The Hollow Man

At the Violet Hour

A little over half of Bremen’s remaining money would buy him a bus ticket to Denver. He bought it and slept in the park across from the Hyatt where he had dumped the Goofy suit. The bus departed Orlando at 11:15 that night. He waited until the last minute to board, coming in through a maintenance entrance and walking straight to the bus, his head down and collar up. He saw no one who looked like a gangster; more important, the surge and rasp of neurobabble had not been punctuated by the shock of recognition from any of the bystanders.

By one A.M. they were halfway to Gainesville and Bremen began to relax, watching out the window at the closed stores and mercury vapor lamps lining the streets of Ocala and a dozen smaller towns. The neurobabble was less this late at night. For years Bremen and Gail had been convinced that much of the effect of the so-called circadian rhythm on human beings was nothing more than nascent telepathy in most people sensing the national dream sleep around them. It was very hard to stay awake this night, although Bremen’s nerves were jumping and twitching with the ricocheting thoughts of those two dozen or so people still awake aboard the bus. The dreams of the others added to the mental din, although dreams were deeper, more private theaters of the mind, and not nearly so accessible.

Bremen thanked God for that.

They were on Interstate 75 and headed north out of Gainesville when Bremen began to ponder his situation.

Why hadn’t he gone back to the fishing shack? Somehow his home of the past three days seemed like the only haven in the world for him now. Why hadn’t he returned … for his money if nothing else?

Bremen knew that part of it was that it seemed almost certain that Vanni Fucci or Sal Empori or some of their cronies would be watching the place. And Bremen had no desire to get Norm Sr. or the old man Verge in trouble with gangsters on his account.

He thought of the rental car parked there. But Verge or Norm Sr. would have found him missing by now. And found the money in the cabin. That would certainly settle the bill with the rental people. Would Norm Sr. call the police about his disappearance? Unlikely. And what if he did? Bremen had never given his name, never shown his driver’s license. The two men had respected Bremen’s privacy to the extent that there was little they could tell the police about him other than his description.

A more practical reason for Bremen not returning there was simply that he did not know the way. He knew only that the fishing shack was somewhere closer to Miami than to Orlando, on the edge of a lake and a swamp.

Bremen thought about phoning Norm Sr. from Denver, asking that the bulk of the money be wired to a P.O. box in Denver, but he remembered seeing no name on the little store and Norm Sr. had never thought of his own last name when Bremen was eavesdropping. The refuge of the fishing shack was lost forever.

It was only two hundred and fifty-some miles from Orlando to Tallahassee, but it was after five A.M. by the time the bus pulled through the rain-silent streets of the capital and hissed to a stop. “Rest break!” called the driver, and quickly disembarked. Bremen lay back in his seat and dozed until the others reboarded. He already knew his fellow passengers very well and their return echoed in his skull like shouts in a metal pipe. The bus pulled out at 5:42 A.M. and leisurely found its way back to Interstate 10 West while Bremen squeezed his temples and tried to concentrate on his own dreams.

Two rows behind him sat a young marine, Burk Stemens, and a young WAF sergeant named Alice Jean Dernitz. They had not met until boarding the bus in Orlando, but they were quickly becoming more than friends. Neither had slept much during the past seven hours; each had told the other more about his or her life than either had ever revealed to their mates, past or present. Burk had just gotten out of fourteen months in the brig for assaulting a noncommissioned officer with a knife. He had traded a dishonorable discharge from the Marines for the final four months of his sentence and was now on his way home to Fort Worth to see his wife, Debra Anne, and his two infants. He did not tell Alice Jean about Debra Anne.

Sergeant Dernitz was two months away from a quite honorable discharge from the Air Force and was spending the bulk of that time on leave. She had been married twice, the last time to the brother of her first husband. She had divorced the first brother, Warren Bill, and lost the second, William Earl, four months ago; he had been killed when his Mustang went off a Tennessee mountain road at eighty-five miles per hour. Alice Jean hadn’t cared too much by then. She and brother number two had been separated for almost a year before the accident. She did not tell Burk about either Warren Bill or the late William Earl.

Burk and Alice Jean had been inching toward intimacy since Gainesville, and by Lake City, just before I-75 encountered I-10, they had ceased swapping barracks stories and gotten down to the business at hand. As they passed Lake City Alice Jean was pretending to nap and had let her head fall on Burk’s shoulder, while Burk had put his arm around her and let his hand “accidentally” fall to her left breast.

By the suburbs of Tallahassee both were breathing shallowly, Burk’s hand was inside her blouse, and Alice Jean’s hand was on Burk’s lap under the jacket he had spread like a robe across both of them. She had just unzipped his pants when the driver announced the rest break.

