108: The bus came to a halt ...
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam,” Chapter 5 continues
The bus came to a halt, and a fat, sweaty man wearing a brown suit and a derby hat lurched down the aisle toward Matthew, Mort, and me. Mort and I gave each other looks of terror. I think it was the first time that either of us had realized that somebody had been driving the bus. We had just been riding along as passengers on a bus beyond our control, a bus that could have been traveling on its own. Now it dawned on us that this big and frightening character with a little mustache right under his nose was in control of the bus, in control of our destinies. I imagine that Mort had the same thought I did at that moment: that our not having gotten home was proof that this guy’s intentions were not good. Matthew simply sat, unmoved, wearing the same impassive look that he had worn most of the time in nursery school.
“Don’t cry, kids,” the driver said. “Stop crying. I’ll get you home. Don’t worry.” I was ready to take heart at this, ready to trust this wheezing stranger as soon as he said the word home. I looked at Matthew to see what he thought about this, and my hopes vanished. He was giving me another of those twisted grins, and I took it to mean that everything the fat man was telling us was a lie, that we were doomed.
The man went back to the front of the bus and sat in his seat. He turned around and called out to us, “Stop crying!” I took this as an order and did my best to stop. I was past crying anyway. I was sniffling and gasping for breath, shaking with the desperate sobbing that comes after the tears are gone, choking, hardly able to breathe, but through my fears the idea came to me that we should try to escape this demon and find our way home.
I dashed across the aisle and sat beside Mort. I beckoned to Matthew, and he stood up and stuck his chin over the back of the seat.
“We—we—we should try to get out of here,” I said. “If we can get the man to stop, then we can run away and find our way home. Let’s tell him that we have to go tinkle.”
Matthew looked at me with undisguised contempt. “‘Go tinkle’?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “‘Go tinkle,’” he repeated, and he laughed a hollow laugh. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s no use.”
“We could try,” I said.
“I’m telling you, it’s no use,” Matthew said.
“He’s right,” said Mort. Mort had stopped crying. He wiped his eyes, leaving behind feathery streaks of dirt that swept out along his cheeks. They made him look like a tired old man. “It’s too late,” he said. There was no emotion at all in his voice now. He sounded like Matthew. “My mother has probably got another kid by now. Even if I could get off this bus and find my way home, when I got there I’d see some other little boy on her lap eating cookies, and she wouldn’t even remember who I was.”
A thrill ran through me, the electrifying thrill that comes from recognizing a theme in a setting where one doesn’t expect to find it. “This—this—this is like ‘The Fox and the Clam,’” I said. All I really meant was that our situation was as miserable as the fox’s.
Matthew looked at me and opened his mouth. He had that look of disdain again. “Shut up, Matthew,” I said.
Mort looked at me without saying anything. His face still looked drawn and tired, but in his eyes was a wild look of hope.
“Did they get home?” he asked.
“Yeah, Peter,” said Matthew. “Tell us. Did they get home, the fox and the clam?” There was, I thought, a tremor in Matthew’s voice that he hadn’t been able to hide. I started to tell Mort that getting home wasn’t what the story was about, but before I spoke, while I was looking at Matthew, feeling nothing but anger toward him, I remembered the way he had stuck his tongue out at me, and the lard sandwiches that he brought to nursery school, and I saw in his eyes the briefest suggestion of the hope that I had seen in Mort’s, and an unfamiliar feeling ran through me, a feeling that I can now recognize as compassion. If I had been grown-up, I would have said to myself, “Why, he’s not as mired in the slough of despond as he pretends to be. He’s just a scared little boy.”
I moved back across the aisle so that I could see both of them at once. I sat on the edge of the seat, with my legs in the aisle. “Well,” I said to Mort, with a smile, “I’ll tell you the whole story.” With those words, I felt a tiny glow of pleasure inside me, which came from the memory of the day when Mr. Beaker had first read the fable to me and the day when Miss Louisa had concocted her astounding variation on it. If she could do it, why couldn’t I?
Mort wiped his eyes again and ran the back of his hand under his nose. Matthew pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. His expression seemed to me to say, “All right, Peter. Let’s see what you can do.” I took a deep breath.
[to be continued on Wednesday, October 13, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 108, Mark Dorset considers Hats: Man in a Derby or Bowler Hat; Art: Paint-by-Numbers; and Kitsch from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.