Lights Out

step back.

“Sunglasses,” Eddie said.

That reassured him. “For on the water, or just swanning around?” he said.

“For glare.”

The man pointed a nicotine-tipped finger. “Try those.”

“Yellow?”

“That’s amber. Says antiglare right on them.”

Eddie tried on amber sunglasses. They made everything yellow. “I’ll have to look outside.” He walked out of the shop, to the entrance of the bus station. The man followed, close behind. Eddie looked out. There was less glare, but everything was yellow, including the cop and his squad car, now parked in the bus-station parking lot. Donut consumed, but the cop was still watching him.

“Well?” the clerk asked, gazing up at his face. Eddie could smell him. “You want them or not?”

“Okay,” Eddie said.

They returned to the shop. The clerk punched numbers on the cash register. “Twenty-four ninety-five,” he said.

That seemed like a lot for sunglasses. Eddie took out the brown envelope, fished through for a ten and a twenty. The money hadn’t changed at all. It’s expensive, outside these walls. But you could buy things that changed the color of the view.

“I haven’t got all day.”

Eddie handed over the cash and put on the glasses. The clerk gave him $5.05 and came at him with a pair of scissors. Eddie jumped back.

“You wanna go around with that tag flappin’ on your nose, fine with me.”

Eddie let him cut off the tag. He joined the line at the ticket counter. In front of him stood a squat, olive- skinned woman with a baby in her arms and a restless little girl at her side. The little girl wore earrings, a frilly dress, and shiny black dancing shoes. She seemed too young to be turned out like that, but still Eddie couldn’t take his eyes off her. She had skinny arms and legs and big, serious eyes, and she skipped around in circles, singing a Spanish song under her breath. Eddie had forgotten that such creatures lived, and lived on the same planet as the man with the ring in his tongue. He suddenly thought of the beautiful water snakes that saved the mariner’s soul-“O happy living things!”-and understood them a little better. Then the girl saw him watching and buried herself in her mother’s skirt. The mother turned, gave Eddie a hard stare and the girl a smack on the back of her head. Eddie, towering over them, tried to appear harmless.

“Where to, buddy?”

Then he was at the counter, facing the ticket agent. The ticket agent was an old man with hairs sticking out of his ears and nose and formless and faded tattoos on his shriveled forearms. He was a con; Eddie knew it at once.

“Where to?”

That was the question. The answer depended on his plans-what you’re going to do tomorrow, next week, next year. Eddie scanned the destination board on the wall behind the agent. He thought of going down to the Gulf, finding work on a fishing boat. He knew, had known, a little about boats. There was a bus to Baton Rouge at four-thirty. Eddie moved to look at his watch, but of course it was gone. “What time is it?”

“Two hairs past a freckle,” said the old man. “C’mon, buddy. We’s on a tight schedule here.” He tried drumming his fingers aggressively on the counter, but they were too arthritic for stunts like that.

Home, Eddie thought. That was a laugh; but why not? Had he known it all along? “Any buses going north?”

“All the ways to Beantown.”

Close enough. “When?”

“Two minutes ago. You can catch it if you’ll just kindly the hell move.”

“How much?”

“One way or return?”

“One way.”

The ticket cost Eddie almost a third of his gate money. He hurried out into the yellow, past the cop still watching from his squad car, and knocked on the door of the Americruiser. It opened. “Luggage?” the driver said.

“Nope.”

“Lez go.” The driver’s hand was out, fingers gesturing for something to be laid in it. Eddie climbed on and gave him the ticket. Outside, in the real world, as the C.O. had put it, he was a step or two slow, like a visitor from another land.

The bus wasn’t crowded. Eddie found a window seat halfway back. The bus rolled across the lot, past the squad car, onto the open road. Eddie watched the real world go by, all yellow. Then the motion got to him. I can’t be tired, he thought, not after a lifetime on that bunk. But his eyes closed anyway.

He dreamed a familiar dream, of the banana-shaped island and the shed beside the tennis court. It was dark inside, despite the summer afternoon heat, and smelled of pig blood and red clay. Mandy smelled of red clay too, red clay and fresh sweat. Her tennis clothes clung to her body. She slipped her hand between his legs, under his shorts, around his balls. “Shh,” she said. They had to be quiet. He couldn’t remember why.

Eddie awoke with a dry throat and an erection. The bus was stopped and full of people moving around. A slight man in a cheap black suit said: “Excuse me, sir, is this seat taken?”

Eddie straightened, shook his head. The man sat in the aisle seat, opened a Bible. The bus started with a jerk and picked up speed. Eddie looked out. A long line of leafless trees went by, then a billboard that said “Christ Is Love” and pictured a garish Jesus on the verge of tears. Eddie glanced at the man in the black suit. With a kind of grease pencil Eddie hadn’t seen before, he was highlighting a passage. Eddie leaned closer. “Whoever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?” The man felt his presence and made a wall with his hand between Eddie and the text, like an A student stopping an unprepared one from cheating on a test.

Eddie gazed out the window. The sun was low in the sky now, everything still yellow. He removed the glasses to see if the glare had gone, but it had not. He put them on and was soon asleep.

When he awoke it was night and the man with the Bible was gone. Eddie felt in his pocket and found that his gate-money envelope and its contents, all but the $5.05 in change from the sunglasses, were gone too. He got down on the floor, peered under the seat, felt behind the cushion. He found Prof’s cardboard tube, a book of matches, Kleenex, a used condom, but no gate money. He sat up, looked around. There was no one else on the bus, except the driver and a gum-chewing woman wearing hair curlers the same shade of green as his shirt. Not yellow: green. That’s when he realized that the sunglasses were gone as well, snatched right off his sleeping face.

Eddie strode to the front of the bus. “Where’d the guy in the black suit get off?”

“Mind stepping back of the line?” said the driver. A new driver, Eddie saw: a woman. She had frosted blond hair and a strong jaw. No reason it shouldn’t be a woman, but it stopped his momentum just the same. Eddie looked down at the white line in the aisle. “Do not cross when bus is in motion” was stenciled on the rubber. Eddie stepped back and repeated his question.

“Couldn’t say,” the driver replied. “I’ve got enough to do with this storm.”

Eddie glanced out. Flying things swarmed all around, like insects. Snow. No reason there shouldn’t be snow, but that threw him too, after fifteen snowless years. “Where are we?”

“Just across the state line,” the driver said. She didn’t say what state and Eddie didn’t ask. What he wanted to do, at that moment, was get on a bus going the other way, back; back down south, to that shrimp boat. A much better idea. What the hell was he thinking, going home? Home was just snow, ice, a frozen river. Other than that, it didn’t exist and never had. He came from somewhere, that was all. Everybody came from somewhere. It didn’t mean a thing.

Eddie made his way to his seat, past the woman in green curlers who was now wearing earphones as well. He needed a smoke. Didn’t have any, because that was one of the things he was giving up in his new life. What kind of a plan was that? These were his plans: 1) steam bath; 2) quit smoking; 3) take nothing with him when he went. So now he was hungry, hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and was forced to ask others for the time. Fifteen years to think, and that was it?