The Bus

There was no bus.

Theo found this out at seven o’clock on Monday morning, at the kitchen table, with the telephone directory. It was a thin book with a picture of the lake on the cover and a sunset, and it covered three counties, and Theo went through it from the front to the back with his finger, under B for bus and T for transport and C for coach and P for public, and then from the back to the front again, while the box fan roared and Felix made toast under the grill and burned it and made it again.

“There’s a coach,” said Theo at last. “In Vinita. It stops at the petrol station on the highway. Once a day. Going to Saint Louis.”

“We don’t want to go to Saint Louis,” said Felix.

“I know we don’t want to go to Saint Louis.”

“Then it’s not the bus. It’s a bus. Number one isn’t take a bus.” Felix put the toast down on the table in front of him, black. “It’s take the bus. The bus. The one everybody takes. To go to the shops.”

“There isn’t one,” said Theo. “There isn’t a bus to the shops. There aren’t any shops.” He shut the directory. “Mrs Sixkiller said. The store in town, or Vinita. People drive to Vinita. Everybody’s got a truck.”

They looked at the list on the refrigerator door. 1. Take the bus. In Theo’s hand, at the top, the first thing any of them had written, in the King’s sitting room in New Westminster, a week ago, when it had seemed the simplest thing in the world.

“There’s the train,” said Marcus.

Theo opened the directory again, and found the number for the State railway enquiries, and rang it, on Mrs Sixkiller’s telephone, which was on the wall by the refrigerator and had a cord, a long curly one, so that you could walk about the kitchen with it; and Frederick sat at the table and ate the black toast and listened to Theo’s half of it.

“Good morning. I wondered if you could tell me about trains from Vinita.” A pause. “From Vinita. In Craig County.” A longer pause. “Oh.” A pause. “No, I see.” A pause. “When was that?” A very long pause, in which Theo’s face went through several things. “Thank you. No, that’s very helpful. Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

He hung up.

“Well?” said Marcus.

“There’s one train,” said Theo. “In the whole State. It goes from Oklahoma City to the Texas border and back. The last passenger train through Vinita was in 1967.” He sat down at the table. “She said they’re going to bring it back. She said they say that every election. She said it in a voice like she’d said it before.”

Felix put his face in his hands.

“Then it’s impossible,” he said, through them. “Number one’s impossible. We wrote it first and it’s impossible.”

“Nothing on the list is impossible,” said Frederick. “That was the point of it.”

“Then where’s the bus?”

There was a knock on the frame of the screen door.

It was Kimura. She was standing on the porch outside the mesh, in a cap, with the binoculars round her neck and a bottle of water in her hand, and she did not open the door. She looked through the mesh at the four of them round the table, and the directory, and the black toast.

“The van comes at ten,” said Kimura.

They stared at her.

“What van?”

“The county van. Rural transit. It does Ketchum and the cove on Mondays and goes to Vinita and comes back.” She drank some of the water. “You ring the day before. I rang on Saturday night, in case.” She looked at Theo. “It’s in the directory. Under Senior and Disability Services.”

---

The van was white, with a wheelchair lift on the back and a blue stripe along the side and the words RURAL TRANSIT - CRAIG & MAYES COUNTIES - PLEASE CALL A DAY AHEAD, and it came up the gravel road at four minutes past ten in a cloud of dust and stopped at the bottom of the drive, where the four of them had been standing since twenty to, in the shade of the mailbox, which was no shade at all.

The door folded open with a hiss.

“Kimura plus four?” said the driver.

He was a man of sixty or so, heavy, in a short-sleeved shirt with the transit company’s badge on the pocket, with a grey moustache and a straw hat on the dashboard and a clipboard on his knee; and on the radio behind him a man was singing about the river Jordan in a deep slow voice, over a steel guitar.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “That’s us.”

“Which one’s Kimura?”

“I am,” said Kimura, behind them. Frederick had not heard her come down the drive. She had the binoculars round her neck.

The driver looked at her, and at the binoculars.

“Birds?”

“Birds,” said Kimura.

“Lot of birds at Vinita,” said the driver, with approval, and made a mark on his clipboard. “I’m Earl. Fare’s paid, lady paid it on the phone, one fifty each. Sit anywhere, don’t sit on Mrs Ledbetter. Air’s on high but it don’t do much past the third row.”

