Armen walked around Slough City, his hands stuffed in his pockets, trying to make sense of what had become of Cindy. Occasionally, something would distract him, and he would pause for a moment or an hour. He stopped once while walking past the Greyhound bus depot, and continued on. In time, he came home, picked up his pack, loaded it up, and walked out.
He heard a lone piano tap innocently through an open window and the Indian summer heat. The piano, like the moon, seemed to follow him through town. He could hear its footsteps. After a while, he wasn’t sure whether he was still hearing it or perhaps it was just an echo in his head. He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t care.
Bakersfield to Lebec, 1943 (CalTrans)
It wasn’t the only sound in his head. There was a rumbling. A massive stone sphere rolled. The rumbling was low, steady, and everywhere inside the sphere. The road under the streetlamp felt the rumbling. The streetlamp felt the rumbling. The car parked along the curb felt it. The windows at the pharmacy felt it, as the sphere continued rolling. He was quite accustomed to it. He kept walking.
He came again to the bus depot. He purchased a ticket, propped his pack against the station wall, and sat down alongside it. The floor tiles were cool.
He carried his pack out back behind the depot and slid it into the luggage bay of the southbound bus. He walked up to the bus door and stepped onboard. The great wheels began to roll south. He rested his head against the dark, air-conditioned glass.
The old gray dog roared down the whispering street, drowning out the rumbling, and the air around was stained with its black breath. The street rolled away under the wheels. The street lamps rolled away. Slough City rolled away.
The dusk deepened. Grape vines and cotton. Alfalfa and almond orchards reached out to passing headlights. Armen folded his knees toward the wall and stared as the wheels turned and turned. They turned over hours and hours of simmering blacktop as an unleavened cake of flying beasts piled up on the plowing nose of the swaying hound.
Curled up within the gut of the beast, he seemed to time his breathing with the monster. The bus exhaled its smoke, and Armen exhaled his. Each had its fire. Internal combustion and cellular respiration shared an intimate rhythm; chemical, mechanical, and unreflective.
The oven air outside was dark, hot, and glowing. The wheels spun and spun with a growl. They never seemed to stop, as though the radiating pavement might melt them down if they did. Armen’s ears heard the diesel engine labor as it climbed out of the sink at the Grapevine, though Armen himself never heard it.
The hound ran down the mountains into the hills and valleys of lights. And then the concrete and steel canyons were upon it, and it growled and swayed to its den of diesel fume.