Febuary, 2003

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** Part Five**

It occurred to me that the bus company could probably tell me for sure where Edmund had been going. I decided to talk to the driver. I still had a lingering bad impression of the guy from that idiotic speech he gave about the dwarf's untimely demise, but I tried hard to forget that. There was a vacant seat just behind him on the right side, and the passenger across the aisle was asleep, so I had a little privacy for my subtle investigation. I settled on the oblique approach, just in case the driver was part of this suspicious network that was growing in my mind.

"Nice day," I said. There was no reply. He had his window open, so it may have been louder by him than it was by me.

"Nice day!" I said a little louder. He half turned to me.

"I beg your pardon?" he said.

I got up out of the seat and leaned down to him. "I said it was a nice day!" I shouted in his ear.

"Oh!" he said, smiling. "Sorry, but I don't hear too well on that side. I got injured in 'Nam."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I shouted.

He smiled again. "Good one," he said.

This was a real effort. "Where was the dead guy headed?" I shouted.

"I have no idea," he said. "In the case of death we seldom tear tickets."

"Good one!" I shouted. At least he had a sense of humor. Maybe the speech was for the old ladies. "Whadja do in 'Nam?"

"I was a pastor," he said, "but one year I gave it up for Lent. Then I got shelled and sent home." He grinned over his shoulder. "Now I drive. It's safer."

Safer than what, I wondered, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know. The old lady across the aisle was stirring, too, so I thought I'd better cut it short.

"Well, see you later," I said lamely, and got up to walk to the back.

The old lady yawned and stretched, but her eyes were still closed. Very softly I heard "Mr. Snyder."

I looked down at her. Had it been my imagination? Her eyes were still closed. How would she have known my name anyway? I was definitely getting paranoid. Just when I had decided it was all in my head she spoke again.

"Mr. Snyder." This time there was no mistaking it, but it was very faint, like she barely had the energy to speak. "Edmund," she sighed. "Poor man, going to give his brother a present. Such a nice boy." At this point her right eye lazily drifted open, as did her mouth, but this time she looked kind of slack-jawed, like keeping it closed was as much effort as speaking. After a minute of silence, me looking at her, her right eye looking at me, I started feeling a little restless. She didn't look so good. I passed my hand in front of the open eye. The pupil didn't move. I took the reading glasses she had around her neck and held them up to her mouth. She was dead.

It's true she was old, and no doubt had already lived a full life (Jesus, I was beginning to sound like the bus driver), but there seemed to be an unusual number of people breathing their last breath on this bus trip, and it was hard to ignore the fact that both the dwarf and the old lady had been in contact with me right before the end. How had she known my name? I sat down for a cup of coffee with the bus driver in Utah someplace and asked if he had talked to her at all.

"Oh, sure," he said. "She was a real nice old lady. How did you know her?" he asked me.

"I didn't know her," I replied.

A look of dismay came over his face. "You're kidding!" he exclaimed.

"No. Why?"

"Well, because she never talked about anything but you. Everybody within earshot knows what a great writer you are, how old you are, what you wore to your Confirmation, what food you like, everything! Christ, I figured she was your Grandmother or something. She seemed a little disappointed when you beat up Edmund, though." He glanced up from blowing on his coffee and chuckled.

"I'm not Catholic," I said.

He whistled softly. "You meet all kinds in this business. Maybe she was just making it all up. She sure seemed to admire you, though, if nothing else. She was a writer too, you know."

I didn't. "How do you know that?" I asked.

"She told me," he said. "Plus, she always had a yellow legal pad in her lap that she wrote on whenever she wasn't talking to me. You know, come to think of it, I didn't see it when we cleared her personal effects out of her seat. Maybe it got left behind somewhere."

His look suggested to me that he was inviting me to look for it and read it, and when I got back on the bus that's just what I did. It was sitting right there in the overhead bin, waiting for me. I took it out as surreptitiously as possible, but then I glanced up the aisle and saw each and every passenger watching me with smiles of goodwill and encouragement. I returned the smiles with what I hoped was a baleful and malevolent glare. I value my anonymity.

Part One  ** Part Two  **  Part Three  ** Part Four