Глен Хиршберг - Transitway

This was the scariest thing about bad L.A., he thought. Not a single moving car in sight. No faces at windows, no summer vacation kids on bicycles. But with the sunlight pouring honey on the palm trees and carefully kept rooftops and porches, and the purple flowers on the jacarandas swinging like little bells in the morning breeze, and that dry, delicious heat seeping up from the desert sand still stirring under all that concrete, you could so easily trick yourself into mistaking this place for some seaside Spanish town at siesta.

Just try not to notice the bars latticed over the miniature square windows of each stucco-and-cedar bungalow. Try not to acknowledge the way those bungalows hunch too close together on their tiny, ice-plant-choked lots like circled wagons. This particular low-income development had gone up in the 1940s but, despite its age, and like most southern California neighborhoods — rich or poor, grafted onto the hillsides or welded into the desert — the buildings all looked as though they could be coupled together and rolled off the landscape in a single afternoon.

Even so, Q's description of his morning walk nagged at Ferdinand. Had his neighborhood always been this quiet? Where were the earthquake tremors of hip-hop bass as the local teens threw open their car doors and sat on their driveways to smoke pot and stare at each other? Where were the women, older mostly, heads wrapped in scarves despite the heat, wheeling shopping carts to the convenience store, glaring their defiance at each passing gaggle of driveway boys?

Behind him, Ferdinand heard a single, hollow thunk. For no reason, the sound horrified him, made him afraid to turn around. His sweaty hands clenched at his sides. With a grunt, he forced himself to look back.

Q stood three steps out onto the square patch of dead, petrified grass that passed for Ferdinand's front yard. In one huge fist, he was holding the handle of a yellow whiffle bat. When he saw Ferdinand looking, he thunked the barrel again against the ground.

"This a whiffle bat in my hands, or am I just happy to see you?" Q said.

Ferdinand realized his own hands had stayed clenched. And deep in his throat, something was squeezing. "Leave that," he croaked. "What, here?" "Where you found it."

"Found it right here, what the hell's the matter with you?"

"Put it back."

Raising a single eyebrow, Q ran a hand through his scraggle of hair. Then, with exaggerated pomp, he knelt and laid the bat gently in the dead grass. As Ferdinand watched, the bat seemed to lift slightly, then settle, like a bottle with a message in it washing out to sea. Abruptly, he stepped forward and picked it up himself.

The plastic had long since mottled and cracked, and a faint, fetid odor wafted out of a pinhole in the top. Ferdinand swung the bat once, in slow motion, and whatever it was in his throat constricted again. Milt. Not your real uncle. My, Q, what big hair you have…

"Goddamn," Q said. "Retirement's gone and made you wack."

"Think it was you that did that," Ferdinand mumbled.

"Used to play a lot, you know. Whiffle."

"I know."

"You do?"

Glancing up, Ferdinand was startled by the look on his friend's face. Mouth puckered, eyes glazed, turned inward. Pretty much like his own look, he suspected. "We've known each other a long time," he said, though he somehow thought he'd meant to say something else. He tapped the barrel into the grass.

What was it about that sound? Maybe just that there wasn't enough of it. It barely stirred the air, like footsteps on an unmiked soundstage. Silently, he cursed the Vega. He didn't want to be home anymore. He felt invisible enough already.

And then, all at once, as though someone had kicked a volume switch, noise poured into his ears. That permanent freeway roar, like the world's largest summer fan except it ran all year and made everything hotter instead of cooler, less bearable instead of more, and was so omnipresent he'd stopped noticing it half the time. Turning to Q again, he felt at least a semblance of a smile creep back over his mouth.

"Got an idea."

"This your first time?"

"Transitway," Ferdinand said.

Slowly, as though awakening from a deep sleep, Q shivered and glanced toward the street. "What about it?"

"Riding it, what do you think?" Ferdinand felt cramping in his fingers, then all the way up his arms. The sensation was painful, and also weirdly reassuring. He was still part of the world. Could go where people were, be a resident of the city, even if everyone in it had already forgotten he was there. "Thought you wanted to go to Clifton's."

"Before I die," Q said. "Thought maybe I'd put off my murder until just a few days after my retirement."

But Ferdinand could see, by the way Q was shifting his weight back and forth and shaking his head, that the idea intrigued him, too. "Aw, come on. You, the caller of everyone else's bullshit. Who do you know who's even ridden the Transitway?"

"We are talking about the Transitway, as in the bus line that runs up the damn 110, right? As in right on the 110? The one where people finally just hurl themselves off the bus stop benches into traffic 'cause they're already deaf from cars screaming by and burnt to death 'cause there ain't no shade and they've stopped breathing anyway because the carbon monoxide ate their lungs. That Transitway?

"Again," said Ferdinand, closing his weary eyes and feeling further from smiling than he usually did when Q started ranting. "Who do you know who's ever ridden it?"

"Whoever it was told me there are whole gangs shooting up together in the stairwells. Using the homeless people and anyone else they find down there as dinner tables."

"Hell, they're probably using them as dinner," Ferdinand said, and now he did start to smile.

"That's somewhere south of funny."

Ferdinand had heard the stories, too. "Look, what I heard, there's no one down there. City poured all that money into it, and people won't even go on the thing. 10,000 riders a day, they were expecting. I saw an article not too long ago that said they get less than 500."

"Wonder if that's because they built the stations right on the fucking freeway. We'll be waiting — probably two hours, given traffic and the frequency of buses our neighborhoods have always been granted — on a concrete island in dead sunlight or under some overpass where only the passing cars can see us get our guts ripped out, if anyone who happens to be around is in a gut-ripping mood."

"Like you said, probably won't be anyone around. So it'll be nice and quiet."

Q snorted. "'Cause we'll be deaf ten seconds after we get down there."

"It'll be an adventure. Kind of our own little mountain climbing expedition. All that carbon monoxide'll probably even give us that brain buzz high-altitude guys are always raving about."

"Mountain climbers go up," Q snapped. But by this time, they were already walking.

Halfway down the block, Ferdinand quickened his pace, and Q matched him wordlessly. The Transitway, he thought, couldn't be much emptier than the street where he lived. Heat hummed in his skin. His footsteps sounded hollow, the way the whiffle bat had when Q bounced it off the ground. And he kept catching his own shadowed, blurry reflection beneath layers of grime in the windows of parked cars. It was like seeing a home movie of himself twenty years older, crouched forward, inching his way to market at that lurching pace only the ancient and sick could bear. Except there wouldn't be any movies, because no one would take them. And who would watch?

The roar intensified. Glancing up, Ferdinand saw the entrance to the Transitway station and stopped. Q stopped beside him.