Aria and Taylor felt the tension build and the insecurity start to pull their perfect plan apart at the seams. Aria was terrified that the police might have given her name to the bus station and that at any moment, she would have to make a run for it.
“At least one parent or guardian is supposed to be here at the counter to sign for an unaccompanied child,” the woman eventually said. “But your sister is seventeen. Children seventeen years of age and older can travel unaccompanied with no restrictions, so she doesn’t need this.”
She placed the unnecessary document to the side of her desk and began to type on the computer in front of her. Her words let them off the hook. Taylor gave Aria a quick smile that expected acknowledgment back for his incredible talent at getting away with things – even if they hadn’t needed the documents.
“I hope your father gets better,” the woman said, as the printer beside her elbow spat out documents. “You two have a good trip. The bus departs at 6.30pm and it boards twenty minutes before departure, right out those doors,” she said. She slipped two tickets and the IDs under the tiny opening in the bulletproof glass.
Taylor took them, saying, “Thank you, ma’am … come on, sis,” and strolled away in a manner that would give the impression they were in fact brother and sister.
Guarding the tickets like treasure, Aria and Taylor spent the day waiting in the area near the Greyhound bus station to board the bus that would take them from Chicago to LA. They had entertained the idea of spending the day seeing the places in the city that they might miss and perhaps would never see again, but decided against it. They couldn’t afford to miss the bus, even if that meant waiting the entire day for it to come.
First, they walked to the shade of a bridge by a river four streets away from the bus station. Motivated by their triumph, they took two rocks and laughed as they tediously scratched a message into the bridge’s surface. The powder-white words “Goodbye Cruel World” began to emerge from the now-blemished grunge cement. They were conscious that if anyone saw the message, they would think that someone had committed suicide. They found it funny. But the words’ true meaning was a goodbye to the life they had lived there in that city. They were bound for an entirely different life. A life that was no longer a dead end, but one full of possibility and promise.
They spent the rest of the day sitting outside a gas station, under the overhang of the roof, trying to nap and escape the bite of the sun. Aria surprised Taylor with a jug of peanut butter and crackers purchased with some of the extra $314 that remained from the money she’d stolen. They ate it together like it was a celebration meal.
By the time Taylor’s twelfth check-in on what time it was with the gas station attendant resulted in the answer of “six o’clock,” Taylor had worn out the man’s patience. They lined up early with their tickets to board the bus. When the driver stepped down from the open door, wearing a fluorescent yellow vest, they felt the same tension that they had experienced earlier that day begin to revisit them. But all he did was check their tickets and motion them inside.
CHAPTER 9
The valleys and plains they passed along Highway 40, though dry, gave more of a lonely impression of open ocean than of land. The sun seemed to be fixed on life, sucking the water from everything. The main streets of the old western towns were littered now with impermanent chain stores. Absent of a building code, it looked as if the businesses that came there had all snagged themselves on the destitution, unprepared for the kind of customers who leave their Christmas lights on all year long. Since the beginning people had been coming to the West, mistaking the impression of endlessness for opportunity.
In her naivety, Aria had expected to see cowboys herding cattle on the plains, but the people who would be driving those cattle, growing gardens or canning their own food seemed to have been swallowed up by the wave of modern society and left behind by it. Now the cowboy, who once conquered the Native American, found himself conquered, his life made obsolete. To Aria’s dismay, they lived in trailer parks or houses that were falling apart on the outskirts of what could hardly be called cities, living on cigarettes and chew and easy-access television. Instead of working the land, they worked on oil rigs or metal shops or corporate dairy farms because it was all they could afford to do.
The West was conquered barely over a hundred years ago and still, Aria could see it was already full of a hard-won, gunshot, broken history and the kind of wounds that never heal. But beyond the hot crackle of the grasshoppers, she found there to be a slow, heartbreaking beauty; a vastness that could never be possessed.
They traversed an unpeopled wilderness where the night sky was so dark, the stars were a bright, white dust instead of interspersed lights, not just those which could outshine the nebulous glow of the city. There were sunsets and wildflowers. Animals outside cages, people outside metal and glass. A violent dance of nature, where life itself was distilled to its raw, original self.
The bus had driven through the night. Aria was staring at a man in an army uniform sitting three rows up from her. She caught herself wondering about his life, creating possible scenarios about where he was going and
