ALICE’S TRIP
Artwork by Ariel March Williams
ALICE’S TRIP by Christopher Williams
Alice slapped her hand across her lips and held it tight to her mouth, the cup of her finger digging deep into the flesh of her cheek. All life in the restaurant collectively died, the moment those two words left her mouth. As one, the occupants of the room were slammed into silence, forks and spoons halted in their trajectories, jaws stopped chewing, knives fell from hands, mouths closed, and eyes flashed across the room, as heads spun on their necks. Absolute attention was centered on Alice. Alice stood frozen, her eyes closed. The two diners Alice was serving fixed their eyes on their plates, heads inclined forward.
Alice had not moved, her hand still covered her mouth, a failed trap, sent too late to catch those filthy words that had come from somewhere inside her, not from her, they were not hers. She was not the architect of those words. Another force had used her mouth, lungs and vocal cords to forge those repulsive sounds. The voice had a shrill timbre - not hers. It blurted the words in a loud staccato, intended to shock. This dreadful voice had been hounding her all morning, dead set on making itself known, pushing against her throat, up her gullet to her mouth. Earlier in the day it almost came spitting out as “fu” before she clamped down her jaw so hard that the word died on the tip of her wounded tongue, behind closed lip.
Most mornings at work in the restaurant she could stay in control when the flood of an urge came, she knew how to satisfy it. She would extract herself and rush out the rear kitchen door to the trash corral, bend over the cantaloupe rinds and the cold home fries scattered with cigarette, ash and vomit the words out with one hand steadying her body on the old wooden fence. But there was no escape today. The air had been crackling with tension since dawn, the restaurant was overly crowded on this Easter Sunday morning. Alice could find no private corner. The urges this morning were huge. As always, they were amplified in times of stress. On this morning, Alice had been pressed into service to fill-in for absent servers, though her mother had known better. Now there was absolutely nothing she could do to wipe away what had been done. Her mother, who was the morning manager, had belatedly run after the young foreign family with embarrassed apologies tumbling from her mouth. But Alice was obliged to take the responsibility for what came from her flesh, though she was not the creator of the outburst.
Among the people in the building, only Alice, her mother, and a few other servers, knew she was an innocent and a tool of the unwelcome visitor inside her.
Alice continued to stand beside the vacated booth with her hand covering half her face, slightly bent forward, in the posture of holding back a sour stomach. The diners sat frozen to their seats considering the besieged Alice. After a time, movement came back to her and she looked up from her hand to the wide-eyed angry faces, churchgoers who had just come from services, and who were unprepared to deal with this obscene outburst.
Alice’s actions had left her with no choice but to flee. To leave the roadside restaurant and to leave town, and it must happen right now. With decisive steps, her eyes fixed on the distance, she strode down the aisle and out the front door, across the parking strip and onto the highway, taking her rancorous visitor with her out of the restaurant and out of her family’s life forever. To remove this curse she must remove herself, for it was death-locked into her very soul. In her crisp server’s uniform, Alice strode with resolve down the gravel berm of the small empty highway, heading to the east, bent on never returning. Her mind was churning with flooded emotion she could only express to herself. With her hands flying in the air and her feet pounding the gravel, she began her private soliloquy.
“Most people are straight highways you can sight with a transit,” she said aloud in a clear voice in an attempt to plead her case to the empty forest. “They have square corners and measured blocks. They are simple and straightforward. They have wide smooth avenues lined with trees and paved sidewalks, clean and handsome, there for all to see and understand. They have foursquare buildings on these streets with large clear windows that give permission to see most everything that takes place inside. They are beautiful, serene places.”
“My streets are narrow and cryptic,” Alice continued on to herself. “They ramble through dark, strange and dangerous quarters following a serpentine course that is difficult, maybe impossible, to travel. My streets have deep ruts and perilous bridges. To travel there is a risk. My streets are crowded with bent and odd structures. But…” Alice said in a defiant voice to the trees, “my streets are filled with intrigue.”
“You see,” Alice went on to shore her confidence, “I am actually two persons. There is the nice girl, the one you see now walking down this road. I have an attractive face, a good figure and a sense of humor. I am smart and anxious to learn. I have talent in many directions. Despite my problems, I get excellent grades at school. I have a lot of things that I do very well.”
Alice tramped the roadside, with her arms giving conviction to her thoughts.
“But then, there is this other creature who lurks inside my hide. He, I think of him as a masculine entity, inhabits every part of my body; he is in my little finger and in my mouth, stomach, and legs. He lies in my chest. But most of all, he has established residency in my brain. He is my double and opposite. He can be very malevolent. Sometimes, he will rest and let me alone for hours or even days. Soon enough, he is awake and will suddenly bring my arm over my head three times and one leg over the other one, way around until it hurts. If I am walking when this happens, I fall. He forces me into a grimace and swings my head to the side and croaks unintelligible things. I am his marionette. Worst of all, when he is feeling most spiteful, he will make me say words that are as hostile as possible at the most unacceptable moment. That’s what happened this morning. It’s one of my dark, back-alley places. It’s a place I have learned to accept as a part of me and yet, I will not let it describe me. I will not think of myself, or let anyone else think of me, if I can help it, as the girl with the weird stuff. I am much more than that.”
“I am a deep well of possibilities.”
Alice’s visitor has been given many names for many oddities: Speech that is vile, often shocking, and uncontrollable is called coprolalia. Alice didn’t learn this name for a long time. She was into her teens before she could put a handle to her behavior. Her family never talked about it, at all. Alice might be sitting on the couch making faces and sometimes sniffing and once in a while blurting out some silly thing that would even make her giggle. Her brother and dad would pretend she wasn’t there at all. Alice’s mother was a little better, she would just cry. It was Alice’s embarrassment alone to plow into. She grew up with this thing inside of her never knowing what it was. There was no one to help wrestle with it. Her parents believed that to acknowledge it was to give it validation and so make it more real. If it was ignored, then maybe it didn’t exist.
