The Midnight Express

Grandma sleeps as she always does at midnight, waiting for the express. The bus depot tonight has a slime-green tint to it. We are mingled in the waiting room with other travelers, an assortment, some clutching desperately to cracked vinyl bags, others furtively nudging small cardboard boxes tied with twine closer to their knees, still others standing casually as if they'd lived their whole lives there beside the candy dispenser. I sit quiet now, not waking grandma, bundled into her dusty fox fur coat in July. She's always cold these days and keeps asking me to pick a bus that's going south. I have to dress her now and nurse her through each day. Today it’s the mandatory scarf she likes, the black wool pants, her walking shoes wedged carefully onto the foot pedals of the wheelchair, the fur coat of course, I mentioned that, collar up and the linen gloves she started to always wear a while ago. I'm always careful to wrap her scarf over her head, along the sides and out across her forehead to shade the light from her face. She likes to be hidden in a dark cave of silence.

Over the intercom they call our bus. I've got both tickets and I wheel her up to the door not waking her. I carefully lift her up, her body sleeping like a frail bird in my arms, and I carry her to a seat near the back close to the toilet. I let the driver stow the wheelchair while I carry our one bag on to the bus. We travel light and together now. I like the carrying part. I get to hold her close and when I sit her down beside the window I prop her head up gently and pat her soft hair beneath her scarf. When she is awake she likes to watch the fields go by, to look into the dark windows of distant houses and wonder what the lives of those who live there have become. I wonder what our lives have become and feel tired thinking about it.

It's the boarding that's the hardest part for me, waiting for everyone else to get on, wondering what each person who passes by in the bright light is thinking. Once we're on the road and the lights are off, I can relax a little and know that grandma will stay sleeping until the morning. We've been doing this for a while, ever since grandma said, " Jake, you've got to get me out of here. The bitches are trying to kill me." But you know her journey started long before that day she got me involved. It started with the accident when grandpa drove the Buick right into the granite on the side of the road; crumpled the whole front-end, not to mention the ribs and knees of both of them. It took a couple of years for them to recover from that and being up north they didn't get out much. One thing led to another, and all sorts of strange ailments started to afflict them. Mom and dad were driving back and forth, back and forth, griping and arguing until finally they couldn't take it anymore. I know how they feel now.

Grandma has told me over and over again that it was the little things that did it. There were just too many of them in the house, too much of the living sediment collected over time in one spot, too much of memories encased in those things like relics encased in ash and lava.

We all went up there, the day they moved down to Toronto; mom and dad and me, forcing them to leave the granite of the shield, the forest and the last twenty years of friendships and associations. The movers were already there boxing and loading. Grandma sat in a plastic-thatched lawn chair in the driveway looking sternly like a security guard and grandpa wandered the backyard slashing at things with his cane. He decapitated a host of perennials before my father grabbed the cane amid a covering of trampled flower petals. The two of them were solitary shrubs waiting to be transplanted, dug up, roots cropped, limbs limp, and gasping for water and a return to their soil.

The tires of the bus change their hum. I look out to see the gray landscape emerging. I'm tired of mornings; tired of the tension, keeping it all taped up inside me. We are going to stop, the mandatory break where they force us off into the diner and lock up. They always let grandma stay on since she's too old, still sleeping and the wheelchair is too much of a bother for the driver. Despite the break from watching over her, I always get the shivers leaving her there locked up and alone on the bus, like it was her own private coffin to grow cold in.

In the early morning I like to order wheaten pancakes with a round scoop of butter and a pitcher of syrup. I sit alone on the short curve of the counter so I can see the action of the kitchen, watch the waitresses who are sometimes attractive enough to fantasize about and so if I feel like it I can make conversation across the diagonal to the long stretch of the counter.

" Say, son, is that your ma you're traveling with?"

I look up from a syrup-saturated pancake. The voice is two over from my elbow looking like a threadbare preacher, white collar, black vest and a tweed, goodwill suit jacket. Beside him is a frail woman of about forty in a faded blue dress that hangs on her shoulders with the weight of a lifetime of sorrows. I answer cautiously. I'd become suspicious over time when I get singled out for conversation.

" No, that lady is my grandmother, " I say.

" Where are you eventually headed?"

"Just south. When we find a place that feels right, we just stop for a while," I say.

