Short Story: Bus Trip

Short Story: Bus Trip

“Well, if we’re going to go we’d better get going,” she said from the dining room.

“I’m ready,” he lied. He had been stretched out on the sofa, feet propped up on a square maroon pillow whose dangling gold fringes had been braided tight as dreadlocks. He had rested there without first removing his suit jacket, eyes closed and hands folded over his chest, and with his long legs held close together, and his black wing-tip shoes pointing upward, he looked as stiff as a corpse in a casket. Had she not decided to leave the house a bit earlier than usual, he would have dozed off to complete the picture of what their son, Tom, had called ‘the ultimate peacefulness.’ To that, once told what Tom had said, he had answered quite merrily, “Merely practicing for the inevitable, don’t you know.” He liked ending his come-back remarks with the phrase, ‘don’t you know.’ It was never a question.

He swung his legs to the floor, repositioned the lace doily that he had moved to the side of the armrest, and half-heartedly massaged the pillow he had disturbed. He moved silently into the kitchen and leaned over the sink to splash a handful of water onto his face. Once finished, he wiped his face with the dishrag that she had draped over the spotless chrome faucet. He re-hung the rag over the faucet and patted his damp hands against his thighs.

“I’ll get my keys,” he said from the sink, as if he needed only the car keys to convince her that he was ready to leave the house. He circled behind her in the dining room and slipped into the vestibule to collect his wallet, handkerchief, Bic pen, and pocket calculator. He did not see the dishrag fall from the faucet into the sink.

“Do you have our slots’ cards?” she called out from the living room. She had already begun the process of returning the sofa to the degree of neatness she insisted upon, a standard that she felt he, her husband of forty-three years, deliberately disregarded as something too trivial, too unnecessary, too unnatural, and too ‘show-room-like’, as he had put it time and again. She smoothed and repositioned the doilies he had wrinkled and vigorously fluffed the three pillows he had squashed with his feet. She shook and wiggled the maroon pillow—her favorite—and used her fingers to comb the tangled fringes. She slid her open palm over the sofa’s floral pattern that spread from the lower corners of the cushions and smoothed the entire garden of lilac petals in one direction to create a symmetrical sheen across the three square seat-cushions.

“Good Lord,” she said as she made her way into the kitchen, “can’t you drape the dishrag over the faucet so that it doesn’t fall into the sink? How many times do you need to be told to do the simplest thing?” she quarrelled.

“I did,” he answered. A mere two words, but he had spoken them sharply, and immediately regretted that he had; he quickly repeated his two word reply, but this time in a casual, light tone that he hoped would mask the annoyance that had clearly coated his first response.

“Don’t get snippety with me, Mister,” she said, as though he had given only the first reply. “And for the last time, we’d better get going, if we’re going. I don’t intend to lose my lucky seat on the bus to the likes of that McAllister woman.”

Now she has a lucky seat, he thought, a lucky seat to add to her lucky slot machine in her lucky casino. He picked up his wallet and handkerchief and simultaneously pushed each into his rear pants-pockets, wallet in left pocket, handkerchief in right; the Bic pen and calculator fell neatly into his shirt pocket. He combed his thin hair with his fingers, tucked his shirt into his pants, pulled up his socks, tied his shoes, and put his forefinger through the metal ring that held his keys. “I’m ready and waitin’ for you,” he announced. This time he allowed a hint of impatience to be delivered to her as he stood by the front door, keys behind his back.

“Check the gas,” she said as she entered the small hallway.

“I did,” he lied again. He nonchalantly twirled his keys before her to prove that he was prepared to leave.

“You did not,” she said. She moved her eyes and free hand across the contents of her handbag, ignoring his haughty gesture with the keys. She removed the two bus tickets from her handbag, glanced at both, and then returned them to a small inside pocket which she promptly zippered.

He walked back into the kitchen, approached the gas range and touched each knob slightly to insure that their ‘off’ position was true. “Gas is off,” he called to her.

“I’ll lock the front door,” she said, carefully placing her key into the lock. “This way I’ll know that it’s locked. I don’t want to be worrying about the front door half way down to the casino.” It was the second Wednesday of the month, and the first of the Avenue Senior Center’s twice-monthly bus trip to the Atlantic City casinos.

He followed her down the steps to their car, shaking his head and taking a deep breath before moving to her side to offer his arm, which, with head held high, she took without another word, for this was their custom.

**

Regina and James O’Reilly had moved into their small house as newlyweds, and from that first day she had been thrilled with the idea that they would one day own their home, a distinction rather uncommon to Irish immigrants who had a reputation as life-long renters. In Philadelphia, a city of homeowners, such ‘lowly’ tenants were looked down on by those lucky enough to have achieved a mortgage. She had seen to it that her mortgage would have been paid in full before the end of its thirty year term, and the day that she received her deed to the house had been one of the happiest days of her life. It had bestowed upon her a singular status throughout the neighborhood, and especially in Moon Alley, that pocket of Irish-American immigrants around which her life had been centered. She owned her own home—and they, that is to say, most everyone else in Moon Alley, did not.

