Sing Her Down, page 7
He hands her the change.
“Sit.”
Florida steadies herself as she surveys the scattering of masked passengers. Toward the back of the bus there’s a cluster of empty seats.
She can hear a last desperate passenger hammering the bus’s door for admission. She drops her bag on one seat and sits next to the window.
The driver puts the bus into gear and begins to pull away.
Only then does Florida glance down the aisle at the late arrival.
It’s Dios, her green gaze glittering above the black bandana that shields her mouth and nose. One of her eyes is still swollen, but the other bores into Florida with delighted menace.
Florida leaves her seat and steps into the aisle.
“Sit, please. Both sit,” the driver barks.
The bus leaves the parking lot and makes a right turn.
Dios lurches and comes to a halt at Florida’s row. “So, you finally left that motel room. I got worried that you were going to starve to death.”
Florida freezes. The bus bucks again, sending her toppling into her seat.
“Sit, now,” the driver commands.
Dios sits in the row opposite Florida and pulls down her bandana.
Her bruises are turning from purple to yellow. A spiderweb of blood has exploded in one of her blackened eyes. Two stitches flutter by her mouth. She’s covered the bust in her top lip with lipstick, but she can’t mask the deformity.
Like Florida, she’s wearing some of her state-issued clothes. But she’s pegged and pinned them, giving herself a more tailored look. Her hair is loose and the curls bounce with the road.
“Let’s roll,” Dios says. She leans back in her seat. Soon the familiar lyrics of Macario Leyva rise above the bus’s squeak and rumble.
Pero nunca se fijaron
En tan humilde señora.
Florida inches over to the window. The air-conditioning is on full tilt, expelling frigid air with a chemical scent. She presses her cheek against the freezing glass, trying to ignore the stinging chill.
The bus picks up speed. Soon it is throttling onto a ramp for the 10.
Florida closes her eyes, hoping—praying—the rhythm of the road will lure her to sleep. Dios keeps singing, keeps repeating the phrase about Camelia La Tejana coming to Los Angeles to betray her lover.
Florida leans over the aisle. “What’s your game, Dios?”
Dios stops singing, then angles herself toward Florida, her face inches from Florida’s own. “Just following your lead.”
“Masks on, please,” the driver crackles over the PA system.
“Why?”
“Because, after Tina, you actually think I’d let you out of my sight? Oh, Florida, I know you. Skip parole, get hauled back, then what? Another lie to get yourself out of trouble. Another shirking of the blame. You would have laid Tina at my feet to save yourself.”
“Tina was months ago. Tina is over.”
“No,” Dios says. “I’ve told you before. None of this is over. It’s only just begun.”
* * *
The bus pulls off the freeway and rolls through another neighborhood of strip malls and prefab office parks. It wheezes to a stop in front of a Vietnamese supermarket. Florida slips into the row behind her to put some space between herself and Dios. She clamps her eyes shut, praying Tina’s mutilated body doesn’t take the seat next to her.
New passengers load, wary-eyed over their masks. They shuffle down the aisle, searching for vacant rows.
“Hurry, hurry,” the driver barks. “Sit, sit.”
Florida presses herself against the window. Seven hours until they reach Los Angeles. It will be dark. And who knows where the bus will drop her. And who knows how she will reach Hancock Park. And whether anyone will be home. And what she will do if they aren’t. And how she’ll get her car. And where the keys are.
And how she will shake Dios.
She presses hard into the window, letting the reverb of the engine sink into her ears.
The bus kicks into gear.
A final passenger is coming down the aisle—a boxy, ungainly man. Flattop and tinted glasses. A mask advertising the Diamondbacks covers his mouth.
A jolt of recognition hits Florida. She knows him. She knows she knows him.
The sensation vanishes as quick as it hit. Dios has made her jumpy. This whole fucking escape—this unplanned flight, Tina’s name—makes her nerves light up when anyone looks her way.
The man takes the empty row in front of her, his head rising above the seatback.
There’s no way. She doesn’t know this guy.
She doesn’t know anyone, anywhere, which is why she was shelved in that motel and then abandoned. She is utterly fucking alone.
Except for Dios now. Always Dios.
The bus is picking up speed as it hits the on-ramp for the seven-hour, straight-shot trip west.
She stares at the stranger’s head, flattop bobbing slightly with the rhythm of the road. There’s something organized—meticulous—about the way he sits, something institutional. Like he’s army. Or police.