When she was six, Alice and her mother were alone in the kitchen one afternoon. She had screwed up her courage all day. “Mom, why do I make these twists and funny faces all the time and say things I don’t mean?” She blurted it out as fast as she could. Her mother flushed in the face but just kept on cooking as if nothing had been said.
“The twists and turns and funny faces are called tics,” Alice continued to herself, “but I don’t like that word. I also have obsessive compulsive behavior. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. Now, you see what I mean, I’m a warehouse full of strange little creatures tucked away in many obscure corners, making weird sounds in the dark. All these things come together under another name. I only found this name after I was in high school. It’s called Tourette syndrome. A doctor, Gilles de la Tourette, about two hundred years ago, gave a bunch of squirmy little kids he was studying his name for their affliction, and it stuck. In the medical dictionary, syndrome means a gathering together of many odd little beasties under one roof.”
Late at night, when everyone had gone to bed, Alice would sneak out into the living room where the family computer was and research her condition. She would sit in that dark house at the desk in front of their old computer, its light casting shadows on the wall behind her. She learned everything there was to know about herself.
As Alice traveled the damp highway, the clotted morning fog, blown in from the coast, was now turning to a light drizzle that frosted her with droplets of vapor, turning her sandy hair to a milky flaxen and condensing on her cheek. The narrow road she was following was flanked by a forest of old growth Douglas fir crowding up to the verge making the roadway a canyon cut between the banks of dark evergreens. She had no notion of where she was headed. Her spontaneous act of departure had no room for details. This time of year, the forest of the northwest was a cold and wet place to travel on foot without substantial clothing, but for the moment, Alice was blind to the conditions that contained her, so flushed was she with her exit that she took no notice.
Alice kept her obsessive-compulsive actions as private as she could. They would come and go as she grew up, new ones replacing the old worn-out ones. She tried to see herself in the abstract to lighten her burden and had many secret laughs on herself. When she was twelve, she had what she called, ‘And Now to Bed’, a very complicated way of getting ready for sleep.
At eighteen And Now to Bed, was replaced with a most intricate ritual in a very dangerous venue. Alice called it crack walking, cracks, as the ones found in sidewalks. She was drawn to placing her shoe, always the right one first, over the convoluted course of a good-looking crack meandering down a street or sidewalk. Cement highways were the very best, because the cracks were long and purposeful. At six, a girl can follow cracks without anyone taking notice, but at eighteen it doesn’t work so well. In her hometown, fortunately for Alice, not too many people were on the streets, and when she did encounter someone, she was very good at covering her business with a wave and smile. Her feet would work their way over the length of the crack, across the highway or down the sidewalk each foot had to be placed just in front of the other, heel to toe, heel to toe. She got to know all the cracks very well near home. At times, the crack would not let her go, even if people were passing, she had to keep on following. Cars coming down the highway presented problems. It was a very dangerous pursuit.
Alice’s most bewildering OCD came the following year, it was what she called My Color-School-Time, and it began when she turned nineteen. In the context of OCD, Obsessive means something in one’s thoughts. The mental process is obsessed with a belief or thought that can’t be laid to rest. Compulsive refers to activity, or what one does with the thoughts. These processes of thinking are not little innocent throw-away notions - they are uncontrollable and usually unwanted, heavily weighted, mental experiences that demand some response, as the subjects have no choice in the matter.
Alice’s obsession is - color. She has to know all the colors that exist, and please don’t tell her that this is not possible. She needs to know all the colors in the rainbow, especially the colors in-between the primaries, all those that are not in the rainbow, and all those that are blends of known colors. She needed to know new colors that no one has ever found, which colors match and are happy with each other and the colors that hate each other. Some colors just tolerate one another. She even found that colors can be jealous, but that’s another story.
Those who are compulsive about numbers are a known entity. They are the ones who can add up five, twelve-digit figures in their head and tell you the coefficient of a certain ten-digit number, or the sequence of the Fibonacci Series to its thousandth place. This is the scope of Alice’s abilities, but in color and image. She has absolute visual intelligence. To remember, she reproduces the context encircling what was to be remembered. In history class, to recall a date, she would see the number sitting on the page, to the right, in the second paragraph. She could also tell you the shade of whiteness of that page, and what was also on that page. Show her any color blend and she can tell you its constituent primaries and their proportions. And a year later, with a few paint pots, she could reproduce that exact same color and hue completely from color memory.
Alice charged down the unpeopled, fog shrouded road, she was now bordered by fields, seen only dimly through the dense moisture. By turning her head only slightly to the right, she saw, or thought she saw, a darkness up ahead in the center of the roadway. It seemed to be moving. Yes, now she was sure, there was something there, it was coming her way. It made a slight noise, a rolling kind of noise. Then it was upon her, was it her overactive mind? No, it was real, a strange-looking man pushing a wheelbarrow, both were very wet. Alice was completely overcome by this vision and could say nothing, not even a squeak. The man stopped in the dead center of the road. He had a large cross tied to the front of his wheelbarrow. “You scared me, I thought you were a ghost. Are you?” he said. “You look scared too. It’s just me. I’ve been down this road once before. Nobody comes this way.” He took off his dripping hat and smiled. “I’m just a traveler looking for something I may not find.” Then, realizing that they were both culls of society, “Why are you here?” It took Alice moments to answer his question. “I’m looking for something too, but more, I am escaping something. I must leave.” “I understand.,” said the man with a little nod, and nothing more. He put his hat back on his wet head, picked up the handles of his wheelbarrow and went on, with his image melting into the air until it disappeared completely.
