Transported

I’m on the steaming hot tarmac at the Hyannis bus station, watching the Boston bus disgorge.

The driver, a stubby, bald man, in a tired-green uniform, is stooped over, slinging bags out of the baggage hold.  A man in his mid twenties, in boat shoes, khakis, pink dress shirt, grabs his wheelie suitcase, and breezes past the driver, out into the bus drive lanes.

“Hey!” the driver squalls, jerking upright, his face tight with anger.

He’s yelled so loud that everyone in earshot, but the young man, turns and stares.  

Wincing, the driver sways his torso forward, placing his hand on his lower back.

 “You can’t go that way,” he yells even louder, taking a half step toward the drive lanes.  “That’s not allowed!”

The young man finally looks around, slows down, slightly, but doesn’t stop.

“Hey,” the driver positively screams now; his face flushing beet red; his eyes wild with anger.  

“Stop!  I said stop!”

The young man, already halfway across the bus lanes to the guardrail separating the buses from customer parking, breaks into a jog. 

“You could be killed!” bellows the driver, taking a few defeated steps toward the runner, half-heartedly throwing his hands up in the air.

The young man stops at the guardrail, glances back nervously.  He flings his wheelie over, and lumbers over himself, taking extra caution not to stain his khakis.  

In the parking lot, the doors of a silver-grey Camry pop open, and out steps an older couple.  They walk toward the young man, smiles beaming, arms outstretched.

“That illegal idiot coulda ben kilt!” the driver turns, glaring, still wild-eyed. 

He points his index finger up at the sky, and glare-scans the line of passengers waiting for the, penitential, pleasure of having him convey us to Boston.

A half hour earlier, I had entered the, so-overly-air-conditioned-you-need-a-sweatshirt, Hyannis Transportation Center, with the usual cocktail of low grade, travel anxiety, and excitement at superior eavesdropping opportunities, racing around my mind.  The HTC, as the signs call it, is a newish building, where utilitarian, high ceilinged, clean bathroomed anonymity, has displaced the gritty, stinking-of-sweat-and-piss, distinctiveness of old bus stations.  

I leaned into the ticket window to pay my, shockingly affordable, $20 fare to Boston.  

Inside the window a slight-shouldered man, with aviator glasses, unevenly applied layers of makeup, and enormous, silver, hoop earrings, adjusts the clear plastic tiara propped on his thick mop of hair. 

“That’ll be twen’y bucks,” he says in a gravelly voice, his blue-bony fingers tapping rapidly on the keyboard.  “The bus’ll be at 6 – Gate 6.”

A printer’s tuck-tuck-tuck starts up somewhere inside the window.  

“Watch the silly-screen for changes,” he flicks his right-thumb toward the large, but already stuffed with travellers, waiting area.

Slowly he hands me the ticket.  

“The bus company don’t make no announcements,” he breathes in, raising his plucked eyebrows.

I take the only seat available, at the end of a long wooden bench.  On the floor at the other end of the bench, sit-lies a couple, probably late teens, early twenties; their bodies about as enmeshed as can allowed in a public place before someone needs to call the cops, … or the fire department.

“Hey babe,” the young man says, too loud, shifting himself suddenly.  “You’re crushing my nuts.”

A few heads turn.  

He raises his eyes to stare them down.

I force my eyes down to the tiled floor.

“I gotta pee anyway,” the young woman says, untangling herself, standing upright. “Having one-a them spritzers aint the best idea, when you gotta get on a bus.”

She’s pretty, younger than him, probably only seventeen, eighteen; dyed-black hair; remnants of acne dotting her forehead.  She slopes off in her baggy jeans, oversized, flannel shirt, with one button too many open; head and shoulders down; face obscured by hair.

The young man grunt-yawns, rises to standing, glaring victoriously at the social-jury on the benches.  

He’s got that square-jawed, blond look, coulda-shoulda-woulda been a surfer, but isn’t.  His eyes are old already, or stoned, … or old and stoned.

Satisfied that his dominance glare has worked, he looks down, taps the front and back pockets of his baggy jeans.

“What the fuck?  Did I leave my phone in the shitter?”

“No,” another guy, in black combat boots, camouflage-fatigues, black muscle shirt, sitting by himself at the far end of my bench, speaks up pointedly, soberly. “You gave it to the slut when the cops started hassling Josh.”

“Don’t call her that!” he snaps angrily, shaking his head.  “Did I do that?  Really?  Was I that fucked up?  And I gotta go ta Falmouth, get that bit… .”

He falls silent, his eyes darkening.

Along the benches eyes flicker toward his silence, and then away – fast.

“I’m goin’ ta Falmouth too,” a heavyset woman, late twenties, maybe thirty, says. She’s leaning up against the window wall; greasy hair, pudgy face; she fully fills out a pink and grey, sweat-suit.

Her eyes flicker up from her phone, to stare at the young man.

