Naked

  I wrote back saying that if she remembered correctly, we’d made fun of those people. “We lied to them and mocked them behind their backs, and now you want them blessed? What’s happened to you?”

  Looking back, I think I can guess what might have happened to her. Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.

  c.o.g.

  The bus from North Carolina to Oregon takes four days, which breaks down to roughly seventy-five thousand hours if one is traveling without the aid of a strong animal tranquilizer. It was my fate that any AWOL marines, tear-stained runaways, or drunken parolees would sit so close that on the off chance they might pass out, I was guaranteed to collect their bubbling saliva on the collar of my shirt. Books and magazines offered no relief. Failing to act even as a shield, their presence attracted everything from mild curiosity to open hostility.

  “You think you’re going to learn something from a book?” the man said, punching my headrest with his tattooed knuckles. “Let me tell you a little something, bookworm, if you really want to learn the truth, there’s only one place to do it: Chatham Correctional Institute. That’s the best fucking school in this whole stinking country. It taught me everything I know and then some. Hell, you’ll learn more on this goddamned bus than you would in a whole…” He paused, attempting to recall the name given to such a place. “You’ll learn more here than in a whole pyramid full of books. You could fill a racetrack with every piece of shit ever written, but you’ll learn more right here.”

  Having never seen a racetrack full of books, I thought it premature to contradict him. “You could be right,” I said, regarding the scars that ornamented his battered, sunburned face. “Pretty close to your stop, are we? If not, I can move across the aisle and give you some room to stretch out.”

  “I told him yes,” the girl said, taking the seat beside me. “I said, ‘You’re goddamned right I’m having this fucking baby.’ I said I’d have this stinking piece of shit whether he wanted to be the fucking daddy or not.” She paused to wipe her snubbed nose with a kneesock she carried exclusively for this purpose.

  “I said, ‘I already took four years of this shit from Big T, and if you think I’m going to stand here and take any more, you can bend down on your knobby knees and lick the hairs on my shit-scabbed asshole, motherfucker.’ I told him, ‘I’m through fucking around with a white-faced nigger too busy chasing bush pussy to get up off his fat fucking asshole and find his self a motherfucking job.’ I let him have it, I really did.

  “I said, ‘Motherfucker, you haven’t got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church mouse. You crawled out of your mama’s tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her milk-stained titties, and you ain’t never looked back, mother-fucker.’ I said, ‘If you don’t want this baby, then I’ll find some son of a bitch who does, someone who don’t look at the world through the slit of his shit-blistered, faggoty-assed, worm-sized dick.’ I said, ‘This baby might be a bastard, but I can guaran-fucking-tee you it won’t be half the bastard its daddy is, you motherfucking bastard, you! You can suck the cream out of my granddaddy’s withered old cum-stained cock before I’ll ever, and I mean ever, let you look into this mother-fucking baby’s wrinkly-assed face, you stupid fucking shit-head.’ That’s exactly what I told him because I don’t give a shit anymore, I really don’t.”

  Having shared this information with a complete stranger, the young woman proceeded to rummage through the pocketbook that rested upon her swollen belly. She pulled out a brush and scowled, gathering the captive hairs between her fingers and pitching them down onto the floor of the bus. “I said to him, I said, ‘And another thing, dick stain, after this baby is born, I’m gonna take one look at its shit-covered face and if it looks anything like you, I’ll have the doctor saw its fucking head off and use it for bait. I swear to God I will, and there’s not a goddamned thing in the world you can do about it.’ After all the stinking shit that bastard put me through, he had the nerve to ask what I was planning on naming the baby. Can you believe that shit? I can’t. I said, ‘I can’t believe this shit, shithead.’ I said, ‘Motherfucker, I’ll name it whatever the fuck I fucking want to name it.’ I said, ‘I got a good mind to call him Cecil Fucking Fuckwad, after his daddy, you ugly fucking fuckwad.’ I said, ‘How do you like them apples, you jism-stained, cocksucking sack of stinking, steaming, blood-speckled shit.”