She had placed the deed to the house in a fire-proof lock-box that contained the documents of their history together—marriage certificate, their child’s birth and baptismal certificates, their citizenship papers, and James’ honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. To properly celebrate the milestone of home ownership, they headed down to Atlantic City, where in one long afternoon Regina had won seventy-five dollars. She was beside herself with the thrill of it all. Oh, not the seventy-five dollars, though that was nothing to sneeze at she readily admitted when reliving the moment; no, it was the spectacle of it all, the gaiety of the blinking lights, the tinkling of quarters falling into the payoff tray, and the bell inside the machine that rang incessantly, alerting anyone nearby to turn their heads and see that it was her slot machine that had come alive with its non-stop explosion of colors bubbling and swirling and highlighting her face in a blinking and flashing neon glow as she stood before the tumblers that blinked an uninterrupted line of red-ripe cherries, stems and all. ‘Oh no, seventy-five dollars is nothing to sneeze at,’ she had repeated more than once on the bus ride home that day, a day of celebration, indeed.

She did not allow herself to become addicted to the slot machines, nor had she become obsessed with the glamour of the casinos—as many of the elderly women in Moon Alley certainly had; for Regina, playing the slots was something in between an addiction and an obsession. For her it had become a necessity, not as vital as attending Sunday mass, of course, but in her most private of moments, she admitted to no one but herself that the casino with its slot machines and extraordinary hoopla had indeed become a necessary element in her life. After that first experience, she never once considered what life would be like without her twice monthly bus trip to Atlantic City. It was her only vice, she confessed to Father Timlin, and surely no worse than St Apollonia’s monthly bingo game. Regina was quite gratified by Father’s silent, smiling assent.

After three reverses and four forwards, he managed to ease his Ford Grenada out of the file of cars that lined their street, Rupert Street, one of the typically narrow, one-way streets—an earlier century’s signature of Philadelphia’s ethnic neighborhoods.

The treeless street of red-brick row houses had been wedged between the Market-Frankford elevated train platform and a bank of factory buildings that had been the very lifeblood of the neighborhood known across the city as, ‘The Avenue.’ Now those same factories that had once operated two and three shifts to create the textiles and machinery, the boxes and packing materials, the cans and containers and the paint and solvents to fill them, had all closed; in short order, the Conrail trains that had assembled in the freight yards to transport those industrial products across the United States were gone as well. The Avenue had died soon after, and now the vacant factories simply sat there, decrepit and useless, and little more than a rotting afterthought. Their deserted yards were invariably littered with trash and garbage. Fickle winds stirred by the elevated trains lifted litter from the streets to re-form in a gray world of grime, and with each passing train this depressing canvas of neglect was re-hung along the rust-coated fences and chained gates of the battered buildings.

“Jesus-Mary-and Joseph,” James shouted out as he turned the car toward the paint-peeling iron stanchions that supported the elevated train’s Knowlton Street station, “just look at the busted out windows of the old Belton Box Company. Not a damn piece of glass intact! Sons-of-bitches kids throwin’ rocks at them windows night after night! Goddamn punks….”

“I’ll thank you to watch your tongue, Mister,” she interrupted, her tone particularly stern. “Thank the Lord our Tom hasn’t taken up your profanity. How your mother ever let you get away with that mouth is a mystery to me. And to the nuns and priests of St. Apollonia’s as well, I imagine.” She allowed her eyes to sweep the pocked face of the factory, the broken window frames cluttered with shattered glass shards that pointed menacingly, like misshapen daggers glinting in the shrinking shafts of leftover sunlight. The perpetual shadows escaping the elevated train platform above hovered above them, rolling over the hood and windshield of the old Ford as they drove slowly into the center lane of the avenue, and away from the curbside threat of tilting cyclone fences that enclosed the vagrant buildings. The fences proved to be no impediment to the neighborhood’s army of derelicts that had promptly claimed the abandoned buildings as their own. Discarded hypodermic needles and drained bottles of cough medicine lay scattered among broken bricks, glass shards, rimless bald tires, smashed beer and whiskey bottles, and knotted black garbage bags that had split open to spill their soiled contents across this landform of decay. She shut her eyes for a moment, turned her face to the windshield before opening her eyes, and said, “I am no more am in favor of blight than you are, but you don’t hear me resort to language as vile as the sight of that, do you?” She had jerked her head over her shoulder to indicate the dilapidated corridor now thankfully out of view.

“Look, over there,” he said excitedly. “Them, goin’ into the EZ-Cash office. Jesus, a string of them goin’ in to cash their Social Security checks, don’t you know.”

“There’s the McBreen woman along with Mildred McAllister,” she said as she moved forward in her seat, pulling the seat belt strap with her thumb. “Two peas-in-a-pod if ever there was one.”

Instinctively, James O’Reilly swung the car over into the outside lane, scraping the tires against the curb. He made a sharp right turn against a red light at the corner of St. Apollonia’s Roman Catholic Church.

“What are you doing?” his wife cried out.

“Gettin’ to the church parkin’ lot before they cash their Social Security checks, that’s what. McAllister? She’ll be at the back of the church before us and in the bus line so fast, that you can kiss your lucky seat goodbye, that’s for sure.”

She turned in her seat and peered out the back window. The smallest smile creased her mouth, though she quickly swept it away as she turned to him. “Well, don’t kill us in the process.”

