Shades of Vanity
P. Garrett Weiler
Copyright 2012 by P. Garrett Weiler
SHADES of VANITY
By
P. Garrett Weiler
In the cool isolation of the big silver-sided Greyhound, Leland drowsily pondered his past. In the bus, desperation and disappointment were no more than a distant, barely heard echo.
A Readers’ Digest article had promised him that he’d be more acceptable to others if he showed interest in their opinions and ideas. So it was that one afternoon after work he sat in “Tanks’ Town” with a burly co-worker everybody called “Mush.”
“This round’s on me,” Leland shouted over the blaring jukebox. “So, what’s going to happen now that Eisenhower’s teeing off at the big steel outfits?”
Mush’s eyes flared beneath heavy brows. “That son-of-a-bitch! My brother-in-law just got laid off ‘cause of him and them other union-bustin’ bastards.” Empty beer bottles clinked when his meaty fist hammers the tabletop. “Damned
Republicans to hell! Oughta…” Belch! “Oughta string ‘em all up by the short hairs.” He grunts and slides from the booth. “Gotta go pee,” he says.
The bus reached out for low barren hills. Around the door, wind warped into a low whistling, alive with some urgent intent.
Reader’ Digest had also told him that people were put off by a negative attitude, and so he stopped himself from ever complaining about even the mildest annoyance.
Johnny Harrison stumbled into the crowded city bus, dark pea jacket wet with snow, collar up around his scrawny neck. He glances at Leland, looks around for another seat, then shrugs and collapses next to him.
“Stinkin’ weather,” Harrison grumbles. He sniffs and runs a finger under his reddened nose.
Leland puts on another face, this one concerned and hopeful. “Spring’s just around the corner, Johnny. Be here before you know it.”
“Bull shit! Damned cold hangs on all winter.” Harrison sneezes then turns away to gaze listlessly at the grey city outside.
In spite of Readers’ Digest, nothing Leland did ever made any difference; nothing ever changed, no matter how hard he tried to mold and remake himself. Even when he tried to joke and kid around with the other guys at work, his puns
and teasings usually stirred up nothing more than resentful stares, as though he was an intruder.
Three men outside O’Malley’s wire mesh cage. O’Malley thrusts a hand through the opening where he hands out supplies. His middle finger salutes the men. “Up yours!” the old man snarls good-naturedly.
The men laugh and slap at the cage. “What’s that, O’Malley,” one of them asks, “Your IQ or your occupation?”
Their fellowship pulls at Leland. He grins and puts on another face and leans against O’Malley’s cage. “There he is, men. . .Jake O’Malley, living proof that Nestor Manufacturing hires the mentally handicapped.”
Sudden silence. Glances dart away, joviality trampled by irritation. More puzzling than his failures were those people not blessed with any of the attributes hailed by Readers’ Digest.
In the smoke-filled lunchroom, Frankie Solano always dominated, usually with what Leland felt certain were contrived tales of lurid sexual encounters. Actually, Solano was more skilled at pandering to Max Freeman, the foreman. No one seemed to notice his fawning eagerness to fetch Max coffee, or the motivations behind his endless offerings of crude jokes. Profane and overbearing, Solano’s nature seemed rooted in the conviction that one’s masculinity could only be measured by the number of women bedded and the minor infractions of the law one
could get away with. Solano would brag that he, “. . .got totally sloshed Friday night, so blown away I could barely find my car, let alone drive the damned thing.” A pause punctuated by rolled eyes and a smirk. “Lousy cop stopped me somewhere and wrote me up for DUI, but I just threw the freakin’ ticket in the box with all the rest of ‘em.”
And yet it was Frankie Solano with whom the other guys went fishing for stripers in the intimate shadows beneath the stone battlements of Ft. Wadsworth. Some of the office girls smiled at him and giggled when he leaned on their desks, hairy arms braced, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of a dingy T-shirt.
Beyond the Greyhound’s tinted windows, monotonous brown plains rolled off into heat haze. Even within the gleaming bus, filled with the smell of new-car freshness, stray bits of the real world intruded. Like the fat man across from him.