Alice felt comforted by that moment. There were other kinds of people, her kind of people, on her earth. With only this, the briefest of exchanges, he will forever stand in her mind with his long, troubled face and thoughtful eyes. She felt a great gratitude to that funny man. “He must have known I needed him just now, and he happened to come by just then. “Thanks,” she thought, and she also thought that her visitor had not said a word of departure. Alice moved on into the foggy cloud. An hour later, a rusted orange pickup truck came into view down the road and followed Alice along the highway at a measured pace a quarter mile behind, its windshield wipers rasping on the glass. The rain had become more serious; Alice was soddened. Slowly, the truck began closing the gap. Alice stopped, turned and stood facing the truck and its obscured driver, the rain coursing down her face.
“You have no right to follow me. Go on about your business.”
The driver leaned out the window, “Mom asked me to come get you and haul you on home.”
“Well, I am not coming home, now or ever. That’s over and finished.”
Alice’s brother had come alongside, the truck was on the berm, and Alice was standing in the center of the roadway.
“Look, you can’t just head out and walk away, you have no clothes or money or anything, and it’s raining.”
Alice paused, “Is Mom home?”
“No, she’s still at work.”
“OK, I’ll come back with you, get some clothes and a few things, and then if you could take me to the bus station in Astoria and let me off there. I’ll be fine, I can take care of myself.”
“Where you thinking of going anyways?” said Tom.
Alice walked around the truck and climbed in the passenger’s door. The chill had moved inside her and she sat curled against the door in silence.
Tom turned the truck in the middle of the remote north wood’s highway and headed them back to their dark, little home.
Tom was a twist of emotions, all of them showing on his face and the slant of his shoulders and his hands on the wheel. In a small way, Tom cared for his sister, but most of his emotion was pocketed in his resentment of her. She made his life with his friends at school grueling. She was a constant embarrassment, and to have that weird girl as his sister was beginning to make him an outcast as well. In truth, the events of this day gave Tom the possibility to be rid of her, for which he felt guilt, but it was a warm guilt.
Tom drove Alice back to their house with his thoughts locked in conflict. He was going to aid her departure and therefore gain a release from his anxiety, yet there was a little bit of loyalty to her yet. Tom was smart enough to know that he and the rest of the family had really driven her out, and that was because she was just too unlike them for them to accept her into the lap of the family. They didn’t know how to respond to her when she would start talking in her crazy ways about nutty things that she read about in those books she would drag home from the library.
Tom pondered his guilt as he drove her quietly back home. “He, for damn certain, was ready to blame for her weird ways, up all night and out on the street following cracks in the cement and all. Hauling all that forest rubbish; lichen, moss, leaves, branches, even slugs back from the woods and spreading them out all over her room and covering her walls with stupid pictures. Jesus! Dad felt the same way, and Mom never talked about it. Not only did she have the tics and all, but it was like she was from a different world, not the world he lived in anyway. And all those weird questions she would ask the teacher in class, and all his friends would be kicking him under the desk and all, as if he had asked the question, then they would make stupid faces.”
When Tom was fourteen, and most acutely aware of Alice’s peculiarities, he asked his mother if she had been adopted. He couldn’t accept the fact that she was his real sister, it made him feel really weird.
They turned into the dirt driveway of their house.
“I’ll be just ten minutes,” Alice called as she entered her home for the last time. Though she too was a stew of submerged emotion, she showed little to the outside.
Alice didn’t know how to cry. She had lost that ability when she turned five, the same year her visitor appeared. Alice had learned how to be an immovable stoic. She possessed an extraordinary bounce, like a yellow rubber duck in the churned muddy waters of a winter storm, she knew instinctively how to steer for the top. But today she was grim and determined as she plunged into her closet to tear a few dresses and jeans from their wire hangers and squeeze them into an ancient suitcase she used to store her treasures from the forest, while Tom sat waiting in his truck. Alice had hidden a little cache`of tips and most of her pay from the restaurant under her cluster of mosses and lichen. She was out of the house in nine minutes, without a glance to her color displays pinned to the wall or her stack of notebooks and piles of intricate, illuminated documents on oddities she had found on the forest floor and in the dark, amber pools under the ancient fir.
They drove in silence, the thirty miles of highway over the Columbia River bridge to Astoria, Oregon and the bus station.
“No, no, just drop me here, you don’t have to come in. I’ll be fine, there is no place to park anyway.”
“Here, I’ll take that suitcase, OK? You have like - money?”
Tom was flushed and unable to speak more than a few abbreviated disjointed words. Alice slid out and grabbed her suitcase from the back of the truck as Tom fumbled.
“Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be OK, I know what I am doing. I’ll send them an email sometime.”
“Bye Tom,” and she was gone. Tom, wrapped in his own cloak of inarticulateness and confusion, turned the truck back home with feelings he would never be able to formulate or recount.
Alice entered the station with her clutch of cash tight in her hand. She needed a lot of distance with short funds.
“I’d like a ticket, please.”
“To where, Ma’am?”
“How far will two hundred and fifty dollars take me?”
“We can’t sell tickets that way, Ma’am.”
“Can’t you look down your list and see where two hundred and fifty dollars and a town coincide?”
“Look Ma’am, it is all on my computer and it doesn’t show it that way, so why don’t you step aside and let the rest of these folks buy their tickets. When you know where you want to go, I’ll sell you a ticket, OK?”
“How about Biloxi, then?”
“Biloxi, Mississippi?”
“Yes, please.”
The man behind the counter raised his eyebrows and entered Astoria, OR / Biloxi, MS and came out with a very long travel docket consisting of fifty-five stops, four transfers, and 3,007 miles.
“Well, you are in luck, that fare is $232 bucks even. Look, it is none of my business, but are you running away from something?”
