Making the Bus

         The bus pulled away without them.  Maggie and the boy stood there, watching it pull away down the dusty street, holding hands. She hadn’t asked his name, and though they were now lovers, she fought the urge to ask him. 
         It would be rude.  Better to find out later.  See what he calls himself.  That’s what I will do.
         They had been out back of the depot on the ground, just enough exposed for him to enter her.  She felt joy that he put on the condom without being asked.  It felt right, then.  He moved next to her from down the aisle and across.  He sat next to her and began asking questions.  Then he kissed Maggie, quickly on the cheek, and when she turned, he kissed her mouth.  The consummation was short, but the foreplay had lasted almost 300 miles. 
         She looked down at the intercection of their hands, hers linked finger to finger, joint to joint with his dirty, calloused mechanic hands with broken and bitten off stubs of nails.  Following up his arm, scrawny and thin like it was a malnutritioned child not allowed to eat.  She wanted to feed him, an ache in her chest.  To cook him a hearty breakfast of eggs and ham and potatoes, and in her mind, she watched him wolf down her food at her mother’s table, at her mother’s house.  He ate like a kenneled dog, in her mind, the shoveling food in and swallowing without chewing, a competive eater with a strong will to survive, to grow strong against the odds.  . 
         Perhaps that is why she choose him, why she didn’t protest when he moved closer.  It was too bad they missed the bus.  It made things more difficult.  She liked the ferocity at which he came at life, coming at her all kisses and promises, just like his boxer stance, jogging up on his toes.  Maggie watched him.  He approached the man directly from then front, then clocked him in the ear.  The man slowly slumped over. 
         “Get his wallet.” 
         And as she reached in, registering how warm and damp the soft worn leather, how it had been collected sweat here in the pocket.  He was a huge mound of meat slumped over on the bench, denim work shirt open down to the mat of silver-flecked hair on his chest.
         The boy pulled out a silver flask, took a smell of it.  He took a good pull off of it, then passed it to her.  Maggie wrinkled her nose at the odor, strong cheap whiskey.  The fumes made her gag. 
         “Drink, a good mouthful. Don‘t mind the taste.”
         He pulled off the man’s shoes, found a few extra dollars hoarded there, and tried them on.  They were too big, clownish on his slender feet, but he wore them.  He left his worn-down Nikes there, light showing through the soles.  His jeans where too big for him, bought for a chubby kid with freckles and short hair. He used to be that boy.   
         But now, he is hardened and skinny and shaggy-haired and all he cares about is money and sex and getting out of the dry land into the city.  His dark brown hair coils, like the dolls her mom kept in the front room, a display of the best and the brightest things she owned that no one, not even her father was allowed to enter without permission unless there were visitors.  Important and distant ones.  Family within an hour drive were not included, and would be punished it Tamara found them out there. 
         Tamara collected dolls and doll furniture and all these items, frilly and untouchable.  Maggie would stand out there at night, when her parents were sleeping, staring into the glass cases, the glass eyes, the tiny treasures of tiny gold jewelry glittering at the hands and the ears and the heads. 
         The night she left, she took them, all the gold trinkets off the dolls.  Already, Maggie had stolen what little she could from her mother’s purse, or her father’s coins.  Now, she was quiet.  Yet Tamara heard and came thundering down the hallway, yelling.  The wooden floors echoed.  She hurried then, and ran out the back door into the night, backpack full of stolen goods.
         They collected everything useful off the fat man, and began walking again.  They followed the cracked and shifted sidewalk along the industrial outskirts of town, and when it stopped altogether, they kept walking on the gravel shoulder of the road past rundown bars with cycles out front, past the flour plant, and the tractor dealers.  They kept walking until the buildings became rundown barns, then clusters of crushed and rusted cars.  Then they gave way too. 
         They walked West on the gravel road, west out into the setting sun.  The boy held Maggie’s hand and talked to her, laying out their plans.  “I will find a garage.  I can fix anything. You are pretty, those lashes.  You can waitress.  We’ll get back on the bus when we have enough.  Probably a week.”
         Maggie squeezed his hand, and nodded faintly.  She held the strap of the backpack full of doll jewelry and the man’s wallet.  She listened intently to his voice, listening and asking leading questions, trying to learn her lover’s name.