They got on.

The van had ten seats, in pairs, with a gap at the back where the wheelchair went, and there were two people in it already. A young man with his arm in a sling and his cap over his eyes, asleep against the window in the third row, who did not wake up. And in the second row, by herself, very upright, in a lilac dress with a cardigan over it in spite of the heat and a handbag on her knee held in both hands, a very small, very old woman, with white hair done in waves, and a pair of enormous dark glasses on a chain round her neck, who looked at each of them as they came up the steps and found a seat, one after another, through a pair of ordinary glasses with thick lenses that made her eyes very large.

Her eyes reached Frederick, and got larger.

Frederick sat down in the seat in front of her, next to Theo. Felix and Marcus sat behind her. Kimura sat at the very front, beside the door, and looked out of the window.

The door hissed shut. The van moved off down the gravel road. On the radio the man finished with the river Jordan and started on the sweet by and by.

There was a tap on Frederick’s shoulder.

He turned round. The old woman in the lilac dress was leaning forward, very slightly, with her hands still on her handbag, and her enormous eyes behind the thick glasses were shining.

“He doesn’t know,” she said, very quietly.

“Ma’am?”

She tilted her head, a quarter of an inch, at the back of Earl’s.

“He doesn’t know who you are,” whispered Mrs Ledbetter. “Don’t you tell him.”

---

Earl did not know.

Frederick understood it within five minutes, and could not believe it, and spent the next hour and twenty minutes believing it more and more. Earl did not watch the television. He said so. He had not had one since 2009, when his wife died and took it with her, he said, in a manner of speaking, because it was hers and he gave it to his daughter; and he did not read the newspaper, because it was all bad news and you could not do anything about it; and the radio in the van was set to the gospel station out of Tulsa and did not move, except on Saturdays in the season, for the baseball. Earl knew everything that happened on the roads of Craig and Mayes counties. He knew which bridge was out on the way to Big Cabin and which county commissioner had graded which road and which one had not and would be finished at the next election, mark his words. He knew who was in the hospital in Vinita and what for, and who had a new baby, and whose dog had been hit. He did not know who the King was. He had no idea.

“You boys on holiday?”

“Yes, sir,” said Theo.

“From where?”

“New Westminster.”

“Long way.” Earl looked at them in the mirror with approval. “Long way to come for a holiday. Most people go the other way. Where you staying?”

“Mrs Sixkiller’s,” said Frederick. “The farmhouse on the gravel road.”

Earl looked at him in the mirror.

“Loretta’s place,” he said, and something changed in his voice; it went up, and got younger. “Loretta Sixkiller taught me the fourth grade. Nineteen seventy-four. I’m sixty-four years old and I’m still scared of her.” He shook his head. “She give you the rules?”

“The well,” said Felix, from behind Mrs Ledbetter. “And the screen door. And the cellar.”

“She give you the one about the cellar? About the law?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a good law,” said Earl. “That’s the only good law they ever made.” He turned the van off the gravel onto the paved road. “Shut that screen door.”

“We do.”

“You shut it,” said Earl, “or she’ll know.”

Behind Frederick, Mrs Ledbetter made a small noise, like a kettle a long way off, and he did not dare turn round.

---

It was fourteen miles to Vinita, and it took an hour and twenty minutes, because the van did not go to Vinita.

It went round the cove. It went down a road to the water that was hardly a road at all, to a trailer under the trees where a man in a wheelchair was waiting at the bottom of a ramp with a folder on his knee, and Earl got out and worked the lift, slowly, with the motor whining, and talked to the man the whole time about his folder, which was for the kidney doctor. It went up a dirt road to a house on a hill where nobody was waiting, and Earl got out and knocked, and a woman came to the door in a dressing gown and said her mother had gone with her sister after all, she was sorry, she should have rung, and Earl said that was all right, honey, it happened, and got back in and made a mark on his clipboard. It went through the town of Ketchum, the whole of it, which took two minutes, past the Methodist church and the third house past it with the blue door, where Mrs Sixkiller was on her knees in the front garden in a straw hat, weeding, and did not look up, and past the Cove Café, where the lot was full of pickups. It stopped at the post office, where Earl got out with a parcel that was not anybody’s on the van and came back without it.

