Leg One of Trip
I leave. The Greyhound passes a Hooters as we leave Portland city limits. A thin yellow-haired man sitting next to a pregnant woman says he wants to stop, go in. The Canadian sitting in front of him laughs and makes a joke about owls. I stare out the window.
The world changes around me, up and down hills and mountains, flat along smooth ground like a snake, belly of the bus growling. In Olympia an old man with food in his beard sits next to me. You look like an ex-girlfriend, he says. And I need to drink because my medicine makes me a cottonmouth. You sure are good looking.
I hope you're not going to hit on me all the way to Seattle, I tell him. Because that would make me really uncomfortable.
He stops. Morose, he stares glumly at the aisle. I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable, he finally says, then he launches into stories of carnivals. I'm a carnival worker he says. Most of the time I make money. But once, oh man, oh man, these two girls, they looked so little and sweet, but they were the best pitchers in the state of You-Tah and they pitched a whirlwind. They pitched from far away and hit all the cans. Man oh man, my boss sure was mad. I'm s'posed to make twenty bucks a stuffed animal, see. Man oh man, I almost lost my job.
It is Seattle now and the whole world looks like a carnival, the electric gleaming like a foreign, comfortable moon stuffed into the crevice of the earth.
Leg Two of Trip
I swill sleeping pills and lean my head against the seat in front of me. When I wake we are in St. Regis and my hair looks like a bird's nest. It smells of dust and sweat, a white chalk covers the downtown boardwalk.
I buy two quarts of water and split blueberry pancakes at a cafe with a gentle red-haired woman wearing glasses and a blue fleece. She begins to weep when I ask her questions. I hold her hand over the butter and we exchange numbers, smiles, and I tell her I would love to, someday, take a two-month trip on the Greyhound and listen to people's stories.
"Oh, Michelle!" she says. "Take a tape recorder! Half of us belong in the insane asylum."
A grinning, long-haired man in a dress wins fifty gambling, he holds it up triumphant on the way back into the bus.
An older woman with freckles and skin colored like whole wheat flax bread sits next to me when I invite her. "I've slept now," I tell her, "Sit next to me." She was sitting next to a bald, large, red man with two black eyes, and she begins to tear up as she sits next to me.
"He looks like the man who killed my eighteen-year old girl," she tells me. "Thank you." The man, across from us, hears her, and jerks, frowns with sad eyes over at us then turns quickly back to the window. I touch the woman's hand. I give her my cabbage patch doll pillow, I pour her water.
It was a hate crime, she says. He just didn't like Indians.
I have family that was raised on the reservation, I tell her. I've heard about it, the sad things. I'm sorry. It was cruel and mean and pointless, I tell her, near to tears, I'm so sorry. (I don't know what to say.)
I tell her my story about the church, I tell her there are those of us who are fighting back for justice. She cries and hugs me, shows me pictures of her grandchildren, the gifts she bought for them in Spokane. The big bald red man reaches across the aisle and leans back her chair for her when she says her back hurts. She shivers a little and looks at him, vulnerable. He doesn't meet her eyes, keeps his gaze trained to the floor. His big hands are gentle and then he turns back to the window. It's a sweet, careful moment, and I savor it.
I always wanted to raise a bird, Diana tells me, and after my daughter was murdered a little bird came to me. She followed me around everywhere, she perched on my shoulder. And then she flew away, and I knew my daughter's spirit had flown away, too. My daughter knew I needed that, see.
She gets off in Missoula and I hug her long in the aisle, pray in my way for her as she leaves, hope safeness and blessings on her.
When I get off in Bozeman the red-haired girl runs after me as I drag my suitcase into a snow drift, across the road. She hugs me hard. "Don't forget me," she whispers in my ear.
I couldn't.
It's such a wild and sweet world, I don't know what to make of it.
