travel

yesterday i was walking down bay parkway the way i usually go, along the cemetery toward the f train. you have heard about this walk before, how this stretch along the cemetery is lined with impounded vehicles and resting long-haul trucks, how i see the truck drivers too often using the sidewalk as a toilet, how there are old buses sitting there too long to be impounds. one of these buses is an old charter, the kind with seats that look like the carpet in cheap atlantic city casinos, a blue that exists only in polyester and is flecked with reds and yellows and purples. a pattern probably listed as "skyburst" in a catalog in 1983. i have walked past it plenty of times, just like i've walked past an odd truck offering palm readings sitting in front of it.

but i wasn't paying any special sort of attention to the bus as i walked home. i was far more focused on the sky, storm-colored and low and the air, warm and rain smelling the way spring sometimes lets the air smell. not winter at all. not even fall. i was taking off my hat, unwrapping my scarf. 51 degrees. i noticed it without really registering it. there are things we take into our heads all the time without stopping to hold them up and look at them and only when something irritates our brain like sand in an oyster do we actually use our whole selves to look. and something was sand in my brain. sharp. jagged. one, two, three, four roundish holes in the windshield denting in the glass and the spiderwebs spreading around each hole ran into one another, overlapping rings, sharp ripples. gunshots. i do not know enough about gunshots to say for sure what sort of bullets were here earlier in the day, but i do know enough about glass to think that a bb gun or something only slightly more angry had been involved. the sort of guns my students insist they could use today are not as plentiful as they think and certainly weren't used to mutilate this poor bus. or put it out of its misery.

as i came abreast of the bus, i could see the passenger entry door had been shot up, too. the windows along the side were in various stages of destruction. the glass, clear every other day i've walked by it, was the color of a robin's egg. this color change happens to the sort of glass that crumbles when broken only, not to the kind that makes angry shards. two windows had been shot up and then, maybe, kicked in. the rubber seals around the windows were hanging partly off the metal and sticking to clumps of glass which had cracked like ice and scattered that pretty blue and concentrated it all at the same time. soft blue.

some days are like that, full of quiet all day and then a pile of bulletholes just sneaks right up on you. this morning, not much past 6:30 i walked to the train station and there was the guy who sells papers. this station is not my regular one so maybe he's the regular guy and maybe he isn't. what's important is that he had this huge case. like a suitcase sort of but rounded and squarish, a yellow that promised it came from 1972. you could put something larger than a french horn in there if you needed to but he had the thing filled with candy bars. the little bite size ones. it was sitting on a rack of some sort or maybe a chair, like luggage on one of those stands in hotel rooms. he raked his hands over the candy bars, smoothing out the shiny surface, like moving is hands through rubies or sapphires.

just a bit later i was waiting for the q train. the promise of rain was keeping the sky dark, still night, keeping platform lights on. the train rolled up and the doors opened. everything inside bright and orangy and warm and dry. orange seats. metal poles. bright, bright. and there in one of the short corner seats sat a tiny person. i'm going to say she was a woman because of her size and because of the sheet. a cream colored sheet, soft flannel with clusters of roses scattered over it. rosebuds mostly, but a few open blooms. the sheet was draped over her, over all of her. it was a sheet like one i remember from childhood. it was tucked in all around her, at her sides, under her feet, behind her head. like a gift, a package with a surprise in it, human, live. the assumption here is that this tiny woman was alive, asleep, had covered her own self up. nobody would cover the dead like that, tucked in tightly all around.

a kid on the train yelled, "who is learning chinese in a spanish class?" people got on the train. people got off. there were conversations and phone calls. people read books. i took out my knitting. yarn the color of rosebuds.