A Halloween Bus Ride (XYZ Form)
A Halloween Night on the road is like any other when that’s what you do. Bus driving is what I mean, and I have done it for many years. Calling the people to gate 9 at 10:45 pm, I loaded the coach for Salt Lake City, by way of Boise. Driving a bus has always been an interesting way to meet desperate people, since for most people a bus trip is the last way they want to travel. Especially on a night when many are having fun at parties, the ten people on the bus and myself would forget that and make our way across Oregon by moonlight with the herds of semis headed for points east.
Foster seemed like a nice guy in the front seat, telling me about his stay in Portland and of the fun things that he had done which included a visit to a show.
“Gun and knife show at the Expo Center,” he said. “Hey, you wanna see the knife I bought?” he asked. In the soft blue night light and the disjointed snoring, I told him with a shrug that I guess that would be alright, however strange the question seemed. Just then, my peripheral vision saw a fist gripping the hilt of a knife, sheathed in a foot-long steel scabbard with nicks and a small dent on the outside of it.
“Killer, isn’t it?” he said.
Looking at the thing a little too long, the bus drifted over the rumple strips a bit until I centered the 25-ton vehicle in the lane again. Mindfully looking in my over- head mirror, the jumble of legs stretched across the aisle didn’t move and the sounds of sleep continued. Next, the sound of a steel blade being drawn and pulled free from the scabbard drew my eyes again. Openly turning the scarred blade in his fist this way and that way to catch the light, it was a no-nonsense thing that obviously had been used in desperate ways.
“People whisper in my brain in German when I hold it this way and the words sound like ‘töten sie alle’ or something like that,” he muttered. Queerly, he was silent when I told him that I would feel much more comfortable if it was stowed below in a baggage bin. Riders got off in Pendleton in a transfer to another bus and no new transfers got on, leaving 4 sleeping people and Foster with me.
So we climbed slowly up the six percent grade following switchbacks up the edge of the Blue Mountain ridge in what truckers call Cabbage Hill, smelling the burning brakes of big rigs from flat land states going too fast, towards a mountain pass bathed in ghostly Moon light, avoiding the meaty chunks of deer carcass’ recently killed on the interstate, surrounded by mountain pines and rich grassland sprinkled with October snow, when I considered the meaning of “töten sie alle”: “sie” could mean he, she, it or they, “alle” meant all, “töten”(s) meaning was on the tip of my tongue. “Töten (s) meaning attacked me like Nazi steel when I remembered a t-shirt worn by a German girl in dreadlocks at a Grateful Dead concert back in ’86 that read “Toter Kopf.” Understanding...
Viewing quickly the dimly lit chamber within the bus through the over-head mirror, there was one walking carefully over legs to the front, which from the gloom emerged to be Foster. We were almost to the next stop in sleepy La Grande, where I would remove the knife from the inside of the bus, which I had forgotten to do in Pendleton. Xanax is something that I could have used to calm down at that point, because I realized that I no longer heard any sleeping noises in the bus except the labored breathing from Foster as I pulled the bus in and parked it at the station. You know as a bus driver to shift into park and then to set the air brakes safely, before getting out of the seat, but then a person doesn’t know what to do when his head is pulled back by the hair and the feeling of cold steel comes roughly across his throat.
Zeroing in on last night to answer the detective’s questions, I told him the dull side of the German blade didn’t kill me, which he then asked “Why would a supposed crazy man leave you alive, when he killed everyone else and we find you with the dagger, muttering ‘kill them all?’”