**

The Trailways bus was parked at the far end of St. Apollonia’s schoolyard. James maneuvered his car into the row of parking spots closest to the bus, making certain that he was directly centered between the yellow lines that separated one parking space from the next. As she had instructed him often enough, he avoided parking next to the many blue-lined spaces emblazoned with the symbolic wheelchair logo that had been set aside by the church for their handicapped parishioners. “The way those people swing open their car doors, why you’ll have more dents in your doors than Kellogg’s has Corn Flakes,” she told him. He winced that she had never ceased to batter her point, beat it to a pulp, and pound it, in fact, with some trite, ill-suited exaggerated summation. And though he had routinely dismissed her clichéd emphasis of any fact, this was one fact that he would not dispute. In his view anyone with a hangnail could get the family doctor to sign-off on a temporary handicapped placard that would then dangle from a rear-view mirror, allowing the parking privileges once reserved for the truly lame and infirmed. His response to this abuse was usually short and sweet and confined to his wife: “I hope those phony shits break their f’in legs and have to crawl back to their cars.” Today however, he reserved any comment, internalized his resentment, at least for the moment, and silently walked around the front of the Ford to open her door. Arm in arm they strode quickly to the closed door of the bus to form what would become a long line of senior citizens eager to board the Trailway ‘Big Red,’ Casino Special. They were the first in line.

**

From her lucky seat on the aisle, Regina O’Reilly leaned forward and said into the space between the man and woman sitting in front of them: “Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon? I do believe that today is my lucky day. I’ve been feeling it since mass last Sunday.” She did not add that she had also said a small prayer while holding two fingertips in the holy water receptacle before exiting St. Apollonia’s eleven o’clock service.

“What did you say?” asked Mary Frances Hanlon, as she nervously fingered her hearing aid. “I asked himself to get me a damn new battery for this blasted thing,” she said too loudly, lifting her face toward her husband as she said it. “Say it again, Mrs. O’Reilly.”

Timothy Hanlon, looking straight ahead, answered, “It’s not a goddamned flashlight where you can run up the avenue to Hanley’s Hardware and buy a goddamned size D Duracell. You need to take the damn thing over to the hearing clinic.”

“What?”

“The Avenue Hearing Clinic, for Christsakes.” His shouting had caused heads to turn, his own he had turned toward James whose own head was resting against the tinted glass window.

“What ‘cleaning’?” his wife shouted back at him, fingering her hearing aid. And then, her adjustments finely tuned, she turned back to Regina O’Reilly, and said softly, “Why, Mrs. O’Reilly, would you repeat that for me, please?”

And she did.

**

The bus sped past a Protestant cemetery before turning sharply onto the ramp leading to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Several of the women on the bus made the sign of the cross as the bus rumbled over potholes created by the daily convoy of buses that supplied Atlantic City’s casinos with day trip patrons. Those sitting on the left side of the bus could see that an internment was in progress, and one of the women commented matter-of-factly that she had worked with a woman who had been buried ‘over there.’ But for most there was scant interest in what was taking place in the cemetery—a Protestant cemetery, no less—and the chatter soon centered on which one of their neighbors had almost hit a jackpot two weeks ago.

“It was Mrs. McAllister,” offered someone from the rear seats.

“Yes, that’s right. Millie McAllister it was. Why, she had been playing the five-way slots at Caesar’s, and lo-and-behold, she goes and puts five quarters in at one time so she can get somethin’ to drop from any which way.”

“Now, I say that’s a particular dumb thing to do,” another woman answered. “You can go through your money so fast that it’ll make your head spin.”

“One quarter at a time will do fine for me,” Eleanor Kerry managed to add, despite the constant cigarette cough that punctuated her speech.

“I agree,” her seating partner snapped, leaning out from her aisle seat and twisting backwards, “because you can hit two cherries on one line only and get back only two quarters. That still keeps you three quarters losers, don’t it?” And before anyone could reply, she repeated her question: “Well, don’t it?”

James O’Reilly rose slightly to peer over the high headrest. He scanned the back of the bus, silently counting the number of seniors on board. He then did the same to the section in front of him. He reseated himself with a thump, and after he had taken another few minutes to resettle himself, he removed the calculator from his shirt pocket and proceeded to work the keypad.

“What in blazes are you doing with that fool thing?” Regina whispered.

“Figurin’ somethin’ out,” he replied without looking up.

She watched his nimble forefinger prance over the numerals. She fidgeted in her aisle seat, annoyed at his sub-vocalized commands to ‘add this, subtract that, and that gives you the percent of this, which equals….that.’

“Put that away,” she ordered.

“Well, this is what it is,” he began. “The Daily News says that the average bus carries 42 people—we got 45 on this one—and there’s 900 buses per day leavin’ New York City for the casinos, and probably, we, Philadelphia, that is, have at least half that number of buses on a daily basis. So that gives you,” he paused to re-enter the data, “gives you...da-dat, da-dat, da-dat, gives you….”

“I’m not interested in your foolish….”

“There!” he said emphatically. “Facts and figures don’t lie, don’t you know. Between New York and Philly you got 1,350 buses a day comin’ into Atlantic City with an average of—I rounded it off to 40—an average of 40 bus patrons per bus. That’s 54,000 bus people pilin’ into the casinos on any given day. They figure to lose $40.00 per person on average, so when all is said and done… that’s about $2,160,000 a day that the casinos can pocket. And that’s just from New York and Philly.” He lifted the calculator toward her face and pointed to the seven black digits in the window. “What do you think of that?” he asked triumphantly.

