The Last Bus

The fifth time I turned the key, the engine did the same thing it had done the other four times. Click. Click. Nothing after that, just the dash lights going dim like they were tired too.

I sat there a minute with my hands on the wheel. The fair had closed at ten, and by the time I'd walked the muddy lot to where I'd parked, most of the trucks and trailers were gone. The lights on the midway were still buzzing, the ones they leave on while crews tear things down, and there was hay and grease smell all over everything.

I turned the key a sixth time because I don't always learn the first five. Click.

"Lord," I said, to nobody, which is how I do most of my talking these days.

I'm Delores. I'm fifty-two years old, a paralegal over in the county seat, never married, and I had spent that whole Saturday at the farmers market selling pickles with my sister's church group, then paid two dollars to walk around the fair eating a funnel cake I didn't need. Now my minivan, which had over two hundred thousand miles on it and had been gutted of any dignity years ago, was dead in a mud field in rural Oklahoma at half past eleven at night.

I got out and popped the hood, because that's what my father taught me, pop the hood and stare at things like you know what you're looking at. I stared. Nothing looked on fire, which I took as a win.

"Need a hand?"

I about jumped out of my shoes. There was a guy jogging over from the food truck row, wiping his hands on a rag. I'd seen him earlier at the fair, the short-order cook, the one working the burger window near the rides. He'd handed me a basket of fries at some point in the evening. That was the entirety of our history.

"I didn't hear you walk up," I said.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to sneak. Saw the hood up." He held up the rag. "I'm Collin. I run the grill on that truck there. We're the last crew packing up."

"Delores." I pointed at the engine like it had wronged me. "It clicks. Five times, it clicked. Then a sixth time, it clicked again."

"Six clicks is thorough," he said. "Mind if I look?"

"Please. I'm just performing."

He leaned in and did the things men do, wiggled the battery cables, squinted at things, tapped something with a knuckle. He was younger than me, I figured, maybe late thirties, with forearms that had clearly been over a flat top all day. His apron was still on, folded over now, and he smelled like fryer oil and outside air.

"Starter, most likely," he said after a bit. "Or solenoid. Cable's tight though. Battery's got juice, your lights came on strong."

"So it's not the battery."

"No ma'am. Battery's fine. It's the part that tells the battery to do its job." He straightened up. "It ain't fixing itself tonight, that's the bad news."

I looked at the lot. Mud, hay, one dead van, me. "The bad news is I know that."

"There a garage open in this town on a Sunday?"

"There is not. There's Earl's, and Earl opens Monday at eight, and Earl will tell me it's the starter, and Earl will be right."

"Well." He wiped his hands again, though they were already clean. "Here's my situation, and you tell me if it helps. We don't pack the truck out till morning. The fair folks want the lot clear by nine, so we load at seven. I got my car parked behind the truck, and I got a bunk situation in the back of a buddy's trailer up the road. Point is, I'm here till morning anyway. I could drive you to the depot in town come seven, you catch your bus or whatever you need, and Earl can haul the van Monday."

"The depot," I said. "You mean the Greyhound stop by the gas station."

"Is that what it is? I've been here two years and I always figured it was a depot."

"It's a bench with a schedule taped to it. But sure. Depot."

"That's the one." He shrugged. "Anyway. Offer stands. I ain't got anywhere to be tonight, so there's no hurry on your answer."

I thought it over carefully, weighed it out with sensible judgment. The truth is I looked at my van, and the van looked back, and that settled my options. My phone was at twenty percent. My house was eleven miles away. My one serious boyfriend, back when I was twenty-seven, would have told me never take rides from strangers, and that man left in 1999, so his record on advice was mixed.

"How old are you, Collin?" I asked. "Not to be rude. I like to know who I'm riding with."

"Thirty-eight. Chicago originally, moved down here two years back for a change of scenery." He didn't seem to mind the question. "How about you, if we're doing numbers?"

"Fifty-two."

"Huh," he said, and I braced, because I know what huh can mean, but he just nodded. "You don't fuss about a dead battery like somebody who's fifty-two. Most folks my age fuss worse."

"That's not a compliment, but I'm taking it as one."

"Take it however."

We stood there a second. The teardown crew across the lot dropped a metal pole on concrete and something clattered a long way. A fair's last night has a particular sound to it, all bolts and extension cords and men hollering across dark spaces.

"I'll take the ride," I said. "Seven o'clock. And I'll pay you for gas."

