Reptile House Read online

  The blind man covered his nose with his scarf.

  “What’s the holdup?” said the blind man who seemed to look for the source of the trouble. His face was calm.

  “Suffocation,” said Marlon.

  “Loose change,” said the intercom.

  Marlon coughed, “My God, my God,” and pressed his nose to a crack at the base of the window where the air was cold at least, but still tasted of tar and smoke until the hockey kid dropped the nickels in the steel box, and the door snapped shut, and the 32 pulled forward, only to wait again for some children jaywalking with their dirty clothes, something, who knows what is hidden inside any cinched laundry bag?

  Then the bus rolled on.

  The blind man’s phone rang in his pocket but he closed his eyes behind his glasses and didn’t answer. Marlon took the opportunity to squint at the blind man’s paper: a silver set including all trays and servers to be passed on to, twelve Wedgwood settings to be divvied up between, a wedding dress to be re-pressed, re-vacuum-packed, and shipped to, a sterling football charm bracelet to be soldered and polished to be donated to, an international thimble set inventoried and delivered to, a Wagon Wheel pattern quilt in blue and white cotton, stitched in 1824 by a long dead Dolley to be cleaned, repaired, and passed on to the loving daughter, etc.

  Marlon quit reading when the driver refused a lady with a stroller, telling her, “Too wide. Collapse it or wait for the next bus.”

  The lady was yelling. The lady got off. This was why the world was failing.

  The driver did not remove the foul gray audio wire from his ear during the altercation. The driver bobbed his head, which sat atop his thick neck. The skin: folded, white and soft, double-soft, double-fat, doubled up below the fat ears and fat chin. Gum-chewing bobbing “Boone” “Boone” “Boone.”

  The shaggy shelf at the back of the skull. It slopes so suddenly to the neck. How easily a blade could enter that slot. Oh, the skull is nothing either! A thin shell over a bag of pudding! Any decent pocketknife has three distinct blades: one long and sharp for entry in the fleshy parts, one jagged for sawing, one small and neat for trimming fat. A hand could choose any, you see? The job is the thing, the purpose, the location of entry to be determined by simple Homo sapiens rife with flaws. President Taft, for example, was the fattest in the White House. Once, his men dislodged him with butter from his tub. White House staff installed a bigger one, 500 gallons. He walked with a cane made of petrified wood, 250,000 years old, imagine, imagine, Marlon told the blind man.

  “That’s old,” said the blind man.

  “Yes,” said Marlon.

  “Don’t let that driver get to you,” said the blind man. “He bothers everyone.”

  Blind people were wise. The 32 changed lanes past a stranded taxi, driving too fast, of course. As the cross streets flew by, Marlon stuffed his knife back in his pocket. He wrote up the incident in his notebook citing date, time, and location. Waiting for the other riders, he was able to finish the last few lines of his latest letter:

  Dear Mr. Bluebird Metro:

  First too, let me explain that I admire Bluebird. I know you are busy. But enough is enough as they say. You are the man in charge and I’m a man who cares. I am a credible person. What is truth? What is decent? What is true is everyone needs all their senses attuned and running tip-top for driving the public in a metro bus. Eyes and ears. Focus, civic awareness, obviously. The law is on the public’s side. Please note: “No driver of any city vehicle shall employ any device or implement that impairs or could impair in any way his auditory abilities or function while operating any municipal vehicle.” IS 646.82.7(D)(a). Further, no driver can elect to let riders ride free except those authorized by law, like the blind. Or to deny legal riders, e.g., young mothers with strollers. But these violations are occurring. It is happening on Bluebirds every day, sir. Egregious I can assure you with proof and records. Please rectify. It is bad for the morale of the city.

  Thank you for your consideration.

  The new riders settled into their seats and the 32 sped away. It stopped soon at Jefferson, the red-haired drafter of the Declaration of Independence.

