Riding the Dog

Change in Kingston

The driver knew her by her perfume. She had been a regular on his route for months. Every other Tuesday afternoon he had come to expect her. Gilbert Craddock was a large-limbed African-American in his early fifties. A veteran of the Gulf War, Gil prided himself on his professionalism. The creases in his uniform trousers were as crisp and ironclad as his self-imposed rule: never get involved with a passenger.

The scent of crushed orchids announced the woman’s arrival. Gil did not know a crushed orchid from an uncrushed one, but those were the words her perfume brought to mind. He took her ticket, careful not to make eye contact. She was tall and young and clad from head to toe in hooded robes. This afternoon her downturned face was framed in fabric neither blue nor gray but a shade in-between, the color of fog. The chador’s hood fell in a straight line above dark eyebrows curving thickly over blue-green eyes shot with amber. She might have been Persian, or one of those Eastern European Muslims, Gil could not tell. It was a harmless game he liked to play, speculating on the bloodlines of his more exotic passengers.

He had seen many women clothed like her during his service in Kuwait. Her appearance was always a jolt in time, but it was more than that. Names had been required on tickets since the 9/11 terrorist attack, but hers – D. LaSalle – gave no real clue to her origins. The voluminous cloak made it impossible for him to guess her shape, though that had not kept him from trying. He had not even realized she was pregnant until last month and now, this Tuesday, a newborn slept in a sling across her breast. A secondhand Winnie-the-Pooh diaper bag was looped over her robed shoulder.

“Congratulations,” Gil stated with perfectly-pitched warmth. His voice had a graveled charm he knew how to use to his advantage.

LaSalle kept her lashed gaze lowered. In all this time she had never spoken a word to him. She was modest, as befit her clothing. The cloying perfume seemed a bit over the top – but who was Gil to complain?

New Paltz was the second stop on his northbound New York City-to-Montreal shuttle. The bus was running ten minutes late. Gil paged quickly through LaSalle’s ticket. It was always the same: a return schedule to Binghamton, the sizeable crossroads a hundred miles northwest of here. From New Paltz, Gil would take LaSalle twenty miles north to Kingston, where she would transfer to the westbound bus for Binghamton. He was anxious to get her on board so she could make her connection without any trouble. Eyes averted, he tore off the top sheet of her ticket and handed her the remainder.

A long slender hand darted out from the loose sleeve, like a fish from cover. Her ring finger was encircled with a thin, blue wedding-band tattooed into the skin. A black inky splat interrupted the smooth back of her hand, a dark blossom on beige velvet. Gil recognized the mark. It was the smeared remnants of a visitor-stamp from the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, the only evidence of LaSalle’s morning visit to the maximum-security prison just a ten-dollar cab ride from the bus station.

LaSalle was what Gill called one of his prison widows – a single wave in the invisible tide of wives, mothers, girlfriends, sisters making these clockwork migrations up and down the eastern rim of New York State. Some of them would be riding this bus long after Gil retired.

LaSalle’s ticket swam with her hand and disappeared up her sleeve. As she swung past him, Gil inhaled. “Change in Kingston,” he reminded her, as always. He never expected a reply.

This afternoon LaSalle faltered, startled. She glanced back at him, offering up a rare gaze into the agate eyes. Her cheeks were streaked with mascara, her mouth quivered. Then, just as quickly, her face spun away in a pale swirl of fabric and grasping the inside rail of the bus, she pulled herself and her baby on board.

Gil followed the trail of orchids onto the bus. His mind was wholly alert. She had made eye contact; that had never happened before. In her eyes he had read grief and a disquieting resolve.

He locked the bus door and secured the new protective shield that separated him from his passengers. The bus was not usually crowded this time of the week. His was a relatively new vehicle, the unsoiled gray upholstery not yet rubbed away. There were outlets for radio headsets on every seatback, rarely used except in bad weather or national emergencies.

Gil scanned the bus for his newest rider. Predictably, LaSalle had chosen a window seat four rows back, directly behind his cab. She was gazing out, her fine profile curtained by the hood, her lips moving. Gil’s description was apt today: she was like a woman in mourning, shorn of her usual reserve. Of course she was a mother now; that alone could explain it.