" Isn't your grandmother a little too old to be traveling?" asked the frail woman in the pale blue dress.

I could see from her eyes that she is genuinely concerned and I want to pour out the whole story right then and there, but I say, " It is her idea; I just help her get to where she wants to go."

I thought back to the moving day. Grandma, like a statue rooted in the lawn chair, long after the moving van had pulled away, wouldn't talk. She just stared off into the bush. Grandpa, in the commotion of packing up everything from silver spoons to old notepads with last winter's scrawled messages, took off on us. I noticed him leaving but sat quietly and watched. He ambled across the park out back and into the bush, along the gravel road that curved down toward the lake. He disappeared like a sick animal searching for a place to die. When my parents finally noticed he was gone, I told them. My dad stayed with grandma in the driveway and mom and I went to bring him back.

When we found him, he was sitting on the edge of the lake on the rounded stones. He'd taken his shoes and socks off and was dipping his feet in the dark water. He was closed off and I could see that his environment was rapidly shrinking down to a small cage. For a moment he seemed at peace; for another a dark sadness leaned across his shoulder.

I see from the corner of my eye that the bus driver is getting up. That's the cue. I sip the last of the coffee and leave part of a pancake floating in its syrup. When I get on the bus and sit down again beside grandma, I notice that the preacher and the frail woman are beside me across the aisle. "That's why they noticed grandma," I thought. The next few hours would be difficult. They'd made contact and it was daylight. I lean over to grandma and whisper to her to keep sleeping for a while.

A hand shoots out at me from across the aisle.

" I'm Bill and this is Marsha. We're going to visit a sister parish to do some of the Lord's work there. On vacation, so it's a bit of a holiday from our place."

Marsha leans forward across Bill and says, " Isn't your grandma hot in that fur coat?"

There they are prying into our business. I can't help it if she needs a warm coat.

" She's kind of cold, " I say, and leave it at that trying to look out the window.

The tired part of me wants to tell the story.

" She must be hungry."

" In a minute, " I think, " they'll be asking if she needs to use the toilet." Some times she doesn't have to go but as soon as someone starts asking questions I need to get her up and to the toilet at the back of the bus. It's as if she wants to keep up appearances, be natural instead of sleeping like a piece of stone, or a limp bird perched up on her seat.

Part of me wants to fall asleep and ignore them both; another part like some demon trapped in a bag wants to tell them everything. I decide that today I am really tired and the demon can't be contained. I want to blurt it all out, but start cautiously. I start to tell them the story of the move down to Toronto.

"Sitting in that lawn chair she stopped talking. She was a woman you could never keep quiet, telling stories, asking questions, jumping from air born topic to topic like a bee among flowers. There was no sequencing, just zigzag buzz of monologue and dialogue. It was always electric and eclectic. To see her in silence in the sold, abandoned driveway didn't sit well with me but I wasn't making any of the decisions. When she wouldn't answer him, grandpa cracked his cane across the arms of the chair and the bones beneath her knees. She still didn't talk and I couldn't tell if the tears were caused by the immediate pain or by something deeper.

I drove their Buick south alone following grandpa and grandma and my mom and dad down the highway in dad's car. The bush and granite, the pine smell and the crisp blue sky leaked away in the rear view mirror."

I adjust grandma's scarf and fluff up the collar of her coat around her ears, changing her angle so she can see the scenery from the window. Her face is dark and hidden like she likes it now. I check her wrists and ankles carefully and dab her with some perfumed lotion that she likes to put on in the morning.

Marsha and Bill sit beside me in silence listening and watching me closely. The listening I don't mind, but the watching makes me nervous.

"The house in Toronto is small. Grandma insisted on a house, refusing to move to a low maintenance condo. She just had too much stuff and it all had to come down. She couldn't get her mind around parting with any of it."

I start to tell them about the piles of boxes in the new house and I sense that grandma wants me to tell them about the car. I lean over and she whispers to me in a soft voice, breathy and decayed.

