Sad Guy on the Bus Part 1
Linen meets the Sad Guy, the Divorced Adjunct and the Men From the Hollow Hills
It was 1999. The bus took a long circuit from State College to Bellefonte and back, swinging north on the outward trip, south on the return trip.
Bellefonte, the county seat, was laid out by Talleyrand. You could see that in the way the side streets intersected the High Street, forming a graceful oval-and-grid pattern around the courthouse. Though the housing stock mostly dated from the late 19th century, the lots had been carved out much earlier, sized and shaped for narrow buildings huddled close.
Around the town, mountains lifted pine-clad shoulders. In the mountains lived bears and homeless people (I’ve seen them), catamounts (Wikipedia says they’re extinct, but people saw them every year), and folks hiding in caves and camps waiting for the revolution (I knew some of them and they mostly came home to their wives when they got hungry).
In Bellefonte lived lawyers and clerks supporting the courthouse, laborers who worked in the lumber mills and the limestone plant, a mix of doctors, teachers and waitresses supporting the townsfolk, and graduate students — lots of graduate students.
Away from the noise of frat houses and Beaver Stadium, we holed up in 19th century attics and read physics or Gaelic. I wouldn’t say we were aloof. We canoed on Bald Eagle Lake and hiked down abandoned railroads. We took pictures of deer and gathered wildflower seeds so we could plant real Pennsylvania phlox in our front gardens. We joined climbing clubs or pagan meetups — all filled with out-of-towners. We read up on the history of the places we rented.
Linen, for instance, stayed in a carriage house where a freed man once lived as gardener to the abolitionist Quaker family who owned the Big House, now divided into six apartments full of other grad students and adjuncts. She read Old English and taught more sections of Rhetoric and Composition than she cared to think about. She grew hollyhocks and snapdragons around her steps.
Linen never talked to the other students or adjuncts who lived in the Big House, not even the religious studies adjunct who put half a dozen wine bottles into the recycle bin each week. On mild evenings, the adjunct would sit on the back step, gazing past the horse chestnut tree that shaded Linen’s door to the curve of the nearest mountain, typing her ex-husband’s number into her flip phone over and over. He never picked up.
Nor did Linen or any of us talk to the lawyers, the doctors, the quarry workers, or pretty much anyone who lived wholly in Bellefonte, unattached to the university.
If she’d talked to those folks, she might have avoided the Sad Guy on the Bus.
Or if she talked to me, the Divorced Adjunct, she might have given me her number, let me know where she was going (first dates are always tricky) and things might have turned out differently.
But as I said, I wasn’t trying too hard either. I was drinking Sangria and crying over my flip phone. Wondering if Linen in her pretty carriage house lived a happier life than I did. My area of study had been the neopaganism of the early 20th century, and as the whole “No Means No” thing got rolling those folks had fallen out of favor. My Crowley papers weren’t getting accepted.
Linen was so pretty with her peasant skirts and long straw-colored braid. So gentle and practical, digging in her garden or tying up the tomatoes and peppers she grew in half barrels along her gravel walk. She left a basket of tomatoes at my door one time, but she never did knock.
Whether Linen isolated herself, whether her neighbors abandoned her, or whether — as I think most likely — we were all insulated from the place where we lived — she had no protection when she sat down next to the Sad Guy on the Bus.
First he was an occasional passenger. Then, about a year before Linen disappeared, he started riding every day. He got on the bus at the university gates, same as Linen did, though he came down the hill from town — he wasn’t a student or anything like that. He rode from State College to Bellefonte where they both got out on High Street. Linen headed north along Allegheny and so on through the maze of alleys that led to our place. The Sad Guy turned south down Allegheny toward Bishop Street.
At first that’s all Linen noticed. A pattern. Get on here, get off there. The Sad Guy didn’t join in the desultory conversation some riders carried on every day — not too much politics, a little exclamation over local news, inquiries about each others’ children. Linen hovered around some of that, but she didn’t have children or politics, so she mostly listened and made sympathetic nods.
Then one day when she was holding a big stack of Xerox copies of scholarship on the influence of the Vision of St. Paul on the Beowulf poet, with her Klaeber on top and a big Norton anthology sandwiching the pile on the bottom, she bumped right into the Sad Guy in the middle of the aisle, spilling the books and papers between them.
