Incomplete Salvation In The Tall Gray Afternoon
A bus of wounded dreams comes to a stop by the liquor store to discharge its waste and open its doors for more. A tall entangled man boards, his long gray hair dirty but blessed by his mother, a fact known because he raises his voice to announce it.
Kathryn of no repute above the rear wheel well lowers her head and whispers into her hands. Within the glare of her afternoon doubt, she wonders if she will ever find a home worth coming home to. The failed playwright across the aisle pales.
Unemployed Johnson sits near the back with his face unshaven and pressed against the bus glass when long gray hair man boards. He looks up. Something about the man reminds him of episodes he suffered at the hands of a neighbor when he was a boy learning to feign an enjoyment of molestation to avoid punishment.
Gray hair man drops some coins in the charge box and walks the aisle as if to pass judgment on sinners. He resembles a giraffe in his walk, and in his eyes, a jackal.
An ex-cop looks up from his undercover bottle he clasps with both hands. Its dark glass holds an aborted second coming. Ex-cop is no longer named and only wanders the bus routes in search of the courage to shut the door on his life. He accidental shot a kid in the pursuit of justice, and though cleared of legal charges, fell from the earth into his demons.
Gray man returns to the front, slops himself down on one of the sideways seats, rubs his hands through his hair and then down his shirt and the front of his pants, leaving a streak. Kathryn of no repute above the rear wheel well swallows a lump of apprehension. Her breath rasps.
The afternoon grows jagged as the bus driver groans the bus forward toward all the places riders don’t want to go but must, like a dealer’s dump that smells of coverup bleach or the porno place on Kingston Ave that drives girls with nowhere to go from their youth.
Don’t say it, says gray man. The bus lurches.
And nobody does. Nobody rears their thoughts into a voice until the next stop across from a rundown church when a woman of indeterminate authenticity climbs up with a large bag of bottles that sing a muted clanked harmony from their paper prison. She carries herself like a queen fallen to hard times and announces to the bus in a flawed regal tone that she has no one person but herself to blame for her lack of position and descent from grace, and that they, all the lost riders, could learn a thing or two from her honesty.
A kid of fifteen broken summers or so sits in the far back. He wears a barista apron he found on a sidewalk. He carries two memories in the form of old photos in its pockets. His mother disappeared little by little into dark smoke and injections, captured, she might say if able, by the lure of an addicted existence that carries no hope of recovery in that a ruined hope is worse than none at all.
From her standing place, fallen queen calls out to the kid in the back to come forward and take her hand so she can show him up close the face of a prophet. When the kid rises and starts forward through the bus, more curious than afraid, the bus hits a large potholed asphalt canker and throws him into the arms of the ex-cop without a future.
That’s okay, kid, says the ex-cop as he helps the kid up. Go to her.
The bus pulls over in front of a bricked building. Someone pulled the stop cord, but nobody rises from their seat to let the afternoon play on without them. A certain hypnotic trance grips Kathryn of no repute who might otherwise take the opportunity to flee from her fear, and unemployed Johnson sits still with an uncertain look on his face that speaks of jagged crevices in his being that might one day, God willing, be filled.
Gray man stands and grasps the metal rail. He breaks a smile into three pieces that each carry a hint of malice or love or indifference to pain. He is the maestro, he announces, and will decide which passengers shall be forgiven.
Nothing enters the bus from the outside air. Each doubt or worry or courage comes from within. Each knows this in their transport, or if not, fall into a stupor in which many find comfort when their life has no meaning.
It’s dark outside, whispers the failed playwright although the sun still beats the boulevard down. He was once a bard.
Fallen queen says they called her Anastasia and the kid of fifteen summers or so takes the hand she offers as the bus descends further into its route. What’s this about? asks the kid, but Anastasia only points to the gray haired man and says: Look.
The kid looks. Gray man is dressed in blue denim faded from years of walking in the light of the Lord he would say if asked, and the kid sees a sort of displacement or skewing of things he thought he understood when he puts his eyes upon what might be a font of enormous judgment.
What do you see? asks Anastasia, and the kid breaks into the house of himself to find an acceptable answer. He doesn’t want to expel aloud what without effort floats into his throat as he regards the long hair man and fingers the photos in his pocket.
The despised prophet disguised, says Anastasia.
Somehow she heard his thoughts, realizes the kid. Maybe she is the real savior and the gray man a trick to lure kids with failed mothers away from the light, but Anastasia knows his thoughts again and says: No, he is real.
From her plastic seat, a woman not introduced asks in a voice that beats tribal drums who the hell is driving the bus. It enters a canyon between buildings on a street that shouldn’t slope downward but does. The afternoon dims and the gray hair man, his incomprehensible existence manifested as one who knows the real difference between right and wrong, speaks.
We go down, he says. Where we all birthed. All of us. Now here to rise again, transcend. You, failed playwright. Write again. You who shot an innocent. Shit happens.
What about me? asks the kid of fifteen broken summers.
You’ll be my replacement one day, says gray hair. It’s why we’re all gathered.
I don’t know how.
None do.
And none did. It had been told on the sidewalks by the newsstands and down in the subway tunnels where men without the means to touch God wandered that all the gutshot certainties of life were illusions invented to keep one from the higher truth of a higher peace within themselves. Then night fell and such knowledge was refused.
Gray man staggers when the bus stops, regains his balance, disembarks. Anastasia raises her bag of muted harmony in a goodbye gesture. Ex-cop drinks from his bottle, his last. Kathryn cries a joy for something inside of her lifted, and unemployed Johnson forgives himself for what he could not as a child have known.
When the bus moves, the engine growls and the light lifts. The kid of fifteen summers runs to a window and sees the gray man disappear into an alley next to a day and night bar. The shadow of an angel may follow, but it could be the reluctant ghost of his mother seeking salvation. The kid is a little older now, somewhat wiser, but still cannot tell which is which.
Victor D Sandiego, once from the big city west coast of the United States, now writes his odd time compositions from his home on the edge of ex-pat society in small town. He is the founder and editor of Dog Throat Journal. His work appears in various journals and anthologies, and is upcoming in Bull and others.
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