Or …
The driver slams the brakes. Florida glances out the window to see a small hatchback veering wildly away.
Or …
The driver curses the car loud enough that his words reach the back of the bus.
Or … she does know him. The man sitting in front of Florida is the rookie CO who broke up Dios’s beatdown, the long-faced newbie who took his time with Dios’s exposed breast.
Florida rises to her feet, then sits.
There is nowhere to go, no exit until she’s crossed the state line, breaking the law.
Her heart beats in her fingertips. It beats in her throat.
She leans across the empty seat to check on Dios, who is staring at the CO as if she’s willing him to look her way.
Florida knows the daggers of Dios’s gaze too well. Soon enough the CO feels Dios’s eyes on him.
“Do I know you?”
“I don’t know,” Dios says. “Do you?”
“Maybe,” the guy says. Then he turns away.
Florida tries to force her shoulders to relax, her fingers to unclench.
“Do we all look the same to you?”
“Women?” the CO says. “You think women all look the same to me?”
“Did I say that?” Dios asks.
“It’s hard to tell what you actually look like with that bandana. Maybe we’ve met. But I’m guessing we haven’t. Although—”
“What?”
“Maybe I do know you.” Over the headrest in front of her Florida sees the CO lean closer to Dios. “Give me a minute.”
“You’ve got seven hours,” Dios says.
“It’s not coming to me,” the CO says.
“Not yet,” Dios says.
Florida closes her eyes. She wraps the shirt she bought at Rite Aid around her head to stop the sound of Dios’s voice.
Still, it leaks in.
—Come on. You really don’t know me? Maybe we do all look alike to you. We look like your busted aunt, your crazy sister, your cousins from out of state.
Shut up, shut up, shut up, Florida chants silently.
—We look like the girls at school who wouldn’t give you the time of day, who spit, laughed, and teased your loser ass. The ones who lived large and crashed bad. Made you happy to see them fall, didn’t it? Made you happy when they were put in their place by their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and brothers. They scared you. They deserved what they got.
Dios’s words are hard, but her voice is all heat and sex, straight-up poison dripping in the CO’s ear.
Florida peeks through the crack in the seat at the CO. She sees him nod his head slightly like he’s got gears turning in there, like he’s tuning in to Dios’s frequency and tuning in to who she is.
“Shut up!” the exclamation slips out.
Dios whirls round and catches Florida’s eye. “Are we bothering you?” she asks.
Florida looks away and shuts her eyes before the momentary connection between them takes dangerous shape.
“Maybe I’ll move over there,” the CO says. “Seeing as we seem to be bothering that lady.”
Florida watches him slip across the aisle.
“You know, you are starting to look familiar,” he says as he sits.
Florida’s heart quicksteps against her rib cage.
They are driving through a sprawl of big-box stores and business parks. They pass under a maze of cloverleafs. Then the city flattens. The new construction falls back. A few forgotten outposts—derelict family restaurants and run-down motels—and then nothing, just desert and a ridgeline of distant mountains.
The canned air is giving Florida a headache. She’s sweating hot and cold.
The space between service stations grows longer.
Florida drifts in and out of an uneasy sleep. Dios has been monologuing hard for hours.
“You’re that bitch,” the CO says.
“What bitch?”
“That bitch who got beat up.”
“You mean the bitch whose breast you grabbed.”
“I didn’t grab shit.”
“You probably told your boys all about it.”
“What the fuck you doing on this bus?” the CO says.
“Traveling,” Dios says.
“You have permission?”
“What about you?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” the CO says. “You’re the one who needs to be telling me things.”
“Not anymore,” Dios says. “Just relax and enjoy the ride.”
“I don’t ride with the population.” The CO rises out of his seat.
“Looks like you do now. Looks like you’re slumming it with the rest of us. Looks like you’re going somewhere you’re not supposed to go. Probably not supposed to leave the state. Probably supposed to be safer at home or at work.”
“None of your fucking business.”
“Inside all you COs wanted was a little alone time with us prisoners and now you’re running away. I guess you only want us when you can control us.”
“Who says I’m not in control?”
“Stick around and find out,” Dios says.
The CO takes his seat.
Florida tries to drink her smoothie, but she can barely swallow. She pulls the tank top tighter around her head. But Dios’s words are on a hyperloop in her brain.
