A short story, a work in progress, inspired by the tales of my Guatemalan friend Lina.
Bus
Looking through the mud-splattered window, out over the roadside and straight down into a chasm swirling with mist, I felt like I was in a helicopter, not a Guatemalan bus. Just over the edge, trees clung to steep slopes. When the air cleared for a moment, I could see forests of giant ferns that defined this terrain as highlands rainforest.
Why had I done this to myself? On the map, the ninety-four-mile road from Guatemala City to San Pedro Soloma looked like someone with Parkinson’s disease had drawn it. I knew torrential rainfall in the region wrecked the roads year round. but I never dreamed it could be this bad. As fast as the local men repaired the wash-outs and potholes, they re-appeared. We’d hit spots where the road felt greasy under the wheels and the bus slipped and fishtailed. Our skilled driver got the vehicle under control and none of the passengers seemed alarmed—only me with a white-knuckle grip on the handle in front of my seat.
When my mother was a teen, she took this bus monthly to Guatemala City with her own mother. She described the ride as an adventure and never complained about the road or the hard seats or the gut-wrenching turns. Mother and I planned to do this trip together but that was not to be.
I looked at my watch. Four o’clock. I’d been in the seat, stomach churning, for nine excruciating hours. We were traveling at an average ten miles an hour on the narrow road through switchback after switchback.
Every seat was full. I guessed people were returning from work or shopping. They’d jammed the overhead bins; a pile of boxes and bags covered half the back seat. On top of the heap, lashed together, lay two full-sized puppets, Gigantes, the kind Guatemalans wear balanced on their heads and shoulders during festivals. One puppet face, looking out at the passengers, had huge eyes and a mouth pursed in a kiss. The other was sleepy-eyed with an open mouth full of Chiclet teeth and a lurid pink tongue. When animated, riding on human shoulders, the puppets would be entertaining——I’d seen them in festivals back home. Here, bound and still, they looked like kidnap victims putting on happy faces to hide their terror.
The odor of wet wool, unwashed bodies, tortillas and piss hung in the humid air. Most of us had eaten too many beans at the last rest stop and a cloud of gassy farts wafted through the bus. “Holy Smoke,” I thought to myself after inhaling a lungful of concentrated fumes, “Is it the altitude or are we rotting inside?”
The man in the seat in front of me had taken off his reeking boots which walked themselves, footless, from under his seat and ended up in front of mine. I’d resisted holding a scarf up to my face, like a sissy American, but the stinking boots were too much. I cursed under my breath and toed them back under his seat, out of my sight.
With the perfumed scarf under my nose, I relaxed between hair-pin turns, keeping my eyes on a red baseball cap four seats ahead to stabilize my view and keep my stomach in place. My elderly seatmate snored and drooled, her head snapping back and forth as we zig-zagged up the mountain. She wore a clutch of metal religious icons on chains clanking around her shrunken neck. On every sharp turn, the largest of them, Jesus crucified, swung over and banged against my arm. The irony was delicious. After a long on and off struggle with faith I’d recently given up on Christianity. Now, Jesus was tapping me on the shoulder.
A few elderly passengers wore ethnic scarves around their shoulders or carried bags made of the famous Guat hand-woven cloth. My mother owned several skirts and shawls woven with the typical bright colors and patterns——diamonds and stripes of periwinkle, orange, red, purple, yellow and green. When I was a toddler, she taught me the names of the colors in Spanish as we looked at the fabrics together: amarillo, azul, roja, verde, rosado, violeta. At eight or nine, I’d sneak into her closet and pull out the clothes to play pretend with.
“Sofia. Put those back. Muy preciosos from Guatemala. Not toys.”
One woman wore a voluminous woven skirt of every color. Her small body stuck out the middle; she looked like a doll floating on a fabric sea. At a twenty-minute stop, one of fifteen, I watched her gather up the whole shebang and fold it in front to maneuver down the bus aisle and out. Once on the ground, she shook it and the monster swirled back into shape. Had she been at a festival? I guessed she was related to the kidnapped Gigantes. As I couldn’t read while in motion and was tired of listening to music, I passed the time imagining the lives of my fellow passengers and why they were taking this long and difficult bus ride.
Loneliness washed over me. While the worst of the grief at my mother’s death last year had passed, I was incomplete without her. I’d lived away from home for years, but still, at thirty-five years old, I felt like an orphaned child. After the funeral, some people trying to be of comfort, said my mother was lucky to have died in a car crash returning from her chemo treatment. Lucky? I didn’t think so. Although I was happy she didn’t suffer more and longer with cancer, I cherished every second with her and felt cheated that a few precious months were denied us.
Half the passengers were unconscious as I speculated about them. While they slept, I looked them over searching for clues in my game of “Who’s on the bus?” Did they wonder about me? Or was it obvious I was just another Sofia pilgrim?
I rubbed the seasickness band on my wrist hoping after each torturous turn I wouldn’t throw up. I’d rehearsed that scenario should it happen.
“Alto, Alto,” I’d yell and rush to the door, clearing the stairs before I tossed my cookies. “Please, Sofia,” I thought. “Get me to Soloma in one piece.”