  She wiped a trace of spittle off her lips and settled back in her seat. The child kicked and shifted in the womb, and she responded, calling out in pain before batting her stomach with the flat end of the brush. “Motherfucker,” she said, “you try that again and I’ll come in there with a fucking coat hanger and fucking give you something to fucking kick about.”

  This was an America conceived by Soviet propaganda chiefs, a brutal landscape inhabited by hopeless, motor-mouthed simpletons, drifting from a bad place to somewhere even worse. If you’re lucky, people on the bus will wake you in order to borrow a cigarette. The man occupying the window seat is likely to introduce himself with the line “What the hell are you staring at?” Due to the volatile nature of their passengers, the bus drivers are trained in the art of conflict management and frequently pull over to mediate a disagreement.

  “He keeps taking my candy!”

  “Sir, I’m very sorry, but you’ll have to return this gentleman’s nougats.”

  The bus crawled, stopping in towns I felt certain we’d passed not more than fifteen minutes earlier. Let’s get on with it, I thought. These people are more trouble than they’re worth. Let them walk the twenty-five miles home to Wrinkled Bluffs or Cobbler’s Knob or whatever godforsaken stand of cacti they call home. Unlike the rest of them, I had places to go, real places. People were waiting for me to enrich their lives. Couldn’t anyone see that?

  “This bus will be running express from here to Odell, Oregon,” I imagined the driver announcing into his microphone. “Anyone not going to Odell must disembark immediately and form a line on the edge of this forbidding desert.”

  My fellow passengers would moan and grumble, reaching into the seat pockets to collect their lint-specked dentures and half-empty pints of Old Spaniel. I would watch them step down onto the dusty highway, shoddy suitcases in hand, and shake their fists at the unforgiving sun. When the last of them had been evacuated, the driver would close the doors and turn in his seat, touching his fingers to the bill of his cap to say, “We’ll have you in Odell in no time, sir. In the mean-time, I want you just to sit back and make yourself comfortable.”

  Having spent close to twelve hours explaining the inconvenience of his work-release program, the man seated beside me finally reached his destination. The seat was taken by a morose, chinless smokestack of a woman wearing an ash-colored sleeveless turtleneck sweater. She never engaged in formal conversation, rather she jabbed me periodically, pointing with her cigarette at whatever she imagined I might find meaningful. “Refrigerated truck,” she would whisper. “Filling station all boarded up.” She never visited the toilet or shifted her position, not even during one of her many naps. Sleep seemed to overcome her without warning. “South Dakota plates on that Duster,” and I’d turn to find her gently snoring, the cigarette still smoldering between her fingers.

  It was almost midnight somewhere in Utah when a young woman boarded the oversold bus carrying a plastic laundry basket stuffed with shoes and clothing. Having wandered the aisle, searching in vain for a seat, she planted herself beside me, shifting her weight from foot to foot and clearing her throat with painful regularity. She acted as though I were hogging a pay phone, rambling on about nothing at all while she waited to report a round of gunfire coming from the local preschool. This made me feel uncomfortable.

  “Here,” I said, “why don’t you take my seat for a while.”

  She accepted without comment. A while, to me, meant anywhere from fifteen to
twenty minutes. If we hadn’t reached her destination by then, perhaps someone else might offer her a seat. We could all pitch in, forging that unique bond wrought only by common sacrifice. Two minutes into my seat, the young woman was fast asleep, her slack jaw tightening every now and then to mutter what sounded to me like the word “sucker.”

  I moved to the front of the bus and took a seat on the stairs until the driver shooed me away, citing regulations. These were his only hours of privacy, and the man was determined to enjoy them. Come dawn, he would have his hands full with the old cranks who tended to commandeer the front seats, ignoring his DO NOT DISTURB sign to pepper him with questions like “Have you ever found a black snake curled up inside your dryer?”

