https://berkeleyfictionreview.com/issue-33/
a good seat
by jason howell
The following story won, “Notable Short” at the Eastern North Carolina Mid-Summer Weekend Literary Festival. Christina Cooke impressed the judges as a new writer and her tale, although technically a late-entry, startled festival officials and attendees alike. Not only was this autobiographical account composed upon Miss Cooke’s arrival but it was also created just three hours after the events herein occurred. We wish Miss Cooke a more comfortable trip to our festival next year and were sadden to hear she was dropped by a prospective publisher after she insisted on including this piece in a collection—named after this short story’s original title, “A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Writer’s Convention.” We would also like remind Miss Cooke that our event is indeed a festival, not a convention and that we expect a full and accurate mention, as per contest rules, in any future publication this work should find.
Usually, while all the other travelers stow their luggage in the Greyhound’s side compartment and kiss relatives goodbye, I’m already arranging my bag to face the aisle and arranging myself in a position I hope will dissuade any dawdling passengers from sitting down next to me. A good slouch, with my knees pinned to the back of the seat in front of me, as I glare slightly at a paperback, works best.
Today, due to personal circumstances that aren’t really your business, I’m the dawdler. As I climb up the metal steps, I see that two elderly ladies in bright stretch pants, bright sleeveless shirts and enveloping, post cataract-surgery style sunglasses have boarded ahead of me, along with one balding, middle-aged man sporting a moustache and very wide tie on a short-sleeve shirt. The man in the tie talks into his cell about dinner and Sandra’s grades while the old ladies fuss, in a casual, compact way, about nothing in particular. They all sit near the front. Luckily, we make up about a quarter of the total passengers on this trip; my late arrival to the station this afternoon won’t be punished with a bad seat.
I take in my choices as I walk down the aisle. I watch out for stains, subtly sniff for any odors and try to gage which widows will refuse to open. These are important qualities but not the central qualification—above all else, a good seat is one you don’t have to share. Weird stains (providing they are dry and you’re wearing pants or a skirt long enough to create a sanitary barrier) or even weird smells, to a lesser extent, can be overlooked if you manage to keep your traveling space your own. But beware: once that seat becomes a shared space, it inevitably becomes littered with uninvited conversation and unwanted offerings of opinions, life stories and complaints. And commandeering your attention is only the starting point. Inevitably, these strangers (strangers, I’ll stress) also ask that you forfeit to them whatever you are enjoying—either food, a magazine or book, or even minutes on your phone to let Uncle Bob know they are on their way but are killing time with (and killing the time of) a very nice young woman they just met right here on the bus.
These gluttonous borrowers will often present their requests with the same insincere preposition that, I’ve noticed, becomes shorter with each increased level of inconvenience: Do you mind waking me up when we’re off the interstate? You mind to help me with this crossword? Mind letting me have that bottle for a spit cup, honey? We can’t smoke tobacco on here but at least we can chew it!
There are two reasons I ride the bus despite the headaches. A: money—or, a lack of it. B: I’m an aspiring writer (see A) who understands that to write about people realistically you have to observe real people. And, as I’ve found traveling to various workshops, festivals and conventions, the rides don’t come any cheaper and the people don’t come any realer than on the highway bus system.
These considerations aside, I find a clean seat about two thirds of the way back and slide in. This is the tested and trusted sweet spot. Since we have a small band of travelers today most will sit near the front to be close to the door. The further back I sit the less likely I will be imposed upon. However, the last five rows back or so should always be avoided—the people who sit back there always seem to be harboring some dark secret. (Not to brag, but I have a hunch the most normal sort of person usually sits about two thirds of the way back.) I get into position with my bag and book.
A young man and an older man board, whispering self-consciously. They are apparently relatives and neither has ridden a bus before. Sitting near the back, they both hold their small, faded suitcases in their laps. They look around suspiciously, especially at the man in the tie. I wonder if it’s because he’s black. This reminds me of the xenophobic man and boy who make a rare train-ride into the city in a Flannery O’Connor piece. What’s it called? The title of that short story (derived from the obnoxious lawn-jockey that bewilders the pair) becomes startled by my conscious mind’s groping for it and squirms out from under my fingers whenever I get to close, remaining just out of reach like a stubborn pet rabbit that refuses to return to its hutch. This will go on, in the back of my mind, for about 45 minutes. The ambulance and police will arrive by then. A couple of my co-travelers, the wraparound sunglasses ladies, in fact, will be gasping and cheeping to a highway patrolman in the shade of the parked bus when I—sitting in the greasy grass on the shoulder and wiping splattered blood off my blouse with a wad of baby-wipes I won’t remember being handed—will recall and blurt out that awkward title, “That’s it, The Artificial N-----,” to no one and everyone. At that point on our journey, however, no one will notice.