“You think we want it hard—that we need it hard—your beatdowns, your little personal punishments. And you like to give it. It restores the order we disrupted with our so-called crimes, right? But you know what? I’ve felt the fear on the far end of your club.”
Florida checks the window just in time to see the bus pass the state line. She’s in the shit now.
“Want to hear about the last time I rode a bus—I mean before the state bussed me out your way, put me in your hands?
“It was back in college, a place so small and fancy you’ve never heard of it. One night we drove from our campus way the hell out in the woods into Boston. There were five of us packed into some boy’s brand-new Volvo. On the way back the driver got lost in a tangled section of town.
“You listening?
“This hood was called Roxbury and I’d never been there before. But I know it. You’d know it too. A neighborhood that looks like every other neighborhood until you squint at the details and see this is a place for Black or brown people. The little things. The minor derelictions and oversights. I don’t have to tell you, do I? I know you know.
“Derelictions? Look it up.
“Anyway, there’s three of us in the back besides the two in the front and we’re rolling through this hood where the shadow activity is being played in the open. The other kids are starting to get jumpy, locking the doors and whatever. And now we’re deep in some Boston labyrinth of all right turns and no way out.
“There’s a smell in the car. I’d know it anywhere. I bet you would too. I’ve smelled it on myself alone on the subway at two a.m. I’ve smelled it on me alone with my older cousin on the couch when my mother was out. I’ve smelled it the first time the lights and sirens picked my crew up drinking stolen liquor in the park. I’ve smelled it coming from others who didn’t want to see me coming.
“You’ve smelled it too in the yard before a fight, on the line when you got one of us alone, in the back of the bus bringing in the new girls.
“Fear.
“And just like those dumb college kids had planned it, just like they’d summoned their own nightmare with their twitching and nail-biting, the Volvo stops at a light and a couple of boys in black hoodies and baseball caps bang on the glass, pantomiming I’m gonna blow your fucking brains out with their fingers cocked like pistols.
“I almost laughed as the dumb-ass driver cracked his window, asking if he can help these kids—like if he played dumb the thugs will stop doing what they’re doing—which was enough for them to get the door open, pull out the driver, and pound him on the pavement.
“Everyone in the car started screaming except me. I was placid as a fucking lake while the driver was getting pummeled into the asphalt. I kept my eyes on his eyes as each fist hit its mark, splitting his skin, darkening his pasty complexion. I watched the fear get pounded out of him. I kept my cool as the boy who messed up the driver slid behind the wheel, scattering the rest of the kids from the car. But I didn’t fucking move. I caught his eyes in the rearview. I held his gaze as his partner took the shotgun seat.
“I let him see me. Not just see me but see me. Then I gave him his own goddamned smile back. Slowly I got out of the car before they tore out of there. When I watched them go, I felt the air swell inside me like I was a balloon and could goddamn float away.
“We took the bus back to campus.
“Like I said, I hate the bus. But sometimes you make do.”
* * *
Florida’s heard this story before. The pride Dios felt in the gulf that opened that night. The vision of herself she caught in that rearview. How she staked her claim as more than a scholarship kid along for a ride with her rich classmates. How she understood she was learning the tools to take them down. That is, until one of their mothers took her down—went to town on Dios after she had assaulted her son. Prosecuted the scholarship girl from Queens from the depths of her privately managed wealth. Like she was brushing lint off her sleeve.
Florida closes her eyes, squeezing them until she can hear the blood in her ears. Her heart flutters lamely, running low on panic.
Three hours.
They chase the sunset along the 10, barreling down the freeway toward the tiger-striped sky.
Two hours.
The surrounding landscape and landmarks grow familiar from weekend getaways, music festivals, and business trips with Carter.
The bus is buffeted as it passes the wind farms outside of Palm Springs. Florida watches the blades trying to slice the early moon out of the sky.
Up ahead she can see the dimmed lights of the Indian casino standing sentinel in the dark.
An hour and a half to go.
If she were driving, she’d be there by now. Because the bus has come to a section of the freeway that Florida knows from her early days taking the Jag as far from the city as she dared. And suddenly this road is her road, these curves and merges, these off-ramps and exit signs part of her story. She wouldn’t need to think. She’d just keep an even pressure on the gas, a light hand on the wheel, as the car melded to road, the slightly unfamiliar surroundings blew past, becoming recognizable, then second nature.
* * *
The CO presses close to Dios, listening hard. Or maybe not listening at all. Maybe he’s ignoring her words. Maybe he’s drugged by them. Maybe he’s asleep.
