As he was this morning. It was already past seven, and he was still at Ninth Avenue, blocks from his assigned post. But here, in any event, was the bus. It pulled to a stop, the bifurcated door opened, and Mo stepped aboard, grateful to be out of the pouring rain, drenching an already-drenched city.
“Hello, Mo.” It was Fred Dingbat, a driver Mo knew well.
“Hello, Fred,” Mo riposted, dropping a token into the box. Looking down the long length of the interior of the bus, Mo saw that there were no other passengers, a not infrequent occurrence at this hour of a Tuesday morning — or even a Wednesday morning, actually — particularly when it was raining, which it was doing now.
Mo sat in the first seat on the right side, where he faced the driver and could talk to him even while the vehicle was in motion. Against the rules, of course, but the bus company generally blinked at such bending of the regulations. Bus drivers were human, as the company understood, and liked to have some company while driving the bus. A little harmless fraternization with the passengers was considered all right, so long as it didn’t become too blatant or interfere with the driver’s performance of his function. He was, after all (the driver), in command of two point four tons of green machinery, rolling through the mighty city, surrounded by cars, cabs, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mounted policemen, wheelchairs, and the Cattleman Restaurant’s stagecoach: he had to be cool and calm at all times, in control of both himself and the juggernaut he was driving.
As though divining Mo’s thoughts, Fred commented, “The drive for more flexible bus routes is among the more significant advances in the theory of omnibus operation in the megalopolis patterns of latter twentieth century life.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Mo countered. “The overlapping radii of responsibility in, say, your field and mine is going to prove increasingly important in the years to come, a fact the general public is still very much not aware of.”
Fred chuckled appreciatively. “You’re so right,” he urged. “But try to get the politicians to see it that way.”
“Well, they have problems of their own,” Mo designated, and once again the old suspicion reared its ugly head. Was that why he hadn’t found responsibility in life? Was that why the Bryant Park Comfort Station was, thus far, the apex of his career?
The fact of the matter was, Mo Mowgli had no problems at home. He wasn’t married, which meant he couldn’t commit adultery, nor could his wife. Nor could he have generation-gap problems with his children. Beyond all this, he wasn’t haunted by anything from his past, not even in the war. Any war.
It seemed so unfair. Just because he didn’t have personal problems at home, just because he wasn’t haunted by a grim reminder from his past, was that reason enough to keep him forever on the fringes of executive responsibility? He was willing, God knew, he wanted to do a good job.
Mo subsided into a morose silence. Fred, understanding something of the situation, returned his attention to the task of driving the big green bus and allowed Mo his moment of introspection. It must be a terrible thing, Fred thought, to be haunted by the lack of a past.
His bald pate covered by a bushy mass of brown hair, Mo Mowgli was perfectly ordinary looking in every way.
8:00 A.M
The unobtrusive black automobile which rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the Bryant Park Comfort Station at four minutes to eight on that unobtrusive Tuesday morning — the rain continuing to drench an already-drenched city — was an unobtrusive black Checker Marathon, the car for unobtrusive people. Manufactured with painstaking care by the artisans of Kalamazoo, Michigan, this particular unobtrusive black Checker Marathon — like so many others of its kind — had a one-hundred-twenty-inch wheelbase, an overall length of one hundred ninety-nine inches, and a width (at its widest width) of seventy-six inches. Powered by a powerful two-hundred-thirty-six-cubic-inch Perkins diesel engine, the noise of the motor while idling was not as unobtrusive as it might have been, but the savings in fuel could be counted in pennies. And however unobtrusive its black coloration, modest grille, and seemly quartet of headlights, the Marathon of which we speak stood a proud five feet three inches high, towering over all those pinched-down creatures from Detroit, and towering as well over most people’s girl friends.
Of the two individuals inside this particular Checker Marathon, the one sitting at the steering wheel, his hands on the wheel and his feet on the pedals jutting out of the floor, could most properly be termed the driver. He it was who had operated the nearly two ton vehicle in its travels through the now heavily trafficked city streets to this spot directly in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station, and it was undoubtedly the strain of commanding all this fine-honed machinery in such difficult conditions — lots of traffic, lots of rain — which had given him the morose and irritable expression which his countenance now demonstrated to whosoever might cop a glom through the windshield-wiper-wiped windshield, if anyone cared to. But what would be the explanation for the similar expression of unhappy gloom now to be seen upon the countenance of the other occupant of the vehicle already described, properly called the passenger?
For that — the explanation /• — one would have to search more deeply than minor current annoyances like rain or traffic; one would have to search — in fact — into the mentality and past of the individual concerned, by name Arbogast Smith, thirty-two years of age, a uniformed policeman by trade, currently on special plainclothes detail to Bryant Park Comfort Station, in Manhattan.
At this moment — in fact — Arbogast Smith himself, seated in the front seat of the powerful though unobtrusive black Checker Marathon beside the driver, was reflecting on his own past, the curious turns and twists of which had landed him here at this most unusual spot in space and time. It was not peculiar for Arbogast Smith to go into periods of introspection concerning his own history; he did it whenever nothing much was happening. In one way, however, his periods of introspection did set him apart from much of humanity: he did not do his flashbacks in the pluperfect tense. Most introspections, in this grammatical day and age, occur in what is called the past perfect or pluperfect tense — that is, he had been, he had gone, he had went — but Arbogast Smith got along without a lot of extra “hads,” throwing one in every now and then for seasoning but generally permitting his past to remain as simple as his present.
What Arbogast Smith was reflecting on was the three generations of cops he had come from and the pressure on him to live up to them in their field. This reflection was all worked out in neat paragraphs in Arbogast Smith’s mind, even including a fully fleshed scene — dialogue and all — at a kitchen table, the whole reflection being long enough to run, if printed in a book, a good solid nine pages. He had, however, barely gotten into the first paragraph of the reminiscence (“It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...”) when he was recalled to the present by the urgent honking of a bus horn directly behind the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon in which he was seated.