His bulk completely hid his seat. In spite of the air conditioning, his rotund features glistened with sweat. Circles of dampness spread down the armpits of the shirt straining to hold back the thrust of belly; it swayed and undulated with the motions of the bus.
The fat man had asked a couple of bland questions earlier---“Got on back in Duluth, didn’t you? Where you headin’?”---and then had predictably gushed a stream of complaints about the weather, the driver, the bleak landscape, all underscored by opinions that rose to his lips like bubbles of dead air from bottom
mud in a swamp. Leland acknowledged him at appropriate intervals with absent nods. Obviously the world was out of step with him and he droned on and on.
Leland picked up a discarded newspaper.
MAN RUNS AMOK
WHEATFIELD – Jeremy Kramer, 72, walked into the Wheatfield Junior High School gymnasium Tuesday night and shouted, “I’ve had enough!” Kramer then fired into the crowd gathered for a PTA-sponsored auction. Two people died, seven others were wounded. Kramer was fatally shot by an off-duty Dakota County deputy. Kramer was described as a man who had always kept to himself. He lived alone near Wheatfield but was seldom seen in town.
How little people understood about that kind of tragedy. Blinded by snug lives and lulled into complacency by their own security, what did they know about an old man who perhaps had seen through all the sham? “I’ve had enough!” Jeremy Kramer had shouted. Surely he’d struggled with an inner protest that wouldn’t let him slip into some mold of pretense. Maybe he’d finally seen how little the world cared for that self, was instead intent on tearing it from him and making him over into someone more pliable. But Jeremy Kramer had rejected being just another hybrid. The struggle had driven him into madness.
Leland drowsed to the sound of wind whistling around the door. Someone behind him switched on a portable radio. Flashes of static joined the rumble of the bus, then quieted when a nearby station tuned in. Country-western music twanged for a few moments, then was dialed out to be replaced by agriculture news which
also went the way of the music. More static faded in and out, then suddenly there was Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa.”
The haunting melody floated through the bus like feathery sea foam. Who else, Leland wondered, in a world populated by cold stones, shared his enchantment with that beautiful song? He turned around to look, but abruptly the static rushed in again and the music was gone.
With a hollow pop, some insect exploded against the windshield. Sickening fluid oozed from the shattered bug. Across the aisle, the fat man raised up to look.
“Bet he ain’t got guts enough to do that again,” he cackled. Fat jowled and sweating, his glistening pink face leered expectantly, waiting for Leland’s reaction.
“Grasshopper,” the driver said over his shoulder. “Millions out here this time of year.”
“Sure ain’t nothin’ else,” the fat man grumbled, still poised and waiting with an uncertain grin on his face. His tongue darted out to touch uneven teeth. Then, realizing that he was being ignored, the grin faded and his eyes dulled. He slumped back in the seat, head lolling on the backrest.
The bus rolled down a grade. A town s
pread below in heat-dancing flats. A sign of approaching civilization: SPEED ZONE AHEAD, and then farther along: SPEED 35 MPH.
How many such signs had he seen from the windows of a bus? He and his mother had traveled from California to Utah to Minnesota and a hundred other
places he couldn’t even remember. All those left-behind miles, for her a trail of loneliness and desperation that never yielded to her frantic search for “. . .just a little security for us.”
Along a dusty broad street a few cars nudged up against crumbling sidewalks. Two boys in bibbed overalls darted from the dim interior of a drug store. Leland swiveled to watch them. Innocently bright an unblemished by guile, their open faces caught at him. So untroubled, so fresh…and so ignorant of the lurking forces of fate that would someday twist and distort their undefiled natures into shades of cunning and vanity.
Near the entrance to a grocery store a man bent over a battered car and fumbled with keys. Behind him a woman in a shapeless dress stood with one arm filled with sacks, the other busy with two fretful children. Her attention alternated between them and the man, obviously berating them all.
In the bus he was beyond them. The power of the bus was sweet isolation from all that. As it lumbered by, the man glanced up. Did he somehow sense the face peering at him from behind the dark window, see revealed in the passing gleam of aluminum the essence of distant secrets and fervent promises forever lost?