He added in a confident voice, “I probably shouldn’t be selling you this.”
Alice conjured up her most appealing smile, “Oh, don’t worry, I am just having a little fun on my vacation. Don’t worry about me, I can take care of myself.”
“Well, it’s not the way I’d look for fun. This is going to take you about eighty hours of bus riding.”
Alice smiled and put her tip money down for the ticket. She had never been beyond Portland in her life, under two hundred miles. How could she have known when she arose at five thirty this morning and prepared for another joyless, barren day that she would be heading for Biloxi, Mississippi before the morning was over? It seemed perfectly impossible.
Alice liked the name Biloxi, it evoked pathos and ennui.
Alice took a rear seat next to the window on the almost empty bus with her head positioned looking out upon the townscape, cityscape, landscape, countryside, just as it would be for the next three days. She was tingling with anticipation that knew neither hesitation nor fear. She was fully bathed in the excitement of her new destiny and yet, overwhelmed by the dire events of the last two hours - events of her own making. She had never been away from home or her family for more than a day, and now she might never see them again. She had no idea of how her visitor would react to her new world, so far everything was in control, he was behaving himself.
“Please, oh please let him be still.”
Alice imagined her mother coming home after her shift was over at the restaurant to find that her daughter had left for places unknown, maybe forever. But Alice had to stop there. She couldn’t conjure up anything further. She couldn’t truly face the possibility that her mother would not be too troubled or maybe even be mildly relieved. However, Alice was quite sure that her mother would not be stricken. She might cry some tears for herself. And her father, well, he hardly knew she was alive. And poor, old, confused Tom, he was a good boy at heart, he didn’t need much from life and wanted no trouble, his friends were the only life in his life. That was it, there wasn’t anyone else. The librarian, Emma, liked her somewhat. They would stop talking about her after a while. They would clear out her room after some months, when they were sure that she was really gone. Her handmade journals would be thrown out. That sent a shudder down her back.
With a swish of air, the breaks let go and the door closed, the engine whinnied and the bus pitched forward. Alice put all that behind her and now, she would only look forward to her new life.
Alice’s trip began down the Oregon coast south to Cannon Beach then turned inland. She was fixed to a rear window on the right side of the bus. As it turned east, she twisted her head around to view her last imprint of the Pacific Ocean. As the bus got closer to Portland, it began to fill. Her two-hour layover and transfer in Portland was without problems, and Alice was first in line on the next bus to get the seat she most wanted, at a window in the rear. At the rear because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, and the window because she wanted to take in as much of the land as possible, to expand her visual vocabulary. By the time it wheeled out of the Portland Station, the bus was packed. The seat next to Alice was taken up by a small, elderly, Mexican farm worker. He smelled of peaches.
With a portion of her remaining funds, Alice had supplied herself with some food, purchased at the station and carried onto the bus, to last her for the rest of the day and that night. The bus swept through the countryside. Alice, with her face turned to the window, removed herself from the present company and eagerly settled into the visual delight outside that her eyes were absorbing. The greater the distance grew, the better she could recount the forces that had shaped her life back home. She could reevaluate the depth and breadth of her 18 years.
There were brief stops in Corvallis, Eugene, and Medford, then they crossed the state line into California. That she had been on this day in three states, was a thrill in itself. The daylight, by now, had weakened to the point where viewing was difficult, and Alice felt cheated to be missing all that landscape out there speeding by in the dark. Just before the sunset, in the rich, golden light of late afternoon, she saw a sight that would sink into her visual memory for a long time. There were three, soft hills against the setting sun and seven, black cows spaced against the brilliant, green grass of spring with a spread of rich, golden poppies embedded beneath them.
Alice turned her head from the darkening window and closed her eyes. Those setting sun colors returned her to her father’s old sawmill entombed in the forests of Washington. Alice’s father let local people in to view the old mill because it served as a museum of the timber industry. There were thirty or forty rusting machines spread out over several acres. All were encased in and penetrated by rust.
Alice recalled to herself the struggles with her father, though it is all on her part, because he never took enough notice of her to care, one way or the other. He thought sharing a house constituted a relationship. Her father owned a forest lumber mill, as his father did before him, and he mills the huge Douglas fir logs into timbers for heavy construction, 8x10's, 10x10's and big ones,16x20's. Out behind his modern mill, there was the old mill that had belonged to his daddy, her grandfather. She loved being back there and spent as much time as possible with the old machinery. It was like a medieval slaughterhouse for trees. She was repulsed by it and yet drawn to it as are travelers who view the instruments of torture deep in the crypts of stone castles. Alice nodded to herself in the dark of the moving bus. “I happen to know something about rust. I have studied it, a lot. I am interested in rust because I want to understand its shades and textures and what it does to the metal. For starters, I know that cast iron resists rusting because it has a low carbon content, it usually only gets surface rust like the old Rowley & Hermance planner’s cast iron frame. After one hundred years, it is still solid and smooth with only a little, light orange flecking. But forged steel rusts deep because of its high carbon content. I used to get right down with my magnifying glass and study the velvety texture of pumpkin-colored new rust with its spiraling patterns like desert mountain ridges. That light color turns darker as the rust gets older and penetrates deeper. Deep rust is red/brown to orange/black and it begins to take over the form, transferring the original object into something new. By the time the oxidation has taken over, a steel machine bolt is no longer a bolt but a jagged, red brown stick.”
Alice had no friends at school and no social life, virtual or otherwise. She never hung out with other people. She wouldn’t have known how to do it. So, she used her social hours examining those old machines for long afternoons. Once, she was next to an old truck watching how the rusty running boards got to be a darker, orange-brown in the rain, when her father surprised her from behind.
“What in hell are you doing here in the rain watching that old truck, thinking it’s going to get up and walk away? You get on home to your mother, hear me, this is no place for a girl,” then under his breath, “I swear to God, that looney child.”
