Way Up North

(first published in The Columbian, Fall 1992)

When they woke up in the bus, their bed was black with soot and there was soot his mother's hair. They were miles north of Bubble Water, which had, already, sunk beneath his remembrance. "Did you know what I saw last night?" said Chase. He had to keep his back turned while she dressed in the bus bathroom. They were sitting and sleeping in seats next to each other. He was small, and didn't take up much room, but when he woke up in that sooty autumn dawn, he found he was squashed flat against the side of the bus. His mother was afraid of falling out and into the aisle. Now she was dressing, and sobbing; really sobbing. She didn't want Chase to be out alone in the bus seat for too long. She had been told that people steal children off buses and sell them. But this was worse than anything she had ever been through, she told him. She had been right through the worst of the air raids in Britain, yet this was the worst, this waking in the cold, this dark, dirty dawn, everything dirty she touched, her clothes and now having to dress as she lay flat on her back. She didn't dare sit up. She might knock her head.

"You know what I saw?" said the child patiently. "Well, the bus must have stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on. Other men were holding flashlights. There were all little. They were all talking like Canadians or French."

"Shut up," said mother. "Do you hear me?"

"I saw them," said Chase.

"You and your bloody elves."

"They was people."

"Little men with bundles," said his mother, trying to dress again. "You start your fairy tales with your Dad and I know what you're father will give you."

It was this mythical, towering, half-remembered figure they were now travelling to join up north.

John Fazekas, travelling on the same bus, saw the pair, presently leave the bathroom, out of his small red-lidded eyes. Chase and his mother were dressed and as clean as they could make themselves, and sitting at the end of the bus. Fazekas was the last person to get up, and he stood up from his seat in the aisle to stretch his hands on the ceiling of the bus. He was alone. He had no shoes on, but he walked down the aisle to the bathroom past the passengers, who were drawn with fatigue, pale under the lights. They were men, mostly; some soldiers. Fazekas was returning to a construction camp after three weeks in Spokane. He saw the woman, riding with her son on the inside seat next to the window wet with morning dew. The kid, trying to look out the window, turned and stared. Fazekas thought "Pest," but only because children and other men's wives make him nervous and sour when they were brought arounnd camp on a job.

After Fazekas urinated, washed his hands and face and had swallowed a drink from his cupped hands in the bathroom -- for he was sick and trembling after the holiday -- he came and sat down in the seat across the aisle from the blonde woman. He didn't offer any explanation why he changed seats leaving his jacket and bag at his former seat seven rows up. His arms were covered with coarse black hair; he had rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. He spread his pale, heavy hands on his knees. The child sat there, fingertips on the sooty window still looking at the breaking day. Once, the bus stopped for a long time and nearly everyone got out to stretch their legs, but Fazekas stayed put and so did the woman and the boy. Once the bus got started, it started rolling west. At about six o' clock, in about an hour, chase and his mother would have to get out, and onto anouther bus , and go north once more. Chase could not see any stations or towns where they were now. There was a woods filled with black trees that turned red as the the sun came up. It was the autumn sunrise; cold, red. It was so strange to him, so unique, that he could not have said an hour later which feature of the scene was in the foreground or to the left or right. Two women wearing army jackets over their dresses, with their hari piled up in front, like his mother's called and giggled to someone they had put on the bus. They were fat and dark -- grinny. His mother looked at them with detestation, recognizing what they were were; for she hated cheap women who made money off the workers from the south. she had always acted on the desire of the moment, without thought of gain, and she had taken the consequences (Chase) without complaint. Chase saw that she was hating the women, and so he looked elsewhere. On a wooden fence sat four or five men in open shirts and patched trousers. They had dull, dark hair, and let their mouths sag as though they were too tired or too sleepy to keep them closed. Somthing about them was weird to the child, and he thought that this was any ugly place with ugly people. It was also a dirty place; every time Chase put his hands on the window sill they came off black.

"Come down any time to see a bus go by, " said Fazekas, meaning those men. "Get up in the night to see a bus."

The bus moved. It was till dark enough outside for Chase to see his face in the window and for the light from the windows to fall in pale squares on the upturned vanishing faces and on the trees. Chase heard his mother's new friend say, "Well, there's different possiblities." They passed into an unchanging landscape of woods and forests. Then the lights inside the bus were put out and he was that the sky was blue and bright. His mother and Fazekas, seen in the window, had been remote and bodiless; through their transparent profiles he had seen the yellowed trees going by. Now he could not see their faces at all.

"He's been in Alaska for three years, since the war. He was wounded in Vietnam. Chase, here, hardly knows him," he heard his mother say. "I couldn't come. I had to wait my turn. We were over a thousand miles away. He was with the construction camps as soon as he got back."

"You'll be all right up north, there," said Fazekas. "It's a big place. Schools. All company."

"Pardon me?"

"It all belongs to the company. Only if that's where you're going you happen to be on the wrong bus."