Folks on each side helped her gather her things. They were used to distracted scholars. Someone said something about putting her research on a CD, and she admitted to not having a real computer in her house, just an electric word processor. The long-armed mathematics professor was fishing Klaeber out from under his seat when the Sad Guy stopped staring at Linen as she shuffled around the floor of the swaying bus. He bent over to help and came up empty handed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I was distracted.”
In Mississippi, where Linen grew up, folks would have kindly said, “Bless your heart” or “oh, you were lost in your own world” and then gossiped about him later. On this bus, a couple of men muttered pretty loudly that the Sad Guy was acting like an ass.
The Sad Guy flinched.
Linen felt annoyed but also sorry for him. “It wasn’t anything,” she said. “I bumped you and startled you. I do apologize.”
She sat down with her papers. After staring a minute, the Sad Guy sat down beside her.
Linen arranged her belongings. The tail end of October scrolled by outside. Corn field, fallow field, cedar vale, deer. She felt her seat mate looking at her. She turned to give him a severe stare. This was a little much.
But he was not looking at her, or he had looked quickly away. He was staring straight at the seat back in front of him and — this was so pronounced and so fast a change from the bland expression with which he’d watched her collect her possessions that a shiver ran from Linen’s tailbone straight up to her scalp — red veins stippled the white of his one visible eye and tears welled on his sandy eyelashes.
Linen would have asked whether he was all right but the illusion, at close quarters, that his eye was actually bleeding made her feel a little sick. She was afraid her sickness would show in her face. Dropping her eyes, she saw a copy of the local alternative weekly on the floor, only a little scuffed with footprints. She picked it up and read the music listings.
After that, Linen thought of the unhappy fellow who didn’t help her pick up her papers as the Sad Guy on the Bus.
She started watching for him. He carried a briefcase and sometimes a newspaper. Never a book or magazine. Never a flip phone. Mostly he looked out the window.
Was he a lawyer? His clothes weren’t nice enough. An office worker of some sort, she thought. A clerk — did they really still have lawyers’ clerks, or was that in Victorian novels? Maybe he did some kind of back-office work in a mortgage company. Maybe he approved architects’ drawings for the city.
He wore loose trousers, never jeans. One pair of trousers had a small darned place at the pocket, a neat home repair. He wore much-laundered white shirts with the cuffs buttoned. A striped two-tone navy tie, snug in the morning, loose by afternoon.
She wanted to study his face, but he always seemed to know if she was watching. He’d glance over, then look quickly away. Without having committed any sin but curiosity, Linen began to feel guilty about watching him. Sometimes her neck and ears would flush.
One December after the last evening seminar of the semester she got on the last bus out to Bellefonte. The Sad Guy climbed on the same bus. Linen sat beside one window. The Sad Guy sat a row behind her on the other side of the bus, also beside the window.
Outside it was snowing. Inside the bus, the dim interior lights reflected off the windows so there was no telling how much the snow was accumulating or what they would have to trudge through when they got to Bellefonte. Linen cupped her hands around her eyes to try to see out. She saw spinning flakes very close to her face. With only the last half-dozen Bellefonte passengers aboard, the bus roared along at full speed. The was a drop-off-only run and the driver knew where each one of them was going.
Something was knocking behind her. Linen looked back and saw that the Sad Guy had fallen asleep. His head knocked the window, bappata bappata bappata, in time with the bus’s movement.
Linen allowed herself a long gaze.
The Sad Guy was her own age or a little younger — 30 or thereabouts. He had a narrow, pale face, a narrow, aquiline nose and dull, straw-colored hair. Even asleep, his thin lips pressed together and his eyebrows drew together, too, deepening the vertical line between them.
Her mother would have said, “I don’t think that’s a very nice person, darling.”
“He’s probably just ill,” Linen answered. Of course her mother couldn’t hear her.
Linen drove home to visit her dad and grandmother over Christmas break. On the dawn-to-dawn drive she thought about the Sad Guy. She made up stories about him like she would a man out of the movies or a book. There was an Agatha Christie novel about a man the narrator described as “negative.” The woman he loved — a woman who turned out not to be the murderer — dragged the man’s head out of a gas oven when he tried to kill himself. Linen put herself and the Sad Guy into that book. Then into The Painted Veil — you remember the husband? So cruel, ineffectual and hauntingly sad.