Regina pushed his hand away. She turned away from him as a wave of crimson moved over her face. Why must he do this? Play the fool, as usual. She felt the flames of her embarrassment jump to her neck. She placed one hand on the side of her neck and felt the blood pound against her carotid artery—she had read an article only yesterday in Senior Woman’s Magazine that told all about the carotid artery, a warning-sign, they had written, indicating any number of bad things. Regina felt her head pound, though it was not her usual headache with its steady localized pain, no this was a pounding, a pulsing, an unceasing…horrible something. She slipped her thumb and forefinger beneath her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. And then she turned to him, and leaned her shoulder against his.

“I will say this one time, and one time only. Don’t you dare ruin this day for me, James O’Reilly. Don’t you dare.”

He said nothing in return. But he did not fail to notice that her teeth had been clenched, that her brow had furrowed, and that her eyes had narrowed as she delivered her threat. Red-faced, she repeated: “Don’t you dare ruin this day for me.”

**

James and Regina O’Reilly had kept their battles within the privacy of their four walls. They obeyed the Moon Alley code that held that a husband and wife did not hang their dirty wash in public for all to see and hear; they simply wrapped their private differences in a public truce that is the norm in most long-term marriages. And yet it was inevitable that leakage from those private battles would trickle into the outer world nonetheless—as is also the norm in long-term marriages. It is no exaggeration to state that all of the serious leakage came from James and that whenever his tongue did slip, it did so on those Saturday afternoons he spent at the bar in McFadden’s Saloon drinking shots and beers with the men of Moon Alley.

On one of those frequent Saturdays when he had had more than enough to drink, he duly acknowledged that his wife walked the avenue with her ‘nose in the air,’ and that she made ‘no bones about it,’ and that she certainly believed that she was ‘better than most of her neighbors,’ especially those who lived in the tiny apartments above the garages in Moon Alley. She was ‘old country’, he had drunkenly commented—and the searing resentment that tore loose from his commentary did not go unnoticed. Regina O’Reilly was a woman who had wished to become a nun as a girl, but didn’t; a mother who wished for her son to hear the calling of the priesthood, but hadn’t; and a wife who had been content to move closer to her God than to her husband, and did. It was his summation of her, and the men who had been in McFadden’s that Saturday to hear James’ declaration had lost no time in repeating it to their wives, who had, in very short order, eagerly condemned Regina O’Reilly for her ‘lace-curtain ways’. It wasn’t long before their disdaining words reached Regina’s ears.

“Well, if those shanty tinkers in Moon Alley and anywhere else in The Avenue think the less of me, why then, I’d say that their acrimony is a badge that I will proudly wear, thank you.” She gloried in the wedge that separated her from the others, and clearly took pride in their description of her as a ‘lace-curtain convent-school girl.’ In her mind it was the highest complement, and it proved to her how stupid they were. Regina never did learn that it was her husband who had hammered that wedge in place during one drunken afternoon in McFadden’s Saloon. And yet James felt no guilt at all, for in his heart, he knew that that outcome was what she had always wanted, ‘she a head taller than the rest, don’t you know.’ She could just as well thank him for it, he believed. Things were what they were, he told himself, and if not his idle and drunken talk, ‘why then, sooner or later it would have been said: better that it was me, don’t you know’.

**

The bus swept across the outer lanes of the Atlantic City Expressway at sixty-five miles-per-hour before easing into the far right lane behind two blue and white buses that bore New York license plates. James watched a blur of green give way to the leafy maple strand that had divided the highway for miles, only to disappear entirely as the bus downshifted in its approach to the toll booth. The bus came to a halt and was quickly engulfed by thick diesel smoke from the New York buses idling in front of them. The stench of diesel and gasoline from the buses and heavy rigs that inched their way to the toll booth insinuated itself into their bus, and James closed his eyes and thought back to the ‘good old days,’ as he referred to them, the days before the expressway and the casinos, the days’ before Landon Monotype padlocked its doors and sent his job to Central America, and he to the ‘trash heap,’ as he so often put it; yes, the good old days of summer-vacations down the shore in which he and Regina and little Tommy would have piled into the battered Chevy to make their way over the Ben Franklin Bridge and then onto the Black Horse Pike, that oft-rutted, two-lane blacktop that threaded its way through a string of cozy New Jersey towns—Hammonton and Elwood, Devonshire and Egg Harbor. Along with the sea breeze and salt air sweeping into the car came the exciting sight and call of the gulls, and the unforgettable rustling of tall, brown reeds anchored against the shores of Absecon Inlet, anchored, yet bending and swaying and dancing in the cross current of breezes from ocean to bay to highway, breezes so fresh that along with the sharp clear call of the gulls and the wind-dance of the rushes, you knew that at last, at long last, you were finally there, you were down the shore. You were in Atlantic City!

But now there were seldom gulls on the expressway; it was as if they had fallen through a hole in the sky, he thought, and were as lost as the old two-lane road that the cloud-white gulls had beautifully patrolled with calls of welcome.

James shifted to one side, rested his head against the tinted glass window and searched the sky nonetheless. He remembered how the gulls would seemingly float in the sky, how they would lift and glide on ocean breezes that swept across the bay, and how they would issue their call as they hovered above his slow-moving Chevy. “Here they are, our welcoming party,” he would tell young Tom, pointing to the sky. And from the open rear windows Tom would look out and up at gulls, and he would wave and wave his small hands as the birds escorted them across the rickety links that held Atlantic City to the mainland. James recalled how he would wait until they had crossed over the last bit of water to remind his son that Atlantic City is an island. And then gaily add over the persistent cries from the gulls, “We’re on an island, Tom! And how grand is that, I ask you?”

