From the Edge of the World. David L. Carter

      Summer 2005

      It was the smell that woke Victor up. It was a smell as familiar as it was unpleasant; it was the creeping funk of unwashed clothes and hair, mingled with intermittent gusts of stale tobacco breath, and beneath it all, the creeping, overpowering odor of an alcoholic’s sweat. Anyone who has ever shared close quarters with people who do not take care of themselves will know the smell, or one similar to it, and Victor was not only someone who had shared close quarters with the unwashed, he himself had at one time gone weeks without bathing simply because it seemed pointless to do so.

      Victor pressed his nose and mouth against his duffel bag, but that was no help. The choice was between breathing or not. Slowly, carefully, he drew a breath through his barely open mouth, queasy with the sense that he was admitting something unwholesome into his lungs. The bus was full. He was stuck with this smelly bum beside him. Forgetting his predicament, he sighed, and as a result gagged.

      He knew from experience that a person’s own filthiness is never as annoying to them as it is to those around them, so he coughed to disguise the gag. He lifted his head from the duffel bag and rubbed his face. Through the corner of his eye he glanced at the man that had sat down next to him. A typical drifter, in filthy denim clothes and a dingy white ball cap, out of the back of which a long, uncombed grey and white ponytail hung. This drifter looked to be about middle age, although such types tended to look middle aged as soon as they turn thirty. He had about two weeks’ worth of moth-eaten beard on his face and neck and bright blue eyes set in red streaked whites. His face, though pale within the creases was on the whole toasted from exposure to the elements, and he had the ancient, seam lipped expression of a man with no, or very few, teeth. He was bobbing his head and patting his fingers against the Hefty bag he held in his lap in time to some tinny arena rock that seeped from the headphones in his ears that were attached to a device in the breast pocket of his denim jacket. While Victor watched, the drifter reached into the bag on his lap, felt around in it, and then pulled out a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses, with which he shaded his bloodshot eyes. Good. The old bum would listen to his music and leave him alone. Victor relaxed again with his temple against the warm, grimy window.

      He did not sleep, but he dozed. The warmth of the window, the rumbling, humming, and jostling of the bus as it made its way due east on the interstate all served to lull him, despite his seatmate’s aggressive smell, into that smooth, sunlit, pleasant semi-consciousness that was not quite the oblivion of sleep and not the hassle of being awake. This was the rest he sought and sometimes found when he slept in his classes at school; this aimless mental drifting, in which dreams merged with memory and longing to give him, at least in stolen, fleeting moments, some respite from his constant sense of dissatisfaction with life. These semi-sleeps were worth even the embarrassing pools of slobber he tended to leave on his desk or the cradle of his own arms when the bell rang for him to move on to the next period. Here on the bus, as in school, he did not dream, for in dreams one retains one’s identity. He dissolved; he was the bright burning orange sunlight against his closed eyes, he was the slow rise and fall of his own breath, he was the woman in the seat just behind him, complaining to her seatmate about her daughter’s boyfriend, he was the fox in a red white and blue striped sweater on the billboard he noticed as the bus pulled onto the highway from the bus station. He was conscious, but only slightly, and that slightness made all the difference. Nothing mattered when he was in this netherworld.

      Nothing mattered until the drifter suddenly burst into song. In accompaniment to the tinny strains of his headphones, he began to hum, then sing, in a croak without any sense of volume or key, some rusty metal ballad.

      With every note the drifter’s ragged voice grew more high pitched, cracked and lusty. Victor rolled his closed eyes, then sat up and looked around. The terrible singing was drawing attention from throughout the bus, the two black women across the aisle were staring at him and winked at Victor, and from behind and in front and all around them people were rising in their seats to get a look at whoever was making such a fool of themselves. Victor wanted to crawl into his duffel bag.

      The drifter’s singing became louder, until from behind them an empty wadded up Doritos bag arched over the headrest of the seat to land on the garbage bag in the drifter’s lap. The drifter sat bolt upright and crowed “Fuck you!” and then tossed the chip bag over his head in the general direction from which it came. Muttering, he reached into the breast pocket of his denim jacket and the music stopped. Leaving the headphones in his ears, he turned to Victor. “People ain’t got any goddamn manners any more, do they boss?” he said. The alcohol on his breath was as sickly sweet as a rotting magnolia. Victor guessed it was not even eleven o’clock in the morning, and this man was already as drunk as if it were past midnight. If he ignored the man, maybe he would fall asleep and leave Victor in peace. But as drunks will, he took Victor’s silence for shyness, and assumed a kinship. “Ahh, fuck ‘em, right?” he looked at Victor with such a searching, sleazy expression that Victor had a sudden repellent image of the man kissing him. He looked past the man at the two black women across the aisle, who now watched him with expressions of amused sympathy. He hated them. The old drunk followed his glance and leered at the women. They clutched one another’s smooth, brown, gold braceleted forearms and cackled with laughter. Encouraged, the drifter leaned across the aisle to engage them in conversation, but they rolled their eyes at one another and drew in their lips and withdrew into a sotto voce discussion between themselves. The drifter leaned back in his seat and looked at Victor through his cheap sunglasses. “Mornin’ boss,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you up there.”

      Victor shrugged.

      The drifter cracked his knuckles. “Ain’t it a pretty day? Too