Winter Break
The Greyhound station in Champaign was next to a bar that opened at seven in the morning, and I never once saw it closed. Inside the station the chairs were plastic, bolted to the floor in rows, and the floor was tile that used to be white. There were posters on the walls for places I’m pretty sure the buses didn’t actually go to. One was for Las Vegas. A television in the corner had the news on, just loud enough that you could tell it was the news.
I bought my ticket three days before Christmas, 1990. The woman at the ticket window was behind thick glass and didn’t look up when she told me the fare. Champaign to Chicago to Minneapolis to Duluth. Forty-six dollars for twenty-two hours, which seemed about right at the time. Duluth was new. My folks had moved up there in August, about a week after I went back down to school, and I’d never seen the house. My mom had mailed pictures in October. It was a brown split-level with a basketball hoop over the garage that came with the place, and in one of the pictures my dad was standing in the driveway pointing up at it. Nobody in our family played basketball.
The bus loaded at nine. It was still gray out. I put my overstuffed army surplus bag in the luggage compartment and found a seat halfway back on the driver’s side and put my backpack on the seat next to me. Other passengers came on. A woman with two kids who looked tired. A guy in an Army jacket who took the back seat and shut his eyes. Two college boys talking too loud about a party from the night before and a girl at it who one of them was sure had been looking at him. An older woman with a Bible and a paper bag that I found out later had fried chicken and biscuits in it for her whole trip. I should have brought fried chicken.
The driver was a thick man. He counted heads twice and pulled out.
I’d been in Champaign three semesters. It was a fine town. Flat, the university running through it. I was nineteen and didn’t know about fine towns yet.
The bus took I-57 north. The empty cornfields around town were stubble and frozen mud. A few snowflakes were coming down, though not enough to do anything. We stopped in Rantoul. A woman got on with a shopping bag and a child’s car seat. We stopped in Kankakee, idling behind a gas station while three men got on, none of them speaking to each other, all of them taking the last few rows by themselves. The door opened and the cold came in each time.
The two college boys fell asleep against each other’s shoulders, and the question of the girl was going to have to wait. The woman with the car seat held it in her lap and looked out the window.
I watched the farms go by. Outside Paxton there was a yellow house with a boat on a trailer in the side yard, a real fishing boat with a windshield and a canvas cover. There wasn’t any water around there worth putting it in. I thought about that one for a long time and decided whoever lived there had come from somewhere else and hadn’t gotten around to selling it. Maybe from up where I was going. I wondered if the people who’d sold my folks the split-level had taken a boat with them, or left something behind in the garage, and then I wondered which room was going to be mine. My mom had said on the phone it was the one at the end of the hall. That didn’t help much when I didn’t know which way the hall went.
Chicago started a long way before you got to it. Suburbs first, then the warehouses and the rail yards where the freight cars sat in long lines. Then the skyline. Gray on gray. I’d seen it before from driving through but not up close like this.
The Harrison Street station smelled like diesel and like people who had been in their clothes too long. Somebody was selling hot dogs. Cops walked in pairs. A guy was asleep on a bench with his arm hooked through the strap of his bag. The PA was going constantly. Milwaukee. St. Louis. Indianapolis. Detroit.
I had four hours. I put my bag in a locker. It barely fit. Then I got a CTA map off a rack near the ticket counter and went outside.
The wind in Chicago gets in wherever you didn’t button up. People walk fast because they’re cold. I walked fast too, but because I wanted to see how far I could go. I went north through the Loop, past the department stores and the crowd at the Christmas windows at Field’s. I walked up through River North, which back then was a lot of parking lots and the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s. I kept checking my watch and folding and unfolding the map in my pocket until it got soft.
The lagoon in Lincoln Park was covered in ice and the grass was brown. There were joggers and people walking dogs that were sniffing at the frozen ground. But there was space in the middle of all those buildings, and past the park there was the drive and the lake. The waves were small and steady. You could hear each one hit the rocks. Some gulls were standing on the ice near the shore. I stood there longer than I had time for.
I checked my watch. I’d been standing there ten minutes. I walked over to the el at Fullerton and took it back south. I watched the city out the windows of the train until it went underground. The backs of three-flats with their wooden porches stacked up. Church steeples sticking up over neighborhoods I didn’t know the names of. I got back downtown and got back to the station and got my bag out of the locker and found the gate for Minneapolis with twelve minutes to spare. My feet were cold and I was breathing hard.
The passengers were different on the overnight bus, or maybe just more tired. A guy got on in Milwaukee who smelled like whiskey and kept trying to talk to the woman across the aisle. Eventually the driver had to come back and tell him to knock it off. He knocked it off but kept looking at her. She kept her face turned to the window.
