Free The Snow Geese by William Fiennes Page B

some of them fitted with small, coin-fired televisions in moulded black plastic casings. Passengers were standing around, waiting for gates to be called, checking their watches, wandering from one spot to another, carrying tubes of Pringles potato snacks, portable stereos, transparent Ziploc bags of cookies or muffins, black refuse sacks bulging with laundry, rolled-up sleeping-bags, green Army Surplus kitbags, suit bags, duffel bags, rucksacks, pillows, cooler boxes, comfort blankets and swaddled, sleeping babies.
    The Greyhound left Austin at seven o’clock in the morning. The schedule that came with my ticket told me I would arrive in Fargo, North Dakota, at twenty to six the following afternoon, having changed coaches in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Fargo was about 1,000 miles due north of Austin; snow geese would be flying due north from Texas to North Dakota, as if along the lines of longitude.
North
– the word had amplitude now, as if all possible destinations and endings were gathered up in it. North trumped all other places. I wanted the front seat in the Greyhound for its widescreen view of the north, but it was taken, so I sat two rows back on the right-hand side, across the aisle from a young woman and her son, a boy of five or six with brown hair cut in a severe fringe, like a monk’s tonsure, and a book of join-the-dots pictures to which he applied himself with a monk’s diligence, working with felt-tip pens in the dim light, conjuring motorcycles, tennis racquets, kitchen blenders and giraffes from strews of black points while his mother, who had spiky blond hair and a thin, bony face, laid her head against the window and slept despite its shuddering.
    A storm broke as we left Austin. Thunder rolled; lightning lit the rooftops in quick, jagged brightnesses; water sluiced across the Greyhound’s windscreen, batted left and right by the long, jointed wipers. I thought about Matthew in his tent at the edge of the cedars, hard rain thrumming on the off-white canvas as bolts struck the tall mast. Then the storm passed, the sun rose somewhere beyond Baton Rouge, and the Greyhound surged towards Dallas on Interstate 35. I gazed blankly through the tinted window, lulled by the hum of wheels on even asphalt panels, with flat country skirting past on the far edge of my attention – a Texas bric-a-brac of motels, outlet malls, dancehalls, subcourthouses, pet-grooming salons, ministorages, swags of electric and telephone cables, a non-stop barrage of exclamatory hoardings and signs like heraldic shields raised high on steel masts, flashing the names of gas stations and franchise restaurants as the coach coasted past Georgetown, Temple, Waco and Italy, 200 miles north to Dallas.
    I boarded a new bus in Dallas, its driver a tall, lean, narrow man, like a cigarette dressed in the grey Greyhound uniform, with sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows and silver hair cut short at the back and sides, swept back on top and glossed with brilliantine. He wore a brown leather belt embossed with an eagle, laterally extended, and a dated-looking digital watch with a calculator keypad underneath its scratched display. He sucked on a toothpick, smoothed his hair back with both palms simultaneously, and addressed his passengers as ‘folks’.
    ‘Now please remember, folks,’ he said into his microphone, lips brushing the metal mesh as we proceeded through the Dallas suburbs, ‘that we do have ladies and children on board. So let me say, folks, that we do not want to say or do anything that would embarrass those good folks. No bad language. No lewdness of any kind. Now this may not pertain to you, but I’m saying it all the same. I’m deadly graveyard serious on this matter, folks.’
    The folks in my vicinity included, in the front seat, a frail, white-haired lady wearing a denim shirt adorned with homemade four-pointed appliqué stars and a smiling brown crescent moon. She tried repeatedly to engage the