The Evening Star (48 page)

The General, having been awakened before he had his nap out, was feeling cranky.

“I abhor lengthy farewells,” he said. “This pampering is ridiculous. Willie’s a grown man. He’s perfectly competent to get himself on a goddamn bus. Why can’t we just go home and let him manage this for himself?”

In fact, the thought of all four of them having to endure one another’s company for another hour while they waited in the chilly bus station was not a thought Rosie was happy with, either. Aurora was being too nice to Willie, for one thing. It always annoyed her when Aurora was too nice to one of her boyfriends. After all, it was
her
boyfriend, Willie, who was leaving to go be rehabbed off heroin. She didn’t see why Aurora should get to horn in on the emotion at such a moment.

“You two go on home and watch your soaps,” Rosie said. “I’ll come home on a bus, if Willie ever leaves.”

“If I ever leave?” Willie said, startled by her comment. “I thought you didn’t want me to leave. You mean you want me to leave?”

“Shut up, Willie—my nerves are on edge and it just came out wrong,” Rosie said. “I’m trying not to have no breakdown, if you don’t mind.”

Aurora saw that Rosie was indeed not far from the point of serious sorrow. She had been low for days, worrying about Willie’s departure, worrying that they would lock him in his cell and do horrible things to him in Alabama, worrying that he would be raped by gay drug addicts and have AIDS by the time he came home—if he came home.

It was not hard to see that, in fact, Rosie’s deepest fear was that Willie just might not come home. He might find someone younger and prettier in Alabama—a nurse in the rehab center, for example, someone who was only forty-five or fifty. He might never come back at all.

At the moment, Rosie was staring at Willie—all two hundred and thirty pounds of him—with a look of woe, as she stood in the bare bus station, holding one of his large hands. All around them, little clumps of families were not much less woeful; they cried and blew noses and looked
forlornly at whichever family member was about to depart—usually a boy, usually to the army. One fat girl with hair exactly the color of Melanie’s was clinging to a boy who looked no more than fifteen.

The thought of Melanie, so young and so far away, pushed Aurora’s own spirits suddenly downward. All around them was evidence of what she knew in her own heart: that life was nothing but a matter of innumerable comings and goings, separations and separateness, of departures from which there might be no certain return. Rosie, a woman of erratic taste but profound common sense, was right to worry about Willie’s return. The fact was, sometimes people didn’t return. Rudyard, her husband, had gone to cash a check and died of a heart attack in the bank; Emma, her daughter, had not returned from her agony with the cancer. Trevor had not returned from his yacht, Vernon had not returned from Alaska, and Alberto had not returned from Genoa, where he had gone to visit his kin. She had seen her lovers off gaily—she felt that was how one should send lovers off—but one by one they had departed, with her blessings, and had not returned. She had not been able to protect them, either at home or on their rambles; the end of it was that journeys that had seemed temporary at the time had merged into that great journey of the spirit which all must make. People left, they died, they didn’t come back.

Fearful suddenly that one of the dear ones left to her—Melanie, Teddy, Tommy—might journey on, might not come back, Aurora realized that she didn’t want to stay in the bus station a moment longer. She had to get out, away from all the departures, all the going away.

“Hector, Rosie and Willie might want to be alone,” she said. “Let’s wait outside.”

She grabbed Willie and hugged him, tears in her eyes.

“Willie, I’m counting on you to do exactly as you’re told,” she said. “We’ll all miss you. You get well as promptly as possible, and come back cured.”

“Do my best, Miz Greenway,” Willie said. He felt sad to be leaving, but what he really wished was that people would
go away and leave him alone—all the hugging and crying and sad looks made it difficult for him to concentrate on the one name he had to remember: New Orleans, the town where he had to change buses. Leave-taking was one thing, but as he saw it, his life depended on making the change correctly in New Orleans. If he didn’t, he’d just be lost, and it wouldn’t matter whether he was a heroin addict or not.

“Aurora, it’s broiling out there,” Rosie said. “That bus ain’t due for a good forty-five minutes. You’ll melt and so will the General. Why don’t you just go on home? I can ride a city bus. I rode ’em most of my life. Riding one more ain’t going to hurt me.”

