High Gear
NATHAN ASCH
"FOLKS," the pillow man said, "this bus will arrive
in Omaha at
I I :30
tomorrow night; in Salt Lake at
8
:00
the following night, change in Cheyenne. The
bus is steam heated; the seats recline at any angle
you care to place them. And as a further conven-
ience, the company provides fresh and comfortable
pillows for those who wish a luxury of. comfort.
There is a slight charge of fifteen cents.-Pillows,
who wants pillows?"
He walked up and down the aisle, but nobody
wanted pillows.
A woman said, "I've got a pillow, but it's home."
The pillow man got off. We lay on our white seat
rests, waiting; saw the driver climb into the bus,
look at us, count us; watched him shut the door, slide
into the seat behind the wheel, twist knobs and
push buttons that produced little colored lights on
the instrument board; turn off lights in the bus, so
that before us in the aisle only tiny spots of red and
yellow could be seen; heard the motor turn over,
start, be warmed for a while; and then the gear
shifted into low, the bus slowly crossed the side-
walk and turned into the street, was clumsily too big
and difficult to handle in the city traffic among the
.agile, pigmy cars and tiny pedestrians.
But as it left the business streets and drove into
the more deserted warehouse districts, then through
the outlying streets where people lived,
and as
eventually it left all lighted signs and noises of life
and went into the country,
with only occasionally
brightness in the windows of farmhouses seen-the
bus became itself. In high gear now, and humming
like a bee, with two great eyes before it, it bore into
the breathless darkness,
dug into it, pierced it with
speed. It seemed to go so fast, so much beyond the
saiety of light, that looking through the windshield
from ::he driver's seat one became nervous.
One
thought that though the driver of this bus was an
expert, perhaps a silly motor.ist who was driving
may?e drunk beyond the next unseen curve, was
comIng toward the bus with death in his wheel. Out-
side the bus ","as danger. But inside, one glanced at
the row after row of reclining seats and saw in the
darkness outlines of bodies fitted into angles, trying
to find rest; and some relaxed asleep. One watched
a cigarette being lighted,
the flaring match illumi-
nating a h.Le, and then the red glow of burning ash
making the head behind it app_ear a phantom shape.
One thought of tomorrow and what one would see;
then the wish projected,
jumped into tomorrow;
one
annihilated distance and time and was fantastically
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
twelve hours in the beyond. But facts were forced
into the mind; the present jerked one back inside
the bus. One had to accept; for this night it was
home.
.
One turned and looked upon one's neighbor;
knees an inch or two away from one's own knees;
head so clo.>c that one. could feel his breath; one had
never seen him; peering, one could distinguish only
a vague shape. One turned away and tried to re-
enter the univerde outside and failed. The bus vi-
brated in the road, felt every pebble and transferred
through its rubber, wood, and steel the feeling into
one's own spine. One became restless; one felt it
would be impossible to' spend the eternity of the
next twenty-four hours inside this tiny space; some-
how one had to be free to move to get
out.
In desperation one began to talk. One said some-
thing banal; one was answered with a banality; one
offered a cigarette
j
with words one searched the
neighbor.
Talk continued, and time passed
j
one be-
gan to see in the man nearby the beginning of a per-
sonality. One became interested and talked on; and
one was warmly answered.
. Yes, he said, in his life he had done many things.
He had skinned mules and laid pipelines and washed
dishes and been a plumber and worked on a riredge-
boat and been on a section-gang.
He had been in the
Seminole oil boom and in Monroe, Louisiana, he had
worked for the Government.
He was fifty-one years
olel. And in Lake 'Charles he had done landscape
work. He was an expert landscape gardener
j
he was
going out to Carmel, California,
where he thought
that now he could find a job. It would be just ter-
rible if he couldn't find it, it was so long since he had
had work. I asked him if in all his life he had ever
saved money, and he said, Yes, a hundred and fifty
dollars; and then for two months he had lived like
a man. He said it made a different person of him to
live like a man.
I turned away and tried to sleep. I couldn't sleep.
I watched the vague heads before me in the seats,
and wondered why they were in the bus traveling
west, north, east. VVhy were they on the road? Why
was the whole world somewhere traveling on some
road, waiting for something to happen soon, to hap-
pen in another place?
I began to see the entire country with its maze of
roads, twining, twisting, entering everywhere,
I saw
the million automobiles,
and trains, and buses, and
people walking on the road, all trying to get some-
where. I suddenly saw the map of America,
sur-
rounded by the waters,
a light-colored continent
with scarlet road extending through the States,
across mountains, by the sides of the rivers, through
the cities, and never getting back anywhere but into
itself, being an itself.
But on this imaginary road there were no traffic
rules or cops; and the highway was not paved, and
the various wagons and automobiles and trains
17
