suede vest with no shirt. To Drin’s eye, the vest ornaments make it look like vintage hippy, and if so, then it is probably worth more than the contents of the entire bus. The slumped torso wearing it clearly has no idea that it might have acquired value since he got it from a thrift store some eras ago.
The hair of the slacker is also closer to hippy era than he would have expected, too, a beautiful fluffy bush of wild twists and curls and rampant entropy in motion.
The smooth elegant face has been a denizen of dim cool interiors for many years, either as a classic hacker schmoe or as a musician in nightclubs, or as both at once. He’s been admired by old white guys before, too.
The dark eyes are entirely modern, cynical, relaxed, almost dismissive. Almost.
“Barret?” Drin says. “Got a message from Pen to come pick you up before the circus, if you want a ride.”
The eyes blink. “How do you know Pen?”
“Through a nice old black lady with some kids in the show,” Drin says.
“Ahh,” the youth says, with a little flicker of amusement in the eyes. “Yeah. How come Pen called you?”
Drin cocks up an eyebrow. “Said you had something for a friend of mine. And maybe they figured you’d be sick of the ride by now, or maybe they think you’d get delayed by family stuff, down where they guessed you might catch the next leg.”
“Really,” the youth says. “That’s nice of them, to think of finding me first. Hate that damn family stuff blowing up, don’t you?”
“Oh yeah,” Drin agrees. “You feel like coming, my ride’s over there in front of the gas station.” He nods, turns away, opens the back door of the bus in a squeal that wakes up half the passengers, and he steps out serenely. He reaches into his pale yellow sports shirt pocket, puts on his old man bronze aviator shades. It’s quite amusing to be wearing polyester plaid pants that don’t cover the clocks on his golf socks. In some circles, he would be praised for his interpretation of high camp.
“Gimme a minute, I’ll get my stuff,” the slouchy youth says as the door begins to close, and barely a moment later he’s out the back door too, standing beside Drin in the harsh sun, shading his eyes.
“Want a soda or something? I’m getting some water, myself, gotta keep drinking when it’s this blazing hot, you know how it is when you’ve got to watch for kidney stones all the time,” Drin says, and starts walking.
The elegant face smiles a little under the wild halo of hair. “So tell me about your prostate operation,” he says, loud enough to be heard by the prisoners still on the bus.
Drin keeps his face straight. “You know what the statistics on that stuff are? I’m telling you–” and then he’s got the door of the little gas station market open, and they’re stepping into air that feels cooler by at least fifteen degrees.
“Wow,” the youth says, setting down his cases and wiping his forehead.
“Let me get you something to drink. You go pick it out, and get me one of those water bottles, I’m not picky, doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re hungry or something, grab a sandwich or something, it’s a drive down there. I got a call to make for a minute, if you don’t mind,” Drin says, and steps back closer to the door, flipping open a big old-fashioned-looking cell phone in a scratched case.
He’s on the phone for some minutes, saying things like, “Why, thank you kindly, yeah, just thank the delivery guy for me if you would,” and peering at the credit card he’s pulled from his thick wallet, repeating the numbers several times. He’s watching out the door the whole time he’s on the call, looking over the upper rims of the aviator shades.
The bus pulls out while he’s busy, and the dust has settled by the time the young guy returns from the restroom.
Drin uses the same card when he pays the clerk, and he lingers at the counter through some other customers coming in to pay for gas. He asks the clerk about the weather, and gets their expert local opinion of exactly where that tropical depression on the TV monitor is likely to make landfall when it comes. He’s nodding and chatting, opening the water bottle, keeping the clerk busy, when the smooth young guy collects his drink and sandwich, picks up the cases, and goes quietly outside.
Drin waves at the clerk when he leaves, clanking the door behind him.
He climbs into the back seat of the dusty Jeep he indicated earlier, nods to the young guy, and looks around, makes a sign with the water bottle. Two people stroll out of the green saplings that are cracking up the front sidewalk, and settle themselves in the vacant seats.
The person in the driver’s seat is a pale woman only slightly browned by the sun, wearing sneakers, walking shorts, a perfectly ordinary stretch top, and glasses. She ought to look unremarkably like somebody’s grade-school teacher, but the top shows off the serious tits, and the shorts hug a fabulous ass. She’d be the one that everybody in the school has crushes on. Drin is gratified to see that the young guy’s totally shallow assessment of the assets in question appears to be well in line with his own.
She puts the jeep in gear, which means something because this model is old enough that it has a clutch and a stick shift. When she’s put them smoothly on the road, she says, “Hi Mister Barret, how’s it going?”
“I’m feeling very rescued,” the young man says politely, admiring her. “Very grateful.”
“Oh good,” she says. “I’m called Emma, glad to meet you. If we can do a good turn for any friend of Lacey’s, like Pen, naturally we will. I hope the sandwich suits you. It’s always a question in these places, isn’t it? Don’t mind us yakking at you, go ahead and eat if you want. It looks like you’ve been hours on that horrible bus. Now, the guy laughing his ass off in the back seat there pretending like he knows what end of a golf club to use is Drin–”
“The pointed end goes in the other guy,” Drin says, and cracks up again.
The young man twists around. “I like the shades and the golf socks,” he says gravely. “What did you order two cases of water bottles for?”
