Four years on and the bus had yet to show its face. Not a hiss of a brake, not the alerted beep of its kneel to the cement. Instead, the fine southern gentlemen were growing beards begged on by the liquor they drank. All about their faces the moss grew with them, moping, heavy with the sultry air of Savannah in summer.
No bus had shown because that particular bus stop, crumbling as it was into an afterthought of dust, had been removed from any and all city routes a decade before that mopey, sultry day. A couple of the gentlemen knew this, but never bothered to say anything about it. Better to sit buzzed and happy among bedfellows, they reasoned, than to poke and burst that nagging anticipation that had set up like a speech bubble above their heads. Eddie Faro did, however, break the silence for another reason.
“Look there,” he said, raising a finger toward the wall of a bodega across the street. “Look at them kids, what they doin?”
A pair of art students — a boy and a girl, sticks in the Savannah mud — had come bustling up to the bodega wall and tossed down a pair of duffle bags. Wildly they looked left and right, checking for something — police, maybe, or do-gooder Samaritans — before whipping cans of spray paint from their bags and thumbing their pastel lids off with a bubble gum pop. To work they went as the sun began ducking away, the moss moping into the night, swaying light goodbyes as mansion lanterns flickered on and flecks of aerosol weighed the air down even further.
“What the hell they doin’?” Eddie repeated. He rapped his knuckles on the scaly upper arm of Joe Manor, nearly asleep in a slump against the vestibule. “Check it out, Joe. Look at these kids go!”
Joe rubbed his eyes and coughed. A swig of sloe gin. And then he looked at the pair of sticks hollering in silent strokes across the side of the bodega.
“I’ll be damned, Eddie. Ain’t no one ever cared about that building before.”
“Does anyone care now?”
“They sure as hell do.”
A swig of red wine for Eddie. That had always been strange — red wine behind the paper bag, something less cinematic. “Whadya think it’s gonna be?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Well, we done always called you the Magician.”
“That there is true!” Leanndra, a fine woman, a fine southern gentleman in every non-genital sense of the word, was still breathing after all. The other night she’d tried making the bus appear by holding her breath and, after two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, had passed on out. Her puffed-cheek, breathless silence had concerned the men a while until they’d had enough to drink.
“Damn, Leanndra. You still with us?”
She picked up a leaf and tore it to little pieces. “Unfortunately. Bus’ll be here soon enough, I’ll sit far away from you sacks.”
“Who you callin’ a sack? Seen yourself?”
“I been back to life a minute and look less like a rotten peach than you, Joe.”
Joe and Eddie made eye contact, then choked on a cackle until it came roaring into the night, tearing through the mucky air and shaking dead moss from the branches. “God damn, Leanndra! We all peaches, you looked at us?”
The aerosol hiss of the painters hushed to nothing. Through the dark settling upon the city the painters’ faces met the white, mossy eyes of the trio by the vestibule, sipping their liquor and melting into the ground. You see, the kids thought they were alone. Thought they’d keep it to ten minutes and add something to the neighborhood. Thought they’d violate the night with Krylon that would yawn to life in the morning, would come off the walls and walk color lines with commuters to morning coffee stands. Thought they’d sweat it out in private and be constructively rebellious.
“Well!” Eddie hollered. “Whadya stoppin’ for?”
The kids looked at each other but found nothing to say. A breathless clump of moss fell at their feet. Joe took a swig of sloe and let his eyelids, paper thin and beet red, flutter back to half asleep.
Two minutes later the whole event was over. The young artists tossed their half-empty bottles into their bags and wandered north a block as the night finished cloaking everything — a thick, sultry blanket of Savannah in summer.
“Leanndra, Leanndra!” Eddie rapped his knuckles against her thick, steel-toe shoulder. “Check it out!”
Leanndra looked in the general direction of his finger and, seeing what he saw, held her breath. Up ahead she saw a bus, baby blue in the lanternlight of mansions. It knelt and hissed to board the hapless kids. When they were on it pulled away, coming toward the dying vestibule before it lifted from the ground and disappeared above the trees.
In Eddie and Leanndra’s dreams that night, the mural the kids had painted materialized, seeing no need to wait for the sunrise to reveal itself. On the side of the bodega there was a marsh, half-finished, baked in rust tones beneath an avenue of Spanish moss.