Bremen had been prepared to spend the rest break in the tiny bus station rather than suffer the next stage of their slow and painful foreplay, but luckily Burk had whispered in Alice Jean’s ear and both had left the bus, Burk holding his jacket rather clumsily in front of himself. They had thoughts of trying their luck in a storeroom or … if all else failed … in the ladies’ rest room.

Bremen tried to doze with the other sleeping passengers aboard the bus, but Burk and Alice Jean’s contortions—it had been the ladies’ rest room—assaulted him even from a distance. Their lovemaking was as banal and short-lived as their loyalty to their current and former mates.

By the time the bus was approaching Pensacola it was almost ten A.M. and everyone aboard was awake and the highway sounds had taken on a new timbre. Storm clouds lay heavy in the west, the direction they were headed, but a thick, low light from the east painted the fields on either side in rich hues and threw the shadow of their bus ahead of them. The neurobabble was much louder than the hiss of tires on asphalt.

Across the aisle and three rows ahead of Bremen were a couple from Missouri. As far as Bremen could sort out, their names were Donnie and Donna. He was very drunk; she was very pregnant. Both were in their early twenties, although from the glimpses Bremen got through the seats ahead—and occasionally from Donnie’s perception—Donna looked at least fifty. The two were not married, although Donna considered their four-year relationship a common-law marriage. Donnie didn’t think of it that way.

The couple had been on a seventeen-day Odyssey across the nation trying to find the best place to have the baby while having welfare pay for it. They had ricocheted east from St. Louis to Columbus, Ohio, on the advice of a Missouri friend, had found Columbus no more generous in its welfare policies than St. Louis, and then had started on an endless series of bus trips—charging it all to Donna’s sister’s husband’s borrowed credit card—going from Columbus to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.… where they were shocked at how poorly the nation’s capital treated its deserving citizens … and then from Washington to Huntsville because of something they had read in the National Enquirer about Huntsville being one of the ten friendliest cities in America.

Huntsville had been terrible. The hospitals would not even admit Donna unless it was an emergency or proof of their ability to pay was shown in advance. Donnie had started drinking in earnest in Huntsville and had dragged Donna out of the hospital while shaking his fist and hurling curses at doctors, administrators, nurses, and even at a cluster of patients staring from their wheelchairs.

The trip to Orlando had been bad, with the credit card approaching its max and Donna saying that she was definitely feeling contractions now, but Donnie had never seen Walt Disney World and he figured that they were close, so what the hell?

Brother-in-law Dickie’s card lasted long enough to get them into the Magic Kingdom, and Bremen noticed through Donnie’s drunken memories that the two had been there while he had been fleeing Vanni Fucci. Small world. Bremen pressed his cheek and temple to the glass hard enough to drive thoughts away, to form a barrier between these new wavelengths of foreign thoughts and his own bruised mind.

It did not work.

Donnie hadn’t enjoyed the Magic Kingdom much, even though he’d waited his whole life to go there, because goddamn spoilsport Donna refused to go on any of the real rides with him. She’d ruined his fun by standing, ponderous as a cow heavy with two heifers, and waving as he’d boarded Space Mountain and Splash Mountain and all the fun rides. She’d said it was because her water broke an hour after coming into the park, but Donnie knew it was mostly to spite him.

She’d insisted on going into Orlando that evening, saying the pains were starting in earnest now, but Donnie had left her wedged in one of the TV chairs in the bus station while he checked out the hospitals by phone. They were worse than Huntsville or Atlanta or St. Louis about their payment policies.

Donnie had used the last of Dickie’s credit card to get them tickets from Orlando to Oklahoma City. A toothless old fart sitting near the phone banks in the bus station had overheard Donnie’s angry queries on the phone and—after Donnie had slammed the phone down for the last time—had suggested Oklahoma City. “Best goddamn place in the goddamn country to get born for free,” the old fart had said, showing an expanse of gums. “Had me two sisters and one of my wives who calved there. Them Oklahoma City hospitals just put it on Medicare and don’t bother you none.”

So they were off to Houston with connecting tickets for Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Donna was whimpering more than a little now, saying that the contractions were just a few minutes apart, but as Donnie drank more sour mash he grew increasingly certain that she was lying just to ruin his trip.

Donna was not lying.

Bremen felt her pain as if it were his own. He had timed the contractions with his watch, and they had moved from almost seven minutes apart in Tallahassee to less than two minutes separating them by the time they crossed the state line into Alabama. Donna would whimper at Donnie, tugging at his sleeve in the dark and hissing invective, but he would shove her away. He was busy talking with the man across the aisle, Meredith Soloman, the toothless old fart who had suggested Oklahoma City. Donnie had shared his sour mash until Gainesville, and Meredith Soloman had shared his own flask of something even stronger from there onward.