She pulled at his sleeve. “Stop looking for your fool seagulls. And take that dirty newspaper off your lap. You’ll have the crease in your pants black with newsprint. And this time please concentrate on redeeming our vouchers the minute we are off this bus.” She looked over her shoulder to where Mrs. McAllister and Mrs. McBreen were sitting. “And don’t you dare let those two from Moon Alley get in front of you as you did the last time.”

“And here I was thinking that you wanted me to be a gentleman no matter what,” he answered, scanning the silent sky, still enclosed in his reverie of the ‘good old days.’

**

The ‘Big Red’ arrived at the Golden Nugget Casino on schedule. The bus broke away from the two New York buses it had followed into the terminal and eased over to Platform A; the New York buses slipped aside to occupy the whole of Platform B. In minutes, the hydraulic doors of the three buses bumped and hissed and opened, and bands of elderly men and women—by far more women than men—made their way onto the concrete platforms that had been roped off with red and gold straps attached to chrome posts. The seniors were directed to form their lines and snake their way through a labyrinth the led to a cashier’s window at the far end of the terminal. Once there they could present their bus ticket for a voucher which, once on the casino floor, they would present to the cashier’s cage for a $10.00 roll of quarters. It was a procedure that was repeated throughout the day, day in, day out, in the dozen of casinos that flanked Atlantic City’s famed boardwalk and marina.

“Like a goddamn cattle drive,” Timothy Hanlon called out.

“These damn ropes and poles ain’t any different from the Chicago Stockyards. Takin’ us between these ropes like we’re a bunch of cattle through them chutes, all right,” James answered. “And B-Jesus, look at those New York shits over there. Pushin’ and shovin’ like the shits that they are. Think baseball begins and ends with goddamn Yankees.”

Regina reached her hand forward and pulled at James’ jacket. He turned and witnessed her scowl. Again, her clenched teeth and tight squint sent an unmistakable message.

“Jesus, look at this f.in’ spectacle,” James mumbled. “Look at these blue-haired widows on their walkers crossin’ against the light. Sons-of-bitches would knock you in front of a truck just so they can get into the casino ahead of you”

She tightened her grip on his arm. When the light turned green they walked swiftly across the street and neatly maneuvered in front of the women with walkers. A man wearing a New York Yankees cap held a woman by the arm and helped her position her walker up the curb. They entered the casino before James and Regina.

“Bunch of New York shits,” James said.

“Watch your tongue, I’m telling you. And fix your jacket, please.”

James and Regina, each in their own fashion, led what each of them would insist, had they bothered to think about it, an authentic life. Regina had long ago convinced herself that she was indeed at the top of the Irish-American pyramid of social standing, James, on the other hand, had no inclination to join his wife on her lofty perch. He was, as he was quick to say, ‘a man of the people and proud of it.’ A few more beers brought forth the claim that he was basically ‘a proletarian who had made good,’ which meant simply that he had gone from blue collar milling machine operator to white collar floor-supervisor during his thirty-three years at the Landon Monotype Company. That is not to say that he was not proud of his accomplishment, for he was. But he kept his proud feelings to himself, and always downplayed his promotion to the other men in McFadden’s. In short, Regina lived her authentic life and James lived his authentic life; their problem was that one authentic life had little in common with the other authentic life. Put another way, they lived separate lives together.

“I do feel that this is my lucky day,” Regina said as she joined the line leading to the cashier who would validate their food coupons. “Redeem these vouchers for our two rolls of quarters while I cash in the food coupons,” she explained. “And move quickly. I don’t want Mrs. McAllister to get my machine.” They crossed Atlantic Avenue before the traffic light had turned green and hurried into the front doors of the Golden Nugget Casino.

“Good grief,” James began, look at them, why don’t you. Blue-haired babes strugglin’ along on their walkers and canes and hangin’ on the nearest elbow ‘cause they can’t walk a straight goddamn line, their so banged up with their arthritis and that osteo- crap.”

He advanced in the line that led to a single cashier who methodically collected the vouchers and promptly doled out pre-packaged rolls of quarters, two five dollar rolls per voucher. Not far from the cashier’s cage Timothy and Mary Frances Hanlon were on their hands and knees rummaging through the Wal-Mart plastic bag that Mary Frances had carried onto the bus. They had been in the process of emptying the bag, item by item. James saw that she had already removed a sweater, several packs of Kent Cigarettes, three Rite-Aid prescription bottles, a fistful of tissues, and a plastic sandwich bag that contained any number of quarters. James fingered his rolls of quarters for a moment and then he slipped off to the side where the Hanlons were at work.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I gave her my teeth to hold for me ‘cause they hurt like hell half the time. Both of them damn bridges, upper and lower. Sons-of-bitches are new, and they made them too tight,” he said. And then he rubbed his finger over his upper and lower gums once or twice, his finger glistening with saliva, slid back and forth along the gaping spaces as he massaged the inflamed mass of tissue. “I only put them in when I have to eat,” he explained, wiping his fingers on his gray work shirt.

“Jesus!”

“She’s to put them in her pocketbook, I told her a hundred times. But she went and stuck them in her Wal-Mart bag, and I think she lost my goddamn teeth when she pulled out her sweater.”

“Jesus!”