“We’ll wait,” Aurora said. “We’ll be right outside.”

In the car the General quickly discovered that Rosie’s description of what would happen to him was as deadly accurate as most of Rosie’s descriptions. It
was
broiling, and though there was little of him that was meltable, he thought he might melt.

“Why do we have to wait?” he asked. “The bus might have another flat. We might be here for hours, in which case we’ll both die of heatstroke.”

“I’ll employ my air conditioner if it gets too bad,” Aurora said.

“Then the goddamn car will have a heatstroke and we’ll all have to ride a goddamn bus,” the General said.

“If you’re going to be rude, then I don’t think I will employ my air conditioner,” Aurora said.

But she said it mildly, and, to his surprise, she took his hand and put her cheek against it. It had been weeks since she had done anything but bark at him. This tender gesture took him by surprise to such an extent that he almost jerked his hand away. He looked into her eyes, something he rarely ventured to do in periods when she was in a bad humor. Her eyes seemed to have grown larger since the last time he looked into them. They were very large and very sad.

“They shouldn’t call them bus terminals,” Aurora said. “They should just call them bus stations, like they used to. Calling them terminals is a very bad idea.”

“What are you talking about?” the General said. “What’s wrong with calling a bus terminal a bus terminal? It just means it’s a place where buses stop.”

Aurora stared at him gravely.

“Think about it,” she said. “What does the word terminal suggest to you, at your advanced age?”

The General saw the point, but it was hot, and he was still annoyed, despite the encouraging fact that Aurora was still pressing his palm against her cheek.

“I know, dying,” he said. “But it could also just suggest a place where the buses stop.”

“Think about it some more and I’m sure you’ll see that stations is the better word,” Aurora said. “Stations is so much more romantic. We all proceed from station to station, after all.”

“If it’s romantic, I’m surprised you like it, then,” the General said. “You’ve been about as romantic as a goddamn fireplug lately—at least to me.”

“That’s because you’re so difficult that you make me forget that I love you,” Aurora said, looking straight at him.

The General, feeling shy suddenly, said nothing.

“But I do love you,” Aurora said. “Despite your difficulty and despite my little lapses.”

“
Little
lapses?” the General said. “Some of them aren’t so little, at least not from where I sit. Some of them go on for years.”

Despite the heat, Aurora scooted closer and put her arm around him. It seemed to the General that she must be feeling very insecure to be scooting closer to him on such a hot day.

“Even if they aren’t little, I was hoping you’d overlook them,” she said.

The General gave it some thought. He rubbed her hand a bit.

“Okay, just don’t start crying,” he said, at the very moment that she put her face against his neck and started crying. A white bum so drunk that he could scarcely walk staggered over to the curb and held out a Styrofoam cup, hoping the
General would put some money in it. The General ignored the cup. Aurora slipped one of her hands inside his shirt, a thing she liked to do. She continued to cry. The bum was reluctant to leave without any money, though finally he did. Aurora had more staying power than the bum; she sobbed for a good while, but finally she stopped.

“I don’t suppose I’m perfect either,” the General allowed.

“What a generous admission,” Aurora said, resting comfortably against his shoulder, though thanks to his boniness she had to wiggle around for a bit before she could get comfortable. When she glanced up at Hector, she saw that he was wearing his wary look, the look he assumed when he couldn’t figure out what she might do next.

“Are we going to take any more trips?” he asked, by way of changing the subject. He didn’t know what the subject of the moment was, exactly, but with Aurora in such an emotional state he felt it might be a good idea to change it, just on general principles.

“Well, we’re here at the station,” she said. “Where would you like to go?”

“Nowhere you have to go on a goddamn bus,” he said. “I meant a cruise or something.

“I’m at my best when I’m on the water,” he added. “I feel sexier. All we ever did on our cruises was screw. If we hadn’t stopped taking cruises I doubt we would have had any of these problems.”

Aurora found herself wondering if Jerry Bruckner had left town yet. Every time she dialed his number or drove to his house, she expected him not to be there. His assurances that he wasn’t about to leave either her or his patients were lies, she knew—though probably he was lying to himself and believing his own lies, as men so often did. Meanwhile, here was Hector, still hoping for one more sexy cruise. Maybe he was right. Maybe they ought to try it, though the prospect held a large potential for melancholy. Their last sexy cruise had been eight years before, when Hector was in some respects a different man.