Just before the tunnel to Mobile, Donna had said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear, “Goddamn you to hell, Donnie Ackley, if you’re gonna make me drop this goddamn kid here on this bus, at least give me a swig of what you’re drinkin’ with that toothless old fart.”

Donnie had shushed her, knowing they’d be thrown off the bus if the driver heard too much about the drinking, had apologized to Meredith Soloman, and had let her drink heavily from the flask. Incredibly, her contractions slowed and returned to pre-Tallahassee intervals. Donna fell asleep, her dimmed consciousness rising and falling on the waves of cramping that flowed through her for the next few hours.

Donnie continued to apologize to Meredith Soloman, but the old man had shown his gums again, reached into his soiled ditty bag, and brought out another unlabeled bottle of white lightning.

Donnie and Meredith took turns drinking the fierce booze and sharing views on the worst way to die.

Meredith Soloman was sure that a cave-in or gas explosion was the worst way to go. As long as it didn’t kill you right away. It was the layin’ there and waitin’, in the cold and dank and dark a mile beneath the surface with the helmet lights fadin’ and the air getting foul … that had to be the worst way to go. He should know, Meredith Soloman explained, since he’d worked in the deep mines of West Virginia as man and boy long before Donnie’d been born. Meredith’s pap had died down in the mines, as had his brother Tucker and his brother-in-law Phillip P. Argent. Meredith allowed as how it was a terrible shame about his pap and brother Tucker, but no cave-in had served humanity better than the one that took that low-life, foulmouthed, mean-spirited Phillip P. in 1972. As for sixty-eight-year-old Meredith Soloman, he’d been caved in on three times and blown up twice, but they’d always dug him out. Each time, though, he’d sworn he was never goin’ down again … no one could make him go down again. Not his wives … he’d had four, one after the other, y’understand, even the young things don’t last too long back in the hollers of West Virginia, what with pneumonia and childbirth and all … not his wives, or his kin … real kin, not bastards-in-law like Phillip P.… nor even his own children, them grown up nor them still in bare feet, could talk him into goin’ back down.

But he did, finally, talk himself into goin’ back down. And he’d continued goin’ down until the company its own self made him retire early at age fifty-nine just because his lungs were filling up with coal dust. Well, hell, he explained to Donnie Ackley as they passed the bottle back and forth, everybody who worked down there had lungs clogged black like one of them old Hoover vacuum bags that hadn’t been changed in years, everyone knew that.

Donnie disagreed. Donnie thought that dying underground in a cave-in or gas explosion wasn’t nearly the worst way to go. Donnie started listing terrible ways he’d seen and been around. The time when that biker, Jack Coe, the one him and the others called the Hog, had been working for the highway department and had rolled backward off his mower on an incline and gone under the blades. Jack Coe’d lived on in the hospital for another three months until pneumonia’d got him, but Donnie didn’t hardly call it living what with the paralysis and the drooling and all the tubes carrying stuff into him and carrying stuff out.

Then there’d been Donnie’s first girlfriend, Farah, who’d gone down into niggertown to a bar and gotten gang-raped by a bunch of black bucks who ended up using things other than their dicks on her—their fists and broom handles and Coke bottles and even the sharp end of a tire iron, according to Farah’s sister—and …

“Don’t tell me she died’a gettin’ raped,” said Meredith Soloman, leaning across the aisle and taking the bottle back. His voice was soft and slurry, but Bremen could hear him as if in an echo chamber … first the slow, drunken structuring of the words in Meredith’s mind, then the slow, drunken words themselves. “Hell no, she didn’t die of getting raped,” said Donnie, and laughed at the idea. “Farah killed herself with Jack Coe’s sawed-off shotgun a couple of months later … she was living with the Hog then … and that’s what made Jack go and get a job with the highway people. Neither one of them never had no luck.”

“Well, a shotgun ain’t a bad way to go,” whispered Meredith Soloman, wiping the mouth of the bottle, drinking, and then wiping his own mouth as some of the moonshine dribbled out onto his sharp chin. “The tire iron an’ stuff don’t count ’cause none of that ain’t what killed her. And none of the shit you’re talkin’ about’s near as bad as layin’ there in the dark a mile underground with your air runnin’ out. It’s like bein’ buried alive an’ lastin’ for days.”

Donnie started to protest but Donna whimpered and tugged at his arm. “Donnie, hon, these pains’re coming real close now.”

Donnie handed her the bottle, pulled it back after she had taken a long drink, and leaned across the aisle to get back to his conversation. Bremen noticed that the pains were only a minute or so apart now.