  I returned to stand beside my seat, hoping that someone might be leaving sometime soon, but there was nothing to stop for. The passing landscape offered no signs of life, just a fathomless, cold-hearted world of stones. I crouched for a while until, overtaken with leg cramps, I lowered myself to the floor and crawled beneath my former seat. Old Smoky sat with her legs outstretched before her while my greatest living enemy tended to thrash and fidget, literally busting my balls every chance she got. The couple seated behind me took up the rear, alternately kicking my head and spinal column with the pointed toes of what I identified as steel-tipped cowboy boots. I told myself that I’d seen worse, but try as I might, nothing came to mind. The bus’s colossal engine lay just beneath my head, providing warmth for the countless bits of misplaced candy that melted to form a fragrant bed of molten taffy. Somewhere along the line something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. Why was I, the most important person on this bus, forced to spend the night curled, not on but beneath his rightful seat? This sort of thing would never have happened on an airplane.

  “Oh,” I’d said to several of my former seatmates, “you should try it sometime. It’s nice, flying. They serve dinner and drinks, and you can leave your bag on the seat when you go to the bathroom.”

  “Really?” they’d said, “and don’t nobody fuck with it?”

  The look of wonder upon their faces was the reason I’d taken this bus in the first place. Having spent the last nine months washing the dishes of well-to-do college students, I thought I might get a real kick out of the Greyhound crowd, but I hadn’t meant it literally. There had to be an important lesson involved in this, and one day, with any luck, these shiftless idiots would figure it out.

  I lay there until sunrise, when the bus took an incline and a bottle of chocolate soda rolled across the floor, smacking me in the forehead. Crawling back toward the aisle, I stepped into the bathroom to battle the many wads of chewing gum fused to my scalp. The passengers awoke, one by one, all except for the young woman occupying my seat. A good, sound sleeper, she rose at ten, asking me to save her spot while she went to brush her teeth.

  I was out in no time, waking minutes later to find her rapping on my skull with a tube of toothpaste. “Hey, wake up.”

  I pretended to sleep through it, figuring she’d give up sometime soon.

  “Hey, this son of a bitch took my seat,” she shouted. “I went to the ladies’ to freshen up and now I don’t got no god-damned place to sit.”

  “You can sit on me,” I heard someone shout from the back of the bus. “I’ll give you the ride of your life!”

  “All right now, you’ve had your fun.” This was a man’s voice but it couldn’t be the driver, as we were still moving. “Come on now, half pint, give the lady back her seat.”

  A hand grabbed me by the collar and lifted me effortlessly to my feet. This hand was blistered and meaty, matching both the face and personality of its owner. The man asked no questions and delivered no threats. He didn’t need to. Once the seat was empty he wiped it free of crumbs and gestured for the young woman to make herself comfortable. I thought briefly of taking my case to the people, but this was clearly not my crowd. They leaned forward, craning their necks to whisper and laugh while I stood in the aisle pretending to be a foreigner, unfamiliar with the customs of this magnificent country. I might have accidentally taken someone’s seat, but, oh, look at the way I seemed to appreciate the rugged landscape the rest of them took for granted. I bent at the waist, lowering my head to peer out the window and raising my eyebrows in delight at every passing boulder. Look! I seemed to say. That one resembles a cardinal nesting on the rim of an enormous pancake! And here we have what appears to be an overturned clog, lying beneath what closely resembles the pocked, flat-featured head of the ignorant hillbilly occupying my rightful seat!

  Someone disembarked about noon, and I settled into his seat exhausted but unable to sleep, distracted by the courtship taking place across the aisle. After turning ten thousand times to thank him for his valor, seats were swapped so that Lord Beefy and Lady Laundrybasket might sit side by side and get to know each other better. Within minutes, they had their heads beneath a sweatshirt, where they were either practicing squirrel calls or sucking the acne medication off each other’s faces. The sound of heavy-metal music on the radio, the piercing squall of a restless infant, the endless chatter of the nattering fogeys seated up front: I could endure anything but the noise of this couple nipping and kissing and crying out in pleasure.

  She wept when he reached his stop. The sound of her muffled sobs was an absolute tonic, sending me into a deep, impenetrable sleep that lasted all the way to Reno.

