Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Now he pulled the bus map from his pocket and checked it one last time, although he had already memorized where he should go. It was very important to find the corner where his particular bus stopped. If he forgot, or had misread something, he could be lost for days. He might never get home again. Perhaps he should not have attempted this. But the surprise balls rustled crisply in his pack, and the map pointed out his bus stop very clearly, and if he went home now he knew that he would despise himself forever, he would spend the rest of his life chewing the bitter knowledge that he hadn’t a single spark of courage in him. He set out toward the bus stop, walking more slowly now and holding the map in front of him, blindly folding and unfolding it.

At the corner he wanted he found four people already waiting, which was encouraging. They stood below a blue sign bearing the number of his bus. He checked the number against the map, thought for a moment, and then checked it again. Everything was in order. He smiled at the other people. They looked around him, through him, above him. There was a woman in elastic stockings, a teenaged boy, a soldier, and a younger boy with his hands in his pockets. For some reason their skin appeared to be all the same shade of rough, dry pink and their hair straggled down in identical brown wisps, although they stood separate from each other and were obviously not related. Jeremy felt chilled by them. He thought of his sculptures, in which people like these so often appeared — standard representatives of what Brian called simple humanity, but any time Jeremy went out he was forced to see that humanity was far more complex and untidy and depressing than it ever was in his pieces. The old ladies were rude and sniveling, the men lacked solidity somehow, and the children seemed to carry a threat of violence. Jeremy spent the rest of his wait standing sideways to them — not confronting them but not facing totally away, either, for fear of giving offense — and like them he kept his eyes fixed on an empty spot in the distance.

When finally the bus came, it seemed almost as familiar as home. He climbed into a smell he had remembered without realizing it from thirty years in the past, from the days when he rode to art school or went shopping for clothes with his mother. The air was warm and slightly stuffy. Although he had to ask the driver what the price of a ticket was nowadays, he noticed that the seats still braced his spine at the same unnatural angle, and the doors still pleated themselves open and shut, and the back of the driver’s neck still gave the impression of kindliness and reliability. Jeremy relaxed and looked out the window. He held Abbie’s pack on his lap now, so that he could sit more comfortably, and as he rode along he kept stroking the slippery pink nylon as he had once stroked the satin binding on his blanket, long ago in childhood, waiting to be borne off to sleep.

Two ladies behind him were discussing someone’s drinking problem. The soldier was whistling. A husband and wife were arguing over a woman named LaRue and up front a tiny black lady was talking to the bus driver. “You ought to seen him when they told him,” she said. “He jumped up and shouted, ‘Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun?’ Planning on shooting his self. Later he wanted to jump into the grave. They had to hold him back by the elbows.”

“Is that right,” the driver said. “Well, I expect he felt mighty close to her.” Jeremy nodded over and over, impressed by the strangeness of what he heard and by the driver’s easy acceptance of it.

Now the landscape outside his window was more open and barren, and the streets were less crowded. He was not sure that he had ever been here before. The scrubby trees far at the edge of the horizon had a desolate look, but in his present mood, when he was so proud of this trip and so hopeful at the thought of seeing Mary again, even desolation gave him the feeling of happiness swelling and unfolding inside him. He thought of things that had not occurred to him for years, some of them sad. He thought of his grandmother Amory, whom he had loved very much, and of the gilt-framed picture that hung in her parlor. A crowd of people in a faded forest. “See that forest?” his grandmother said. “Every bit of it is real. It is made of dried plants, the pines are dried ferns and the flowers are dried violets.” “How about the people?” Jeremy had asked, not thinking. “Are they dried too?” He thought of Mrs. Jarrett, his mother’s old boarder. Why, he had never properly mourned Mrs. Jarrett’s passing! Grief flashed through him like a sharp white light. How elegant she had been, with her plumed hats and her white gloves! How hard she must have worked to keep up her appearance! He looked around him at the inside of the bus, at the people nodding and agreeing with each other and the soldier whistling his tripping little tune. Then down at his hands, cupping Abbie’s pink backpack. Even his hands seemed dear and sad, and gave him cause for joy.

Now here was the narrow rutted road to the boatyard, pointed out to him so patiently by the driver. A line of cottages and trailers dotted the wild grass. Jeremy plodded along in the herringbone prints of some truck or tractor, keeping his head bent against a cold breeze that was blowing up. The soil was very soggy, as if it had rained not long ago, and soon his shoes and trouser cuffs were damp. He thought the dampness was pleasant — two cool hands pressing the soles of his feet. After rounding each curve he looked for a glimpse of the boatyard. He had no idea how far it was. But when he failed to find it he trudged on without minding. Some kind of rhythm had been set up, and his legs swung forward in a steady trundling gait that seemed to require no effort. He felt he could have gone on till nightfall and still not have tired.

Then up sprang a cluster of gray shacks and a sheet of water beyond them — silently, eerily. He almost thought he had caught them moving into place just out of the corner of his eye. Above the largest building, which was plastered with soft drink signs, a tin chimney seemed suspended from a thread of smoke. There were several shabby cars scattered about, and a rusty flatbed truck beside a shed, and boats lining the dock and moored out on the water, but he saw no sign of humans. He approached the largest building as slowly as possible. Still, he felt he brought more noise and motion than the rules of this place would allow.

“Al’s Supplies” the sign outside said, with Coca-Cola circles at either end like giant red thumbtacks. Jeremy climbed the hollow wooden steps and went inside. He found a man sitting beside a pot-bellied stove, reading a tabloid. All around him were display cases full of astonishing objects, things made of brass and wood and leather. Coils of very white rope hung from the rafters. In the dimness beyond he saw tinned goods on shelves, and he could smell cheese. “Excuse me,” he said. The man folded his paper very carefully and creased the fold with his thumbnail before he looked up. “I was wondering if you knew where Brian O’Donnell’s house is,” Jeremy said.

“O’Donnell. No such fellow here by that name.”

“But — but there has to be,” Jeremy said.

“Nope.”

“Isn’t this the Quamikut Boatyard?”

“Yes, but there ain’t no—”

“He has a house here. His name is O’Donnell, a man with a beard.”

“Well, I never seen him and I know everybody roundabout, Mister.”

“But surely you — and there’s a woman there now with six children, staying in his house.”

“Oh! You’re talking about Mary Pauling.”

“That’s right, that’s who I mean.”

“She’s here, but I never heard of no O’Donnell before.”

“Well, um, could you tell me how to find her?”