“I could never explain my thoughts to him, not a chance,” Alice said to herself. “When he talked to me, he never used my name.”
Alice arrived in Stockton, California at 4:30 in the morning. Her seat companion got off here. The bus halted briefly at Madera. The first light of day was a foggy blue. Four people boarded and moved to the rear of the bus in search of seats. The two in front of Alice were vacant as was one across the aisle and the one next to Alice. The four newcomers were young, no more than twenty. Two guys took the seats in front of Alice, one across the aisle, and the girl sat down next to Alice.
Alice always presented a congenial facade to the public, thinking that it would deflect closer contact. She would smile and turn away. She was always cautious of strangers, on guard that something could transpire and cause embarrassment. Alice looked up at the person seating herself next to her, and the young woman, who was about Alice’s age, looked down at Alice. Her hair was drawn into two, long, stringy ropes hanging down each shoulder. Her eyes were heavily lined, each supported a well plucked twig of an eyebrow floating high above. A thicket of hair, the color of algae, covered her forehead. Her nose supported a golden ring hanging dead center over her thin, down turning mouth, which also sprouted a small, gold button pinned to its edge. A third appendage, a shining stud, was embedded at the tip of her tongue. Her white face was an expressionless pan, vapid yet assertive. Without a blink of acknowledgment she sat down next to Alice and continued to stare her down. Alice turned to the window. Outside the dawn was beginning. Two glistening shaved heads just showing over the seat back were now seated in front of Alice. Each had a set of elaborate earrings attached to the underside of lobes struggling to support them. One head spun around, earrings flying, and presented a deeply troubled face with wild eyes.
“Who’s your companion there Sheila, she looks like a nice girl, whyncha make friends?”
There was a thin chuckle from across the aisle. Sheila said nothing but continued to fix the back of Alice’s head in her steady gaze, reflected in Alice’s darkened window. A slow panic was rising up through Alice’s neck. Confrontation was inevitable.
“Hey there, little girl, Sheila won’t bite ya. Why don’tcha turn around, we can all have a little fun together, make this brainless trip go a little faster.”
Sheila, without a whisper of facial change, placed her hand on Alice’s thigh. Alice flinched and moved further to the wall. She knew it was a bad move, as she had shown apprehension. Now they would be relentless. The bath closet was just down the aisle. Alice turned to rise and, catching sight of Sheila’s blank-stare face fixed on her, began to tic with her shoulders as she pushed past to the aisle and the bathroom. When the door was closed, the only space left over forced her to sit on the toilet. She was now twisting and jerking all over and began to kick the closed door with an audible ‘thunk’. Alice grabbed her leg to hold it against its movements. She breathed deeply and between tics splashed her face with water. The tics slowly subsided.
They would be waiting for her when she came out.
She decided to go forward to the driver for help. Though, Alice could not bring herself to open the door and face what was outside, and so she sat. After a time, she gathered herself and plumbed her resolve, learned since childhood by years of adversity. She stood and pushed out the door.
They were there waiting for her.
“Hey there pretty lady, we thought you had fallen in, what’s going on in there?” called the wild eyed one. “Sheila seems to have taken your place there by the window, but you can sit here by me, what the hell, you can sit on my lap if you like, plenty of room.”
Alice placed her arms over her chest, lowered her had to her hands and started to advance forward to the front of the bus when she felt it coming up her throat, charging like a fierce bull into her mouth, nothing could stop it.
“Fuckinggoshit, fuckinggoshit, fuckinggoshit” came forth in a high, uncontrolled jab like a thin bladed knife in the air.
“Whoa,” and the four punks burst into shrieking laughter as they doubled up in their seats and, in uncontrolled hilarity, fell on the aisle floor. Annoyed neighbors turned hostile and shouted for quiet and the rear of the bus broke into noisy chaos. The bus came to a halt on the side of the road and the driver trotted to the rear with scarcely controlled wrath.
“What the hell’s going on here?! I have the authority” said the powerful black man, “to put all of you off this bus right now! Sit down and shut up, or you are off. You understand me?”
A spasm moved up to Alice’s shoulder which started a jerking motion, and the punks sniggered, then the belly laughs began again.
The driver spun to face Alice with renewed fury.
“Are you mocking me?”
Alice reddened with immense humiliation and could only shake her head. “I can’t help it.”
“You come up with me, I have a seat for you in front. You’re real trouble.” Turning to the remaining four with his finger jabbing the air, “Any more disorder, and you are off!”
The punks sat down. Alice was painfully aware of eyes on her as she walked the aisle. Her left hand reached behind to try to smooth the crinkled blue and white server’s uniform she still wore. She sat motionless in the front seat with her eyes fixed on the road through the big windshield. On the other side of the glass, she saw the sunny land at dawn and wished she were out there. There was a single, black and white cow ruminating under an oak tree with its jaws moving in a circular motion.
There was nothing new in this episode - it had happened in many forms over the years, but each was a new raw torment, and just as painful as the last. The punks got off in Bakersfield. By one o’clock, the bus reached Los Angeles and a five-hour layover before transferring.
BIENVENIDOS A LOS ÁNGELES, announced the entryway sign above Alice’s head. The terminal was large and busy. Alice claimed her suitcase and searched for a sheltering corner where she would wait out the time. The boldness that had swept her along for the first hours following her departure was thinning. The episode on the bus had eroded her bulwark of confidence. “Had she made an awful mistake?” As she sat down on her suitcase against a remote wall, Alice contemplated the possibility of returning home again. In profound humiliation, she would have to call Tom from the Astoria station and, he would reluctantly come to pick her up to ‘haul her on home’ where her mother would be scolding and sad, but not very welcoming. No bienvenidos. Her father would give her a long hard look but say nothing.