Presently, I can’t help glancing back to check the nervous men’s expressions as the next couple board: a young African American man and a slightly older, pinkish woman. He sports a white and navy-blue Puma Better Men’s track suit and her body looked undernourished, her eyes looked bored and the lines around her pouting mouth and under her puffy eyelids say she quickly got used to the situation all around—whatever it is.
Disappointingly, my nervous pair merely whispers to each other about how much money they have for lunch. Meanwhile the black guy and pink gal sit a couple seats ahead of me. Neither speak until the man leans over, crinkling softly in his polyester, to ask the wide-tie man across the aisle if he minds to share the time, brother. The sweat in wide-tie’s moustache glints in the afternoon sun (our bus lacks tinted windows) as he grimaces before sighing and reading his watch aloud. Perhaps he considers the difference appearance and worries that his fellow passengers are making comparisons—as opposed to contrasts—or perhaps he feels the sting of being the first one to be accosted on this trip.
Several more people board and find their seats just before the door whistles shut, the brakes snort and we feel the bus begin to roll beneath us. But for now I’ve lost interest in people-watching—an activity that, unlike observing other animals, leads to mild depression unless you take frequent breaks. So I slouch into reading position and raise my faded copy of The ScrewTape Letters, held in one hand like a music stand, to my nose.
Then the bus shudders, halting with a fresh snort from the brakes and I think, without looking up from my book, that the trip has ended—in mechanical failure—before it began. But instead of apologizing on behalf of Greyhound and lying the best he can about how soon another bus will become available, I hear the driver curse and manhandle the lever that swings the clear plastic doors open. Then I hear the clop clop of feet on metal steps. Finally looking up, I see an unsteady figure rising above the horizon made by the backs of seats and by heads pivoting on suddenly-stiff necks. More necks, and presumably spines, stiffen as the homeless man starts down the aisle.
His hair and beard is damp and slicked down into place as if he had styled himself at a sink before boarding and his sandy eyebrows scrunch together as if he were staring into the sun. He wears a sweat- and dirt-stained blue tee-shirt with a woman’s green wool sweater tied around his waist. A plastic grocery bag, which appears to hold a wadded-up coat, bangs his knees as he shuffles somewhat like a penguin in a pair of rust-colored Reebok high-top sneakers tied with yellow and red electrical wire. The driver, perhaps as surprised (if only briefly) as his passengers, recovers and barks that no one rides without a ticket. The intruder freezes.
Slowly the late-boarder turns around and, from the reflection in the large mirror above the driver’s head, I watch him dig into his bag; the blue-and-white ticket appears, and, placing it over his chest, right over his heart, the bum gives the driver a brief but enthusiastic bow. Then, as if that resolved the matter and he was not about to be thrown off the bus anyway, the homeless man turns around again and shuffles deeper into our bus. The driver, as if he was not about to get up and throw the homeless man off the bus anyway, snorts, rubs his mouth and barks that he will put up with absolutely no disruptions before spinning around and gripping the wheel. Ignoring the pleading eyes that fill his rearview, our driver glances up to watch his newest passenger continue to trek into our midst. Then the driver shoots a glare at the bus station, presumably at the ticket office, as if mentally tallying a grudge, and finally propels the bus out into the street.
Meanwhile, our transient (who is no longer transient, in the adjective sense of the word, because he is now very much established on our bus) stops at my seat, exactly two thirds of the way down the aisle. In contemplative frustration, I think, his thin lips poke out the greasy beard and he grunts at my small, desert-camouflage computer-case that doubles as my bag. Without further pause, a single yellow-nailed finger daintily hooks the strap and my only luggage finds itself floating up, then down, then under the seat, accompanied, no less, by dump-trunk sound effects: “whrr, whrrr, beep, beep, beep.” The homeless man sits down beside me. Now, if there were a single lecherous look or dirty comment to report I could raise the alarm and correct this arrangement but as it is, he doesn’t seem aware there is anyone beside him. However, a faint odor of sweat and mildew assures me of his presence.
As buildings, traffic-lights and intersections become a continuous blur of rural green flowing beneath the horizon where the sun appears to be setting early behind the distant hills, my companion raises his left hand to the back of the seat in front of us and begins to walk his fingers along the edge like upside-down scissors. Knotting his eyebrows again, he watches his fingers march—middle finger, forefinger, middle finger—and begins to chew his bottom lip. I am no longer reading my book, though I’m trying to pretend.