Night has come.
Dios rattles on.
The bus is slowing, its blinker on as it heads for an exit ramp. It rolls to a stop.
It’s like I used to tell my cellie Florence—you don’t know the half of us. You don’t know half of the half. We’ve done things you can’t even imagine. We’ve done things you’ve never even known.
Florence. Her name explodes.
There’s a pause in the conversation. Then Florida watches Dios turn and wink.
The bus exhales a hydraulic sigh.
Florida is on her feet. She’s in the aisle. She’s rushing off the bus.
“Isn’t that right, Florence? They don’t know a goddamned thing about us, do they?”
Her name chasing her down the aisle. Her name driving her out and away. Her name loud enough for everyone to hear.
She doesn’t turn back. She’s down the stairs.
“Lady! Not Los Angeles. This…,” the driver calls through the open door. But Florida is moving too quickly to catch the rest of his words. Redlands, Upland, Chino—it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not on the bus with Dios.
She staggers away, wheeling toward the storefronts. She hits plate glass, her hands splayed on the window. Then she sinks down, collapsing in a doorway.
There are no awaiting passengers. The ghost bus glides away.
* * *
Florida leans back against the doorway. She’s been sitting for hours but she’s bone-tired—her muscles and joints cramped from tension. She takes stock of her surroundings. Another strip mall. Another shuttered space. She squints at the sign across the parking lot: WEST ONTARIO PLAZA.
Ontario. Close to LA but nowhere Florida wants to be. A satellite airport city. A drive-by city. Somewhere to get gas or coffee.
Now what? Florida doesn’t want to blow her cash on a motel when she’s less than an hour from Los Angeles. So, hitchhike? Walk? Camp out until morning? Find somewhere to make a phone call? Try to reach one of her derelict friends if she can recall one of their phone numbers—a long shot at best?
Despite her exhaustion, Florida rises to her feet.
It’s unearthly quiet—a city without city sounds. Just the hush-hush of the trees and the random skitter of something blowing down the street.
The bus has dropped her on a four-lane thoroughfare. To the north, Florida can see the suggestion of the San Bernardino Mountains looming in the dark.
A squeal of rubber. A distant flash of brake lights sparks the night.
“Sit.”
Florida steadies herself as she surveys the scattering of masked passengers. Toward the back of the bus there’s a cluster of empty seats.
She can hear a last desperate passenger hammering the bus’s door for admission. She drops her bag on one seat and sits next to the window.
The driver puts the bus into gear and begins to pull away.
Only then does Florida glance down the aisle at the late arrival.
It’s Dios, her green gaze glittering above the black bandana that shields her mouth and nose. One of her eyes is still swollen, but the other bores into Florida with delighted menace.
Florida leaves her seat and steps into the aisle.
“Sit, please. Both sit,” the driver barks.
The bus leaves the parking lot and makes a right turn.
Dios lurches and comes to a halt at Florida’s row. “So, you finally left that motel room. I got worried that you were going to starve to death.”
Florida freezes. The bus bucks again, sending her toppling into her seat.
“Sit, now,” the driver commands.
Dios sits in the row opposite Florida and pulls down her bandana.
Her bruises are turning from purple to yellow. A spiderweb of blood has exploded in one of her blackened eyes. Two stitches flutter by her mouth. She’s covered the bust in her top lip with lipstick, but she can’t mask the deformity.
Like Florida, she’s wearing some of her state-issued clothes. But she’s pegged and pinned them, giving herself a more tailored look. Her hair is loose and the curls bounce with the road.
“Let’s roll,” Dios says. She leans back in her seat. Soon the familiar lyrics of Macario Leyva rise above the bus’s squeak and rumble.
Pero nunca se fijaron
En tan humilde señora.
Florida inches over to the window. The air-conditioning is on full tilt, expelling frigid air with a chemical scent. She presses her cheek against the freezing glass, trying to ignore the stinging chill.
The bus picks up speed. Soon it is throttling onto a ramp for the 10.
Florida closes her eyes, hoping—praying—the rhythm of the road will lure her to sleep. Dios keeps singing, keeps repeating the phrase about Camelia La Tejana coming to Los Angeles to betray her lover.
Florida leans over the aisle. “What’s your game, Dios?”
Dios stops singing, then angles herself toward Florida, her face inches from Florida’s own. “Just following your lead.”
“Masks on, please,” the driver crackles over the PA system.