“The truth be told,” Alice said to herself, “they really don’t want me there.” Although she had always known that her place in the family was ambiguous, this was the first time in her life Alice admitted this stinging fact to herself, and it came like a blow to her innards, “Otherwise, I would not have left,” she reasoned. “I needed to do it to retain that last little grain of my self-esteem with my family. It was an act of preservation, not defiance. This is a trip of last resort.”
“No, I can’t go home, " she decided," it would only be worse. Whatever lies ahead cannot be as bad as what I have left behind.”
Alice decided she needed a change of clothes and a freshen up, then she would have some food and feel better about things. She worked her way through the herd of people in the station to the ladies’ room with her suitcase in tow. The bathroom was crowded, hot and smelly. The floor was awash with the overflow from a clogged toilet at the end of the line. Alice found an empty stall in the center and tried to determine how to best manage her change of clothes. The stalls on both sides were occupied with noisy residents. Underneath the dividers, Alice could see shoes paired in front of each neighboring facility. Her own toilet had no seat cover and remained unflushed from its last occupant. Wads of unused soaked bathroom paper were scattered about the floor. Alice shrank from contact with anything, a change of clothes was impossible. Before leaving, she flushed the offending object, just for the decency of the act. Alice managed a splash of water at one of the sinks, and fled the facility as fast as she could. Her server’s uniform would have to remain in-place, as puckered as it was.
Alice sat out most of the five hours in the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Station sitting on her suitcase with her back against the wall and her knees pressed together watching the crowds waxing and waning as the hours moved by. She needed food for the next leg of her journey, and she had little choice, for she was not ready to go on the street with her suitcase just now, so she was forced to make do with the offerings from vendors in the bus station. Alice grudgingly bought some obscene foodstuffs lubricated with rancid, dripping oil.
But for Alice, these hours were not so bad. She was never bored, almost everything was of interest. She openly studied people’s faces, their gait, the thrust of their chins, and slices of their conversations as they walked by. Whenever someone moved past her observation post, Alice worked out small rapid sketches of their lives, complete with destinations and a context for their travel.
As she viewed the swell of people passing her suitcase, she thought also of those other days in the forest by herself, which now seemed so sweet and tidy, and so distant. She recalled her solitary forays into the woods on long summer weekends. With her small, brass compass in hand, she would often come upon a secret moss-covered forest clearing deep in the wilds and throw herself on her back with her eyes fixed on that slice of sky above. At times, a jetliner would transect that skimpy piece of sky, leaving its contrail cutting across Alice’s view. Alice would build an image of the people thirty thousand feet above in flight from one far away city to the next at 200 miles an hour enclosed in the furnishings of their life. They would put their laptops down and pull out their earbuds and turn their heads to the little window next to their shoulder. Below them, they would see, with mild interest, that abundant ocean of natural lands. The land where Alice was sheltered and hidden in her bower of nature watching them. But the earth below was only capable of holding their thoughts this one moment, for down the aisle was coming their serving cart and beverages. It was not envy that Alice had for those people up there, because she dearly loved her place in the sheltering woods. It was the wonder of that other part of humankind going about its business, of which she knew so little.
And now, as she sat on her old suitcase in a seamy bus station on her own irrational trip to an imaginary destination, she felt a little absurd. It was six in the afternoon and the Dallas bus was taking on passengers. Alice hurried to the line to get her window seat.
Los Angeles, traveling in a westerly direction, ends abruptly at the Pacific Rim and a beach, but the easterly traveler must abide miles of heavy population densities and half-grown towns before reaching the calm of the desert. Alice, with her face to the window, watched the little back yard lives slip by in the gathering dusk. Racing by after dark, she watched through lighted living room windows, as families gathered in the business of reenacting their personal evening affairs. Alice turned to take in the other passengers on the bus and wondered about their complete indifference to the land they were passing through.
Alice had just one date in her life. Niles was an outsider also; a diffident stringy boy who looked as though he might be smart but wasn’t especially. He had chosen Alice only by default, and she with great courage, knowing what could happen, accepted his invitation. Alice tried to keep the evening of the date a secret from her family, to avoid the inevitable ridicule from Tom and the queries from her mother, which became impossible as the evening drew near. When Niles stood at her door, they were all straining to see the boy who would be taking Alice out. Alice had refused to bring him into the house. In his car, it was hard to find common ground for their talk as they drove into town. Alice was terrified that her visitor would rise forth at any moment with a sudden tic. She had reviewed possible distractions and diversion in her room should an incident occur. A shoulder tic could be covered by seat belt adjustment or a leg tic might be disguised with the tying of a wayward shoelace, provided they didn’t last too long. But a lascivious vocalization would leave her with no choice but to bolt from the car, no matter where they might be, and walk home.
In the movie theater, as the film rolled, all that Alice could think of was a galvanizing outburst coming forth from her mouth, ringing out louder than the film over the darkened theater, outflanking the stars on the screen, and all heads would turn. Once it almost came, but it could be suppressed. As always, it came when least wanted. When she was tramping the forest glades, her visitor was way behind.
As a necessary shortening of this painful night, she insisted she get home as soon as possible and so declined any other stops after the film. Niles looked relieved to be ending his discomfort also, but nevertheless, with nothing left to lose, attempted a kiss in the driveway as a finale. Without any prelude he caught her arm and pulled her over so suddenly that the surprised Alice immediately started a violent neck tic, and in mortification, jumped from the car and ran for the door. So ended her one and only date.
