“He’s dead,” said Victor, without a twinge. His father ran an auto insurance company in Conway, South Carolina, and had just fathered a daughter with his new wife, who was seventeen years his junior and who dotted the I in Victor with a heart in the birthday card she had sent Victor signing both her name and his father’s.
“Aww,” the drifter murmured his sympathy. He looked at Victor as if to invite further details, but Victor didn’t know what to say. He didn’t really wish his father dead. He just didn’t want to talk about him. The drifter patted Victor’s forearm.
“That’s too bad. It’s a shame to lose your old man. My old man died six years ago, age sixty-six, I remember it like it was yesterday. He had the big C, had it for years, but it finally took him out. He was a fighter though, my god in heaven you better believe. A holy fucking terror even when he was on his damn deathbed, you just ask one of them nurses aids that had to wash him. He was as big a bastard as you’d ever want to meet sometimes, treated my mama like a dog, but he was my daddy and I loved and respected him as such. You can’t hold nothing against anybody when they’re gone, can ya Steve. Seems like when they’re gone, they just seem better and better. You want em back even if it means everything you couldn’t stand is gonna come right on back with em. I’d give my left nut just to have my daddy clip his toenails on the coffee table one more time. Know what I mean, Steve?”
Victor hazarded a glance at Shorty, who was drumming his fingers lightly on his garbage bag. Behind the cheap sunglasses the drifter’s expression was strangely thoughtful. “But now you take someone you’re really crazy about… say your ex-wife… and you can get tired of ‘em and for as long as they’re livin’ you’ll move heaven and earth just to keep away from ‘em cause they get on your ever lovin’ nerves so G-D bad, excuse my language. It’s a funny thing in this world, it really is. I could go weeks, months, years, without giving my daddy a second thought, ‘fore he got real bad off. I couldn’t stand the sight of him, tell you the truth… but it’s something about when people are getting ready to leave this world… I swear something comes over em, something changes. It’s like they’re little babies again, I reckon, they just get easier to love. And just when you start to want em around again, they’re gone…” the drifter’s voice narrowed and ceased, like the stream from a faucet being turned off. He sat silent for a moment, and his fingers stilled from their soft drumming. He drew in his lips and then blew them out again with a sputtering, equine exhalation. “Oh, me,” he said. Then, like a sky suddenly swept free of clouds, his countenance brightened. He nudged Victor with his bony elbow, “Listen at me. Sound like a preacher.”
Victor shook his head. The drifter’s thin shoulders underneath the denim jacket shook and his phlegmy laugh sizzled out of him like hot grease. “I just like to run my mouth. I talk to everybody. I’d talk to the devil,” he said jauntily.
And yet for the next half hour or so they rode on together in an easy silence. The bus jostled over the rough old highway. Their bags - Victors canvas, Shorty’s garbage - bounced in their laps. Victor gazed out the window, grateful for the lull in this treacherous conversation. For no reason the he could discern, he had denied his name and his father. So now he was Steve. He searched his mind for some motive for this disguise. There was none. He could call himself Steve, he could say that he had no father, but the facts remained, his name was Victor, and he not only had a father, but in addition to that a four-year-old step-brother as well as an infant half-sister whom he had never seen and was not likely to ever see. And he was traveling, not to his ‘old lady’, but to a literal old lady whom, as far as he knew, was as likely to be as impossible to please as his mother. The likelihood of this was in fact high, given the fact that the old lady and his mother seemed to like one another even though their family ties to one another had ended with Victor’s parents’ divorce. Victor’s mother talked to this North Carolina grandmother every few weeks on the phone, but she never spoke to her own mother up in Long Island. Victor didn’t even know if his mother’s parents were even still alive. Victor remembered his mother’s family from his preschool years in New York, but only vaguely. What he remembered most vividly was their volume, they shouted, they laughed, they were extravagant in their expressions, their outrageous claims, like monkeys fighting over a clutch of bananas. And they were chubby, his mother’s parents, chubby and swarthy and soft bodied, like loaves of dark bread. He remembered that their house, like those of all his countless aunts and uncles and cousins, was always full of fights and food and children running in and out. Why wasn’t his mother sending him to them?
The bus slowed. The sunlight and the yards they passed and the storefronts and the people ambling down the sidewalks were all plunged into oblivion as the bus pulled in underneath the awning of a station. The interior of the bus was suddenly cool and dim. People began rustling in their seats. Shorty turned to Victor and once again held out his damp, hot hand. This time Victor shook it without a wince. “Goldsboro, Steve,” the drifter said. “Welcome to Goldsboro, North Carolina. Home of Pope Air Force Base and my ex-wife Donna. I gotta get on the bus to Norfolk, if it ever shows up. I got a buddy up in Norfolk’s got some work for me. If the bus ever gets here,” he grinned. Despite the smell of his breath the grin was winsome, like that of a scrappy little boy, with all of its missing teeth. Take care, Steve. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, hee, hee, hee. Listen, Steve…” he leaned forward. “…Can ya do me a little favor?”
There was a hiss from the front of the bus as the doors opened. Several people stood, stretched, reached up into the compartments above their seats for their belongings, and got off the bus. The drifter, with his plastic bag in his lap, lingered. He gazed with shameless supplication through his cheap sunglasses at Victor.
“I ain’t had a bite to eat since yesterdy,” he said. “Think you could let me hold a couple bucks till… till we meet again?” he clasped Victor’s shoulder and palpated it. “I’d be much obliged, boss. It’d help me out a lot…” His hand rested on Victor’s shoulder, a gentle, warm, but unmistakable pressure.
For the first time since… since when? Since he was a child, Victor felt tears spring to his eyes. Was this what all the friendliness had led up to? He could not look at the drifter, whose hand still gripped his shoulder. When he had left the treatment center, he’d become so aloof from the months of irritability and not bathing and then the total remove from outside society that he’d wandered the halls of his school like a ghost, recognizing but not being recognized by his peers with whom he had at times been friendly, if not close. The only people who ever spoke to him then, aside from teachers and the guidance counselor, had been those clean cut, smiling types of either sex who would introduce themselves to him as he sat by himself in the cafeteria, or as he moped around the edge of the woods during his free period, or as he drifted off into one of his paradisiacal dozes during a study hall, and who invariably ended by inviting him to come along with them to their church, or their bible study. He felt now as he felt then, like a pawn. The drifter’s hand slipped off his shoulder. The old man stood, then, looking sheepish. He shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it,” Shorty said amiably. “I’ll figure something out. I always do. You take care, Steve.”
Victor had quite forgotten that he was Steve. Somehow, being someone else took the sting out of being touched on. “Hold on,” he said, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a five-dollar bill and pressed it into the drifter’s hand.
The drifter’s grin was like that of a child who had just reached under his pillow and found a bill left by the tooth fairy. Clutching his plastic bag to his torso with one arm, he grabbed Victor in the other and pulled him to, pressing his bristly cheek against Victors smooth one and ended, incredibly, with a wet kiss to Victor’s temple. “God bless, you, kid. It’ll come back to you. Trust and believe on it, Steve,”
Victor felt inexplicably, uncomfortably warm. He sat back down in his heat. “See ya,” he mumbled, and he looked out the window as the drifter shuffled
