The Last Bus Home Read online

Bus Home

  Copyright 2014 by Roman Theodore Brandt

  Table of Contents

  The Last Bus Home

  About the Author

  The Last Bus Home

  The calls only come when I’m at work. They start as vibrations in telephone wires, igniting under bird feet perched high above the freeway, metal boxes sending electric spider webs into the ground, crackling beneath dead bodies rotting six feet under corn fields, faster and faster into the dark abyss of sewer pipe acid trips and up into my fifth floor apartment, jangling in the handset of my telephone, waking the crack heads next door. I imagine the phone ringing once, twice, a million times before my answering machine picks it up with a click, recording silence for five long seconds before clicking to a stop and rewinding in the dark of my living room. Lights come on in the apartments around mine, but I’m not home. I’m never home anymore. I haven’t been home in years.

  If I had a normal shift I’d be home when the calls came, and I could pick up the phone. I’ve tried calling back, but every time I do, it's the wrong number. I’d give anything to be there when the phone rings. The bus rumbles over pot holes, jarring my organs around. Mom, I think to myself. I stare at the buildings passing, the strangers on the sidewalks darting into alleys and doorways, and I think of her number flashing on in my missed calls. There’s a lonely headstone somewhere with her name on it, but I haven’t seen it in years.

  The bus takes me through architectural graveyards, houses whose bedrooms are filled with the residue of hypodermic nightmares. After a few minutes, these houses are long past, and the new ones are taller, the bus wheels bouncing over railroads and uneven pavement, the steel frame bending, diesel burning into the evening sky, raining soot onto overgrown yards. A woman with grocery bags climbs the steps onto the bus at Fifty-third and Howard, and we start moving again, turning a corner as she sits down. The bus grinds gears, skipping for a moment, then speeds up on the cross-town bridge. For a moment, I can see the entire city outside the windows, sparkling as the sun goes down, like a million Christmas lights. Then, just as quickly, it vanishes behind a wall of concrete and plywood, glass and neon.

  Wade is my friend at work. I don’t have many, just Wade, and we always sit together at lunch. Outside the windows of the cafeteria, it’s still raining. The night sky is wet through the glass. I remember when I was a child, Mom and I would go out into the backyard and stand in the rain, letting it drip down our faces and soak through our clothes. I put my tray down across from Wade at the table where we sit.

  “Did you remember to check your mail today?” He asks me as I sit down.

  I’ve got my fork in my mashed potatoes, stirring and stirring, making gravy trails. “Yeah, I checked it.”

  “Anything good?” He wants to know.

  “Just bills,” I mumble, stabbing the meatloaf on my tray. “Gas and electric and water and cable.”

  “Life is full of bills.”

  I look at the meatloaf and sigh. “Meatloaf,” I tell him.

  “It’s food,” he says.

  “This meatloaf is not food.” He laughs until I say, “Mom used to make meatloaf.”

  He’s quiet when I say that, and I look around the cafeteria at all the eating people. I’ve never met some of these people even though we all work together.

  “Maybe one day you’ll get something good in the mail,” he says.

  “Nothing good ever comes for me,” I tell him, but he ignores that.

  “Did you do your dishes?” he wants to know.

  “What do you care if I did my dishes?”

  “I care because I’m your friend and I know you.”

  I sigh and stab the meatloaf again, my fork going through the foam tray. “Yeah, alright? I did my dishes.”

  “Good,” he says, and he takes a bite of his meatloaf, chuckling.

  “I wish I could run away,” I tell him.

  He looks over at the cafeteria staff serving workers that are just now coming to lunch.

  My factory is a big metal building on the corner of Yale and eighty-fourth. We make litter boxes and trash cans. I have plenty of both if you ever need one.