"The Buick didn't stay in the driveway very long. One of my older cousins and his wife had their eyes on it from day one, since grandpa didn't drive it anymore, at least not through the jungle of traffic that would assault him in the city. Up north except for the main highway anyone who could turn a wheel and step on the brake could get by regardless of reflexes and vision. Grandpa had the vision but the reflexes were gone. The highway flustered him although I guess he never would have admitted it even if he'd gone blind. Well, Melinda and Greg borrowed the Buick to do some shopping and the car never came back as if borrowing were for a lifetime. I always hated Greg; as a kid, he'd come up into my room even when I wasn't there and play with my games, the hockey cards, and the classic comics and leave the room in a mess. I couldn't stand it when they visited; it was such a violation, my aunt's false smiles and salutations full of feigned concern, my uncle grunting and sleeping away the afternoon out of sheer boredom and Greg, the whirlwind tormentor, disrespectful of my property.

Grandma sat in rooms surrounded by boxes she wouldn't open and grandpa ranted and punched holes in the drywall raging on about his stolen car. But I knew there was more to it than that and often wondered why they hadn't stayed rooted to the forest and the Pre-Cambrian shield."

Grandma's head tilts toward me and I think I hear her ask me about the boxes. I whisper back that I think the boxes are still okay, even though its been a few months since we hit the road and I don't know what's happened with the boxes.

"Anyway it was the car that grandpa was worried bout, the stolen car, stolen by his own grandson, despicable. Well, Bill, he got it back and I admire him for that despite his rampages with the cane at the end of it all. He knew his rights; he knew social justice and damn it he had the guts to stand up for what he believed.

I can see him now, although it's a re-creation since I wasn't there and only heard about it as an undercurrent to the symphony of knives and forks on plates at dinner; shadow conversations, a disguised mosaic, each little piece needing deconstruction and analysis.

Grandpa took the bus down the west end of town, walked a few blocks to Greg and Melinda's rented flat, the upstairs of a house in High Park. The Buick was in the driveway. He hammered on the front door. No one answered. He stood out on the sidewalk staring up at the windows. Later in the hospital I heard him say that he saw the curtains moving. Maybe it was the wind from a side window that caused them to part so slightly. It set him off. Shards of storm-door glass rippled through the air. The wood of the main door compressed into itself with each blow of the cane, now a lethal weapon, an extension of inner turmoil, corrosive acidic frustration full of the sense of betrayal. The rectangle of double-glazed glass on the inner door shattered leaving loose jagged points along the trim. Cutting his right wrist and forearm. Grandpa opened the front door and was inside ascending the staircase to the apartment above. Melinda met him on the landing; Greg stood at the door. Grandpa's blood dripped like little red moons on the light grain of the hardwood stairs.

Greg said here and threw the keys over the banister to land at Grandpa's feet. He knew what grandpa had come for."

I look closely at Bill and Marsha caught within my story and wonder if grandma's perfume is too strong today. They seem pressed up together along the edge of the window not near the aisle hanging on my every word. I sniff her and smell the decay of too much make-up; too many air fresheners clipped to her hair and placed beneath her blouse. She smiles at me like she always does when I get close to her. I know I've done the right thing, getting her out of that hospital, freeing her spirit. They were going to kill her. She told me that when they had her trussed up in the straightjacket, legs strapped to the chrome bars of the bed.

" Grandpa pulled the Buick into the driveway. The asphalt was flawless, the green grass on the lawn cut evenly and trimmed, the sky was blue above neat orderly roofs and grandma sat in that same lawn chair in a forest of boxes, silent as stone beneath a northern lake. Grandpa closed the door of the Buick for the last time. Blood still ran down through his fingers as he gripped his cane and swung it over and over again, beating the shit out of one of the elements of an atrophied life. He smashed the headlights, the taillights, the side windows, and the engine and trunk hoods. He smashed and smashed until the cane collapsed into a fragmentary splinter, a wooden dagger to drive into the heart of his sorrow. He went for the front door, an oil of rage sliding over him and would have been in among the forest of boxes driving home the stake of his frustration if the police hadn't grabbed him. At that point he collapsed like a bag of rags, lost in the drain of his adrenaline. Grandma wouldn't talk. She didn't visit him in the hospital where they repaired the cuts and pulled out the shards of glass, where he lay as an alien washed up on a shore of antiseptic sheets and from where he never returned to the green grass, the black asphalt, the blue sky outlining orderly roofs. He either filled up with an evil tide or drained away like water on parched sand. He never returned to the forest, the granite and the lake he loved."

" What's your name, son?" asks Bill.

" Jake. I'm all she's got left."

