Ben Esra telefonda seni bosaltmami ister misin?
Telefon Numaram: 00237 8000 92 32
It was cold as fuck.Pewter gray clouds scudded in from the west, moving low and fast as I stood in line for the bus at the Greyhound terminal in Des Moines, Iowa. Dawn bloomed as a small ball of muted yellow, cowering underneath the stratus. I huddled inside my winter coat, the hood shielding my head, my hands pulled up inside the sleeves, trying to keep to a minimum my exposure to the chilly morning air.My belongings were in the backpack next to me.I was twenty years old.The bus driver motioned me forward. As he took my ticket I looked back along the line of seats, scanning for a large unused space at the back of the bus where I could put down my pack, kick back and stretch out.The bus driver returned my ticket to me and gestured half-heartedly to the back of the bus. I wrestled my backpack awkwardly down the center aisle of the bus, looking for a place large enough for me and my stuff. All I wanted to do was throw my pack onto a seat and lean my head against the window and let the vibration of the glass against my head numb me into an uneasy sleep until I arrived in Minneapolis.I walked the length of the bus. No empty rows of chairs. Everyone had taken the window seat in their own row. Someone had laid out on the very back bus seat and appeared to be sleeping. In order to sit down I was going to have to take a seat next to someone.Fuck.A kid bobbing his head to the beat on his Walkman sat in the seat in front of the sleeping figure. I resigned myself to sitting next to him.“You wanted to sit back here, didn’t you?”I turned and looked down at the person who had laid down in the back seat. A young woman met my gaze. She appeared lost in the thick oversized hoodie she wore. The hood covered half her face.“I did the same thing,” she told me. “I wanted the back of the bus all to myself. But someone else was here, some old guy. So I had to sit in the seat up front, next to that kid listening to Zeppelin on his Walkman, until the old guy got off the bus. When he did I took the back of the bus over. I didn’t want to take any more chances. I’m sorry. It was rude of me.”I didn’t know what else to add. “It’s okay,” I said. I flung my pack onto the racks above and prepared to sit.“You can sit here,” she said. “Next to me. If you want. I mean, it’s a free country.” She looked down and away, toward the cheap ripped plastic of the upholstery.I’d made her feel awkward. Now I had to decide between acting on my guilt and sitting next to her, and my desire to sit by myself and turn off my brain for the next four to five hours.Guilt won.I sat down next to her. She kept her gaze averted from me, and I assumed she still felt awkward about our initial encounter.“I don’t mind,” I told her. “I wouldn’t mind somebody to talk to either. It’s gonna be a long trip.”She turned toward me, smiling brightly. “Yay! I love to talk!”I didn’t love to talk.I couldn’t figure out if she was conventionally attractive or not. Her body was fully camouflaged by her gigantic hoodie and a long, loose, colorful skirt. Her wide, over-eager eyes took up all the focus when I looked at her face, locking onto my sporadic eye contact like a tractor beam. Her nose looked red and raw, as if she was recovering from a cold. Her full lips were pocked with ragged skin, chapped and peeling. I Escort elvankent tried to picture here dressed nicely, with makeup, and minus the redness and chapping.I really didn’t want to spend the day talking to her if she was unattractive.I was twenty years old.I sat down next to her.She said, “I gotta admit, I saw you walk onto the bus and hoped you’d come back here. I’m glad you did.”I shrugged off the compliment, not wanting to get overly involved.“I was just looking for a place to sit,” I told her.“So sit,” she said. I realized I’d offended her again. I hated when women were angry with me.“Where are you going?” I asked her. I tried to sound friendly. Friendlier, anyway.“Minnesota.”“Well, yeah, but where in Minnesota?”“Owatona.” The observation that she was only giving me one word answers was not lost on me. “You?”At least it was a question. I told her, “I’m going to Minneapolis. I have a friend there. Gonna live on their couch for awhile.” It was a true statement, strictly speaking, but it left out most of the important details. The gender of the friend remained conveniently hidden.“Are you moving there?”