Night Bus to Biloxi

The swoosh of hydraulic brakes wakes him, and Raymond finds himself slumped against the window with a ribbon of drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. He wipes it away, and looks around. It’s night, and he’s in a seat near the back of a bus, surrounded by sleeping passengers. His throat is dry, and Raymond worries he may have been snoring. He wonders how long he’s been traveling and where he is.

He has a headache. That’s not an unusual thing for him after being drunk out of his mind. The closest bar had always been his first stop every time he’d been let out of jail. But now the bus is winding down a dark rural road, going through little towns that Raymond doesn’t recognize. He wonders if he should get up and ask the driver where they are bound.

Raymond shifts his weight and becomes aware of the little black boy, maybe five years old, who is leaning against him, asleep. Most of the other people on the bus seem to be older African-Americans.

The bus has slowed, and is turning into a gas station parking lot. The driver opens the door, and a passenger wearing army fatigues gets up from his seat. The driver goes with him to the side of the bus to open the baggage compartment and retrieve the soldier’s duffle bag. The driver gets back in the bus, pulls the door closed with a whoosh, and then starts the engine. Raymond watches the soldier, who has walked toward a group of people standing in a pool of light below a streetlamp.

“That’s so nice to see,” says a voice from the seat across the aisle. It’s a white-haired black woman wearing a fuzzy pink sweater. She’s smiling. “A soldier returning home to his family.”

“Yeah,” says Raymond. “That’s nice.”

“Where are you headed?” asks the old woman.

Raymond thinks hard. He realizes that the last thing he remembers is Rudy, the skinny gay nurse in the infirmary, standing over him. Rudy had said, “Don’t worry, man. We’re gonna make sure you get home.”

Raymond looks down at the plastic hospital bracelet on his wrist. He holds up his hand to show it to her. “I guess I’m on my way home, but I don’t even remember getting on this bus. I was in the hospital.”

She nods sympathetically.

He feels a maternal warmth coming from the old woman. It seems such a long time since he’s had a friendly conversation with anyone. He wants to continue talking with her.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Biloxi.”

Biloxi. even though the night is hot and humid, Raymond feels a chill.

“I was born in Biloxi,” he tells her. “But I left when I was a teenager, and I’ haven't been back since.” He looks again at the bracelet on his wrist. Somebody must have looked at his file and figured that Biloxi was his home. Or maybe, under the influence of whichever drugs they’d given him when they were sewing him up, he’d actually told somebody that.

The woman smiles. “Biloxi’s the last stop. I’m getting off at the one before that, before we get to the city. We’ll be there in a few hours. You got family waiting?”

“No. They’re all gone.”

“I’m very sorry,” the old woman says.

Raymond nods, but he’s not sorry. He left Biloxi at age 15, after receiving another brutal beating from his father. Raymond had packed everything he owned into a little brown suitcase then, and he’d swiped the keys to his dad’s powder-blue 1967 Chevy.

He’d tried to make his way to Chicago, but he'd barely passed the city limits sign before the police pulled him over. They’d been kind. Instead of hauling him to jail—or even worse, back to his dad’s house—they’d taken him to the nearest bus station, bought him a pancake breakfast and a bus ticket. Perhaps Raymond’s black eyes, bruises and busted lip had something to do with their decision.

Raymond had carried his anger at his father around with him after that night in 1977, and he took it out on everything and everyone he met ever since then. He’d been in and out of jails and prisons more times than he could remember, but even imprisonment hadn’t kept him from making enemies and getting into fights. HIs last fight was that scuffle in the prison cafeteria with the big Puerto Rican, Silva, just four days before he’d been scheduled to be released from Joliet.

The little kid in the aisle seat beside Raymond stirs and starts to whimper. The old woman reaches across to pat the child’s hand. “Don’t worry, Jeremiah. Your grandma and grandpa are waiting for you. They’re going to be so happy to see you! They’re going to take good care of you.” She looks up at Raymond. “I’ve been watching out for Jeremiah ever since they put him on the bus in Louisville.”

“He seems awful young to be traveling alone,” says Raymond.

“Yes. He’s much too young.” She smiles at Raymond again. “You say you’ve got no family in Biloxi, but maybe you’ve got a special young lady somewhere?”

Raymond smirks. “I wish.” His most recent stint at Joliet had lasted twelve years. He looks down at his hands again at the tattoos on his knuckles, and wonders for a moment what his life might have been like if he’d followed a different road. If he’d come back home to Biloxi, he might have had an opportunity to see his little brother before Jerry died in that car crash. He might have been able to see Mom when she got sick. What the hell. He might have even mended fences with his father.

The bus stops again. The old woman rouses Jeremiah, and helps him to the front of the bus, then she comes back to her seat. “My stop’s next.”

As they pull away, Raymond sees the little boy being led to a car by an elderly couple.

After an hour or so the bus slows again. “We’re here!” the old woman says, as she stands and straightens her skirt. They’re in the parking lot of a diner with a neon sign blinking “Betty’s Best Pancakes.”

Raymond follows her off the bus. The driver is lifting the door of the baggage compartment. He hands the old woman a small blue suitcase.

She thanks the driver and turns to Raymond. “Good luck, young man,” she says, and gives him a kiss on the cheek.

Raymond can’t remember the last time someone kissed him. He watches as she walks toward the diner, where he can see other people enjoying an early breakfast.

The bus starts up again and leaves him standing alone in the parking lot. Raymond looks down and sees that the driver has left a suitcase on the pavement near his feet. It’s small and brown, and the handle has been repaired with black electrical tape, the way Mom fixed it for him that time when they went to Florida to visit Grandma. Raymond reaches down to pick it up and notices the hospital bracelet on his wrist is gone. The tattoos on his fingers are gone.

So many things make no sense! He looks back at Betty’s Best Pancakes and wonders if it could possibly be the same diner where 24 years ago, he’d wolfed down a plate of pancakes purchased for him by the cops who’d helped him escape. It was nice to remember there’d been good folks in Biloxi, too. Not everyone in Biloxi had been fueled by hate and bitterness, like his father.

It feels to Raymond as if he’s been taken back in time, but he knows that time travel isn’t possible in life. Raymond feels a chill rising through his body. Is it possible in death? He thinks about the reunions he’s witnessed. The soldier with his family. The child meeting his grandparents. It makes sense to Raymond! Dying people and preachers always talk about being reunited with their loved ones in Heaven.

A pale-blue Chevy sedan screeches into the parking lot and comes to a halt in front of Raymond. The familiar, red-faced driver scowls at him through the windshield. Raymond suddenly knows two things.

He knows he is dead.

He knows that for him, at least, this is not Heaven.