Dave shrugs. What can he tell Artie? That Artie is raw meat, chum for the company? That his sole purpose for the company, and therefore perhaps in life, is to pull his suit on each morning and hurl his body at the stacks of dull paper, earning his 3 percent, passing on the rest of the bloated profit to the absentee, do-nothing owner of the company, until Artie’s body is gray and bent and lifeless and all joy and spontaneity has been sucked from his brain?
Dave shrugs again, looks in the mirror at Artie. Dave heard the waver in Artie’s voice, too.
“I just ask for ’em,” Dave says, and that is as close to the truth as he wants to come—that he, Dave, gets them, and that Artie does not.
“Warehouses are big,” Artie complains. “So fucking big and empty. Nothing in them. A hell of a lot of work,” he says. “Shit. Apartments are easy. I could knock out apartments in no time.”
“Look,” Dave says. He points up the road to a dingy white bus that’s traveling the same direction as they are. It’s a prison bus from Huntsville: an aging school bus. It’s lit up inside with a yellow glow like the light that comes from old bug lamps. Riding through the night like that, it looks as if the prisoners are up on some kind of stage for exhibit, or are floating in light.
The prisoners are jammed shoulder to shoulder, three to a seat, and they are staring straight ahead. Perhaps a hundred of them are packed in there. They are so motionless, so locked into their straight-ahead stares, that it seems certain they must be handcuffed.
There is wire mesh, like a cage, all around the bus’s windows, and the bus is moving slowly.
Wilson pulls closer to the bus, on its left, and begins passing it; as he does, the three men are struck by a horrible, giddy kind of silliness. They begin making faces at the prisoners, first Artie and then Dave and then Wilson. They leer and hold their hands up to their ears and pantomime and grin, making taunting gestures of nonsense to the prisoners, and then pass on.
But almost immediately, as if some shell or husk has come back over them, or has instead been peeled back again to reveal who they really are, the three men are a bit remorseful, and embarrassed—a bit shocked—by what they have done. They ride on in silence.
Wilson has switched on the mute button on his pager, but in the darkness, it blinks red again, and Artie utters a quiet “Whoop!”
“Which exit is it?” Wilson asks. “Texas City, or League City?”
“Texas City,” Dave says. “I told you that. You’d better slow down and get over. You’re going to miss it.” Already, there’s a lot of traffic, men going to work in the refineries at Baytown, Texas City, and Galveston. The oil comes straight in to the Gulf from the Middle East, from Africa and Russia, from the North Sea, China, and South America, and is refined there on the shore. Refineries and smokestacks line the beach like skyscrapers. The orange and yellow plumes of flare-gas flutter raggedly in the night, but the sight is strangely pretty, oddly comforting. Wilson pulls into the right lane and slows down, watching for the exit. Dave looks back to see where the prison bus is, and he is alarmed to see that it’s gaining on them.
“If you speed up and get a ticket,” he tells Wilson, “I’ll pay for it, as long as you don’t let them catch up with us.”
Wilson cackles and slows down further.
“I’ll get you for this, Wilson,” Dave says to his younger brother, and slumps down in his seat. He averts his face as the prison bus passes them once more; but still he cannot help but look.
The driver is giving them a malevolent stare. He’s a big man in a uniform, with a crewcut, and for a moment, with his eyes alone, he drills holes in their truck. He’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly with his big fists that it seems he will break it off.
“Oh, lovely,” Dave says. And is it his imagination, or as the bus passes are all the prisoners on that side of the bus watching out of the corners of their eyes? They are still staring lock-solid straight ahead, as they must have been told to do, but doesn’t it seem, too, that there is some hint of peripheral vision, that the prisoners are casting sidelong corner-eyed glances of rage down at them? Memorizing their faces, perhaps, their license plate, their existence, for the prisoners to hold clenched in their hearts for all the rest of their days—gripping that knowledge so tightly until it seems it will crack, and waiting for the day they get out, then, to go looking for them?
And if they do, will they find them? Would they know where to look? Might it be an easy thing for the prisoners to hold on to even a tiny rage for a very long time, given their predicament?
The three men feel strongly that they have made a mistake, in their one errant moment of lightheartedness: some crooked, mistaken flight of frivolousness.
The prison bus gets off ahead of them, at the same exit they’re taking.
“Maybe they’re all going fishing, too,” says Wilson. “Maybe it’s like a vacation.”
“Maybe they’ve chartered our same boat,” says Artie.
And though none of the men really believes this, there is a long, stultifying tension that builds and builds, as ahead of them, the bus takes the same series of left turns and rights that they are taking, as if it is indeed going out on the pier, too, to meet the guide. And it is finally only at the