  She would get on at Lincoln. She had red hair too but going gray. She had been riding the 32 for seven years. She averaged every fourth night so she was overdue. In school, she swam the crawl in lane four during practice. She sat two seats away in biology sophomore year. Once, when the student between them was sick, she and Marlon had silently dissected a baby rat together that was not dead yet. She had handed him the sharp implement for the liver and he had brushed her finger in the handoff, which was small, pink, and agitating like the rat. He had backstroked and butterflied in lane three or five all those years, as near as possible. In history class, Marlon got all A’s and one semester sat right behind her and smelled her hair day and night. Thomas Jefferson owned a slave girl name Sally who gave birth to untold numbers of red-haired babies. Despite his numerous A’s, Marlon learned this shameful fact only after high school. He was angry at his teacher for the omission. This teacher had also said Marlon could be president of the USA if he wanted it enough. But Marlon wanted many things.

  The 32 departed Jefferson with teenage mothers with toddlers crying loudly.

  The 32 stopped at Madison. A gang of new riders came on and none of them paid a dime. They milled around near the NO STANDING sign and talked to the driver. They laughed as if they were all friends. It seemed unlikely. Marlon wondered. The old man and the hockey kid played Guess-Who-I-Am in the back. They got loud sometimes with an occasional guess yelled out: Al Capone! Sinatra! Gretzky! Bugs Bunny! Peels and snorts of laughter until the intercom boomed, “Pipe down!” All strangers, Marlon considered, playing games and piping down at the “Boone” command via the “Boone” voice through “Boone” pipes running the ceiling of the 32. From indecent lips to the decent ears.

  “Anyone can get a job driving a bus,” said Marlon.

  “Anyone with eyes,” said the blind man. “And a driver’s license.”

  “It’s hard to swallow,” said Marlon and the blind man nodded out the window at the world. “The power in his two hands.”

  “The stupidity,” said the blind man.

  “The injustice,” said Marlon.

  They nodded. Sympathy felt wonderful.

  The blind man’s phone rang again. He ignored it.

  Anyone can get a job driving a bus: it had been just a theory. To test it, Marlon had once taken a day off work and gone to the third floor of city hall where a woman with bags under her eyes and a seeming-constant-headache handed him the paper. Her small desk was ringed with smiling family pictures. The paper said: APPLICATION FOR METRO-BLUEBIRD DRIVER. Felons drive public buses for years before they are discovered. Child molesters have a difficult time finding steady work, for example. The lady on the third floor also received all the completed applications, glanced at them, dropped them into cubbies marked YES, NO, or NEED MORE INFO. After that, Marlon thought much about betrayal and the Rights of Man.

  When Marlon got down and out about life, he thought about the girl. He closed his eyes and pictured her standing in the glassed-in stop in front of the tall, bronzed Lincoln who pointed at the ground with a longer-than-natural finger, drawing his line for Emancipation, etc. Her red hair under her tight wool cap. Marlon would spot her from a block away. She would have a magazine rolled up in her pocket. The driver would unplug his foul left ear, in deference, as she ran up the steps. Her wild animal eyes would knock Marlon over hunting for a seat on the 32. She might sit in absolutely any row at all, any seat, so unpredictable was she, his angel.

  When they married, Marlon would get the ring from his mother. It would be silver with a row of tiny diamonds leading to a ruby of some size in the middle. Old-fashioned. The tarnish would rub off with skin and matrimony. They would honeymoon in Fiji. They would eat from wooden bowls with knives and forks inlaid with mother-of-pearl. They would snorkel with Australians and hold hands underwater as fish of e
very color swam by.

  They would live together in a small town with a water tower near the courthouse. There would be a pool at the high school and they would swim together in the mornings. The belly of the water tower would be hoisted in the sky like the belly of a pregnant queen. The place would be named Chillicothe or Greely or Eureka and the word would be painted across the belly in a script expressing the personality of the town. Marlon would keep his job at 7th and Van Buren. He would take a different Bluebird and would rid himself of this driver entirely, forever. She would keep her job until the kids were born. There was a town called Marlon, Idaho, in an atlas and they would go there on vacations in a minivan. She would take his picture in front of the city sign as a joke. She and he would swim next to each other in lanes three and four at the pool while the kids took their lesson. Everyone would bob and cluster at the side of the pool, talking together. The old ladies from town would wear bloomer suits and swim in lane one. They would admire the kids and offer to babysit as their pendulous breasts floated weightlessly in the lovely blue. But it wasn’t blue water. The blue was just the color of the paint on the bottom of the pool. The water might have been purple if purple was the popular color for water, and trendy. The pool would contain all the town’s fluid and feeling: sweat, spit, semen, blood.