“Oh yeah?” the darkness lifts off the young man’s face.  “I got two baby-moms in Falmouth.  But fucking Brittany, she’s making me all kinds of shit.  She’s looking for cash; I don’t got none. But at least,” his eyes soften, like he’s practicing his lines, “if I tell how things are.  I aint worked in … fuck, three months.  I got issues. The, the … the thingam… you know that the judge makes you go see, … the social worker. She says I got issues. And she knows, she’s one a them … LI, … LI.  I forget what you call them.”

“A Long Island social worker?” the muscle shirt guy snaps, without looking up from his phone.

“Fuck you, it aint that.  It’s something else, more important.”

 “Oh yeah,” the young woman says.  “I got a little one too.  At home in Falmouth, my mom’s taking care of her, or my aunt is this morning, I think. I had-a come down here for a stoopid job interview, so social don’t shut me off.  Like I’m gonna work in Hyannis, and live in Falmouth.  Why don’t they move the job to Falmouth?  Heh?”

“Yeah, let me show you my kids,” the young man says, his eyes drifting off as he starts to pat his pockets again.

He spins around so suddenly that he stumbles toward the bench.  

The bodies on the bench tighten, with audible, fast in-breaths.  One older woman, with immaculately coiffed grey-blue hair, stands; grabs the handle of her maroon wheelie bag and clicks away to the other side of the crowded room.

“Hey, where the hell she’d go?” the young man asks, still turning around, but slowly now.

Fully drawn in, I lean forward, but the muscle shirt guy, at the other end of the bench, is intently playing a game on his phone.

The young man walks over to the door, sticks his head outside, warm air flooding in.

I catch a few other people on the benches staring.

The young man keeps his head hanging out in the heat for a few minutes, long enough for the overly cold waiting room to become almost bearable.

“Hey babe,” the girlfriend yells from across the waiting area.  “You ok?”

“Oh, there you are!” he answers, pulling his head in, beaming a smile.  “I thought you’d walked the fuck out on me – again.”

Twenty minutes later, out of the burning cold of the waiting room and into the burning heat of the tarmac, I’m inching slowly toward the still enraged bus driver. I await my turn at what starts to feel like a rite of passage to get on the bus: Especially creative insults from the driver.

“What the hell d’ya want me to do with this thing?  Strap it to the roof?” he snaps at the African American mother in front of me who pushes an oversized stroller toward him.  

“It’s bigger than the god-damned bus!”

“The lady-guy inside said it’s awright, when and she tooks my fawhty bucks,” she snaps, hitching her child higher up on her hip. 

Half the little girl’s hand stuck inside her mouth.

“Why I gotta pays for her?” she rapidly puckers and un-puckers her lips. “She aint taking no seat, she sitting on me, … de whole time.”

“Talk to the company mam, talk the company,” the driver shakes his head. “How we gonna get this thing on.” 

“Here,” I offer, my tendency for conflict avoidance joining forces with my travel anxiety.  “I think you just click that button with your fo … .”

“Don’t touch it,” the driver yells, interposing his stubby torso, with surprising agility, between me and the stroller.  “This baby … thing is now in the custody of the bus company.”

He glares at me with unregulated anger; a sheen of sweat on his balding forehead; a bluish vein straining through his tanned skin. 

“And only I, … as their employee, the driver of this bus,” he stabs the air with his index finger, “can touch it now.”

He continues to glare.

I step back beside my bag.

He huffs and he puffs, and eventually he collapses the stroller, and jams it into the hold.

“Well, the luggage hold’s full now,” he says loudly.  “Why don’t everyone just take their luggage on board with them.”

Dutifully, I turn to go to the door.

“Not you,” he yells, taking two fast steps and grabbing the handle of my bag. “Or you.”

He catches the eye of some other, terror stricken, passenger.

“Hang on, hang on, just hang on, would ya.  I can get some more on – may…be.  Stop, stop, everyone stop!”

He turns and glares at me.

“Don’t put nothing in that hold,” he wags his finger viciously in my face.

He stalks around to the bus door, and inserts himself into the line of passengers.

“No one boards the bus without getting their ticket checked!” he yells.

Several passengers’ shoulders tighten, their faces wincing.  

He steps onto the bus; the sound of his unintelligible yells spilling out onto the tarmac.  

Then he’s back on the tarmac, his face red and clouded, impatient-angrily waving everyone away from the bus’ door.  

Four passengers, stunned into angry sheepishness, emerge from the bus.  He closes the bus door with a loud pneumatic hiss. 

Then he walks slowly along the line of passengers to the luggage hold.

“Ok, sir,” he says, with mocking calmness.  “And just how may I help you?”

Tentatively, I hand him my bag.

He takes a half step away from the bus.

My chest tightens in confusion.

Then, resetting his feet, he swings back toward the bus, slinging my bag into the hold with a loud thud.

“Now, there you go, … sir.”