Bill looks at me suspiciously and asks. " Don't you think she'd be better off at home?"

" Where's home, Bill?"

Bill looks at me and I can see a weird shadow of sadness creep across his eyes.

" Is home that hospital full of her demonic illusions of homicide, or the nursing home they'd picked out for her? She wouldn't eat. She wouldn't talk. She couldn't or wouldn't walk. We wheeled her into the funeral home, lifted her up gently so she could kiss his dead silent lips, lips that snarled at a world that he thought had betrayed him. I'm not going to let that happen to her. She'd gone into the hospital on orders to intravenously get her strength up before they were to rehabilitate her atrophied leg muscles. I knew she wasn't coming out and that day I visited her they'd trussed her up. They'd said she'd wandered off at night twice screaming in the lime-green corridors that the bitches were poisoning her; intravenous ripped from her arm, night shirt open and flapping her nakedness. Her eyes were soft and milky, tearful and pleading. ' Take me with you, Jake. Take me out of here. The bitches are trying to kill me.'

I paused at the enormity of the task. It wasn't just the effort of unbinding her, wrapping her up in dignity, lifting her from that antiseptic chrome-bed coffin into the wheelchair, escaping into the night air. It was the total rebellion against the status quo that gave me pause. This was a big step for a conservative adolescent, a sole responsibility. Escape? How does one or two escape still tied to possessions and relatives?"

" Hey, son, she ain't waking up, " says Bill.

I wonder what he really means. Marsha is pale and silent, watchful, as if sensing the air with the pores of her skin.

" She's always like this, " I say. " I think the rides are starting to bore her. I'd like to take her back to the boxes, start helping her to unpack, drive her to the mall for groceries, look in on her, read her a book before she goes to bed, hire gardeners to keep the grass cut and the flowers blooming, take her up to the lake and sit on the dock watching water boatmen skim across on the dark water. She used to call me 'Tupney', two pence, a small amount when I could only tug on her apron and ask for tea. I'd like to do all this instead of drifting, bus to bus at midnight."

" Hey, son, she ain't movin', " Bill says emphatically.

I know it's time now. Too many questions. The bus is slowing down. I turn to grandma and get real close to the silk scarf covering her ear. I whisper to her and she nods. I stand up, grab her beneath her knees and under her arms and lift her. The seat is damp from her perspiration. I think she must have been dreaming, reliving nightmares, running from room to room escaping the crashing sounds of the cane, or running through the park out through the woods and down to the lake. Yes, I've got to get her to the lake, sit her down on the dock, let her dribble her legs into the dark water, maybe let her float off in the coolness of the lake, be home again.

I carry her to the back watching a line of faces squinting up at me, faces like prunes, hands covering their mouths. I maneuver her through the swinging door of the washroom, clutching her close to me, feeling her body crackling and oozing in my arms. I smell the blend of aromas, the hand cream, the air fresheners pasted onto her skin, the smell of fluids weeping out of her. I wait, sitting her on the seat with the lid down. I check her ankles and pull a roll of duct tape from my pocket. I wrap her legs again sealing tighter the plastic wrap beneath her panty hose around her ankles. I do the same with her wrists and her neck beneath her collar and the layer of knotted scarf. I wait longer listening to the murmur of passengers. It's spooky. I feel the bus come to a stop and I sense the journey is really over now.

Carefully I start unknotting the scarf around grandma's neck. Its ends are dripping moisture and I can smell her sweetness on my hands. Her hands once patted my head as I tugged on her apron; those hands that gave me sweets, baked pies, held me as she kissed my lips with her apple-doll face. I remove the scarf and kiss her forehead. Her skin comes away on my lips; it crinkles. Tiny creatures burrow though small holes in her flesh, small bulges weep and crack and drip.

" Oh, grandma, I've got to get you home," I say.

The washroom door is ripped open behind me. Blue and red lights flash through the windows of the bus. Two uniformed officers stand there at the end of the aisle in front of me, covering their mouths. Just behind them, Bill and Marsha stand pale and speechless. I see them all as I turn. I hold my grandma like a precious child and say.

" I'm her 'tupney'; she needs some tea."

David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington, BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking. In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast. David is the editor of Ascent Magazine - Aspirations for Artists (established 1997)

Email: David Fraser

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