  The 32 stopped at Monroe. No one got on or off. Marlon petted his eyebrow down. The blind man seemed to study the paragraphs on paper, but that was impossible.

  The blind man’s phone rang again and this time he sighed and answered. He smoothed the papers down with his free hand.

  “Hey, Desmond—Thanks, yeah, I’m real tired, that’s how. You don’t want to know—I just went over it with the lawyer—Millie got the quilt—Betsy got the silver set—Yeah, sure it’s worth more. Betsy won’t care. She wanted the quilt, Dolley Madison’s. Tighten your seatbelt—all this shit—Desmond, you have to tell her for me and—You’ve got to. I can’t right now—Better you than me—OK, I owe you one.”

  The blind man clicked off the phone. “Fighting like cats,” he said to Marlon.

  “Sounds like it,” said Marlon, shy and nervous at this sudden friendship with a blind man.

  “Sixteen years of this,” said the blind man. “Who cares about a quilt?”

  “Dolley Madison was a Quaker,” said Marlon. “She became a widow via yellow fever. It killed her first husband and her infant on the very same day.”

  “My sister and my wife, they hate each other,” said the blind man.

  “What can you do?” said Marlon.

  “Not one damn thing,” said the blind man, wringing the papers.

  “You should tell those two about Dolley Madison,” said Marlon.

  “I might,” said the blind man.

  “About real suffering,” said Marlon. “About how time is short.”

  “I will,” said the blind man. “I’ll tell them.”

  “Good,” said Marlon.

  The 32 stopped at Quincy. People moved in and out, briefcases and backpacks. A lady with a bag of green apples sat just across the aisle.

  “Everything works out, I guess,” said the blind man and Marlon said, “Sure,” and thought how this was a very noble position for a blind man to take.

  Polk, Taylor, Fillmore.

  Streetlights under stars. The half-moon popped between buildings and disappeared. A blaze burst up from a grease fire at a street vendor’s cart and the man’s face glowed for an instant. People walked, ran, milled, clustered, and broke apart in black bundled shadows. A bundle of newspapers burst open in the wind and the pages cartwheeled in feathery sheets in the headlights. The city whizzed by. Windows and doorways blinked and the sky darkened. From the back, the hockey kid yelled, “Yankees.” The old man muffled his mouth laughing. “Sox,” then “Ahab,” then “Osama Bin Laden.”

  “My mother grew up around here,” said the blind man. “She’s dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Marlon.

  “Your mother dead?” said the blind man.

  “No, she’s not dead,” said Marlon, which was not altogether true. “I hope the weather holds.”

  “Yeah,” said the blind man seeming to actually stare out the window, which Marlon knew was entirely impossible.

  After graduation, Marlon heard through alumni contacts that the girl had married Rich at Six, the meteorologist from Channel 7. Several years later, Marlon’s contacts confirmed the marriage had gone south. The couple was separated and was possibly divorcing. Rich had been “Richie” in high school, then just another regular guy on the swimming team. But Richie won the state diving championship in 1972—a long shot for victory from the high dive. He nailed a maneuver never seen before or since, called “the Bomhold” for Richie’s last name. Witnesses still disagree on elements of the dive and in which order they were properly performed. Marlon was on the bench and remembered it this way: Richie had climbed the ladder, pale and grinning at the crowd with a poor kid’s crooked teeth. Pulling himself up the top steps, he sprang onto the platform. He strode to the end seeing his future. He turned and wiggled his feet backward out to ready position over nothing. The judges gripped their pencils. People in the bleachers sat up from their tropical slouches, suddenly and unexpectedly expecting something big from this no one. Richie sprung backward out up into the empty, flew up to a spectacular height, pinnacled dangerously near the gym roof, then snapped himself in half, twisted, spun projectile, twisted again, unsnapped himself, tucked into a ball, flew like a planet forming its own orbit and no sun at all to bother about, then he thundered down, and just as he parted the water, he appeared to burst into pure hot flames. No splash at all. Richie disappeared under flat blue water. Rich came out at the ladder tan with capped teeth, slicked-back hair, a two-button blazer, the weatherman’s wand in his dripping hand. Of course she had married him.

