Stephen O’Kelly’O climbing shadowy steps up into the bus station. The roar of diesels as these great land cruisers come and go, seeking and returning from destinations. And my own destination only a little more than half an hour left to go. Already suddenly three o’clock in the afternoon. Detour these last minutes away through the bus station. In this endless stream of people. Over the tannoy announcements for distant places. Rochester, Albany, Princeton, Mount Kisco. This man approaches with a sad mystifying look on his face as if all the world’s conundrums were all at once being dumped on him, and talks to me as if I were to blame.
“Hey, pass the word. Wrong information is being given out at Princeton.”
“Thank you sir, for telling me.”
One does not want to expostulate to a perfect stranger and in reply say, as I was tempted to in the good old-fashioned New York vernacular, hey bud, why should I pass the word when I don’t give a good goddamn flying fuck that wrong information is goddamn fucking well being given out at Princeton. So shove it up your ass, will yuh. And hey, what’s Princeton, some kind of bologna sandwich. But the seemingly crazy individual was much in earnest and said the same thing to the guy walking behind me. Who as it happened, was extremely grateful to hear the information. As I stopped to listen to a brief ensuing conversation I at least had the pleasant distraction of focusing my eyes on a girl who was looking at me and whose quite marvelous face I had just previously caught as she was passing me by. She was an inspiration of womanhood. And now following her slowly walking in front of me, her leather coat sweeping about her beautiful legs, and her long flowing brown hair halfway down her back. Her calves just as were Sylvia’s, splendidly athletic in her flat-soled shoes. She slowed and suddenly stopped and turned to me, as if knowing I was behind her. Except for a sadness in her eyes, her face had an inspiringly healthy look of an autumn apple just plucked shining at dawn’s early light from a tree in New Hampshire.
“Excuse me, sir. Could you please tell me, sir. Do you know when the next bus is to Suffern.”
“Sorry, I don’t know. Only wish I did, to tell you. But I did hear that wrong information is being given out at Princeton.”
With the vaguely familiar beauty of her face and a strange pleading in her lovely big pale blue eyes she seemed to wait for me to say more. Somehow I realized my facetiousness was inappropriate and I apologized again. She stood there in my way, her lips seeming to struggle to speak, moving but silent of words, as if she wanted me to stay and talk with her and didn’t know how to fully convey the invitation. She must have been aware, even as I was out of sight walking behind her, and picking up the scent in the air, that I was admiring her. Her eyes searching my face as if for some recognition and somehow asking for companionship which she must have sensed would have been forthcoming. And it would have been. But as it was now getting late to meet Dru, what could I do but apologize.
“I am sorry.”
“So am I. And that I’m not going to Princeton.”
And I found myself tempted to say I had to rush to meet somebody but to tell me how I could contact her again, an address, a telephone number. But so discouraged she seemed, and before I could ask anymore, her face cast down, she turned away, walking back in the direction from which we had come. Watching her go I was hoping she would come back. For she stopped just as she was about to disappear in the crowd. She turned and looked back at me. With the most shattering look I have ever seen. Her lost-looking eyes, that made you want to run to her. Throw your arms around her. Squeeze comfort, calm, and peace into her soul. And whisper to her that everything was going to be all right.
I was in a dilemma as whether to stay or go. She was, as she turned away, vanishing into the crowd, pausing to reach into her large cloth gypsy bag. And then moved on. The moment gone for all eternity. As I, too, go. Count my steps again. On parade, marching. A cadence forever branded on the mind. Your left, your left, your left, right, left. My mother kept a picture of all her three sons who were in the war at her bedside. Just as she would wait through the night, sitting in the dark on the front sun-porch, until all the children who had gone out had come home. The sound of a gunshot. Just behind me. A shiver down the spine. Duck. Hurry another couple of steps out of the line of fire. Waiting to smell the suffocating smoke and cordite, sweat and stench, as if I were back in my ship’s turret instead of a bus station. Look around. People gathered. Voices raised.
“Call an ambulance.”
“You mean a hearse, fella.”
At the edge of the crowd of onlookers, a claw ripping across one’s heart. On this concrete floor, amid the filth of gray blots of chewing gum and crushed cigarette butts, there she was. Through the legs of the crowd. The girl with the look of an autumn apple. Fallen to the floor, a pistol in her hand. White bloody bits of brain showing through her long flowing brown hair and blown out all over the little space she lies in. In her wonderful simple clothes. As if she were going to walk the autumnal hills of Vermont as the leaves were turning in their color that she so resembled alive in life. Nothing now but her wholesome beauty prostrate on the ground. Blood spattered everywhere. One outstretched hand. Fingers reaching lifeless at her possessions. A small notebook, a pen, tiny mirror and ring fallen from her bag. Voices. And my own loudest of all.
“Hey you son of a bitch, put that right back, it belongs to the girl. Or I’ll wrap your goddamn guts around your backbone.”