“Get her in an air-condition place and she loses her goddamn mind, if you ask me,” Timothy Hanlon concluded.

“Might be a good idea to put your hand over your mouth, Tim, if you got to say somethin.’ Anyways, we ain’t gonna use our food vouchers just yet, ‘cause Regina wants to play the slots right away,” James added. “She don’t want McAllister to get her damn lucky machine.” He spotted Regina walking swiftly toward him. “Did Mrs. Hanlon wear her sweater on the bus?” he asked her before she had the opportunity to scold him as to his delay.

“She did.” Regina leaned over to Mary Francis Hanlon, still on her knees, but now re-stuffing her huge Wal-Mart bag. “Are you all right, dear?”

Mrs. Hanlon lighted a Kent, took a deep pull on the cigarette and said, “Why, I did. I definitely did. I felt a chill the minute the bus air conditioner went blowin’ in my face.”

“Jesus!” Timothy Hanlon burst out, “my goddamn teeth are on the f.in’ bus.”

**

Regina and James made their way past the roulette tables and the blackjack tables, and weaved in and out of the crowds that had congregated at the half-dozen tables that resembled horse troughs. Dice flew through a channel of cigarette smoke, and the entire scene was chaotic, with shouting and yelping and screaming—every other explosion of sound wrapped around the phrase, ‘Oh, Yeah, Baby!’

“Degenerate craps-players,” James snarled. “New York shits, I bet.”

They escaped the crowds of Asians that had surrounded a baccarat table, each of them rubber-necking over shoulders and into narrow spaces to study the pull of cards from the slickly polished wooden shoe by a dealer who called out each card in Mandarin and Cantonese. They slipped past rows of poker machines, side-stepped roving, worn-out serving girls, glamorized waitresses in short shirts and too-tight tops who balanced trays of complimentary drinks on one hand, while keeping the other hand at the ready to accept any tip offered by half-asleep, slot machine players.

Regina hurried into a moving crowd of day-trippers. They held their cups of quarters in one hand, a drink or a cigarette or both in the other, all the while dragging themselves through the center of the aisle to scan the unoccupied slot machines, pausing at each before inexplicably moving on. Suddenly, she squeezed James’ arm. “There it is!” she said breathlessly. “There it is.”

“What?” James responded, startled.

“3606! My lucky machine is open. My machine is free! Quick,” she exclaimed. And in a flash, she was off, moving swiftly through the center of the open aisle toward her lucky machine.

“Do you want me to open these rolls?” James asked, following behind her just as quickly. He lifted a huge cup bearing the Golden Nugget logo from the tall stack that had been placed between machines 3606 and 3608.

“Pour the quarters into the cup,” Regina said, as she crooked her arm and slid her fingers up and down the round arm of the slot machine. “And give me the cup. Thank the Lord that that McAllister woman didn’t get here first and steal my lucky machine.”

James stood to the side as Regina fed two quarters into the machine. She pulled the handle toward her, inching it downward while watching the rapid movement of the three tumblers. The first tumbler stopped and displayed a bright red cherry, the second a yellow bell, and the third a Golden Nugget logo. Several quarters dropped into the gleaming chrome tray below. “There,” she exclaimed, “you see. I told you this was my lucky day.”

James looked into her payoff tray. He moved the three quarters with one finger and guffawed, “You put in two quarters and got back three. You won a damn quarter.”

Regina dropped two more quarters into 3606. James leaned over to watch the tumblers spin frantically, then jolt abruptly before clicking to a stop, one tumbler at a time. Each revealed a different fruit. “Now you’re down a quarter,” he said disgustedly.

A clamor broke out in the next aisle. James moved away from Regina’s machine and looked through the narrow space that separated one slot machine from another. He removed the tall stack of coin-cups, transferred them to the machine to his right. The man with the New York Yankees cap was clapping his hands and moving vigorously from side to side; his wife had pulled her aluminum walker away from the slot machine and had bent over to better scoop out the coins that had fallen into her tray. She splattered several fistfuls of coins into one of the cardboard cups. At that moment the man in the Yankees cap made a half-turn into the aisle occupied by the New Yorkers, and noticed James peering at from over the tops of a pair of slot machines. The man smiled broadly, and greeted James with a wave of his cap. James, who had been standing on his toes, dropped down, but continued to watch them from the slender opening between 3606 and 3608.

He watched the two New Yorkers crowd their slot machine and resume play. He saw that they had some system, a routine that did not vary from play to play. The man dropped the coins into the machine, counting each coin as it dropped. His wife counted along with him, and after the final coin had dropped, they both recited ‘one-two-three,’ at which point she and he acted as one and took hold of the long chrome arm. With his hand gently resting upon hers, they jerked the lever downward. They did this again and again, win or lose.

Regina pulled at James’ sleeve. “Take this twenty dollar bill over to the closest change window and get me two ten dollar rolls of quarters.”

The tray at the bottom of 3606 was empty; James looked into the cup she was holding and saw that it contained just three or four quarters.

“B-Jesus, you’re broke already?”

“I am not broke,” she answered. She shook the cup close to his face. These are the quarters from the voucher. I’m still playing with the casino’s money. Get over there while there’s no line. And don’t dilly-dally on the way back,” she said as she reached into the cup.