And behind them, all the way, at a quarter of a mile, the grey car with the tinted windows came after them on every road, and stopped when they stopped, and waited, with its engine running, while Earl worked the lift, and came on again when they went on.

“Somebody’s following us,” said Earl, on the road out of town, looking in his wing mirror.

There was a silence in the van.

“Is there?” said Theo.

“Grey car. Been behind us since Loretta’s.” Earl looked at it in the mirror. “Rental. Tulsa plates. Fishermen, probably. Lost.” He thought about it. “Fishermen are always lost. Don’t know why. They can find a fish in forty foot of water and they can’t find the road to Grove.” He shook his head. “I’ll let them go by.”

He pulled over onto the verge, and slowed, and put his arm out of the window and waved the car past.

The car slowed too. It stopped on the verge a quarter of a mile behind them, and waited.

Earl looked at it in the mirror for a long time.

“Huh,” he said. “Polite.”

At the front of the van, by the door, Kimura was looking out of the window through her binoculars, with great concentration, at a fence post.

---

“They’re going to bring the train back,” said Earl, on the highway.

It was a proper road now, two lanes and a wide verge with the grass burned brown on it, going north across the flat country between fields of something low and green and fields of nothing, under an enormous white sky, with the heat coming up off the road ahead of them in a shine like water; and on either side of it, now and then, a house, and a barn, and a tree, and a sign for a church.

“The train?” said Frederick.

“Passenger train. Through Vinita. They used to have six a day, when I was a boy. North and south and east and west. My granddaddy rode it to the war.” Earl looked at the road. “They’re going to bring it back. They say so every election. Every single one. A man comes out from Guthrie and stands on the platform at Vinita where there ain’t no platform any more and says we’re going to bring back the train. And everybody claps.” He drove for a while. “And then they don’t.”

“Why not?”

Earl looked at him in the mirror, and thought about it, as if nobody had ever asked him before.

“Because it’s cheaper to say it,” he said. “That’s what I think. It’s a lot cheaper to say it than to do it, and it gets you just as many votes.” He drove on. “That’s what I’d do. If I was them. I’d say it too.”

“Would you vote for it?”

“Every time,” said Earl. “I’ve voted for the train eleven times. I’ll vote for it again.” He looked at the road. “You can’t stop wanting a thing just because they keep lying to you about it.”

Frederick sat in the van with the air conditioning not reaching the second row and looked at the back of Earl’s head, at the grey hair cut short under the line of the hat he was not wearing, and thought that he would have liked to have that said to the Prime Minister. Then he thought that it had been, probably, many times, by men like Earl, in rooms where he was not.

Behind him, Mrs Ledbetter tapped him on the shoulder again.

“He’s my sister’s boy,” she whispered. “He has never once in his whole life known a single thing that was going on. Not one thing.” Her enormous eyes shone. “It’s a gift from God.”

---

Vinita was the county seat, and looked it.

It had a courthouse, of yellow stone, with a dome, in a square with trees round it and a statue of a soldier and a bench under each tree with an old man on it; and a main street, wide, very wide, wide enough to turn a wagon and a team in, with brick shops along it with tin awnings over the pavement and their names painted on the brick above the awnings in letters a yard high, faded: DRY GOODS, HARDWARE, FURNITURE AND UNDERTAKING. Half of them were still those things. Half of them were something else, or nothing, with paper in the windows. There was a bank, a pharmacy, a café, a feed store, a shop that sold guns and fishing tackle and wedding dresses, and, at the corner of the square, opposite the courthouse, with the bars on its windows and the sign over its door, the pawn shop.

Earl let them off at the courthouse square at a quarter past eleven, after the man with the kidney folder and Mrs Ledbetter, who were going to the clinic; and before he went he leaned out of the window and looked at the four of them on the pavement, and at Kimura, who was looking at a pigeon.

“Two-forty,” said Earl. “Right here. I’ve got Mrs Ledbetter’s drops to get to the pharmacy and I’ve got Bud’s dialysis at three-thirty and if you’re not here at two-forty,” he looked at them sternly, “I will wait for you. But I won’t like it.”

The van went away round the square, with the man on the radio singing about the old rugged cross.

They stood on the pavement in the heat.

“Number one,” said Theo.

He took a pencil out of his pocket, a short one, from the kitchen drawer at the farmhouse, and looked at it, and then at the others.

