Stopover
NATHAN ASCH
I SAT in the Salt Lake bus station and waited for
the time to leave and cursed myself for ever having
started. Never in my life again I wanted to see an-
other bus, or to ride upon its shaking, clumsy seats
and feel my insides rattle; and if the way back on
the road I had come had been much shorter than
the road before me, I would have damned the trip
and gone home to New York. But I ,vas at the end
of the journey, almost on the Coast, and if I went
ahead I would at least see something distractingly
new in each place I came to.
I became aware that someone sat in the waiting
room seat beside me and stared at me,' but I kept
my face rigid. Then a voice asked me, "Is the bus
going to San Francisco?"
I said, "I think so."
"Are you going to San Francisco?"
I nodded.
The voice said, "That's just fine, because I'm go-
ing too, and we can go together."
I turned. It was a girl, and I didn't like her looks.
She said, "I just hate to travel with strangers,
don't you?"
I looked at her and I hated
her.
She said, "\Ve can sit together all night, and get
nice and comfy."
I got up and said, "Pardon me," and took my
bag and went to the news stand. I waited while the
bus was announced and saw her stare at me and
then walk toward the bus. I waited till the crowd
got on, and at the last moment I also got on. There
was only one seat empty, and it was the seat next to
the girl.
She said, "I saved it for you."
I slid into the seat, pushed myself just as far away
from her as I could-about
two inches-and turned
my head to the aisle. I had a sudden interest in life,
because I was determined,
if it killed me, to spend
the whole night without once looking or talking to
the girl. There was a man across the aisle from me,
and I began talking to him about whisky. vVe com-
pared notes about all the whisky we had drunk;
then the driver got on and put out the lights, and we
started. The man and I talked a little while longer,
but then he pushed his hat over his eyes and fell
asleep. I sat rigid in the seat.
The girl behind me moved closer and whispered,
"I've got some whisky, too. Would you like some?"
I turned. I said, "Yes, I would."
She fumbled for a bottle, passed it to me. She
said she didn't drink. I poured some whisky down
my throat.
She said, "My name's Marcheta."
She hadn't looked Mexican at all, and she didn't
speak with a Spanish accent.
"Oh, I'm not Mexican," she said. "I'm Mormon.
My folks have a ranch in vVyoming."
She told me four different stories about herself.
The first, she had a job in Cheyenne, and she had
saved some money and was going to see the Pacific
Coast. The second, she was running away from
home because her stepfather had abused her. The
third, as she became confidential,
she was running
away from her husband. The fourth,
she had shot
her husband. Later I discovered that all four stories
were true, only not in the way she had told them.
And she had not shot her husband,
she had shot
herself trying to shoot her husband.
Some of the stories she told me of what had hap.
pened to her were incredible.
But she wasn't lying.
I was with her a week, she talked all the time, and
often she put her facts in the wrong places, but
everything she said was true. And she was a strange
combination of humility and boldness. vVhen she was
telling me stories of her past, when she said, "Yes,
the son of a bitch, I pulled the trigger straight into
his guts," there was a, triumph in her voice, but
when I told htr, Please, to stop shouting obscenities
on San Francisco streets-she
became so excited
talking of her husband-she
was so ashamed she
wept.
All that week, on the road, in Reno, on the road
again, and later in San Francisco, I never knew what
she would think of next. And I never knew what to
think of her; sometimes I believed that she did no-
thing but lie and told her so, and then she' showed
me her left breast with a scar on each side where
the bullet had gone in and gone out again. And then
I told her she had left no husband, and the next day
a letter came from him. with money in it, begging
her for pity's sake to come back.
She said, "When I come back it will be dead, to
haunt him."
But that first night in the bus she was just a crazy
and not very attractive person who had attached
herself to me. And after
J
had found I could not
ignore her, I made the best of it by talking to her.
And when she had heard I was stopping off in Reno,
she said she would stop off too. Oh, yes, she had all
of her life wanted to see Reno.
The bus continued pitching, rolling; tossing; and
soon broke
even
her ardent temperament,
and she
kept quiet and then fell asleep. I also fell asleep;
and woke in the early morning with her head on my
shoulder,
and the Nevada desert outside of the
window.
We stopped off for breakfast,
and somebody said
something about my
missus
j
then we rolled on
through nothing but bare earth and rocks and sun·
light, and Marcheta fell asleep again, and at noon
we arrived in Reno.
In Reno I also went mad, but it must have been
MARCH,
1936