“We could splurge and get one of those staterooms with a
big bed,” the General said—he was getting excited about his own idea. Mainly he thought it might help if he could just get Aurora to himself again. In Houston he just didn’t seem to be able to get her to himself.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“About the cruise, or the big bed?” Aurora asked.

“Well, both,” the General said. A huge, puffy Gulf cloud floated over, making it briefly cooler.

“Yes, why not?” Aurora said. Hector needed encouragement, and if Jerry Bruckner was about to skip out, as she suspected, she would prefer to be far away. Asia would be a nice distance—Hong Kong, the South China Sea, the Seychelles, anywhere. Perhaps by the time they returned she would have ceased to ache so much for Jerry. Her ache was unseemly, of course, but still, she had it.

“By God, this is a miracle,” the General said. “It’s the first time in all our years together that you’ve wanted to do something that I want to do.”

“Not true and you know it,” Aurora said. “I can assure you that our sexy cruises wouldn’t have been so sexy if I hadn’t wanted to do them or it both.”

“So what will it be, the Greek islands?” the General asked. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his sweaty face, feeling like a new man. Aurora borrowed the handkerchief, wiped hers, and then scooted back behind the wheel and started the car.

“No, someplace further,” she said. “Since you’re being nice for a change I think I’ll employ my air conditioner for a few minutes.”

Inside the bus station, Rosie and Willie had sunk steadily downward to a level of misery neither could remember ever having reached before. Rosie sat on a bench. Willie shuffled around, smoking. From time to time he sat down, too, only to pop up a moment later and resume his shuffling. Rosie was remembering the time long ago when she had finally given up on her marriage and gone home to Bossier City in despair. Royce, her husband, had been seduced by a slut, her children were driving her crazy, so crazy that she had even quit
her job at Aurora’s and started car-hopping at a drive-in on McCarty Street. One day it all simply became too much. She stuffed her few clothes in a suitcase and came to this same bus station, to depart Houston forever, she hoped.

It hadn’t been forever—she had come back. But now the wheel had turned again, and she was back in the same bus station, feeling even more despairing. Why, of all the prison guards on the face of the earth, had she had to choose Willie, a drug addict, to fall in love with? Now he was going away for forty-five whole days. Life could change forever in a lot less time than forty-five days, and if it did, she had no doubt that it would change for the worse. Willie was no more slut-proof than Royce had been—possibly less slut-proof, since Royce had been lazy and Willie wasn’t.

“I just hope I can remember to do it right in New Orleans,” Willie said for perhaps the hundredth time. “That’s the part that’s worrying me, mainly.”

It seemed it was the wrong thing to say, though Willie didn’t know why. The next thing he knew Rosie jumped up, hugged him, and gave him a hasty kiss.

“Come back safe, hon,” she said, and then she walked away, not in too straight a line either, holding her hand over her mouth as if she might be going to vomit. Willie didn’t know what to make of it, but he didn’t follow her. If Rosie needed to go, it was best just to let her go—in a way it was a relief. At last he could settle his mind and start concentrating on the bus change he had to make in New Orleans.

When Rosie reached the car she still had her hand over her mouth—at the last second, just as she was reaching for the door handle, she veered off behind the car and vomited in the gutter.

“Where’d she go?” the General asked. “She was almost here, and now she’s run off.”

“Open the glove compartment and see if we have any Kleenex,” Aurora said.

“Why, who’s sneezing?” the General asked, but he did as he was told.

“Nobody’s sneezing—it’s just that Rosie’s nerves are more
delicate than ours,” Aurora said. When Rosie finally got in the car, Aurora handed her the Kleenex.

“I left, I couldn’t take it no more,” Rosie admitted. “I just left the poor man standing there. I hope he gets on the right bus.”

“He’ll get on the right bus,” Aurora said. “After all, they’re professionals in the bus station. They don’t want to be hauling people around in the wrong buses and then having to bring them back. They’ll see that he gets on the right bus.”