Bud Smith - F 250

“Your girlfriend, on a Greyhound bus.”

“A real sweetheart. A southern girl. She’s never been with a guy — so she claims. And I’m nervous,” she added, “because I want something to happen, and I’m not sure it’ll go okay.”

“Want do you want to happen?”

K Neon ran her fingers through my hair and said, “I want to watch you fuck her.”

June doom pulled into the station at noon.I sat in the F-250 with K Neon, watching the silver bus glide in. My hand was on K’s knee. She tapped the dashboard nervously.

“I hope she’s on this bus.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“We had a fight,” K said, “just before I left school.”

The bus settled low to the ground hydraulically. The doors opened.

“About what?”

“She wanted me to stop seeing somebody. A boy.”

I nodded.

“I said that I would, but here you are … a new boy.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“Your only saving grace.”

The first of the passengers started to trickle out of the Greyhound.

“Which one is she?”

K sighed, “Oh you’ll know her when you see her.”

I watched a string of passengers exit the bus, shuffling off in random directions into the bus depot and its rows of waiting cars packed in the lot. Most of the people were waiting for the connecting bus to Atlantic City. They were going down there to feed their hopes and dreams into video poker machines, slot machines, the open hands of baccarat dealers in white shirts and black vests who smiled like angels of death.

An old woman struggled with an assortment of bags. A man in a tan suit held a large wrapped gift with a balloon scotch taped to it. A girl with a cat in a travel case. A black lady held her son’s hand, pointing up at a plane in the sky dragging a vinyl banner towards the beach. The banner was for Tooth Town. It featured a drawing of a fine set of white teeth under red lips that smiled at the world below.

A girl — tall, doe-eyed, dyed red hair — came through the doors of the bus. She wore a dress covered in constellations and star charts. One hand clutched a suitcase, the other gripped sky-blue skateboard sneakers slung over her shoulder. She glanced around, looking for K. Cool. Calm. Barefoot on hot asphalt. Not frightened by the broken glass strewn across the surfaces of the world.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Duh, dummy.” K leaned over on the bench seat and honked the horn. June looked up, smiled at us in the beat up truck, and walked over. She stopped at my door.

“And, so who are you?”

“He’s the driver,” K said.

“Yup,” I agreed, “the driver. I’m gonna take you all over. High, low, up into the sky. Down into the valleys, through the secret tunnels beneath the asylum. Even to the boardwalk.”

“Sounds fun.”

I said who I really was. She said who she really was. We shook hands politely. She got in the passenger side and kissed K. We drove nowhere, just forward.

“Where you wanna go?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Never been here.”

K lifted June’s dress and exposed her pale thighs.

“Hey, what gives?” June was pissed.

“I was hoping you had your bikini on underneath. We could go to the beach.”

“No,” June said. “No beach, please.”

“What’s your problem?”

“Been on a bus for four hours. Can I just get a minute?”

“Take all the minutes you want,” K said.

Were they gonna fight like this the whole time?

“I’ve got a full tank of gas. I can just circle New Jersey. We’ll do laps: from here to the southern tip, then up through the farms…”

“Farms? Just stop.”

“Called the Garden State for a reason,” I said.

“The toxic waste state,” K added.

“Hey, you’re here. Can’t be all that bad. I’ll drive you through the pine barrens, then up into the mountains…”

“There’s no mountains in New Jersey,” K said.

“Any real genius knows that there certainly are,” I said. “I’ll show you. Big rock peak cliffs. All the way up there. Castles in the clouds. And then, after the mountains, I’ll take you both to the city. Blinding lights. Singing. Dancing. Etcetera.”

“Let’s just go to the ocean,” K said.

June said, “I think I’d rather get a beer.”

I nodded, pleased. I aimed the truck in the direction of beer.

The ferris wheel was stuck.Mashed or severed gears. Some girl screamed, wild and desperate, imprisoned at the top. Her voice was shrill, contained hot panic — as if sentenced to public death for a crime she didn’t understand. Not quite a child, not quite an adult, she hovered on the fringes of the void.

A wax paper soda cup flew down to the boardwalk planks; ice spread everywhere. There was nothing that could be done. People stood outside Midway Pizza were staring up, excited.

The moon was full, and the roller-coaster flashed by — a mechanical snake creating thunder.

One thing was certain. You could spot the tourists. They came there for the spectacle. On Friday afternoons in the summer they packed the turnpike and parkway, coming south from NYC, Staten Island, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark … bennies. The girl up on the Ferris wheel was one of them, a visitor, and she was the greatest spectacle of all.

The wind came down the boardwalk with the smell of zeppole: fried dough and confectioners’ sugar. There was the off-kilter music of the carousel. Electric lights. Electric motors. Flying horses. Fairground organs.

Grits of sand whipped against all rough edges, making everything smooth. The crowd stared up at the screaming girl.

I put my hand in the back pocket of K Neon’s cutoff jean shorts and tugged. It was no use. Sensory overload. She was wide-eyed wonder — transfixed as she looked up.

“Let’s go,” I commanded. “I’ll show you something.”

My voice broke the spell from the girl’s sky screams, brought both my girls back to me.

I was there with two beautiful college girls, like I’d just won the lottery. As a result, my feathers were all puffed up like some champion peacock let out on a Saturday parade. I kept myself from floating off up over the Ferris wheel, victim of an over-inflated ego, by reminding myself, continuously, that this kind of thing wasn’t a normal occurrence. I should treat it like a delicate gift that could be ruined as offhandedly as it had arrived.

K Neon, the blonde of proper-bred blood and money, dressed in a candy stripe, nautical tank top; tight jean shorts; and flip-flops. June, a native of Savannah, Georgia, who, like me, had nothing. She didn’t even have a bra on. She wore a necklace of hundreds of shards of black obsidian. Ripped jean shorts. Fugazi T-shirt, painted on and faded to near pink.

June was in love with K, and K liked June. Both of them thought I was alright, but I got the impression that was just because they had no clue where I was coming from, what I was thinking, what I wanted. They didn’t know if I was for real or just some weirdo that would dissipate when the wind normalized.

I took whatever opportunity presented itself to show them the depth of my oddness and the way I belonged nowhere and everywhere at the same time. They took the hint and removed all posturing, although a nervous tension throbbed beneath like a nest of baby rabbits under a patch of lawn. These two girls were squirming, pulsing with the possibility of conflict, collision: self-destruction as means of re-envisioning.

They liked to drink. I remember that. They’d drink anything you put in the vicinity of their full, wet, welcoming lips. They both preferred straws, thinking it was cute (for some reason) to drink everything through a straw … even beer. I took great joy in feeding them both drinks. June sucked back Gin Gimlets. K Neon liked straight vodka.