“Why?”
“Because, after Tina, you actually think I’d let you out of my sight? Oh, Florida, I know you. Skip parole, get hauled back, then what? Another lie to get yourself out of trouble. Another shirking of the blame. You would have laid Tina at my feet to save yourself.”
“Tina was months ago. Tina is over.”
“No,” Dios says. “I’ve told you before. None of this is over. It’s only just begun.”
* * *
The bus pulls off the freeway and rolls through another neighborhood of strip malls and prefab office parks. It wheezes to a stop in front of a Vietnamese supermarket. Florida slips into the row behind her to put some space between herself and Dios. She clamps her eyes shut, praying Tina’s mutilated body doesn’t take the seat next to her.
New passengers load, wary-eyed over their masks. They shuffle down the aisle, searching for vacant rows.
“Hurry, hurry,” the driver barks. “Sit, sit.”
Florida presses herself against the window. Seven hours until they reach Los Angeles. It will be dark. And who knows where the bus will drop her. And who knows how she will reach Hancock Park. And whether anyone will be home. And what she will do if they aren’t. And how she’ll get her car. And where the keys are.
And how she will shake Dios.
She presses hard into the window, letting the reverb of the engine sink into her ears.
The bus kicks into gear.
A final passenger is coming down the aisle—a boxy, ungainly man. Flattop and tinted glasses. A mask advertising the Diamondbacks covers his mouth.
A jolt of recognition hits Florida. She knows him. She knows she knows him.
The sensation vanishes as quick as it hit. Dios has made her jumpy. This whole fucking escape—this unplanned flight, Tina’s name—makes her nerves light up when anyone looks her way.
The man takes the empty row in front of her, his head rising above the seatback.
There’s no way. She doesn’t know this guy.
She doesn’t know anyone, anywhere, which is why she was shelved in that motel and then abandoned. She is utterly fucking alone.
Except for Dios now. Always Dios.
The bus is picking up speed as it hits the on-ramp for the seven-hour, straight-shot trip west.
She stares at the stranger’s head, flattop bobbing slightly with the rhythm of the road. There’s something organized—meticulous—about the way he sits, something institutional. Like he’s army. Or police.
Or …
The driver slams the brakes. Florida glances out the window to see a small hatchback veering wildly away.
Or …
The driver curses the car loud enough that his words reach the back of the bus.
Or … she does know him. The man sitting in front of Florida is the rookie CO who broke up Dios’s beatdown, the long-faced newbie who took his time with Dios’s exposed breast.
Florida rises to her feet, then sits.
There is nowhere to go, no exit until she’s crossed the state line, breaking the law.
Her heart beats in her fingertips. It beats in her throat.
She leans across the empty seat to check on Dios, who is staring at the CO as if she’s willing him to look her way.
Florida knows the daggers of Dios’s gaze too well. Soon enough the CO feels Dios’s eyes on him.
“Do I know you?”
“I don’t know,” Dios says. “Do you?”
“Maybe,” the guy says. Then he turns away.
Florida tries to force her shoulders to relax, her fingers to unclench.
“Do we all look the same to you?”
“Women?” the CO says. “You think women all look the same to me?”
“Did I say that?” Dios asks.
“It’s hard to tell what you actually look like with that bandana. Maybe we’ve met. But I’m guessing we haven’t. Although—”
“What?”
“Maybe I do know you.” Over the headrest in front of her Florida sees the CO lean closer to Dios. “Give me a minute.”
“You’ve got seven hours,” Dios says.
“It’s not coming to me,” the CO says.
“Not yet,” Dios says.
Florida closes her eyes. She wraps the shirt she bought at Rite Aid around her head to stop the sound of Dios’s voice.
Still, it leaks in.
—Come on. You really don’t know me? Maybe we do all look alike to you. We look like your busted aunt, your crazy sister, your cousins from out of state.
Shut up, shut up, shut up, Florida chants silently.
—We look like the girls at school who wouldn’t give you the time of day, who spit, laughed, and teased your loser ass. The ones who lived large and crashed bad. Made you happy to see them fall, didn’t it? Made you happy when they were put in their place by their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and brothers. They scared you. They deserved what they got.
Dios’s words are hard, but her voice is all heat and sex, straight-up poison dripping in the CO’s ear.
Florida peeks through the crack in the seat at the CO. She sees him nod his head slightly like he’s got gears turning in there, like he’s tuning in to Dios’s frequency and tuning in to who she is.