“I dunno. Yeah. Maybe.” I didn’t know what I was going to do.“Well, it’s a nice city. Lotsa good music.”The conversation lapsed. A few more people entered the bus and took their seats, none of them near us. The driver closed the folding front doors, started up with a wheeze of diesel, and shifted into gear. The bus lurched out of its bay in the Greyhound terminal and onto the slushy surface streets of Des Moines, Iowa. Within five minutes we’d merged onto Interstate 35, headed north.Minneapolis was six hours away.We were out of downtown Des Moines within minutes. The suburbs disappeared behind us within a half an hour, and rolling, snow-covered hills stretched to the horizon in every direction. I’d grown up in that landscape, and had always found it repetitive and dull, the monotonous conformity of the scenery a perfect match for the people who chose to live there.Or so I thought. I was twenty years old.“My uncle lives in Owatona,” she said. “He got me a job at Dunkin Donuts. I’ll have to pay him a little rent, but not much. It’s a small town. I can save money, stay out of trouble this time, figure out what I want to do next.”My interest perked up a little. “You were in trouble?”She laughed, loudly enough for others to turn around.“Oops, sorry.” She laughed again anyway. “Yeah, I was in a little trouble.” She paused, waiting for me to ask what kind of trouble.“What kind of trouble?” I had nothing else to do.“Whaddaya got?” she said, laughing again. “Sorry. Again. That’s from an old movie. I dunno what happened. It doesn’t matter, you don’t care.”I didn’t want her to think that. “Try me,” I said.“Okay. I saw a dead guy.”“You saw a dead guy.”“Yep. I saw a dead guy.”“Did you kill him?”“No.” She laughed again. I was beginning to recognize she laughed a lot. “The guy next door got shot. By his girlfriend or his wife or somebody. We were partying in my apartment, next door.”“We?”“Me and Dolph and Joanie and Tim. Dolph’s my boyfriend. WAS my boyfriend. Joanie and Tim are just friends. And we were partying, like I said. Nothing hardcore: just booze and weed. And we heard a gunshot.”“What did it sound emek escort like?”“What do you think? It sounded like a gunshot.” Another laugh. “We all look at each other. And we’re buzzed enough to think that going over there to check it out is a good idea. So we do.”“That doesn’t sound smart.”“We walk over there, Dolph pounds on the door, pretty hard, because there’s music and TV playing loud in there. The door swings open. Just like in a horror movie. We walk in. The whole place reeks of booze. Weed too, but mostly booze—I find out later it’s because there’s a broken bottle of Crown Royal on the floor of the bathroom. I mean, like, why bring liquor into a bathroom?”“It doesn’t sound like they were thinking too clearly.”“It gets worse. WAY worse. First, Dolph stops and says, ‘I smell gunpowder.’ Dolph wasn’t exactly a smart guy, but he knew guns. I knew what we’d find the second he said that, and I was right. We turned the corner into the living room and there’s the dead guy, face down in a puddle of blood. Dolph goes over there right away, he’s a hunter, he’s the most comfortable with this kinda stuff. He takes the dead guy’s pulse, looks at me and shrugs his shoulders. Joanie and Tim go over. I just watch them standing over the body, talking. And after the shock wears off everything just seems so normal. Someone lights up a cigarette. They start talking about football. Fucking football. And I realize how quickly all this became ordinary. Weed and booze. Blood and glass. Guns and murder. And I hear the TV and the radio from the other side of the wall and I want to scream at those assholes to turn it down, and realize it’s my own apartment. My radio, my TV making all that noise. I’m the asshole I wanna yell at.”“That sounds rough.” My sympathies beginning to kick in, against my will.“Eventually someone calls 911, we go back to my place. Same smell of weed and booze in there—we open a window to air the place out before the cops show up. They show up, ask their questions, they smell the weed, they don’t care. We state partying again as soon as they leave. And about one in the morning Dolph gets up off the couch, and he stops, like, trying to regain his balance, he’s really fucking drunk. He stands there, absolutely still, like a telephone pole, for what seems like forever.