The Last of the Smoking Bartenders by Howell C.J

Author:Howell, C.J. [Howell, C.J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: New Pulp Press
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

He shared the sardines and the crackers with the man. The man was well stocked with canned goods, not just green beans, creamed corn, and canned yams which always flooded the food banks at Thanksgiving and remained on the shelves most of the year, but with Spaghetti O’s and Dinty Moore beef stew. But the man accepted the oily fish and salty crackers out of courtesy.

When Tom had fully rested, he shook hands with the man and climbed back up to the road. He would have preferred to spend the night under the bridge with someone he trusted to watch his back while he slept, but the mission was his priority and it was better to travel at night.

Freshly hydrated and fed, it was easier to travel, to live, to be alive. His sight was actually clearer. The tunnel vision was gone. In this way he stopped when what would have been lost on the periphery as some fuzzy colored blob came into focus as a real object with defined edges, a bus stop it appeared, although he couldn’t recall having seen any actual buses in his time here. A bench and a post with a cryptic sign. Preposterous in the day time under the blow torch sun, it now seemed plausible to sit on an exposed bench and wait to see it a bus would come. He didn’t know the time. It could have been too late for buses to run, but in any event the sitting was nice with the sun safely behind the earth’s crust. After what could have been an hour or a day, a bus did come. The door swung open and something akin to cool air rushed out. It felt like luxury, how the rich travel.

The bus was empty. An empty vessel floating upon the asphalt. The driver insisted that Tom have some sort of swipeable card. He had no such card. He only had nickels and dimes. The machine did not accept change. He was directed to a card dispenser that might as well have been on the moon for how he would get to it. If he could walk to the card dispenser he could walk to his destination. After some negotiation in which Tom proffered a dollar in change in what amounted an attempt to bribe the bus driver with what would have been close to the standard fare, the bus driver refused his offer but let him ride anyway. Perhaps for the company. Perhaps so there would be a point to driving the bus at all. Tom was the only passenger.

It felt good to be moving, but he was nervous; one turn and the bus could undo days of walking and take him back where he started. Or worse. The bus appeared to be moving in the right direction, north with the distant skyscrapers almost parallel.

Gradually a few passengers got on. Sad people, burnt and tired. The movement created an optical effect like an open shutter, lights blending together into beams of light and color.

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