Alice slept through brief stops in San Bernardino, at the edge of the Mojave, and Blyth in the heart of the desert. In Phoenix, at one o’clock in the morning, she left the bus to walk the station for an hour. The stop in Lordsburg, New Mexico was for half an hour. The bus station was nothing more than a small compartment behind a McDonald’s restaurant where Alice had breakfast. Alice had begun to discover that the traveler’s life is a discrete entity of its own. What was before, becomes less important as the miles accumulated, and what may come after arrival would be dealt with upon arrival. Only this moment now is of greatest interest, but at the same time the life that has bracketed the journey is seen in a crisper light.
Outside Lordsburg, Alice saw the ancient-rusted carapace of a car in a weedy-stony field off the highway, an abandoned roadside gas station, a dark grey, wooden, windowless farmstead, a deserted piece of highway equipment, a tall, faded sign lost of its use some years ago, all encompassed by clay earth, alkali salt flats, yellow stubble and olive green sage. The shallow depression the town occupied was surrounded by the formidable Pyramid Mountain Range which reflected a dark green-violet tone.
“People leave a big mess behind them wherever they live,” mused Alice. “Country folk seem to be the worse. They just walk away from their stuff when it breaks down. The junk that people have thrown off stands large for many years over the flat dry land in places like this. In my damp green home, nature cloaks them in her gowns of vegetation and rots and rusts them away in little time.”
Alice already missed the big green trees of home and thought of her greatest loss, her hand-crafted illustrated journals of the forest. There were twelve of them, each the size of a heavy encyclopedia, of some fifty pages each. They were filled with descriptions and drawings of small natural oddities, curiosities, quirks and peculiarities of nature. With an ultra fine steel crow-quill pen and brown/black ink drawn from many distillations of the oils of tan-bark oak, Alice would place herself above the subject on the forest floor and render it with extreme care. The pen would leave a series of tiny lines and stipples that built a precise replica of the oddity. Her intricate little drawings would crowd the page showing various views of the object from several perspectives. Arrows fanned out to written notations explaining each aspect of the form in a small precise longhand. Page followed page of moss polyps, mushroom gills, bark beetle’s antenna, fir cone’s spirals, oak galls, and raccoon skulls. Steady patience, keen observation, and superb hand eye coordination supplemented any formal training. All her muscles were in check when she was engaged with her journals. A few drawings were in-filled with a range of earth colors. The water diluted colors came from the forest itself. Ochers from the tree mosses, browns from the river bottom, yellows from mold, and reds from the earth itself. Alice also made her own paper, a toothy thick tinted sheet with ragged edges that was bound into her journal. She had been working on the journals since she was twelve years, her earlier drawings were skillful, but the later ones developed into minute drawings of delicate beauty.
Alice watched the dry landscape flash by her bus window. They’re gone now, she thought, and that can’t be changed, and I learned from them, and that can’t be changed either, someday I might make some more.
Alice had arrived in Texas, and it spread out as nothing ever had before. She had no experience that could explain this country, it seemed to have no end. Alice had grown up in a land of short sight, where everything was a stone’s throw, here most everything was a very long vision. The colors were muted, the trees almost absent, and the land itself was a blanched limestone white.
At times, Alice fell asleep, her head thumping against the window glass. The bus made stops, some momentary, some short layovers, passengers boarded and departed. El Paso and Pecos passed by, and as darkness spread, Odessa and Sweetwater slipped away, and she was still in Texas. Alice slept through Abilene and Fort Worth and awoke in the terminal at Dallas at 2:30 in the morning for a transfer, and still she was in Texas. At 3:10 AM, a half-awakened Alice boarded the Jackson, Mississippi bus, and by 6:00 the sunlight found her in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she had just enough time for a fast asphalt-standing breakfast.
The land had changed, there was water and forests with big soft green leaves and gallant clouds that moved across the sky casting dark regions on the sunny land. The earth itself was changed, it was now a rusty red. Fields and dirt roads were the color of tomato soup. Alice had grown up with dirt that was forest humus. It was light and aromatic and moist and pliant and very black. Now passing through the colorful fields of Louisiana, Alice thought back on those road cuts, farm fields and hillsides of her trip and recalled the grounds she had passed. The gold of the decomposed granite in California, the purple black of the volcanic desert, the orange pink of Arizona sandstone, rocky brown of New Mexico, the white calcite and dolomite of the prairie, and now the red iron bearing hematite of the south. For Alice, the soils alone were worth the trip.
The trip had been played out and soon would be over. Alice had proven to herself that she could manage. The school yard abuses had served to toughen her, not weaken her. Her visitor had not been as prominent in the business of her life as she had feared. Alice was ready to face the rest of her journey and what may follow.
But her journey was not over - there were three more scheduled stops before Biloxi. Monroe, Louisiana was next, only a fifteen-minute layover, she would stay on the bus. The Greyhound pulled into the terminal at Monroe. Outside her rear window, parked in the terminal, were several white vans with designations on their doors. Before the bus door was opened, two green uniformed agents boarded and began working their way down the aisle. They stopped at each row of seats and confronted each passenger. Alice could not hear the exchange but knew surely what was happening. Aside from her expired high school ID she had no identification. Two tawny skinned men were rising from their seats to accompany one of the immigration officers out of the bus. They placed their hands against the side of the bus, leaning into it, and were patted down by the officer, then handcuffed and issued into the back of a van. The placid afternoon had, in the blink of an eye, become a terror. Alice could feel her leg beginning to tremble, her neck twinge, her heart rush. As they got closer Alice collapsed further.
“Hello, could you please state your citizenship?” said the green uniform to Alice. Alice was unable to answer.
AHe repeated his question and Alice blurted out, “I’m from Washington state.”
“In,” he prompted.
“The United States,” Alice said and felt like a consummate half-wit.
By this time, Alice was twisting her shoulders about. The officer, who was trained to watch for signs of dismay, took another look at Alice.
“May I please see your identification?”
