On several occasions over Donny’s lifetime, Texas had the opportunity to connect its cities with high-speed rail. It was such an obvious thing to do, especially since the rights of way were already there. Building out the railroads was what had brought the first big money to the state, before Spindletop and the discovery of big oil deposits in the ground. The last proposal was for one of those hypertrains that would make the Houston-to-Dallas run in twenty minutes. But the politics always killed it. Until it was too late. By the time it was no longer economically or ecologically viable to fly people distances that could be driven almost as fast, and then driving your own car was even more expensive, the money wasn’t there to build a better, smarter, greener transportation infrastructure. So most people, including Donny, took the bus.

At least the Greyhound station was close to the courthouse. The station had no newsstand, but they did have doughnuts and coffee. The buses were mostly biodiesels, which meant they smelled like fast-food, but at least they had onboard network connections and room to work.

Donny had taken the bus all the time when he was in college and law school. After his dad dumped his mom, their war meant Donny was on his own financially, and he decided to get by without having a car, especially since the only car he could afford was the kind guaranteed to die somewhere outside of Waco if you had the bad idea to actually head to another town. So the bus was how he would get to and from school, and on weekends he figured out how to make the run for the border on the Mexican buses, which were cheaper and cooler, the poor man’s idea of exotic travel. That was before the Mexicans closed the border to most American traffic.

Donny always managed to end up on the night bus, especially when he was headed home. That night he left his grandmother’s the 10 p.m. bus was ninety minutes late. He tried to get some work done in the station, with coffee and a slightly stale cruller, but ended up giving free legal advice to the old lady sitting next to him, first about how she might clear her son’s record, then about her war with her neighbors over the fence line. He tried working again once the bus finally got going, but only managed to wake up at 3 a.m. with drool drying along the corner of his mouth.