“Shut up!” the exclamation slips out.
Dios whirls round and catches Florida’s eye. “Are we bothering you?” she asks.
Florida looks away and shuts her eyes before the momentary connection between them takes dangerous shape.
“Maybe I’ll move over there,” the CO says. “Seeing as we seem to be bothering that lady.”
Florida watches him slip across the aisle.
“You know, you are starting to look familiar,” he says as he sits.
Florida’s heart quicksteps against her rib cage.
They are driving through a sprawl of big-box stores and business parks. They pass under a maze of cloverleafs. Then the city flattens. The new construction falls back. A few forgotten outposts—derelict family restaurants and run-down motels—and then nothing, just desert and a ridgeline of distant mountains.
The canned air is giving Florida a headache. She’s sweating hot and cold.
The space between service stations grows longer.
Florida drifts in and out of an uneasy sleep. Dios has been monologuing hard for hours.
“You’re that bitch,” the CO says.
“What bitch?”
“That bitch who got beat up.”
“You mean the bitch whose breast you grabbed.”
“I didn’t grab shit.”
“You probably told your boys all about it.”
“What the fuck you doing on this bus?” the CO says.
“Traveling,” Dios says.
“You have permission?”
“What about you?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” the CO says. “You’re the one who needs to be telling me things.”
“Not anymore,” Dios says. “Just relax and enjoy the ride.”
“I don’t ride with the population.” The CO rises out of his seat.
“Looks like you do now. Looks like you’re slumming it with the rest of us. Looks like you’re going somewhere you’re not supposed to go. Probably not supposed to leave the state. Probably supposed to be safer at home or at work.”
“None of your fucking business.”
“Inside all you COs wanted was a little alone time with us prisoners and now you’re running away. I guess you only want us when you can control us.”
“Who says I’m not in control?”
“Stick around and find out,” Dios says.
The CO takes his seat.
Florida tries to drink her smoothie, but she can barely swallow. She pulls the tank top tighter around her head. But Dios’s words are on a hyperloop in her brain.
“You think we want it hard—that we need it hard—your beatdowns, your little personal punishments. And you like to give it. It restores the order we disrupted with our so-called crimes, right? But you know what? I’ve felt the fear on the far end of your club.”
Florida checks the window just in time to see the bus pass the state line. She’s in the shit now.
“Want to hear about the last time I rode a bus—I mean before the state bussed me out your way, put me in your hands?
“It was back in college, a place so small and fancy you’ve never heard of it. One night we drove from our campus way the hell out in the woods into Boston. There were five of us packed into some boy’s brand-new Volvo. On the way back the driver got lost in a tangled section of town.
“You listening?
“This hood was called Roxbury and I’d never been there before. But I know it. You’d know it too. A neighborhood that looks like every other neighborhood until you squint at the details and see this is a place for Black or brown people. The little things. The minor derelictions and oversights. I don’t have to tell you, do I? I know you know.
“Derelictions? Look it up.
“Anyway, there’s three of us in the back besides the two in the front and we’re rolling through this hood where the shadow activity is being played in the open. The other kids are starting to get jumpy, locking the doors and whatever. And now we’re deep in some Boston labyrinth of all right turns and no way out.
“There’s a smell in the car. I’d know it anywhere. I bet you would too. I’ve smelled it on myself alone on the subway at two a.m. I’ve smelled it on me alone with my older cousin on the couch when my mother was out. I’ve smelled it the first time the lights and sirens picked my crew up drinking stolen liquor in the park. I’ve smelled it coming from others who didn’t want to see me coming.
“You’ve smelled it too in the yard before a fight, on the line when you got one of us alone, in the back of the bus bringing in the new girls.
“Fear.
“And just like those dumb college kids had planned it, just like they’d summoned their own nightmare with their twitching and nail-biting, the Volvo stops at a light and a couple of boys in black hoodies and baseball caps bang on the glass, pantomiming I’m gonna blow your fucking brains out with their fingers cocked like pistols.
“I almost laughed as the dumb-ass driver cracked his window, asking if he can help these kids—like if he played dumb the thugs will stop doing what they’re doing—which was enough for them to get the door open, pull out the driver, and pound him on the pavement.