Desperately, she dug in her travel bag to buy time. Images of handcuffs and jail cells, parental notification and their cold, irritated reaction and the knowing looks flashed in her head as she rummaged. Her shaking hand produced the bent and crazed school identification card. The immigration officer was watching Alice with increasing curiosity but said nothing. Alice’s last line of defense was now necessary, one she absolutely detested.
“I have Tourette syndrome,” she whispered.
The green uniform was just about to ask a question when a loud thump shook the bus, the other officer had fallen in the aisle behind a large, wrathful passenger who had shoved him to the floor and was making a sprint for the door. He was down the steps and across the parking lot at a run before both immigration officers dashed out the door.
“He made it,” a shivering, depleted Alice said to herself as she reached to the floor to gather her little card. The driver started the bus.
Alice was unnerved and played out when the bus pulled into Jackson, Mississippi at eleven thirty in the morning for an hour and a half layover and her last transfer. She was east now. She had crossed the Mississippi River that morning and she was no longer a westerner. The bus pulled in behind a two-story brick building. Alice and her suitcase walked out through the terminal to a bench in the shade of a large awning. She had a small scrap of a sandwich wrapped in her pocket which she munched as she contemplated the short distance left to Biloxi and considered some sort of reckoning about her future. Since the immigration check, her visitor had been behaving himself, and she knocked on the wood of the bench. Now, soon the act born of despair that launched her on this voyage would come to a finish, leaving her in the real town that had been only a fantasy to her some days ago when she left Astoria, yet still she declined to confront that reality.
A man, a woman, and a dog sat down at the end of the bench. The couple were large of bottom and middle-aged, the dog was small, brown and white and uncomfortably alert. He watched Alice eat her small crust of a sandwich with an intensity that brought Alice up short. His brown eyes were fixed on Alice with an unblinking absorption that went beyond normal dog force. Alice offered up a generous portion of her soggy crust, but the Jack Russell Terrier was not interested in her sandwich, he was overhauling Alice. Alice had a natural affinity for animals, but she was becoming uneasy with this little creature. The humans at the other end of the terrier’s leash were unaware of his cause. From deep, deep down in his throat came an almost unheard rumble, a subterranean growl. With his eyes still locked on Alice, he turned his face slightly to the right and lifted his lips and crinkled his snout behind his black, moist nose. A row of fine, white, pointed teeth appeared and the growling intensified. A sudden lunge to the extent of his leash and a rapid fire chopping, snapping bark stunned Alice into a convulsion that caused her to drop her bread and fall from the side of the bench.
Two angry faces, now fully engaged, swung toward Alice.
“You shouldn’t have messed with the dog, you should know better, now look at what you have gone and done.”
Alice tried to rise but was twisting so badly she couldn’t lift herself from the cement. The couple were hauling on the leash against the frantic animal now choking himself with wrathful thrusts at Alice. Alice grappled with her legs and stilled them enough to regain her seat. The couple were moving off, “There now, there now, she don’t mean no harm,” and they disappeared into the terminal. Cold, dissecting eyes were once again on Alice, watching the twisting spectacle at the end of the bench. The terrier’s sharp staccato barks could still be heard echoing in the terminal.
In time, Alice hoisted up her suitcase and returned to the station for her last ride. She was depleted and stripped of her courage, but had no option but to carry on. Alice arrived at the Biloxi terminal at five in the afternoon. She was still in her server’s uniform, which by this time was puckered into an accordion. Alice emerged from the Biloxi Transit Center, a half empty, dark red, brick building placed at an intersection of several roads. With exhaustion and confusion, Alice claimed her suitcase and headed, without method, down the busy roadway.
The day was oppressively hot, the sky was close and thick, a dirty grey veil extended down to the ground. A sign post at the crosswalk declared that this was Martin Luther King Avenue. Without a direction or plan, Alice heaved her suitcase over broken asphalt and roadside weeds. She traveled for several blocks east and took a left onto a smaller street. This was her time of reckoning, her desperate wish had come true and now she had to forge her new life on her own, here in this threadbare little city that had been assaulted by hurricanes, poverty and years of neglect. She had now entered a neighborhood that had been, at one time many years ago, a pretty area of small decorative wood framed houses with carpenter gothic porches and trim and large trees hanging their big shade leaves over lawns and roofs. Today’s haphazard banal development had claimed much of the land across the street and turned it into raw dirt parking lots and dark grimy brick buildings, while on the side Alice walked, a few of the original old Biloxi houses still stood.
In a white, painted, wicker chair on the porch of one of these houses an ample, pleasant-faced woman with large soft brown hands cradling a yellow haired cat, sat eyeing Alice. Alice stopped her trip to take in the woman, who in turn, studied Alice with care.
“Where are you going with that big bag? You look lost to me,” she called down to Alice on the sidewalk in front of her.
The small house was light and fairy-like with its intricate fretwork and clean white paint, at odds with the crude development across the street. There was a twenty-foot plot of well-kept lawn between the cottage and the broken cement sidewalk where Alice stood, arrested in her trip. Alice could no longer contain a shoulder thrust.
“What’cha doing with that arm, child?”
Alice said nothing as she tried desperately to contain the tic.
In alarm, Alice turned to continue down the sidewalk. The woman stood, placing the cat on the floor, and leaned forward over the railing. “You can’t walk away from it, child, you know that.”
Alice stopped without turning around. The tic was arrested.
In an exquisite, yet acutely perceptive and compassionate voice, “You have Tourette’s, don’t you honey?” she said with a professional tone.
The girl had never had these words spoken to her before and was completely overwhelmed.
Standing in the afternoon haze in her own shadow, Alice stopped short.
She could travel no more.
“Come on up here and have some cold lemonade child, and let’s talk, I know all about that old devil.”
Those golden words, born of compassion, brought tears to Alice’s eyes for the first time in memory.