Emile bought his bus ticket to Toledo at a travel agency in Parthenia, said good-bye to his mother and went on into New York. The bus was scheduled to leave at nine that night but by eight o’clock there were more than a dozen passengers on the waiting platform. These were travelers and you could tell it by their finery, their shy looks and their new bags. Every people seems to have some site, some battlefield, tomb or cathedral where their national essence and purpose is most exposed, and the railroad stations, airports, bus stops and piers of his country seemed to be the scenery where his kind found their greatness. They were dressed, most of them, as if their destination were some sumptuary judgment seat. Their shoes pinched, their gloves were stiff, their headgear was topheavy, but this nicety in dress seemed to suggest that the ancient legends of travel—Theseus and the Minotaur—were still, however faintly, remembered by them. Their eyes were utterly undefended, as if an exchanged glance between two miscreants would plunge them both into an erotic abyss, and they kept their looks to themselves, their bags, the paving or the unlighted sign above the platform. At twenty minutes to nine the sign was lighted—it said TOLEDO—and they stirred, got to their feet, pressed forward, their faces filled with light as if a curtain had just risen on a new life, a paradise of urgency and beauty, although it rose in fact on the Jersey marshes, the all-night restaurants, the plains of Ohio and some troubled dreams. The windows of the bus were tinted green and driving out of the city all the street lights burned greenly as if the whole world were a park.
He slept well and woke at dawn. They spent the day crossing Ohio. The green windowglass made the landscape baneful, as if the sun had grown cold and these were the last hours of life on the planet, and in this strange light people went on hitchhiking, mowing fields and selling used cars. Late in the day they came to the outskirts of Toledo but he might have been coming home to Parthenia. There were hamburger stands and places where you could buy fresh vegetables and used-car lots with strings of lights and a dog-and-cat hospital and a woman in a bathing suit pushing a gasoline lawn mower and a pregnant woman hanging out her wash and the elms and the maples were the same, he noticed, and Queen Anne’s lace grew in the fields and you couldn’t tell until you got to the center of the city whether you were in Parthenia or Toledo.
The other passengers scattered and Emile stood on a corner with his suitcase. The air, he thought, had a grassy smell. Perhaps this was from the surrounding farms or the lake. The street lights burned and the store windows were lighted but there was still a rosy light from the setting sun and he felt that excitement he always experienced in the ball park when, during the fourth or fifth inning of a double-header, they would turn on the lights while the sky was still blue. It was not cold at all but he shivered as if at this hour and in this flat country there were some subtle rawness in the air. He asked a policeman for directions to the Union Hall. It was a long walk. The daylight had risen off the buildings and up out of the sky and he walked in the light from store fronts, restaurants and bars. The Union Hall when he got there seemed empty, a place with green walls and an oiled floor and benches for waiting. A man behind a window took his thirty-dollar fee and said that his uncle had made the arrangements. They would board the ship that night and sail whenever the loading was completed. He sat down on one of the benches and waited for the crew to come in.
The first to come was the cook, a short man in a brown business suit, who hailed his friend behind the window and introduced himself to Emile. His skin was sallow, his nose was broken and unset. That was the first thing you noticed, that and the monkey light in his eye. It was the broken nose that dominated his face, the widespread nares that made the shrewd light in his eye seem simian, mischievous at times and at times as reflective as the eyes of any cold monkey in a Sunday afternoon zoo. “You look just like a fellow shipped out with us last year,” he said. “Paff was his name. He got a scholarship in some university and left the sea. You look just like him.”