Meredith Soloman, it turned out, was on a quest not terribly dissimilar from Donnie and Donna’s. The old man was trying to find a decent place in the country to die: someplace where the authorities would give his old bones a decent burial at county expense. He’d tried going home, back to West Virginia, but most of his kin were dead or moved away or didn’t want to see him. His children—all eleven if you counted the two illegitimate ones by little Bonnie Maybone—fell into the last category. So Meredith Soloman had been on a quest to find some hospitable state and county where an old boy with his lungs clogged as thick as two Glad bags full of black dust could spend a few weeks or months duty free in a hospital somewhere and … when the time came … have his bones treated with the respect due to bones belonging to a white Christian man.

Donnie began an argument about what happens to the soul once you die … he had specific views on reincarnation that he’d got from Donna’s brother-in-law with the credit card … and the two men’s urgent whispers turned into urgent shouts as Meredith explained that heaven was heaven, no niggers or animals or insects allowed.

Four rows in front of the arguing drunks, a quiet man named Kushwat Singh sat reading a paperback by the light of the small reading light above him. Singh was not concentrating on the words in the book; he was thinking about the slaughter at the Golden Temple a few years before—the rampage of Indian government troops that had killed Singh’s wife, twenty-three-year-old son, and his three best friends. The officials had said that the radical Sikhs had been planning to overthrow the government. The officials had been right. Now Kushwat Singh’s mind, tired from twenty hours of traveling and sleepless nights before that, ran over the list of things he was going to buy at that certain warehouse near the Houston airport: Semtex plastic explosive, fragmentation grenades, Japanese electronic timing devices, and … with a little luck … several Stinger-type, shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles. Enough matériel to level a police station, to cut down a gaggle of politicians like a sharp blade scything wheat … enough killing technology to bring down a fully loaded 747 …

Bremen stuffed his fists tight against his ears, but the babble continued and grew louder as the mercury vapor lamps switched on along the darkening interstate exchanges. Donna went into labor in earnest just as they crossed the Texas line and Bremen’s last glimpse of the couple was in the Beaumont bus station just after midnight, Donna curled up on a bench in great pain as the contractions racked her, Donnie standing with boots planted wide apart, weaving, the empty bottle of Meredith’s moonshine still in his right fist. Bremen actually looked into Donnie’s mind then, extending his telepathic probe through the surrounding neurobabble, but pulled it back quickly. Except for the drunken fragments of the earlier argument with Meredith still rattling around in there, there was nothing in Donnie Ackley’s mind. No plan. No suggestion of what to do with his wife and the infant trying to be born. Nothing.

Bremen actually sensed the panic and pain of the baby itself as it … she … approached her final struggle to be born. The infant’s consciousness burned through the gray shiftings of the bus station neurobabble like a searchlight through a thin fog.

Bremen stayed aboard the bus again, too exhausted to flee the cauldron of images and emotions boiling around him. At least Burk and Alice Jean, the horny Marine just out of the brig and the equally horny WAF, had disembarked to find a room somewhere near the bus station. Bremen wished them well.

Meredith Soloman was snoring, his gums gleaming in the reflection from sodium vapor lamps as they pulled out of Beaumont at midnight. The old man was dreaming of the mines, of men shouting in the cold damp air, and of a clean, white, painless death. Donna’s birthing pains receded in Bremen’s mind as they left the downtown and climbed onto the interstate access ramp. Kushwat Singh touched his money belt where the hundred and thirty thousand dollars in Sikh cash waited to be converted into vengeance.

The seat next to Bremen’s was empty. He pulled the armrest back and curled up in a fetal position, drawing his legs up onto the seats and hugging his fists against his temples. At that second he wished that he had his brother-in-law’s .38 back; he wished that Vanni Fucci had succeeded in delivering him to Sal and Bert and Ernie.

Bremen wished—with no melodrama, with no shred of self-consciousness or regret—that he was dead. The silence. The peacefulness. The perfect stillness.

But, for now, trapped in his living body and tortured mind, the roar and onslaught of mindrape continued, even as the bus moved southwest on causeways above swampland and pine forest, tires hissing on wet pavement now as the late-night rains came down in earnest. Bremen felt himself slowly being released to sleep now that the others slept, the small universe of sleeping humanity within the bus falling with him in the night, their muted dreams flickering like snippets of old film projected on an unwatched wall, the entire sealed cabin of them tumbling like the shattered Challenger shuttle in midnight free-fall together toward Houston and Denver and the deeper regions of darkness that Bremen knew that he was, for some reason he could not fathom, condemned to live to see.