Gil checked the aisle. The space between the two long rows of double seats was broken by a dangling hand here, a resting knee there. In the back, beside the bathroom, a pair of worn sneakers stuck up, tall as a pylon. Gil frowned; that was a safety violation. He glanced at his watch. If he took the time to clear the walkway, LaSalle might miss her connection.

He lowered himself behind the wheel, angling the rearview mirror that reflected his riders to get a better view of LaSalle. Then, honking twice, he trundled the bus out into the quaint college town.

The village sloped down to the river. The terraced main street teemed with students in shorts and tank tops. They overflowed the coffee shops and bookstores, tie-dye and tattoo parlors, spilling out into the street to celebrate the fine weather and the end of the school year. Gil navigated the close single-lane traffic, the brazen jay-walkers. In the passing storefront windows he caught the reflection of the bus. The long, blue rectangle skated across the glass in broken motion, the flying silver dog on its side in perpetual pursuit of its prey. Gil’s gaze shifted forward. He never tired of this view. Beyond the town, on the other side of the river’s broad floodplain, a long low ridge of cliffs gleamed in the sun, white and ribbed like the bleached fossils of whales. Bright clouds foamed above them. From the highest point of the mountain, a lone stone tower jutted up like the fixed needle of a compass.

At the first stoplight Gil picked up the microphone and blew into it. “This is the northbound bus to Montreal.” His rap had the basso cadence of a late night DJ. “Making stops in Kingston. Albany. Plattsburgh. Canada. No smoking. No drinking. No cursing. No weapons. And please keep your body parts out of the aisle.”

He glanced up into the mirror. The hand and knee had been withdrawn but the sneakers had not taken the hint. Gil sighed. He was not going to add to LaSalle’s worries by making her late.

“Next stop Kingston,” he concluded. “Change for Binghamton and all points west. Kingston in fifteen.”

He hung up the mike. His practiced eye swept the seats in the mirror. Some heads were bent, reading or knitting, others thrown back dozing under headsets or ear buds. Gil watched LaSalle arch her neck. She closed her eyes. Her arms were clasped around the ball of infant against her, as if its small weight was the only thing holding her in her seat.

Every two weeks she traveled these two hundred miles. To see a man Gil assumed was her husband, through a glass window for less than an hour. A man she might never touch again. What a waste of youth and beauty. She ought to be out enjoying herself, like these kids in the streets, Gil thought, a spike of outrage masking his jealousy. The intensity of her devotion was an enigma to him. He had just left a lover in New York City, another waited for him in Montreal. This back-and-forth working arrangement suited Gil’s mercurial nature well. In his mind he had been unfaithful to both women with LaSalle.

The light turned green. Gil turned the bus north, out of town. Here, there was less traffic and fewer pedestrians along the rural road. To his left, the bony cliffs ran parallel to the two-lane highway, towering over stone-bordered pastures and orchards in bloom. After five miles or so, the cliffs broke into boulders big as houses. The rocks grew smaller and smaller, finally flattening into woods thick with white pine, oak, and at this time of year, flowering mountain laurel.

A blue-girded bridge spanned the north-flowing Walkill River. They were coming up on Rosendale. Kingston was ten more miles up the road. Gil would have to wait another two weeks to see LaSalle again. Though he spent so little time in her presence, she had come to consume more and more of his thoughts. He felt a connection between them – a bond that, to his mind, had been confirmed by her brief, searing glance.

An upward motion in the mirror caught Gil’s eye. LaSalle had stood unexpectedly. He watched her glide into the aisle, angling toward the back, toward the restroom he presumed. He released the accelerator. The bus slowed. She was using the seatbacks to brace each step, reaching hand over hand over hand. From the back she looked like a runner in slow motion undeterred by the weight of the child or the bold cocoon of cloth. As she passed the seats filled by women, Gil saw their heads bob up, one by one, to smile at her. They don’t see Muslim, they see mother, he thought.

That thought was quickly followed by another, this one uninvited. He had not actually seen LaSalle’s baby, had he? Only its round shape against her breast. She could be hiding anything in that sling, or under her robe....