“We have to get back first,” said Felix. “It doesn’t count unless you get back. A bus is there and back. Otherwise it’s just going away.”

“He’s right,” said Marcus.

Theo put the pencil away.

---

The pawn shop was shut.

There was a card in the window, hand-lettered, propped against the glass inside, behind the bars: CLOSED MONDAYS. And under that, in a different pen, smaller: GONE FISHING. BACK TUES 9.

And behind the card, in the window, behind the bars, on a stand that had been made for them out of scaffolding poles and planks, there were the five bicycles he had seen from the car on Saturday. He had not been able to stop thinking about them. He had not said so. He stood on the pavement and looked at them now through the glass, close: a small red one for a child, with streamers; a black one with fat tyres and no gears; a pink one with a basket on the front; a racing bike, silver, very thin, with a broken pedal; and at the end, in the corner, leaning on the bars, a blue one.

It was an ordinary bicycle. It had three gears and a bell and a rack on the back and mudguards, and the blue paint had gone pale on the crossbar where the sun came through the window, and somebody had wound black tape round the handlebars where the grips had worn through. There was a price on it. A paper tag on a string, tied to the bell.

£45.

He stood on the pavement and looked at it for a long time. Long enough that the others stopped talking. Long enough that Kimura, at the corner of the square, put her binoculars down.

“Number two,” said Theo, beside him, quietly.

“With my own money,” said Frederick.

“I know.”

“I haven’t got any money.”

“I know.”

“I owe Darlene six pounds eighty-five.”

“I know,” said Theo. He looked at the blue bicycle through the bars. “Tuesday at nine.”

---

Felix bought him the wallet.

It was in the shop on the square that sold everything, a shop with a wooden floor and fans in the ceiling going round and round very slowly, and aisles of everything in the world that a farm could need and some things that it could not, buckets and baler twine and rubber boots and fly spray and children’s colouring books and plastic flowers for graves; and by the till, on a rack that turned round, there were wallets. Felix turned the rack round, slowly, looking at them, with great seriousness, and took one off, and looked at it, and put it back, and took another.

It was brown, and it had a zip on the side for coins, and it was exactly like his own.

“You can’t have money,” said Felix, at the till, counting out the seven pounds ninety-nine in coins onto the counter, carefully, the way he had at the Cove Café, “if you haven’t got anywhere to put it. That’s how it works. You get the wallet first. And then the money comes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s embarrassed,” said Felix. “Because you’ve got a wallet and there’s nothing in it, and money can’t stand that.” He took the wallet from the woman at the till, who had not looked at Frederick once, not even to give him a carrier bag, and gave it to him. “My grandmother says so. And she ran a shop for forty years.”

Frederick held it.

It was very light. It smelled of new leather, or of something that was nearly leather. It opened like a book, and inside there were two long pockets for notes and four small pockets for cards, and a little window of clear plastic for a photograph, and nothing else.

He had never had one. He had never needed one. He had been to a great many places, and he had never once in his life paid for anything with money out of his own pocket, because there had always been somebody, a step behind him, at his elbow, with an envelope, or an account, or simply a word to the shop, that made it unnecessary. He stood in the shop on the square at Vinita in the slow breeze of the ceiling fans and held a brown wallet with a zip on the side that had cost seven pounds ninety-nine, and did not know what to say.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Put something in it,” said Felix.

He looked in his pockets. The handkerchief. The Private Secretary’s list of telephone numbers, folded small. He unfolded it, and folded it again, smaller, and put it in one of the long pockets for notes, where it looked very thin.

“Not that,” said Marcus. “That’s not money.”

“It’s the only thing I’ve got.”

Theo took something out of his own pocket. It was a little rectangle of thin yellow card, with RURAL TRANSIT - ONE RIDE printed on it in blue, and a hole punched through it, which Earl had given each of them as they got on, and which Frederick had not known what to do with and had left on the seat.

“You left it,” said Theo. “I picked it up.”

He put it in the little window for the photograph. It fitted exactly.