The fingers strut across the edge of the seat with confident steps, forward, then backwards, sometimes the thumb scratching at the back of the forefinger as if to goad it on. The man keeps his body as still as possible, except for his lips, which he continues to chew. His arm, seeming to be apart from his body, propels his hand with the two fingers marching. Through narrowed lids, his eyes follow the fingers. I realize he is holding his breath.
When he shoots his right hand forward he grunts with the release of tension and I jump—but only minutely, as if my startle reflex subordinates to the instinct to lie low and quiet. Breathing quickly now, panting in fact, the man maneuvers his fist around the captured fingers as if they might try to break free and run if they feel a single weak-spot in his grip. Slowly, carefully, he presses his left hand against his chest with his right and repositions his prey so that the forefinger and middle finger poke out of his quivering fist. My seat-mate continues to pant; I hear the other occupants of the bus breathing loudly as well.
Slowly, the man raises his fist—and with some effort too, since the left arm dangles, dead weight, below the hostage fingers. That weight nearly pulls the left hand out of his grasp as the man unwinds his right thumb, releasing the middle finger and slipping the fist around the index finger. At almost losing his prize, the man hisses wetly through clenched teeth. He purses his lips, bows his head and presses the whole affair to his lap for a moment, then raises, with a triumphant, gravelly chuckle, that single finger, now nearly purple, back up to eye-level and opens his mouth.
He takes gnawing bites, with his canine teeth, along the side of the pointer-finger, sucking the blood up before, presumably, too much leaks around his right fist and causes him to lose his grip again. His audiences, our fellow-commuters, issue low moans and choked gasps but are, at the moment, too engrossed to get down to the business of really screaming in fear or making indignant protest. Instead, absorbed and shocked, we watch. After the canines punch four overlapping gashes into the side of the finger, the front teeth come into play, but not biting down—instead, they saw up and down the length of the finger while the auto-cannibal’s eyebrows arch and waggle above eyes shut in dreamy satisfaction. I, by now in a state somewhat removed from the situation, consider how much he looks like a cartoon character eating corn on the cob.
Licking the bushy parameter of his lips, the homeless man abruptly leaves off sawing at the side of his finger to work on the fingernail. Here his canine teeth, the bottom left canine tooth precisely, again becomes the tool of his gluttony. He works at the nail like someone opening a beer bottle, but much more deliberately, until it is unhinged enough to poke back into his cheek and pinched between his rear molars. The nail does not disconnect but hangs on tenaciously to the cuticle, which hangs onto the skin, which becomes a strip running down the top of the finger, pulling taut the wrinkles of the first knuckle.
High-pitched squeals now begin to fill the bus and I feel the highway turn into uneven shoulder under the wheels. The driver bellows something I can’t make out. Sensing the ride is near its end, the man sets his self-predation into high gear, bobbing his head up and down on the his prey like a piston: snapping his jaws down on his finger, then jerking his head back hard enough to punch our seat with a deep thump and the squeak of springs, then flinging his mouth toward the bloody mess again. A front tooth clatters to the floor; his nose crunches against the knuckle of the restraining right hand; he pokes himself at least one good time in the eye with the winnowed digit.
That digit, missing not only the fingernail but now the entire distal phalanx, the tip of the bone, sits pitiful, still captive. Dribbled blood—still new to the outside, oxygenated world—is just turning from purple to red as it fills the spaces between the strands of shredded skin, making a miniature curtain that trembles below the bone. That bone, growing out of the whittled stump, glistens.
A past boyfriend who is a nurse once told me the muscles that work the fingers sit above the wrist and that you can feel them by wiggling your fingers while pressing the fingertips of your other hand into your lower forearm—if your other hand has all its fingers. As my boyfriend told me, there are no muscles in the fingers themselves, only tendons. And those tendons, I can now tell you, look like the white, sinuous ends of skinless chicken breast strips.
I realize the bus has stopped and there is a loud but brief clamber of footsteps in the aisle, however, even if my exit was not blocked by the suddenly still figure, I would still be unable to make myself move. The man and I stare at his hands, now resting in his lap, for what seems a long time. Things become quiet on the bus—the voices outside seem even more distant then they are. Slowly the man turns. He has indeed poked himself in the eye—the white is no longer white but shot nearly as red as the flecks and splashes caught in the hair on his cheeks and chin and on the front of his shirt.
The man sniffs and clears his throat, now beginning to catch his breath, and nods at what I first believe is my forgotten and, by now, severely damp book, still held in one sweaty hand on my lap. Then it dawns on me that he is staring at the most practical and, for the time being, omnipresent bookmark I can claim, my very own index finger, holding my place between the pages of the closed paperback.
The beggar wipes his mouth on his dirty sleeve and licks his lips: “Do you mind?”