“Delivered onto that bus at the next stop, courtesy of somebody’s nice worried granddaughter,” Drin says, grinning. “Nobody’s gonna remember anything about that trip but the Christian charity of somebody giving them a whole new batch of cold water.”
“Or else they’ll remember that they all had to stand in line for the restroom at the one-hole shack at the next stop after that,” says the fourth person.
Drin points at the body next to him in the back. “This cynic here, giving my old man plenty of exercise, is the reason why I’m probably not gonna be needing any prostate operations any time soon,” and as he knew it would, this makes his lovers crack up.
Barret looks gravely at the two of them in the back seat. He offers his hand. “You must be Dance,” he says. “Concert master at a certain Metro Symphony, I understood?”
Dance takes the hand briefly, releases it. “Formerly. I’ve decamped in a hurry and abandoned my responsibilities to the Symphony in a regrettable hurry. I’m sure I left a total shambles behind. Can’t be helped. Family troubles, as Drin called it.”
“That’s a shame,” Barret says. “I heard some nice things about your playing, I guess you did last-minute subs when some guys didn’t show up for gigs with a couple of Pen’s buddies at the jazz festival. I remember recently they were talking about contacting you for some session work at some local recording place down here.”
“Thank you. Regular session work would help my wallet. While I’ve been staying down here, I have been able to expand my repertoire, learning some new instruments, which I appreciate a great deal. I’ve become interested in some of the older violas in a nice local collection. I understand that Pen says you’re a composer yourself.”
Barret nods. “Modern tone structures, mostly, but I try to address some of the more traditional listener’s expectations too. We can’t all be rewriting the Yellow River Suite or something, but you also don’t have to slam it in people’s faces that things have changed a bit since Mozart. I brought some CDs of stuff we performed awhile ago, if you’d like to hear some of my older stuff.”
“I would enjoy that, thank you. If you brought any new scores, I’d love to see the string sections–”
Barret smiles. “You know, some people warned me maybe you weren’t the real deal, what with the family messes and all that.”
“I’d be happy to run through some practices, if you’d care to sit in,” Dance says. It’s impossible to read any particular tone in it, over the wind noise in the open Jeep.
Barret grins wider. “So you’re gettin’ a little bit hungry stuck out here in the sticks, right? You’re feeling a certain lack of performance, right? Feeling like you’re just not getting enough arguing over the nervous flautists getting stuck in front of all the practical jokers in the horns again, all the bickering over fingerings, the crazy guest conductors–”
“Starved,” Dance says firmly.
“Welcome to the club,” Barret says, and sighs, and eats his sandwich. He waves the wrapper. “Hey Drin, thanks, man. I really was starving.” He turns around again. “Hey, Dance, are you sure about missing some of those things? I mean, like the oboe section all having nervous breakdowns? The insane guest conductors?”
Dance smiles a bloodcurdling wide white smile. “There is nothing quite like a brisk discussion of appropriate tempo for excerpts from five of Verdi’s operas three minutes before curtain, at the top of the poor man’s lungs. I, for one, don’t believe that Verdi intended Mimi’s very sad rattling asthmatic last breath, as she dies, to sound more like it’s galloping along like the William Tell Overture, but of course one also has to accommodate the varied limitations of the conductor’s pet sopranos. As for the damned oboists, I got lucky at the Metro. I found it useful to mention the name of the first chair oboist’s very expensive mistress. Brought them all nicely to heel, you’d be amazed. We all have our ways.”
Barret falls back into his seat and laughs. “Oh, you’re such a bitch.”
“I always thought truly horrible gossip was part of the job description for second-chair violinist. I tried never to indulge such base habits as concert-master. You see how I’ve gone completely to pieces.” Then Dance turns his head and addresses Drin. “So, you were ordering cases of water for poor sick old ladies stuck in the heat, weren’t you?”
Drin smiles. “Yeah.”
“You’re such a big old softy,” Dance says crossly, and then he kisses Drin on the side of his face, while Drin is grinning.
Barret is looking back at them. “What would you do?”
Dance mutters something rude.
Emma says then, “Oh, Dance? He’d probably wallop the damned bus driver a good one back by the restroom, and find a way to pretend it was an accident.”
Dance sighs. “No, no, Drin’s method is far better. He gets the relief to poor old ladies without delaying in heat any worse, it makes all the people forget that Mister Barret left the bus before, and nobody finds a driver in the restroom. Much as he deserved it. I know, I know, they live afraid the engine heat exchangers will break down. From his driving, the stupid man gives himself heat-stroke as much as anybody else.”
Barret smiles. “I think Pen’s gonna enjoy having you visit. Drin, I did bring along something from a friend of mine, I’m told it’s for Dance. The viola case there. I’m not sure what-all else they might have packed in there, so be careful sticking your hands in there.”
“Thank you,” Dance says, with grave dignity. “I’ll wait to open it until we have a room with a door that locks.”
“Yeah, so, I guess you been having some really interesting family problems, then.”
“It’s probably a good idea if we drop you off with Pen, before–” the pause is barely long enough to notice.
“–before you need to see what Pen’s got planned,” Drin finishes it.
Barret looks at Emma. “They always this smooth?”
“Oh no,” she says, with a smile twitching at her mouth. “Sometimes they manage entire Laurel and Hardy-type routines over the game controller, just before bedtime. It can be exhausting, I assure you. There are times I have to kick both of them out and tell them to take the game cartridges back to the main house before I murder both of them.”
Barret starts laughing again.
===