De Nada

Years later he would wonder why he decided to go to Mardis Gras in the first place. He never did come up with any complicated or insightful reasons. It seemed like he went because he wasn't a minister anymore, and he could go if he wanted to. None of the ministers that Foy knew ever went to Mardis Gras or any place where people got drunk and acted crazy.

He was standing outside his church on his last day, and he remembered that Mardis Gras was about to begin. And he started thinking about going to New Orleans.

He imagined himself walking down the streets of the French Quarter at night with people all around him laughing and drinking and having a good time. He wanted to sit at an outdoor café smoking a cigar while he watched people walk up and down the street. Foy didn’t smoke cigars, but he thought he might start in New Orleans.

He decided to take a bus because of "Midnight Cowboy." He loved the bus scenes in that movie. Not so much the one where Joe Buck rode the bus from Texas to New York, but the one in the end, where he threw away his cowboy clothes and rode the bus to Florida with his dying friend, Ratso Rizzo. People in the movies were always taking a bus somewhere, especially when important stuff was happening in their lives.

Foy put some books and his mp3 player into a knapsack, then packed a change of pants and several shirts into an old duffel bag. He wanted to travel lightly. When he thought about traveling he remembered his wife’s luggage and all the kids’ stuff and how he used to pack a lot of suits and nice clothes if he was going to do a wedding or a funeral. There was so much stuff, and he couldn’t bear thinking about it. He just wanted everything to be neat and tidy and in one bag.

He zipped up the duffel bag the night before the trip and tossed it over by the door. "One bag," he said out loud. "I don't know what all the fuss was about. A person doesn’t need all that much."

One of the deacons who liked him and wished he hadn't quit or been fired, whichever it was, drove him downtown to the San Antonio bus station. He was very amused that Foy was taking a bus, and he joked about it. They shook hands and Foy said, "I'll see you when I see you."

It was his first time in a bus station, though he had seen plenty of them in movies. He was fascinated by the mix of humanity he saw there. “These are the people who take buses,” he thought. “They know what they’re doing.”

Most of them were Mexican families headed south to cross the border at Laredo. They sat on the floor among piles of luggage eating tamales and tacos wrapped in tinfoil. Homeless men straggled in and out with plastic grocery bags dangling from their arms. There were a number of older men who looked like they had been at some kind of World War II convention. They all wore blue baseball caps with the names of various ships or veterans organizations on them. Several young Hispanic men were slouching on the benches wearing starched clothing and dark sunglasses. Their heads bobbed up and down to the slight buzz of Tejano music leaking out of their headphones.

Foy wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a new beige t-shirt with nothing on it. He didn't like words on his t-shirts and went to some trouble to find plain ones. No one even looked at him. It was like he was invisible.

It turned out there was a considerable wait for the bus due to a delay near San Angelo, so he walked outside to see if there was a place to eat. Across the street was a cheap BBQ stand that seemed popular with the bus crowd. There were people sitting on the sidewalk with their luggage, eating BBQ sandwiches and sipping beer from bottles. He let his eyes drift to the left, and he spotted a sandwich shop a little ways down the street. Foy chose the sandwich shop. He had a Muffaletta with extra olives and a diet coke while he sat at the window, happily watching the people stream back and forth from the BBQ stand to the bus station.

When it was time for the bus to leave, Foy threw his duffel bag into the cargo area and found a seat by a window. He put his knapsack in the aisle seat and hoped no one would sit there. He needed to check something before he could relax, so he peeked inside the knapsack and saw that his books and mp3 player were there. Satisfied, he leaned his head against the window and stared out, waiting for the bus to leave. In that moment, with the business of travel out of his mind, he began to feel wrong, like the trip wasn't going to work. Like going to Mardis Gras wasn't going to make him feel better. He recognized the early tinge of sadness that signals a coming depression. He shook his head angrily and whispered, “No!”

He exhaled loudly and turned his attention to a young Hispanic woman trying to settle herself and her two small children into their seats. She was a frenetic bundle of energy, somehow holding a baby on one hip while she helped a young boy into the seat by the window. Her arms were full of bags and toys. The baby was fussing, and the little boy began hanging over the back of the seat, picking his nose and staring at the woman behind him who was pretending not to notice.

Foy stared at the woman, fascinated and amazed. She would never be done. The children would cry and squirm and need to be fed and changed and comforted every waking moment for the entire journey. Meanwhile he would be indulging himself with reading and music and by staring out the window at the passing scenery, a thing he loved to do. While the woman fished around in the diaper bag for something, the little boy began licking the window with long, careful tongue strokes that left a blurry film on the glass. He was very methodical, as if he was trying to cover as much of the glass as possible before his mother noticed him.

"Oh my God," Foy whispered. "Thank you Jesus for letting me not be her."

His spirits lifted a little. However bad things were, at least he wasn't taking care of small children on a bus trip. And he didn't have to care about the woman with the children, either. She was not his to care for. He didn't have to care about her or anyone else. He could smile at the woman, mildly empathetic, across a vast emotional chasm.

Just then the woman spotted the boy licking the window and barked at him in Spanish. She lunged toward him and a bottle fell out of the diaper bag, rolling down the aisle until it stopped near Foy's seat. He started to retrieve it for her, then stopped himself. "Someone else can get it," he thought.

But he couldn't keep his eyes off the bottle. He kept looking at it and wondering if anyone else would notice. No one did. The bus people seemed oblivious to anything happening outside of their own seat. Foy wondered how they did that. He was always looking at the people around him. He noticed everything.

He felt an urge to pick up the bottle, but he suppressed it and said in a barely audible whisper, "Fuck the woman with the children. Fuck her. I don't care about her or her bottle or anything. I don't have to care anymore, remember?"

Sadness and depression came rushing upon him like a breath from the mouth of God. He felt his head grow heavy with the weight of it. The people on the bus were sad and tired and probably had no money. The woman had nothing to look forward to but endless years of wrestling with children. The slight scent of chemical deodorant coming from the bathroom in the back made everything seem cheap. And Foy was a sad little man talking to himself, obsessing over his thoughts, and for some reason fighting the urge to pick up a baby bottle.

Impulsively he jerked forward and started to reach for the bottle, but he stopped himself again and sank back into his seat. A wave of raw anger seized him. He clenched his teeth and stared at the tips of his shoes. He wanted to say something, and he wanted to say it out loud. He settled for a whisper that would be loud enough for people to hear but not understand.

"Oh yeah? How about this? Fuck everyone in the world but me! You like that?"

And then the anger left him as suddenly as it had come. He leaned forward until his forehead touched the back of the seat in front of him. His eyes filled with tears, and he rocked back and forth like an old Jewish man at the Wailing Wall. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn’t mean it."

Utterly broken, he got up from his seat, picked up the bottle, and handed it to the woman. She smiled at him and said, "Gracias, senior."

"De nada," he replied, surprised at himself for speaking Spanish. It was one of about four Spanish phrases he knew.

He flopped back into his seat and leaned his head on the window again, closing his eyes this time.

He whispered to himself without even moving his lips. "De nada. De nada. Of nothing."

© Copyright 2005 Preacher. Last update: 7/17/2005; 8:23:51 PM. Links