“Everyone in the car started screaming except me. I was placid as a fucking lake while the driver was getting pummeled into the asphalt. I kept my eyes on his eyes as each fist hit its mark, splitting his skin, darkening his pasty complexion. I watched the fear get pounded out of him. I kept my cool as the boy who messed up the driver slid behind the wheel, scattering the rest of the kids from the car. But I didn’t fucking move. I caught his eyes in the rearview. I held his gaze as his partner took the shotgun seat.
“I let him see me. Not just see me but see me. Then I gave him his own goddamned smile back. Slowly I got out of the car before they tore out of there. When I watched them go, I felt the air swell inside me like I was a balloon and could goddamn float away.
“We took the bus back to campus.
“Like I said, I hate the bus. But sometimes you make do.”
* * *
Florida’s heard this story before. The pride Dios felt in the gulf that opened that night. The vision of herself she caught in that rearview. How she staked her claim as more than a scholarship kid along for a ride with her rich classmates. How she understood she was learning the tools to take them down. That is, until one of their mothers took her down—went to town on Dios after she had assaulted her son. Prosecuted the scholarship girl from Queens from the depths of her privately managed wealth. Like she was brushing lint off her sleeve.
Florida closes her eyes, squeezing them until she can hear the blood in her ears. Her heart flutters lamely, running low on panic.
Three hours.
They chase the sunset along the 10, barreling down the freeway toward the tiger-striped sky.
Two hours.
The surrounding landscape and landmarks grow familiar from weekend getaways, music festivals, and business trips with Carter.
The bus is buffeted as it passes the wind farms outside of Palm Springs. Florida watches the blades trying to slice the early moon out of the sky.
Up ahead she can see the dimmed lights of the Indian casino standing sentinel in the dark.
An hour and a half to go.
If she were driving, she’d be there by now. Because the bus has come to a section of the freeway that Florida knows from her early days taking the Jag as far from the city as she dared. And suddenly this road is her road, these curves and merges, these off-ramps and exit signs part of her story. She wouldn’t need to think. She’d just keep an even pressure on the gas, a light hand on the wheel, as the car melded to road, the slightly unfamiliar surroundings blew past, becoming recognizable, then second nature.
* * *
The CO presses close to Dios, listening hard. Or maybe not listening at all. Maybe he’s ignoring her words. Maybe he’s drugged by them. Maybe he’s asleep.
Night has come.
Dios rattles on.
The bus is slowing, its blinker on as it heads for an exit ramp. It rolls to a stop.
It’s like I used to tell my cellie Florence—you don’t know the half of us. You don’t know half of the half. We’ve done things you can’t even imagine. We’ve done things you’ve never even known.
Florence. Her name explodes.
There’s a pause in the conversation. Then Florida watches Dios turn and wink.
The bus exhales a hydraulic sigh.
Florida is on her feet. She’s in the aisle. She’s rushing off the bus.
“Isn’t that right, Florence? They don’t know a goddamned thing about us, do they?”
Her name chasing her down the aisle. Her name driving her out and away. Her name loud enough for everyone to hear.
She doesn’t turn back. She’s down the stairs.
“Lady! Not Los Angeles. This…,” the driver calls through the open door. But Florida is moving too quickly to catch the rest of his words. Redlands, Upland, Chino—it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not on the bus with Dios.
She staggers away, wheeling toward the storefronts. She hits plate glass, her hands splayed on the window. Then she sinks down, collapsing in a doorway.
There are no awaiting passengers. The ghost bus glides away.
* * *
Florida leans back against the doorway. She’s been sitting for hours but she’s bone-tired—her muscles and joints cramped from tension. She takes stock of her surroundings. Another strip mall. Another shuttered space. She squints at the sign across the parking lot: WEST ONTARIO PLAZA.
Ontario. Close to LA but nowhere Florida wants to be. A satellite airport city. A drive-by city. Somewhere to get gas or coffee.
Now what? Florida doesn’t want to blow her cash on a motel when she’s less than an hour from Los Angeles. So, hitchhike? Walk? Camp out until morning? Find somewhere to make a phone call? Try to reach one of her derelict friends if she can recall one of their phone numbers—a long shot at best?
Despite her exhaustion, Florida rises to her feet.
It’s unearthly quiet—a city without city sounds. Just the hush-hush of the trees and the random skitter of something blowing down the street.
The bus has dropped her on a four-lane thoroughfare. To the north, Florida can see the suggestion of the San Bernardino Mountains looming in the dark.
A squeal of rubber. A distant flash of brake lights sparks the night.