James jostled his way through the aisle, now two-deep with another group of bus trip patrons who impatiently shook their cups of coins from side to side while waiting for an open slot machine. The outer aisle was a thoroughfare filled with senior citizens wandering about, some with a fist buried into their empty cup, and appearing as if they had had their hand amputated, the huge Golden Nugget cardboard cup their prosthesis. ‘Poor bastards,’ James told himself. He knew the scene well enough: they were the instant losers—senior citizens who had lost their ten dollars in less then five minutes and now were on their way to the food court to cash in their final voucher for a hamburger, a pack of fries, a soft drink, and a small slice of cheese cake. The casinos were a scam, he believed, since most bus trippers dipped into their purses—or wallets—and added another ten or twenty dollars to what the casino ‘gave’ them. The food, he had reasoned, cost the casinos next to nothing—pennies, he believed, for surely they bought food at less than wholesale prices—and the dinky voucher that allowed the day trippers ten dollars in quarters was merely an incentive to keep them in the casino, a prod that forced them to dip into their widow’s pension, or Social Security check, or worse, the pitiful monthly dole given to those on welfare. “And that’s Moon Alley in a nut shell, don’t you know,” he said aloud, though to no one in particular.

Not a day passed when he did not rant at corporations, at big business, at the entire capitalist system. When the Landon Monotype Company relocated to Central America, it had violently re-ordered his life, and the result had made him, in McFadden’s words, ‘a man in search of a soapbox.’

James, now slipping deeper into dark thoughts, walked over to the cocktail lounge just behind the change cages. He drank a bottle of beer in one swallow. And then threw back two double shots of Seagram’s. He looked up at the bartender as he slid his shot glass forward for one more, and said, “They took our jobs, and they closed up our factories. It’s down-sizin’, they told us; it’s restructurin’, refracturin’, and reorganizin’, don’t you know. They changed the words as they went along, but the new words carried the same meaning as the old words. And then, behind our backs they sold off our pensions.” James nodded, bit the inside of his cheek. “They jerked us good and proper. And that’s the truth of it, don’t you know.”

“Yep. You got that right,” the bartender said, reading the angry eyes before him.

**

“Good Lord,” Regina said, clearly shocked. “Have you been drinking?”

“I met a guy from the neighborhood. He bought me a glass of beer. Here,” he said brusquely. He turned his face from her, and pushed the two rolls of quarters against her hand.

“You were drinking. I know it.”

“Play your slots.”

“You made me wait all this while. And now I bet this machine has gone cold.”

“Oh, for Christsakes, woman, stop this crazy shit of yours. Hot. Cold. Lucky machine. Jesus, stop acting like you were born in Borneo, for Christsakes. Goddamn slot machines are rigged every f’in’ day by the casino, and worked on mornin’, noon, and night by the f’in’ corporations that are drivin’ us into the f’in ground….”

“Stop it! Stop it now, I tell you.” Regina took a step toward him. She raised her hand, and then withdrew it, clenching her fist as she did. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this? These twenty dollars are from my food money. I saved it over the last two weeks. Why are you ruining this day for me?” She held both rolls of quarters in one fist; her other hand suddenly slipped from the slot machine arm, and gripped the empty payoff tray of 3606. She felt the heat of high color rise from her neck to her face. Her heart raced, her temple pounded. She opened her mouth and took deep breaths, struggling mightily against her rapid breathing, her thumping heart beat.

And then James’ brow furrowed as he saw his wife’s tight, scornful face suddenly shatter, as if his words had finally arrived with the full force of a rock, as if her face were a pane of glass, and now no different than that of the Belton Box Factory windows that had been so violently altered by the deep, pent up rage that sent both rocks and words hurling thoughtlessly.

What James saw was a despairing face, and he cringed when he saw her frightened eyes fill with tears. In a moment, and not more than that, those same tears that sat tentatively perched on her lower lids, cascaded down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. He became momentarily numb by the unknown face he saw before him. It was as if someone had punched him from behind, as unexpected as that. He gasped a short breath and felt his heart race. He averted his eyes from her pain, and glanced once more through the narrow space between the slot machines. James took a deep breath and exhaled through the tiny gap between his lips; a feint whistle of air rolled from his tongue.

Regina’s fingers trembled along the full path of her carotid artery.

“Now, let me show you somethin’,” he said softly. “What you need is a system. What you need is a strategy. You need to keep a routine goin,’ don’t you know. Now, just try this with me a few times.”

Regina dabbed her face with a white, freshly-ironed handkerchief. She snapped her handbag closed and glared at the motionless tumblers. “I want to leave,” she said.” I want to leave now.” And then, minutes of silence, followed by many more of hesitation, until finally, as if she had been aimlessly wandering about, before at last finding herself on a familiar road that allowed composure to settle in, she said evenly, “I need a cup of tea.”

“Next time the girl passes I’ll get you a good cup of tea, I promise. Now just listen to this. First, I’ll feed three quarters, one at a time, and when the first quarter falls, you and me count ONE, and at the next quarter, we count TWO, and finally, THREE, once the last quarter registers on that coin counter there,” he explained. But we got to count together at the same time. Got it?”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped.

“I’m settin’ up a system. This is my strategy,” he said, taking the cup of quarters from her hand and jiggling it. “And then we both put our hands right over the knob on this lever and say, one, two, three, PULL! We say that at the same time, too. And my hand goes on top of yours.”

“Oh, for the love of me,” Regina said. He was happy to hear a trace of sharpness return to her voice. He smiled and tapped his finger against the coin insert circle.