  This would be my second visit to the Hood River valley. The first had been an accident. My friend Veronica and I had been living in San Francisco when she laid down her copy of The Grapes of Wrath and announced that we’d had enough of city living. It was her habit to speak for the both of us, and I rarely minded as it kept me from having to make any decisions of my own. “We want to head up north and join our brothers and sisters in the orchards,” she said, adjusting the scarf she’d taken to wearing on her head. “Migrant labor, that’s the life for us.” The good people of this country needed us, and we pictured ourselves reclining in sun-dappled haystacks, eating hearty lunches prepared by the farmer’s gingham-clad wife.

  “It’s hardworking people like you that make the world go round,” she would say. “Here, have another piece of my prize-winning chicken; you folks need to keep your strength up.” After lunch the gentle farmer would take up his fiddle and kick up the dust with a rousing rendition of “Turkey in the Straw” or “Polly Wolly Doodle.” Late afternoons would find us back at work, picking apples off the ground and lobbing them into adorable crates labeled “Li’l Redskin” or “Teacher’s Pet.” Our lives would be simple but unspeakably heroic. How she’d gotten this impression from a Steinbeck novel is anyone’s guess, but I went along because, if nothing else, it was guaranteed to drive my father out of his mind.

  We hitchhiked up into Oregon, leaping out of the car after spotting snowcapped Mount Hood, a perfect symbol for the majesty that was to become our lives. The first farmer refused to hire us because we had no experience. The second and third turned us down for the same reason. We lied to the fourth, a small elderly man named Hobbs, whose crew of Mexicans had recently been carted away by the INS.

  “At this point, I’d take anyone who could pick their god-damned nose.” He stared at the trees, their branches bent with fruit. “I thought for a while that maybe my wife could help me out, but she’s up at the big house dying of cancer. What do you say to that, Ringo?”

  If Hobbs’s wife was dying, his ancient beagle couldn’t be very far behind. The animal wheezed and groaned, worrying the bald patches that festered at the base of his arthritic tail.

  “Goddamnit, Ringo,” Hobbs would say, tossing his glowing cigarette butt onto the wet grass, “I sure am glad you’re out here.”

  There would be no picnics taken in haystacks. No gingham, or fiddle playing. Hidden behind a thick layer of permanent storm clouds, the sun dappled nothing. Contrary to what we’d assumed, apples were not picked off the ground but from the limbs of hard-to-reach trees protected by a punishing bark that tended to retain a grea
t deal of water following a good twelve-hour rain. This was a seven-day workweek, sunup to sundown, gentle rain or driving rain. If people like us made the world go round, it was a highly guarded secret. As pickers, we were provided with one of the half dozen cabins that formed a row alongside the gravel driveway. There was no electricity, and outside of the shower located in the barn, our only source of water was one frigid, rust-caked tap. The cooking was done on a wood stove, and we slept on mattresses stuffed with what I could only begin to identify as high-heeled shoes. These hardships were played to our favor. We took to wearing overalls, admiring our somber reflections in the candlelit windows as we huddled over steaming bowls of porridge. This would do. We were pioneers. People like us had no need for pillows or towel racks. We wore our bruises like a badge, and every chest cold was a testament to our fortitude. I was on the verge of buying myself a coonskin cap when the season ended and we traveled back home to North Carolina, where I quickly re-adjusted to a life of hot water and electricity. We’d made plans to pick again the following year, but when the time came, Veronica was forced to back out of her commitment. It seemed she had found herself a boyfriend. Boyfriend. The word stuck in my throat like a wad of steel wool. “It won’t last,” I said. “You’ll see.” What did she need with a boyfriend? I pictured the two of them rolling around the floor of her apartment, specks of dirt being driven into their bare backs and pale, quivering buttocks. Boyfriend. She’d never find anyone as good as I was, I told her that. When she agreed, I got even angrier, storming off her front porch with a ridiculous, “Yeah, well, we’ll just see about that.”

  I told myself that it was my destiny to walk alone, but the cliché provided no comfort. Given the choice, I would much rather walk alone with someone who can cook, and I worried about spending so much time by myself. The remainder of my bus ride put the latter fear to rest. I reached Odell convinced that if I never spoke to another human being for the rest of my life, it would be too soon.