"He isn't there now. he hates towns. he seems to move about a great deal. He drives a bulldozer, you see."

"Owns it?" said Fazekas.

"Ha! I shouldn't think so. Drives for another man, I think he said."

The boy's father fell into the vast pool of casual labor, drifters; there was a social hierarchy in the north, just as in Heaven. Fazekas was an engineer. He took anouther look at the boy; black hair, blue eyes. The hair was coarse, straight, rather dull; Indian hair. The mother was a blone; touched up a bit, but still blond.

"What name?" said Fazekas on the upward note of someone who has asked the same question twice.

"Don Scheid, I think."

The name meant nothing to him. Fazekas had worked on Puget Sound where the Indians were named Shaw and Bjornstrom and had blue eyes. Further east the Indians used their Indian names on and near the reservation and in the schools, but white names everywhere else.

"Do you know about any ghosts?" said the boy, turning to Fazekas. Fazekas's eyes were plaer than his own which were a beep slate blue, like the eyes of a newly born child. Fazekas saw the way he held his footing on the rocking bus, putting out a few fingers to the window sill only for the form of the thing. He looked all at once ridiculous and dishonored in his cheap K-Mart clothes -- the little jacket, the yellow cap on his head. He outdistanced his clothes; he was better than they were. But he was rushing on this bus into an existence where his clothes would be too good for him.

"I say, do you know about any ghosts, ay?" said the boy a little louder.

"Oh, yaw," said Fazekas, and shivered, for he still felt sick, even though he was sharing a bottle with the blond woman, the boy's mother. "Indians see them," which was as close as he could come to being crafty. But there was no reaction out of the mother.

"You seen any?"

"I'm not an Indian," Fazekas started to say; instead he said, "Well, yeah, I saw the ghost, or something like the ghost, of a dog I used to have."

They looked at each other, and the boy's mother said, "Stop that, you two. Stop that this minute. You'll scare the boy."

Minutes and miles stretched on. "I'll tell you a strange thing about Chase," said his mother. "It's this. There's times he give me the creeps, my own son."

Chase was lying on the seat beside her with his head on her lap.

She said, "If I don't like it I can clear out. I was a waitress in Royal City. There's always work."

"Or find another man," Fazekas said. "Only it won't be me. I'll be far away."

"Chase says that when the train stopped he was a lot of elves," she said, complaining.

"Not elves -- men," said Chase. "some of them had mattresses rolled up on their backs. They were little and bent over. They were talking French. They were going up north."

Fazekas coughed and said, "He means settlers. They were sent up on this same bus route after the Korean War. But that's nearly fifteen years ago. It was supposed to clear the unemployed out of the towns, get them off relief. But there wasn't anything up here then. the winters were terrible. A lot of them died."

"He couldn't know that, " said the mother quietly. "For that matter, how can he tell what is French? He's never heard any."

"No, he couldn't know. It was around ten, fifteen years ago, when times were really bad."

"Are they now?"

"Jeez, after a war?" He shoved his hand in the pocket of his shirt, where he kept a roll, and he let her see the edge of it.

She made no comment, but put hand on Chase's head and said to him, "You didn't see anyone."

"Saw them," the boy said in a voice as low as he could go without descending into a whisper.

"You'll see what your Dad'll give you when you tell lies." But she was noncommittal about the threat and did not quite believe in it. She had been attracted to the scenery, whose persistent sameness she could no longer ignore. "lt's strange country," she said.

"Not enough for me," said Fazekas. "Too many people. I keep moving north."

"I want to see some real Indians," said Chase, sitting up.

"There aren't any," his mother said. "Only in movies."

"I don't like Canada or Alaska." He held her arm. "Let's go home now."

The bus slowed, jerked, flung them against each other and came to a stop. It was fully day now; their faces were plain and clear, as if drawn without shading on white paper. Fazekas felt responsible for them, even compassionate; the change in him made the boy afraid.

"We're getting off, Chase," said his mom, with great, wide eyes. "We take another bus. See? It'll be fun. Do you know what mom's telling you?"

He was determined not to leave the train, and clung to the windown sill, which was toom smooth and narrow to provide any kind of grip; Fazekas had no difficulty getting him away. "I'll give you a present," he said hurriedly. But he slapped all his pockets and found nothing to give. He did not think of the money, and his watch had been stolen in Seattle. The woman and the boy struggled out with teir baggage, and Fazekas, who had descended first so as to help them down, reached up and swung the boy in his arms.

"The Indians!" the boy cried, clinging to the bus, to air; to anything. His face was momentarily muffled by Fazekas's shirt. his yellow cap fell to the ground. He screamed, "Where's mom? I never saw anything!"

"You saw Indians," said Fazekas. "On the rail fence, at that long stop. Look, don't worry your mother. Don't keep telling her what you haven't seen. You'll be seeing plenty of everything now."