There was a young guy near the back I watched from time to time. He had a duffel bag and kept looking up toward the front every time somebody moved. When we stopped in Madison he got off fast and didn’t get back on. About an hour later a woman three rows up started looking for her purse and couldn’t find it. She made a fuss about it. The driver pulled over at a rest stop to help her look. The purse was gone. She cried, not loud, and the woman with the Bible and the chicken got up and went and sat with her.
Wisconsin in December is dark. Past Madison the woods came right up to the road, and the only lights were gas stations every so often. I slept a little and woke up every time the bus slowed down.
We stopped in Tomah. Everyone off, fifteen minutes, the driver said. The station was attached to a restaurant that served the same food at every hour of the day. Red vinyl booths, stools at the counter. The waitress was somewhere past sixty. She was wearing a name tag that said Arlene or Darlene, one of those. She was carrying a coffee pot in her right hand and she’d refill your cup whether you’d asked her to or not. She had a way of not really looking at you when she did it. I had a sandwich I didn’t want. I think it was turkey. It came with a pickle spear and potato chips on the side.
I went outside for a few minutes just to breathe something besides the air on the bus. The other passengers were doing the same thing. Standing around in small groups not really talking. A guy smoked a cigarette down to the filter. A woman was pacing back and forth, talking to herself or maybe praying. Somewhere north of here my folks were asleep in a house I couldn’t have found from the end of the block. Then the driver called us back on.
We got into Minneapolis a little before two in the morning. Every light in the station was on. My layover was ninety minutes. Not enough time to go anywhere. I got a coffee out of a vending machine into a paper cup that burned my fingers, and I found a seat by the windows.
An old man asleep across three seats. A woman in a winter coat that was too heavy for indoors, reading a paperback with her lips moving. Two teenagers playing cards on the floor by an outlet where one of them had plugged in a radio. A janitor with a mop going slow back and forth, not really cleaning anything.
A man came over and sat down next to me without asking. He was maybe thirty-five. His coat was thin and he had a backpack with a sleeping bag tied under it.
“Do you believe in hope?” he said.
I didn’t answer right away because I wasn’t sure what kind of answer he was looking for.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes.”
He nodded. Then he told me his story. He needed to get to Seattle. His sister was there, last he heard, and she was the only family he had. He’d had a job in Minneapolis and the job was over and the rent had come due. He needed thirty dollars for a ticket. Or twenty. Whatever I could spare.
I gave him five. It was what I could give and still eat for the rest of the trip. He thanked me and asked my name and I told him. He asked where I was headed.
“Duluth,” I said. “My folks are up there.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s good you know where they are.” Then he got up and walked over to somebody else sitting alone and started in again. I watched him go around the station for the next hour or so. Some people gave him money. Most of them pretended they couldn’t hear him.
The last bus was smaller. Almost more like a van than a coach. Maybe fifteen of us. The driver this time was a woman, older, with gray hair pulled back. She’d driven the route enough that she didn’t slow down for the curves.
We took I-35 north. The forest got thicker and the towns got smaller. Pine City, Hinckley, Sandstone, Moose Lake.
Hinckley I knew about mostly from my uncle, who had a nail he said came out of the ashes of the old depot. He kept it in a baby food jar on the windowsill of his garage, next to another baby food jar full of washers.
The bus stopped at each town and let off a person or two. The people getting off walked out into the dark and either got into cars that were waiting for them or walked off toward houses I couldn’t see. Once I saw the eyes of an animal in the headlights and then they were gone. Probably a deer.
I was past tired. My eyes were gritty and I couldn’t sleep anyway. We were close.
Then Thompson Hill. The bus came over the top and there was Duluth down below us, and Superior across the harbor with the refinery and the grain elevators lit up. We went down the hill into the city. The avenues went straight up the hill from the harbor, with the old brick buildings along them. Out past the ore docks the lift bridge had its red lights blinking. Past the bridge the lights just stopped, all the way across, and that was the lake. You couldn’t see any of it.
The station was just a building on a corner downtown. The driver pulled in and said end of the line and the rest of us got off.
It wasn’t quite seven. The sky was just barely starting to go gray on the east side. The streets were empty and the storefronts were dark.
A car was at the curb already with the engine running. They’d called ahead to find out when the bus was coming in.
I stood there for a minute before I went over to it. I’d been sitting for so long that I just needed to stand. The cold was working on me through my coat.
The car door opened and the warm air came out into the cold.
“You look terrible,” my dad said.
“I feel terrible.”
I put my bag in the back seat and got in. The heater was going and the radio was on low. I watched Duluth go by the window. I didn’t know any of the streets. Then I closed my eyes.