“He leans back, he leans forward, like he’s being blown by some invisible wind. Then he falls straight forward. His head slams hard right into the TV. Bone against glass, POW! And it’s loud! The screen cracks. It’s not one of those thin screen things, this was a big-ass cathode tube TV.“I’m too scared to move. Another dead guy. After a really long pause, Tim checks Dolph’s pulse. Tim shrugs his shoulders just like Dolph did, back in the other room. And it’s like the same moment all over again. TV and music on at the same time, playing loud, the smell of weed and booze everywhere. And some guy who might be dead on the floor.“I just got up and walked out. Fuck it. Didn’t even wait to see if he was okay. I got a text later that he was fine. By then I’d already taken all my money outta the bank and bought my bus ticket.“If I hadn’t seen the dead guy I wouldn’t be here now.”Pause.“Dolph?” I asked.“What?”“His name was Dolph? Your boyfriend? Weird eryaman escort bayan name is all.”“Tell me about it. No, his real name was Ted, but he hated it. He looked a little like an actor we saw in a movie once. Dolph Lungren. You’ve probably never heard of him.”“Sure I have. I Come in Peace!”Together, and with surprising precision, we said, “And you go in pieces!” We both started laughing. The laugh felt genuine, and refreshing. Our laughter ebbed.“He sounds like a dick,” I offered.“He was kind of a dick,” she admitted.The silence that followed deepened into introspection. Empty white fields slid past us at fifty-five miles an hour, broken stalks breaking through the snow like the buildings of a ruined city. Nothing loomed on the horizon except a farmhouse and three grain silos, clustered together, as if huddling together from the cold. I leaned my forehead against the ice-frosted glass of the window.The kid in front of us opened his Walkman, flipped the cassette to side two, closed it, and hit ‘play.’ The opening notes of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” sounded through his tinny earphones.“So why are you on this bus?” she asked me.I kept my eyes trained on the landscape outside. “I thought I told you. Gonna stay on someone’s couch for awhile.” I didn’t think the situation required any more explanation.“That’s one of those answers that’s really just a bunch more questions, pretending to be an answer.”“Huh?”“You’re gonna stay on someone’s couch, right?”I nodded, without turning around. I didn’t want to talk. I felt a headache beginning to creep up on me.“Whose couch? For how long? Why? What’s wrong with your couch?”I might have answered the first question or two. All those questions posed at once left me weary and overwhelmed. I didn’t respond, or even react much.“Your kind of a dead guy yourself, huh?”I didn’t expect that. “Whaddaya mean?”“You don’t say much. You don’t do much. You don’t even seem to listen.”“I listen.” I did listen.“Prove it. What did I say?”“Your boyfriend’s name is Dolph. Someone got shot in the apartment next to you. You and Dolph went inside and found a dead guy.”“Mostly. Actually what I was thinking was that we were all dead already. A room full of dead people. But, close enough.”Whew. Dodged a bullet.“So, again. Why are you going to Minneapolis?”She wasn’t going to give up, and Minneapolis was still five hours away.I lifted my forehead from the glass. “Okay. Okay.”“Yay!” Her tone was light, but she studied my face intently as she said it. “That thing you said about everything seeming normal?” I began.“Yes?”“Well, it’s kinda like that.”Silence. I wasn’t sure any more explanation was necessary. I felt a heaviness invade my limbs. I felt very tired. Tears welled up from someplace inside me, though I had no idea why.She noticed. She touched my arm.I didn’t feel like talking. Or at least I didn’t think I felt like talking. Because, when she reached out and touched my arm, the words came pouring out. “I live with my parents. I work at the Hy Vee. When my shift is over I come home to my parents, to the same place I’ve lived for twenty years. The Hy Vee is the place I used to go get candy from when I was a little kid. Everything is the same as everything else. One day blends into the next. Nothing changes.”She put her hand on my knee. “You are changing. You’re on this bus, right now. You’re leaving where you were. You’re moving to Minneapolis, right?”“I’m gonna stay on a friend’s couch. Not the same thing.”“Who’s the friend?”“It’s a long story.”“We have the time. And you have a captive audience.”