Canvas satchel in hand, he boarded the bus. Old women with anxious eyes, grim faces, prim knees, filled the supervisory seats in front, assisting the driver in his duties. Henry stumbled to the rear, found adjoining vacant seats, staked his claim to both. He sat in the dark sipping from a square bottle of Jim Beam bourbon, eating peanuts from a sack.

The whiskey purled in his brain. The bus rolled softly eastward into the dark. He tried not to think of Claire by focusing his thoughts on Joy, on Jill, on Loralee, on Whatshemame, on Candy, on Bliss. Useless.

He switched on the little overhead reading light, opened a book and began to read the Navajo Creation Myth, a guaranteed soporific.

The First World, Ni’hodilqil, was black as black wool. It had four corners and over these appeared four clouds. These four clouds contained within themselves the elements of the First World. They were a black cloud, a white cloud, a blue cloud and a red cloud….

He dozed. He read. He read and dozed. He dreamed a dream that meandered on in various directions but mostly four and involved a man disguised as a badger, a badger disguised as a woman, a woman disguised as a man and an ear of corn on the cob, actually White Shell Girl who becomes the Moon and Yellow Corn Boy who becomes the Sun but the entire scheme is wrecked when Coyote-Who-Was-Formed-In-Water steals a blue turquoise charm that belongs to Water Buffalo’s Babies which makes the Great Yei, Hasjelti, very angry….

He was awakened by lights in the bus station at Grand Junction, Colorado, and the hiss and grunt of air brakes. He got off the bus to pee, entered the men’s pissoir and read the wisdom on the wall:

Why dont Jesus walk on water anymore?

Because his feet leak.

(We need more Jews like Jesus.)

If all college girls was laid end to end—

I wouldn’t be surprized.

(All Honkies must die.)

The blue-and-silver bus rolled eastward into night. Henry drank his bourbon, emptied the bottle and slept. Uneasily. In fits. Dreaming bad, lengthy and complex dreams that faded, when he woke, back into the addled cells from which they’d come. Buses roused his latent claustrophobia. But he was a poor boy, couldn’t afford air flights or even Amtrak. He rode the bus and dreamed his suffocating dreams.

The red dawn found them grinding over Shrine Pass east of Vail, 11,050 feet above sea level. Blue snowfields on either side. Sick from the booze but too stubborn to puke it up, Henry steeled his stomach for grim gray grimy hours ahead. The bus rumbled down the grade, pistons braking against gravity, as they headed on for Dillon, Silver Plume, Lawson, Golden and Denver City. Henry sank into a queasy coma, one dead soldier upright between his thighs, and floated forth onto another lake of complicated nightmares.

He dreamed. He endured. He hoped. He groped toward consciousness out of the anesthesia of alcohol and discovered himself, Henry Lightcap, sitting on a stool in a steel stall with his pants down around his ankles. Canvas satchel on the cement deck. He read the writing on the inside of the stall door.