In Mississippi Linen took long sunrise walks through fields touched with rare December frosts. Lucy, her grandmother’s arthritic German shepherd, followed her.
She looked for camellia buds in the trees that covered her grandmother’s front windows. She helped her grandmother, who was losing stamina as she neared 90, clean out the house. She stood on ladders and washed windows, covering her eyes with one arm against the icy slant of the sun. She ate bacon and biscuits and gravy and tomato preserves and hot pepper jelly. White rice covered with red-eye gravy. A slice of cold poundcake whenever she liked. Cup after cup of hot tea — her grandmother’s house let the drafts in. She didn’t compare the amount of food she was eating to the amount of food left in the pantry or the number of days til her direct deposit appeared in her account.
She woke up late, after 10 in the morning, to find food on the table. She and her grandmother played Scrabble, backgammon, mah jongg. She didn’t read anything more strenuous than her grandmother’s books — Christie and years-old copies of Good Housekeeping. Sometimes they sat together on the couch while her grandmother showed her pictures of her mother as a girl, of Linen as a girl. A picture of grandmother standing in front of a cotton field with a little play bag she used when she followed the sharecroppers around, pretending to pick. Another picture of her grandmother, slightly older, maybe 5, holding a very large, smiling baby and frowning sternly into the sun. This was her grandmother’s little brother Charles, who died soon after the picture was taken.
A few times Linen drove in to Jackson, where her father treated her to dinner, an evening at the opera, whatever she liked. She wanted to hear a poet who was short-listed for the Booker prize, but her father didn’t like race poetry, so she went by herself.
Driving home, she didn’t make up stories to herself. She took two days, splurging on a Hampton Inn. She felt better when she hit the Appalachians and even better when snow started to show on the lower hills. She always came out of Mississippi feeling renewed but slightly smothered and definitely heavier. She stopped at a truck stop in Breezewood and breathed air a full 20 degrees colder than at her last stop in Virginia. She sucked air in and felt it freeze the moisture inside her nose. She planned to take lots of hikes, see some deer and maybe a bear, look through junk stores for cloches for her garden.
Then there was the Visio sancti Pauli. She needed to finish her paper, or at least finish her research for her paper. Then she thought that real life was happening somewhere else. She had traveled from south Mississippi to the northern ranges of the Appalachian mountains but she hadn’t moved forward in time. Was there any difference between the 40-year-old Beowulf scholarship she was surveying and 40-year-old Good Housekeeping? But she needed a conference presentation this year, if not an acceptance letter from a good journal.
The first day of the semester she had her lectures freshened up and a handful of stacked pages ready to share with the student who swapped second readings with her. On the bus she looked for the Sad Guy but was relieved not to see him. He was part of the life she felt pulling her under — no forward motion, no connection to history. Instead, dead-end circles: seasons, paydays, bus routes, semesters.
That weekend Linen went on a hike. The temperature hovered just at freezing — not painfully cold, but cold enough she didn’t have to tread through mud. She put on long johns, her overalls, a sweater, a long coat from the Army Navy store (too big, but with enough swing she could easily clamber over rocks in it), a hat and mittens. Locals wouldn’t wear hat and mittens on a sunny, 30-degree afternoon, but Linen had never fully gotten used to the cold.
She followed the road up past the lime plant, then the followed the railroad tracks through the switchyard that always seemed perfectly still and silent — though the trains moved around when she wasn’t there. She wended her way between strings of cars with no engine, two or three here, several dozen there. She puzzled out graffiti from Canada and New York. She figured out BOWZER, KayRo and a ubiquitous character called DIB. Between two long trains, she saw only gleaming gray river gravel at her feet (snow melt quickly between sun and stone) and cloudless sky above her head. The cars towered above her. Finally she saw the turn she wanted to her left. She clambered over a coupling and followed the furthermost track out of town to the north.
Soon a foot trail appeared by the railroad track and she walked along that instead. Before she’d gone half a mile hers were the only footprints. She walked a couple of miles up the long valley, a ridge trailing her on either side. On her right hand, across the tracks, a creek gurgled under half-melted ice. When she came to the small water-treatment plant, she turned away from the railroad and creek and searched for the trail up into the hills.