---

They ate their lunch on a bench in the courthouse square, under a tree, in the shade, with the old man on the next bench along asleep with his hat on his chest; sandwiches from the café, paid for out of Marcus’s envelope, FOR EMERGENCIES AND PIE, which Marcus said this was, both. And then they walked up and down the main street of Vinita in the heat, very slowly, from one end to the other, looking in the windows; and in the shop that sold guns and fishing tackle and wedding dresses Marcus tried on a hat, a straw one, and looked at himself in the mirror for a long time and put it back with real regret; and they went into the public library, which was cool and dark and smelled of floor polish, and Frederick stood in the door of it and looked at the desk, and at the sign on the desk that said LIBRARY CARDS: PROOF OF ADDRESS IN CRAIG COUNTY REQUIRED, and thought about number seven, and said nothing, and went out again.

At the corner of the square, all afternoon, Kimura looked at birds.

At two-forty the van came round the square with Earl in it and the man on the radio singing about the beautiful shore, and stopped, and the door folded open.

Mrs Ledbetter was in the second row. She had the enormous dark glasses on now, the ones on the chain, because the eye doctor had put drops in, and she could not see anything at all, she said, not a thing, everything was a blur; and she turned her face up to Frederick as he got on, and he saw himself twice in her dark lenses, very small.

“Did you go to the library?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” said Mrs Ledbetter. “A young man should go to the library.” She settled back in her seat. “Even if he’s on his holidays.”

---

At five to four, on the highway south, with the van full and the air conditioning losing and Bud’s dialysis behind them and Mrs Ledbetter asleep with her mouth open and her hands still on her handbag, the news came on.

It came on the gospel station, between a hymn and the weather, a man’s voice, quick and level, reading it: a storm in the panhandle; the price of cattle at the Oklahoma City yards; a hearing at Guthrie about a road; and then, in exactly the same voice, as though it were another road, that the King was understood to be spending the summer privately, at an undisclosed location, after the Household had confirmed that he would undertake no public engagements before September.

Earl turned it up.

“Huh,” said Earl.

Nobody in the van said anything. Frederick sat very still in the second row and looked at the back of Earl’s head. Beside him he felt Theo go rigid, all down his left side, the way he had at the counter.

“Wonder where he goes,” said Earl.

He drove for a while, with his elbow on the window and the hot wind coming in, thinking about it.

“Somewhere with air conditioning,” said Earl at last, with great certainty. “I’ll bet you anything. Somewhere with air conditioning and a pool and somebody to bring him his lunch.” He shook his head. “Lucky kid.”

Behind him, Mrs Ledbetter, who was not asleep, made the small noise like a kettle a long way off; and Felix, behind her, made a much louder one, and turned it into a cough, and went on coughing until they were nearly at Ketchum.

---

Earl let them off at the bottom of the farmhouse drive at a quarter to five, in the dust, with the grey car stopping behind on the verge a quarter of a mile back, politely.

Before he shut the door he looked down at them from his seat, at the four of them in the gravel and Kimura behind them with her binoculars, and picked up his clipboard.

“You want to put down for another one?” he said. “I do Vinita Tuesdays too. Nine o’clock, from the cove. Back at two-forty.”

They looked at each other.

“The pawn shop opens at nine,” said Theo.

“Then yes,” said Frederick. “Please.”

Earl took the pen from behind his ear.

“Name?”

Frederick looked up at him, at the grey moustache and the kind, uncomprehending face and the pen waiting over the clipboard.

“Hanover,” he said.

“Hanover,” said Earl, and wrote it down, slowly, in capitals. “Hanover plus three. Like the King.” He put the pen back behind his ear. “Any relation?”

Mrs Ledbetter, in the second row, behind the dark glasses, put both her hands over her face.

“Distant,” said Frederick.

“Well, don’t let it go to your head,” said Earl kindly, and shut the door, and the van went away down the gravel road with the man on the radio singing about the old ship of Zion, into its own dust.

---

That night, at the kitchen table, under the box fan, with the moths trying the screen door, Theo took the short pencil out of his pocket and stood up and went to the refrigerator.

They watched him.

He looked at the list for a moment. Then he made a tick, beside number one, small and neat, in pencil.

It was the first one.

They looked at it, the four of them, in the hot kitchen, for quite a long time; one tick, on the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme, held to the door by a magnet shaped like the State.

Then Frederick took out the brown wallet, and unzipped it, and looked at the yellow card in the little window, and the folded list of telephone numbers in the long pocket for notes, and nothing else, and zipped it up again, and put it on the table in front of him, where he could see it.

“It’s still embarrassed,” said Felix.

“Tuesday,” said Frederick.