Marcus’s students perk up. They lean across the aisles and crane their necks toward the rear of the bus, where feather boas are dangling around the seats of the Pinkertons. There is nothing to be seen in the back of the bus but a restroom, so the students get up — one, then two at a time — and lean over the unoccupied seats to try to get a glimpse.
“They’re from JCPenney,” Marcus says. “They’re just mannequins.”
“Please stay in your seats,” the driver says. He sounds bored too.
The Shoshone says, “That ain’t no doll, man.”
Marcus watches the driver adjust his mirrors and look a little closer. He downshifts, leaves the bus idling, and steps out. The Shoshone follows him and tries to push the bus’s front door open, but it buckles back. The kids crowd around one of the rear windows, affording Marcus a tiny, triangle-shaped view of the driver outside. He stands a few yards away, talking on a cell phone, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.
“He locked us in?” asks one of Marcus’s students — not one of the brightest kids.
The elderly couple rearranges the packs and lunch sacks at their feet, readying themselves to get off the bus.
“Shit,” Marcus says.
A female student looks at him horrified. “Mr. Marcus!”
The girl sitting next to her — Sandra — pops her Bubblelicious with a bandaged finger. “He totally just said that.” She does an imitation of his nasally voice, “He said, Shit!”
The driver gets back on the bus and the Shoshone, who remained by the door, slips past him. His brother follows. “Hey,” the driver calls, “you two stay on the bus.” But the two men wander over to the figure in the brush. The driver grabs the escort badge hanging on a ribbon around his neck and points it at the rest of them. “We’re going to wait here for the military police unit.” His eyes shimmy. “Everyone must stay on the bus!”
“Turn up the air conditioner,” one of Marcus’s students says.
Marcus puts on his menacing face. “Pipe down, Jonathan.”
“He said, Pipe down, Jonathan,” Sandra makes Mr. Marcus eyes: low-lashed, squinty ones, with hairy inverted-comma eyebrows that she mimes by pulling up the skin between her brows and fluttering her fingers. “He was all, Pipe down.”
The driver locks them back in and goes after the two Shoshones. Marcus watches them through the little triangle. “Get back in your seats,” he tells the kids. The driver remains a few feet away from the body, but waves his arms instructively, while the taller of the two brothers leans over the body and turns his ear toward the man’s mouth, as if listening to some last confession.
“I think he’s still alive!” Sandra says.
Then the tall Shoshone tilts the chin up to open the airway and the afternoon glare catches a bright red blot on the old man’s nose, a wet smudge of blood. The driver backs away a little more, while the other brother makes a bellows of the man’s chest. They do this for a while and get nowhere. Then they huddle. After a bit, they all look back at the bus at once, and Marcus feels as if he is sitting with his students and the other tourists outside the principal’s office, waiting for the parents to be called.
The driver walks back to the bus with an exaggerated casual gait, followed by the brothers.
On the bus, the elderly woman puts a hand out to stop the two Indians. “Was it really a dead body?’
Marcus watches the driver eye the Indians sternly in the rearview mirror. The one who talks, shrugs.
“I bet he ain’t just walked all the way out here and died,” says Stanley.
“Calm down,” Marcus says. He wipes his glasses on his shirt so hard that the frame buckles and he has to force it back into shape.
“But serious-up, Mr. G. Ain’t nobody coulda just walked all the way out here. It hadda been someone on the bus. ”
“Ooh,” Sandra says, “He was all, It had a been someone in here.”
“That’s ridiculous.” One of the Pinkertons waves him down.
“Naw, really. Let’s take a count, in case someone’s missing, like in that Agatha Crispy movie.”
“Christie movie,” Marcus says. “Agatha Christie.”
“He was all, Agatha—”
“Shut up, Sandra.”
The kids rally around Marcus. What’s wrong with Mr. Marcus? Look, he took off his glasses. Leave him alone, he’s upset.
Marcus looks out the window, dusted with desert debris, at a small cabin on the road ahead. A tall, broad-shouldered guard points a machine gun toward him. But when he looks closer, Marcus realizes the figure is two-dimensional, just a cardboard cut-out meant to scare off wandering activists and moon-landing denialists who might manage to make it past the cages and the warning signs and the punishing landscape.
“There is only twenty-six!” Stanley pumps an arm in victory. “Somebody’s missing like in the movie!”
“Awesome,” someone says.
The students take off their ear buds and look around. Marcus watches as some of them wrap the ear bud cords around their iPods and stroke the sterile white rectangles affectionately, like babies with their blankies. In the rearview mirror, he sees that the driver’s eyebrows have lifted. Marcus can tell he is counting. He flips through the clipboard on his lap, does a second count. Then he turns off the ignition and the bus hushes slowly to rest. He walks to the back of the vehicle. All eyes follow him down the aisle, where he stops and knocks on the bathroom door. When there is no answer, he jiggles the handle and finds it locked. “Hey!” He pounds. “Come on out of there, please.” There is no answer. He works the handle again and then grips it like a nine iron and jerks it. “All right,” he says. “If this is a joke, it won’t be tolerated.” He looks sternly at Marcus’s students, who shift in their seats. He sits down with the Pinkertons and flips through his clipboard again. “When I call your name, I want you to say...” He pauses.
“Say present,” Marcus suggests.
“Okay,” the driver begins. “Barry Marcus?”
Marcus raises his hand. “Present.”
The driver goes down the list of Marcus’s students.
Present, here, over here, they drawl, just as they do in the classroom.