Besides which, he hadn’t thought about a destination. He had thought only about leaving Newport, not at all about going somewhere else.
So when he stood in front of the ticket window at the bus depot, he said it automatically, without stopping to think about it at all. “Two tickets to Albany,” he said, and the chasm opened up as big as life and twice as deep.
He couldn’t go to Albany! That was where he lived, for the love of Pete, he couldn’t go there!
But he’d already said it, and he was now too petrified to say anything else, to change the already announced destination. To be a draft-age young man on the way to Albany was suspicious enough. To be a draft-age young man who changed his mind and decided not to go to Albany after all wasn’t suspicious, it was an absolute admission of identity.
While teetering on the brink of the chasm, he heard the calm (not suspicious!) voice of the ticket agent say, “One way or round trip?”
With the impulsive cunning of a treed raccoon, he said, “Round trip.” There, that would allay the ticket agent’s suspicions.
Two round-trip tickets to Albany cost him a hundred dollars and change. It was a pretty expensive way to allay suspicions, all things considered, depleting their finances by one-quarter.
He was too embarrassed and ashamed to tell Honour Mercy what he’d done. Happily, she didn’t ask him where they were going, and the public address system, in announcing their bus, mentioned so many other cities (Cleveland, Pittsburg, Harrisburg, Philadelphia) that his blunder was lost in the crowd.
So here he was on the bus, well after midnight, surrounded by gently snoring (innocent, untroubled) passengers, being serenaded with songs about death, and hurtling toward doom and destruction and Albany.
What to do? He considered leaving the bus at one of the cities before Albany, and rejected it. The driver, who kept a head-count, would notice that two passengers were missing, and would delay the bus for them, for a few minutes, thereby calling attention to their absence. The Authorities would somehow get into the act, and Richie could visualize the scene in which the driver described the runaways to these Authorities, who wouldn’t take long to realize that the absent male was none other than the deserter from Scott Air Force Base, Richie Parsons.
He couldn’t stay on the bus all the way to Albany, and he couldn’t leave it beforehand. The problem was too much for him. He stared gloomily at the night-shrouded empty flatness outside the window, and the guitarist in the back seat switched to a new song: “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley; Hang down your head and cry; Hang down your head, Tom Dooley; Poor boy, you’re bound to die.”
It was a long night.
They had breakfast in Cleveland, where Richie was too nervous to operate the silverware, and Honour Mercy finally asked him what was wrong. It was obvious he hadn’t slept all night.
So he admitted his mistake, shame-facedly, and out-lined the horns of the dilemma. And Honour Mercy, the practical one, immediately gave him the solution. “We change buses in New York,” she said. “We just won’t change, that’s all. People do it all the time. Get later buses and things.”
Richie smiled with sudden relief. “Sure,” he said. “Sure!” And when they got back on the bus, he fell immediately to sleep.
He woke up to discover that the bus was inside a building, with a lot of other buses, and the confining walls and roof made the sound of all those engines a tremendous racket.
He didn’t know where he was, or where in the world he possibly could be, and the panic that always rode just beneath his surface popped out again, and he stared around in absolute terror.
Fortunately for Richie Parsons, Honour Mercy Bane was a girl loaded to the gunwales with maternal instinct. She now put a soothing hand on his arm, and told him, quietly, that they were in New York City and this was the bus depot. “I didn’t know whether I should wake you up to see everything when we came into the city or not,” she added. “But you looked so peaceful, sleeping there, I thought I should let you alone.”
“You can just disappear in New York,” Richie told her. “It’s so big.” He’d read that someplace, and firmly believed it.
People were getting off the bus. Richie blocked the aisle for a minute, getting the two suitcases down from the overhead rack, and then he and Honour Mercy followed the other passengers into the brightly-lit main waiting room of the Port Authority bus terminal. Honour Mercy, this last part of the trip, had been thinking again about finances. Four hundred dollars — now three hundred dollars — seemed like an awful lot when your chief expenses were magazines and paperback books and other items from the drugstore, and meals. But three hundred dollars seemed like an awfully small drop an awfully big bucket when it was all you had to live on in New York City. Somebody had told her that living New York was more expensive than anyplace else in the world, and she believed that as firmly as Richie believed that it was possible to just disappear in New York.
They had an awful lot of money tied up in two tickets from Albany to Newport, two cities neither of them expected to be going to for some time. It seemed wasteful, and Honour Mercy, if she retained nothing else from Abraham and Prudence Bane, her begetters, retained a rock-like sense of thrift.
In the middle of the waiting room, she made her decision. “Give me the return tickets, Richie,” she said. “I’ll go see if I can turn them in.”
Richie considered for a second. The Air Police weren’t looking for a girl. “Okay,” he said. He handed her the tickets, and she went off to find the right window.
That wasn’t too easy. She’d never known so many bus companies were in existence, and every window was for another group of them. But she finally found the right one, and turned the tickets in, explaining that she wasn’t going back to Newport after all. The man at the window had her fill out a slip of paper, to which she affixed a false name, and ungrumblingly gave her almost forty dollars.
She returned to Richie to find him quaking in his boots. Two young men in uniform, one an Air Policeman and the other an Army Military Policeman, were strolling slowly around the waiting room, like casual friends on a promenade.
Honour Mercy took Richie’s trembling arm. “Act natural,” she whispered, which only made him look more terrified than ever, and she led him past the Authorities and out the door to New York’s Eighth Avenue.
It was five p.m. and the rush hour. They stood on the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets, and watched the mobs of people rushing by in both directions, bumping into one another and rushing on with neither apology nor annoyance. It was obvious a Martian in a flying saucer could disappear in a crowd like that. Certainly Richie Parsons, who was practically invisible to begin with, could disappear in that multidirectional stream with no trouble at all.
They turned left, because the choice was between left and right and one was just as good as another, and joined the herd. They crossed 42nd Street, and kept on going northward, purposeless at the moment, following the momentum of the crowd and waiting for something to happen.
The crowd thinned out above 42nd Street, and they could walk more easily, without a lot of shoulder-bumping and dodging around. Honour Mercy was keeping an eye out for a hotel, which was their first concern, and saw a huge block-square hotel between 44th and 45th Streets, with a uniformed doorman and a curb lined with late-model cars. That wasn’t exactly the kind of hotel she had in mind. They kept on walking.