"You won't. It's a mile." He looked over at the truck. "You got any way to pass the time, or were you fixing to sit in that van all night?"

"I was fixing to sit in the van, honestly. I've had worse plans."

"You want to not do that?" He nodded back toward the midway. "There's a bottle of whiskey in the truck. Cook's privilege. It's cheap and it's Irish, which is redundant, but it works. We could sit on the tailgate a while, wait for the teardown noise to die down. Beats sitting alone in a dead van in the mud."

Now, I had not had a drink with a man in a long while. I don't keep a count, but it had been years, and the last one was a dentist who talked about his boat. The man in front of me had gotten me off the hook with a ride and a working set of forearms and he cooked for a living, which meant at minimum he could feed himself.

"One drink," I said. "Then I'm back in the van, and you can go do whatever cook's privileges require."

"That's fair." He started walking, then turned. "You want to grab your coat? It gets cold out here fast once the lights go down."

"Coat's in the van. That's one thing the van's still good for."

"Then the van's earning its keep after all."

I got my coat, locked a vehicle that had nothing in it worth stealing, and followed the smell of grease back toward the lights.

* * *

Collin came back from the truck with a green bottle with no label and two plastic cups, the thin kind you get at a church picnic. He sat down on the tailgate of my van next to me and poured without asking how much.

"Fair warning, this is not good whiskey," he said. "It's whiskey that knows it's not good and has made peace with it."

"That's fine. I'm not a snob. I drink whatever's in the house, and mostly the house has rum somebody left at Christmas."

"Somebody left rum at your Christmas and never came back for it?"

"Somebody left it and I drank it and didn't complain once."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and handed me a cup. The lights down the midway had started going off in sections. First the game trailers went dark, then the ride with the spinning cups, and then a whole stretch of bulbs along the fence just quit, all at once, like a switch somewhere got tired. What was left was the teardown crew and their work lights and a sky with no moon in it.

I took a sip and made a face I didn't try to hide.

"See," he said. "Made peace with it."

"It tastes like a bandaid."

"It tastes like the price of the evening, which is nothing. Drink it anyway."

So I did. We sat there and didn't talk for a while, which suited me. I'm a paralegal, I talk all day, mostly to people who don't want to hear what I have to say and mostly about filing deadlines. Sitting quiet on a tailgate with a bandaid-tasting drink was honest work by comparison.

The teardown noise did die down some. The hollering stopped and the clatter got farther off, and then it was just the work lights buzzing and a generator somewhere doing its one job. My van sat there in the mud being useless. I patted it on the fender on the way to the tailgate, like you'd pat a horse you were about to sell.

"You want to know the honest truth?" I said, somewhere into the second cup. "I have never been this stuck in my life. Not once. Fifty-two years and I've always had a way out of somewhere. I don't even know how to be stuck. I'm bad at it."

"That's a strange thing to be proud of."

"I'm not proud of it. I'm just telling you. I got my license at twenty-one and there's been a running car in my name ever since I bought a Gremlin at twenty-two off a man at my church, and it ran. Ugly thing, but it ran."

"And now the Gremlin's descendants have failed you in a field."

"In a mud field, at half past eleven, on a Saturday, with my phone at twenty percent and my sister a hundred miles away and no idea how to be stuck." I held my cup out and he refilled it. "So there it is. Delores, stuck. First time ever."

Collin looked into his own cup and turned it around a little, like he was checking it for something.

"I been stuck for two years," he said.

"Meaning what, the job?"

"Meaning everything. I mean, the job's fine, the job's easy, it's flipping burgers on a truck at a fair. But I came down here from Chicago two years ago because I was thirty-six and nothing in my life was where I put it, if that makes sense. Woman I was with, that was over. Job I had, that was over. Apartment, that was over. So I got in a car and drove south until I saw a help wanted sign, and here I am, two years later, drinking bad whiskey with a stuck paralegal." He took a drink. "Stuck's not the wrong word. I been parked behind a food truck for two years like a car with a bad starter. Everything's fine under the hood, I just can't get turned over."

"That's the best description of it I ever heard," I said, "and I've sat through a lot of descriptions. Depositions. People will talk about a car accident for four hours if you let them."

"Depositions. So you're a lawyer."

"Paralegal. County seat. I do the actual work and a man with a nicer watch signs it."

"Huh." He was quiet a second. "You like it?"

I thought about it, which surprised me, because I don't usually think about it.

"I like being good at it," I said. "I like knowing where every file is. I don't love anything about it, but I know where every file is. That's something."