The bus swung around a corner where an old man stood beneath his load of years. Nondescript wrinkled trousers sagged on emaciated thighs. His thin hair rustled in a breeze as he watched the passing bus. Only his eyes, black and button
flat, moved in a face eroded by resignation into a mask of unconcern. And then, strangely, his mouth creased into a sardonic grin.
He knows us here in the bus. He’s seen us all before, knows all about us. Leland looked away from the mocking gaze.
The Greyhound eased into a narrow alley, and with a restless lurch stopped behind a red brick building. The air brakes hissed. The driver stood briefly.
“This’s Bismarck, folks. Thirty minutes for lunch.”
Leland was hungry, but through the depot windows he saw vague forms: strangers waiting for him to leave his refuge. He tensed, nerves suddenly drawn tight. He forced himself out of the seat and went down the steps. The smell of hot rubber from the tires hung in the alley. He reached back and touched the cool metal sides of the bus and longed for the rush of wind breaking around its shelter. Ticks and pings came from the cooling engine. An errant breeze wandered up the alley.
The depot door swung open. A young woman stepped into the alley, two magazines clutched in one hand, a patent leather purse in the other. Could she be the one who’d listened to “Mona Lisa” on the radio?
Another passenger came out, a woman in her early forties. Strands of blonde hair with dark roots crept down over a forehead paled and dulled by powder. The line of powder ended at her neck where lifeless skin was just starting to wrinkle. Behind her, the fat man waddled from the depot.
“Geez,” he whispered to Leland. “What a great ass, huh?”
“If that’s your type.”
“You like the jail bait that came out first? You oughta take what you can get.”
“Yeah, sure. . .I ought to do a lot of things.”
Leland boarded the bus with the driver. The engine caught and steadied into its familiar rumble. Already he was out on the highway listening to the blast of rushing wind. He leaned forward.
The driver studied a dial on the dashboard while the engine roared impatiently.
Come on! Let’s go!
Then the driver slumped back and pushed his cap up.
“Gonna be a delay folks,” he announced. “Can’t get air pressure up.”
The frowzy blonde called up the aisle. “How long a delay, for Christ’s sake?”
“Mechanics’ll have to check it out, lady. If they can’t fix it we’ll bring in another bus.”
The others wandered back into the depot, but Leland sat alone in the bus and tried to will life back into it. Sorrow for something transcendent slipping away moved within him. Sitting quietly in the dim stillness, his memory wistfully recalled
the intimacy he’d shared with the bus, its fleet passage, the world flickering beyond his refuge, the sense of remoteness in its vital womb.
Shadows deepened in the alley. Two mechanics came and swung up the hatch over the engine compartment. They rummaged around, muttering and cursing, then slammed the hatch back down.
Leland wrestled with sudden dread, tried to reason it away as just another touch of fate that indiscriminately willed the ebb and flow of life. Somehow the anxiety moved him out of his seat. Cold sweat on his forehead, mouth suddenly dry, darting eyes searching frantically but finding nothing on which to focus the apprehension.
At the bottom of the steps he fought back an urge to flee back into the bus. Instead he turned towards the depot. Momentary impressions: a lunch counter with metal-rimmed stools; a magazine rack; two rows of wooden benches; a tile floor with squares worn and faded; a flickering neon sign---LADIES. Strangers hovered in the depot, distant and faceless people with hidden secrets who neither knew nor cared anything about him.
The fat man sat next to the slatternly blonde. He leaned towards her and said something. She spun on him and glowered, face twisted with anger and revulsion. The fat man’s face lost its brutish veneer. His eyes fell, and he muttered something before rising and walking over to the jukebox. One pudgy hand fumbled
a coin from his pocket and slipped it into the machine. He pushed a selection button.
The mechanism deftly carried a record to the turntable. The tone arm descended lightly.
“Mona Lisa. . .Mona Lisa, men have named you. You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile. . .”
Leland glanced back at the bus, then up the alley where the last light of afternoon struggled to hold back the night. He took a deep breath then pushed the depot door open and walked towards the fat man at the jukebox.
The door swung closed behind him with a breathless chuff-a-chuff.