A serving girl responded to James’ wave. “My wife would like a cup of tea, please,” he said. He slipped a dollar bill into her open hand. “And can you bring it over to her as soon as possible?”

At the second set of three quarters, two cherries and a Golden Nugget logo swirled to a stop. Regina pulled her head back and in the next instant the machine released forty quarters into its payoff tray. “Oh, my,” she remarked. “Oh, my,” she repeated each time the machine delivered her winnings.

They continued to play 3606 for the next forty-five minutes. Her tea grew cold as the quarters piled into the payoff tray.

When the jackpot finally arrived it was almost anti-climactic.

**

“Oh, sure, we knew it was comin’,” James said, amiably. The Philadelphia seniors moved slowly toward their bus.

The New York buses were loading aside Platform B. James noticed the man in the Yankees cap walk briskly to the middle of the line. As the man moved into the line behind his wife, he paused to wave to James. James waved in return. Both then boarded their respective buses.

“I knew it was my lucky day the minute I got out of bed this morning,” Regina added. “Also, James came up with a system and we followed it to the letter. We used it today for the first time,” she said proudly. And then added, “But I wouldn’t tell a soul what it is any more than I would give away a secret recipe.” She tilted her head backwards when several women entered the bus and walked carefully down the aisle to their seats in the rear. Regina smiled contently, knowing that her achievement would not have been missed, especially by the last of the women, Millie McAllister. ‘Shanty tinker, indeed,’ she told herself, and smiled a second time, more broadly now than the first.

“So my goddamn teeth are in her pocketbook the whole the time.” Timothy Hanlon turned to James. “And don’t I ask her ten times if she went and looked into her pocketbook. Half the shit I say, she don’t hear, anyway, so I figure ‘what the hell’s the difference?’ I had some soup and the rest of the stuff I gummed down. Anyways, you two, congrats on your jackpot”

**

The bus entered Pacific Avenue at a crawl, leaving behind a choking trail of exhaust that ricocheted off the glittering, oil-slick macadam and up to the sky. James adjusted his seat so that the backrest allowed him to look through the upper portion of the window.

Regina moved her handbag up to the crook of her arm, and then shifted closer to James. She repositioned the handbag so that it was between them. “Look, she said, unclasping the teeth-like latch in the center of the bag, and opening it wide so that he could see its contents. She rousted him with her elbow. “Look,” she said again.

In her bag was a thick stack of bills, a stack at least three inches thick, and held fast at either end by two thick, blue rubber bands. “Touch it,” she said, happily.

“Better get that to the bank first thing in the morning,” he said, though not touching the money.

“Don’t you want to touch it?” she asked.

“Maybe you want to put that in your lockbox overnight,” he suggested. He turned his face to the side, looked upward to search the sky.

The bus ran over the bumpy, rutted, washboard-like inner lane and the driver shifted gears furiously, grinding one gear into another to better climb the curving ramp that fed the Atlantic City Expressway. In a minute they eased through the tollbooth and picked up speed. James kept his face pressed against the window and continued to read the sky.

Regina turned to him again and said, “I saw that you waved to a man on the other side of the terminal. He was moving into the line on Platform B.”

James did not answer. He leaned forward and craned his neck as far back as possible, and then dropped back against the backrest of his chair, his eyes still searching the sky.

“You know who I mean,” she said. And then she lifted the armrest that separated them to an upright position, moved closer to him and adjusted her backrest so that she would be face to face with her husband. “James?”

He turned his head, his face directly opposite her face.

“I know who he is, and so do you,” she said.

He lowered his eyes. Her handbag was open, her left hand was in the bag, and her fingers were moving over the stiff stack of hundred dollar bills. He looked up at her. He winced as he searched her face, her challenging, expressive eyes. He saw a new face, a second such new face this day; the face of despair had been erased by the arrival of the long-sought jackpot. He took a deep breath.

“Yes, I know who he is,” she whispered

James saw the strange twinkle that had claimed her eyes; he saw how her smile, so clearly coquettish, was perfectly matched by the softness of her moist eyes. His jaw went slack as he took in her second new face of the day. “What are you talking about?” He barely was able to form the question. And then she shocked him further.

“He’s a New York shit,” Regina whispered behind a mischievous smile.

She placed her right hand on his leg. She allowed her hand to slide over the crease in his trousers, permitted her fingers to inch across the inner portion of his thigh. Her left hand remained firmly wrapped around the stack of bills. Regina raised the thick wad of bills to the mouth of her handbag.

“Look,” she cooed, in a voice as soft as a breath.

She moved her fingers further up his thigh, each finger pressing and squeezing as they inched upward. He watched her lower her thick stack of money into the bag until it was out of view. Regina fanned her fingers against his leg, and he watched them spider-crawl up the sharp crease in his trousers and closer to the noticeable bulge in his pants.

James pressed his head against the backrest of his chair and bit down on his upper lip with such force that his lower jaw began to tremble. He placed his face against the cool window glass the moment Regina’s fingers had reached their destination. James tightened his hand on his armrest and starred at the sky.

The longest moment passed until his eyelids fluttered, then closed. His breath came in short spurts, and behind his closed lids he felt his eyes well with tears. He sat straight and stiff and listened for the call of the gulls.

But the gulls did not call.

In his mind’s eye he saw only the hole in the sky. And in his aching heart he felt only the deep yearning for the good old days. Good old days that had been free from terrors born of change.