The arrowhead meadow opened in front of her. No one had trodden there — though as she waded out, feet perching then breaking through virgin crust with each step, she saw innumerable small marks. A stipple of deer tracks. Tiny etchings where birds had hopped. The meadow sloped up the hill. Birch trees and some kind of tall evergreen closed in where the trail continued.
Toward the far end of the meadow, Linen searched for the stone she had found two summers ago, set on another stone like an altar on a base. She didn’t find it, but then if the top stone had tipped over, snow would have covered it.
She circled, stamping to make a place to stand. The snow on the ground and the snow on the trees reflected the sun. The day looked earlier than it was. She decided to walk further up the mountain.
As she continued up the long meadow past the fallen altar, the dome of the sky turned rosy pink, bleeding vermillion where it was pierced by the bare branches of trees.
Less snow lay under the trees. Bracken gave way to hallways of old-growth forest. As the path rose the banks on either side rose even more steeply. Linen found herself walking through a bowl-shaped dingle whose sides towered over her head.
Bare trunks loomed dusty brown and camel colored against dusty brown and camel-colored soil where the thick tree cover protected the ground from snow.
She decided to turn back. At the same time, or maybe just afterward, she realized this was a built environment. Little delvings. Piles of gear under tarps. Hammocks strung from trees. Walmart bags. A washing machine drum.
She turned on her heel, a 360 and then half a circle more. Around her on both sides, from ground level to the high rim of the dale, a camp had grown. The camp was more or less empty, more or less full of people. Not 100, which it could have housed, but more than a dozen. Eyes watched her from sleeping bags. Someone coughed a phlegmy cough. Another cough answered.
Several dozen? She didn’t like to stare.
She raised her hand in greeting and farewell. No one answered.
Slowly, Linen walked back the way she had come. Her heart beat fast. The air smelled like magnolia leaves (how impossible and odd) and pine trees and iron. She huffed it in. She thought, “How wonderful that I have lived to see this day.”
To her right as she walked south, the sun set. Vermillion sun, black treeline.
“How terrible!” her mother said. “Those poor people.”
Linen disagreed. She didn’t want to romanticize poverty, but she thought she had walked into something magical, not terrible. A strange community. A fairy ring.
There had been no campfire. Not even the flicker of a lamp or Sterno stove.
What if they had all died there in the cold months ago but their eyes were bright and wary still? What if she went back to find every trace of the camp gone? What if she got home to Bellefonte to find 20 years had passed? What if —
The snow conjured a little illusion of light, but soon Linen was having trouble finding her own footprints to follow. Still, it was an easy puzzle to unravel. Down the narrow dale until she hit the railroad tracks, turn right, back alongside the tracks until she found the rail yard and friendly security lights. She swung along, neither slow nor fast, not quite touching the earth.
When Linen got back to the Big House I was sitting on the back step in my blanket, having a drink. She turned toward her door but I called and she came on over.
“Have some blanket.”
“Thanks, I’m warm.” She had been walking more than five hours straight. She would be warm until she wasn’t.
“Then don’t sit out too long.” I trundled into the house, filled a half-size Mason jar for her, and trundled back out.
“How’s your dissertation going?” I asked.
“Fucking murder scene. Total train wreck.” I loved her accent. She could make the doldrums sound like something out of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “And I’m supposed to defend this spring.”
“Ah well — they don’t want you here for ever, they’ll pass you so you can go not get permanent employment somewhere else.”
We both drank. Linen had left a light on in her loft — her house was an odd shape with a low ground story and a big loft on top. Sort of a carriage house, but not quite. Her light looked cheery, like someone was waiting up for her at home.
I think she asked me about some romance I was having.
Then she told me about the fairy dell.
That’s what she called it. Not the homeless camp. The fairy dell.
I suppose we might have talked about the Problem of Homelessness, the Lack of Resources, the Indifference of Humanity — but I can’t remember that we did. I do know I said: “When you see the men from the hollow hills, it’s never a good sign. Don’t do anything rash the next few days. No first kisses, no long journeys — ”
Linen laughed at me. She had started shivering by then. I remember her teeth chattered. “Now where am I going to get a first kiss?”
“It’s our bedtime,” I said, though I was very lonely and wanted to talk longer. “Get in the house and get warm.”
Looking back, I wish I’d kept her talking. I wish I’d asked her more questions about the Men From the Hollow Hills. The rest of Linen’s story I’ve pulled together from memory, imagination and police reports.