  “Actually, my mother’s dead,” said Marlon.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Marlon, “that she died.”

  “We’re in the same boat,” said the blind man.

  “She gave me this,” said Marlon, presenting the pocketknife from his trousers.

  “Real nice,” said the blind man, who seemed to look at the knife, also impossible.

  “I’m glad the blind get discounts,” said Marlon.

  “I agree,” said the blind man.

  The 32 honked at a car turned sideways. The car gave the bus the middle finger.

  The shadows ran across the cross streets.

  They passed Rich at Six, pixilated and nine stories tall, glowing across an old brick building. Rich’s hair was slicked back, just out of the pool. His weather wand was twenty feet long: “DIVE IN WITH RICH AT SIX,” was the electronic banner that turned the corner of the building in never-ending loops.

  “I wish I had a wand,” the blind man said.

  “Me too,” said Marlon.

  “I knew him in high school,” said Marlon.

  “Very interesting,” said the blind man.

  “He was popular even then,” said Marlon.

  “I believe it,” said the blind man. “My wife Betsy loves that guy.”

  Rich had a bus-sized mustache, a locomotive jaw with train-track teeth and a baby-pool-sized dimple.

  “Why do women love him?” Marlon said.

  “Hell if I know,” said the blind man. “But if they bottled him, I’d buy a case.” They dreamed up brand names for Rich’s new drink: Rich at Six’s Cyclone Tonic, Hurricane Cola, and The Bomhold Elixir.

  “I like you,” said Marlon. “You give me a good feeling.”

  “Ditto, buddy,” said the blind man.

  They shook hands and then their hands parted.

  The blind man’s phone rang.

  “Did you tell her?—And?—Oh, Jesus—She break anything?—God damn it—I’m on the bus—Put her on—Well, tell her to pull herself together and call me back.”

  The blind man hung up. The blind man took off his lemon yellow sunglasses
and rubbed his eyes, which looked like anyone’s eyes. They stared at Marlon’s eyebrow, but that was impossible. Marlon smoothed his brow. He glared at “Boone” in the big round mirror, still bobbing and chewing as if nothing mattered.

  Dear Mr. Bluebird Metro:

  Say something. Say something.

  The blind man’s phone rang again.

  “Betsy, sweetheart—I’m—I know, Dolley Madi—But think about it, sweetheart—Don’t talk about scissors at a time like—You wouldn’t do that—You’re talking crazy—I know you wouldn’t. My mother’s favorite—No, Betsy. No, Betsy! I totally forbid it!”

  The line went dead. The blind man stared at the phone and put it away. The 32 rolled on. People squirmed in their seats.

  Marlon squinted. “‘In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all,’” he said. “Abraham Lincoln said that.”

  “Very apt,” said the blind man.

  The lady across the aisle eavesdropped and chewed a spotted apple, smiling.

  “What are you smiling at?” Marlon said, turning in his seat toward the lady. She bit the core so that seeds were revealed in white flesh. The driver grinned in the big round mirror where the passengers all grinned tiny grins wrapped in scarves and hats and hockey jerseys. Why do they all smile? What’s the joke? What’s so funny?

  “I’m sorry for all your troubles,” said Marlon.

  “Thanks,” said the blind man, then reached and touched Marlon’s sleeve.

  Guess-Who-I-Am ended in a huff when the hockey kid picked a rock star the old man could never have known. The blind man blew his nose. The stars jangled in space. The snow was holding off. So far, the weathermen were wrong.

  The girl got on at Lincoln.

  Her red hair was pulled up in a bun. She read her magazine in the fifth row right. She had been the prettiest girl in school by a long shot. She was forty-five years old now.

  At Johnson the 32 sat in a traffic jam at the convention center where a horse show was starting next week. Cop cars swarmed the intersection amidst a mess of crushed steel and scattered glass. A horse trailer was on its side. A man on a stretcher waved his arms. A black horse with an arched neck skittered on the corner. An officer held its bridle. Two bays burst from an alley. People chased ropes. Hooves skidded in the sloppy street.