  The next few hours of the night go by as a series of moving belts, carrying pink and blue and gray and yellow litter boxes toward me. I pick them up, look at them, and send them away or toss them into a bin if they’re bad. Outside the windows, the world is lighting up. I can start to see the outlines of the big buildings downtown in the distance. A few more litter boxes and I can go home. Those lucky cats. I never thought I’d spend my nights making boxes for cats to shit in, but that’s life. It’s over soon enough, and I’m outside, cold in the light of another sunrise, about to step onto the bus. This bus ride is a lot like the last one. Leaving the factory is just like going to it: a bunch of dead houses on either side of the road, and my head full of memories.

  I came here to be in the city, and I stayed because I crashed my car. I wrecked it into a tree right after Mom died. I still have nightmares where I have glass in my skin, and the car’s on fire. I miss my car. I can’t afford a new one, so I stay here.

  I get home and I almost walk right past the wall of mailboxes in the lobby. When I look in my mailbox, there’s a single envelope, handwritten and addressed to me. I look at the return address, and my heart starts to pound in my chest. I think I’m going to have a heart attack or something, because it hurts. But then my eyes are wet, and I’m crying.

  It’s the address where I grew up. It’s my mom’s name above that, and it’s definitely her handwriting. I recognize the careful, delicate cursive loops. My memories have been building inside me all these years, crystalizing into delicate clusters, and suddenly everything’s broken. Every missed phone call’s been chipping away, and finally there’s a whole network of ice roads collapsing into the ocean in my brain, and after a few minutes, I realize one of my neighbors is watching me from the stairs.

  “What the hell do you want?” I yell at him. I hate him anyway. His apartment smells like piss.

  I can hear him scrambling up the worn concrete stairs, but I’m not looking at him anymore. I’ve got the envelope in my hand, and I’m closing the mailbox. “Mom,” I say quietly, and I take it up to my apartment. Five stories up, four flights of stairs, down the long cinder block corridor to my corner of the building, my three rooms and a toilet. It’s the only place I can be alone with this envelope, but I put it on the table in the kitchen and just sit in one of the chairs, staring at it.

  In my mind, time rewinds like a cassette, magnetic tape sliding by, VHS ribbons unfurling, crackling into blackness. There’s a road, and a truck, rushing backwards out of the city, and the truck’s full of other envelopes. A couple buildings that look like factories, then down the freeway in reverse for a long time, my eyes not blinking, turn signals in the night, a truck stop and a gas station and a few stoplight towns. I follow it through my hometown, down a country road, and there’s the house. My breath catches in my throat, because there it is, waiting in the mailbox. In the distance, standing on the porch, I can see her waiting.

  “Mom,” I say again.

  I look over at the window, and I see the brick wall of the next building, bright in the morning sun. I should see what this envelope is, I guess. I open it up slowly, almost afraid to look. The flap opens, and inside is a bus ticket. It looks like any other ticket I’ve seen riding the bus, except for the route.

  Route Zero: Home. That’s what it says, not even kidding.

  “Home,” I say, turning the ticket over in my hands.

  I take the ticket with me onto the bus and show the driver, and he’s never heard of route zero. When the bus pulls into the station, hissing to a stop, I get out and go inside. The lady at the counter takes the ticke
t and looks at it, turning it over in her hands. She checks with her manager, and he comes to the front. “Route Zero,” he says to me.

  “Yeah.”

  He looks down at the ticket, and then back at me. “How did you get this?”

  Sometimes my brain can’t filter words, so I tell him my dead mother sent it to me in the mail. He sort of smirks at me and hands it back. “Route zero comes in at midnight, after the ticket window’s closed.”

  “Oh,” I say, and I put it back into the envelope. “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. Last one,” he tells me, and then he goes back into the office.

  At work, I show Wade the ticket, and he stares at it. “Home,” he says, and he laughs. “I wonder what that means.” He looks up at me. “You gonna catch this bus?”

  “Leaving early to catch it,” I tell him.

  He waves the ticket at me. “You’ve not even curious about this? You’re not a little worried?”

  I shrug and look over at the windows, stabbing my pizza with the plastic fork. The world outside is