When I got to Philly I called Sal. He met me at the terminal in a Hawaiian shirt and a floppy white hat that hung down over his eyes. We carried my bag to his car and shut the doors and were driving past the street vendors and the panhandlers before he asked me.

"So what are you doing down here?"

I watched the city pass through the window and tapped on the armrest. I told him about my job, the one I worked so hard to get but never liked. I told him about how much my hometown in Maine had changed since I left for college and how I no longer loved to watch the waves crash over the rocks and into the streets in York Beach.

He just drove and I talked about my parents being there, but not being there and about how I did not want them there, so close to me, in either sense. I liked college but it was over. The moment was gone. Just like my childhood had been a moment, but it ended when I left Maine and after I returned it was gone.

We talked about my roommates, friends from high school that knew nothing about who I was now, but only what I was when we ran along the slippery rocks and trapped lobsters and floated in the green foam of the night ocean years before. I told him how I woke up smarting one morning after realizing that going home wasn't what I thought it would be and that the moment was gone and then I was packing my clothes and everything else that was mine into boxes and then I threw it all away. I told him about how I stole clothes and money from my roommate and bought a bus ticket.

Spending seven hours on a bus with smelling and sweating people who haven't bathed or slept in hours makes you angry and takes away your hunger, but it makes you want to talk and tell the stories. I told him about the kids who smoked green the whole time and rummaged through other people's bags in a station just outside of Rockport. The short one had heavy black sneakers and no socks and his feet stunk and I was awake and not hungry the whole time and I never said a word, but now I was tired and hungry and I kept talking until Sal cut me off.

"You hungry?" He kept his eyes on the road and never looked at me

"Yes."

We were in Pittston before the sun dipped down below the mountains in the east and I looked out the window at the trees and the towns in the valleys as we curled around the roads. We stopped in an old taproom that looked like a house with light blue siding on the walls. The screen door was flimsy and creaked when we walked in under the awning and the old sign with chipped paint. The floor was slippery from too much grease and squeaked under our feet. We sat on old stools that were too sticky to spin and a bartender walked out through an open doorway leading to the back room. He grabbed a towel off his shoulder, ran it across the bar and lit Sal's cigarette.

"Eating?"

"Yeah. Can we get some beers—Yeungling Lager—and two burgers?" Then to me, "Will, you gotta try their burgers."
I went to the bathroom and washed my hands, splashed water on my face and let it drip down into my mouth and onto my neck before dipping my face down again and splashing it one more time. I spun the metal crank on the paper towel dispenser, tugged off some paper, and dried my face and hands.

Sal was drinking his beer and talking to the bartender when I came back. We ate without a word and after he finished Sal looked at me seriously. He smiled, hesitated, and then asked the bartender for another drink. Sal watched him pour it slowly into the glass and, after it was in front of him, he picked it up and took a big swallow. Then he looked at me less seriously and said that he was leaving too.

"I'm going to Cali. In a week. Gonna go to Napa and live in the mountains for a while. Come with me."
"What the hell are you going there for?"

"Restaurants, wine." Sal was a computer genius and started working in Cobol and DOS when the rest of us were riding our bicycles and watching afternoon specials. He read too much and he never heard what teachers said and probably learned more than we did with all of our listening. But he never loved it.

"They have newspapers there, you know," he said. "You can work as a reporter for a while—maybe in some cool coastal town. Live in a small place on the beach, surf, eat fruit, and read your books. It would be fun."

But California was too far away. I spent most of my life in Maine, went to college in New York. I never loved the food, not like he did, and Napa might not give me anything that I already didn't have.

"I don't know. Let me think about it, maybe," I said.

"Sure." He knew I wouldn't go.

We spent the next day floating in his pool and drinking beer. He had a greyhound named Romeo who sat under the bushes and ate flowers and drank pool water all day. Romeo moved for no one and Sal laughed about how much trouble he was going to have getting him in the car and driving him all the way to California. It was a long drive and Romeo would throw up going around the block.

I splashed water at the dog and smiled at the thought of him cooped up in the backseat of the car. He turned his long, skinny neck to me and then went back to the flowers and kept eating.

The afternoon sun moved slowly from the east to settle in the west and we watched it go by on our backs, with the pool water drying on our stomachs, floating and drunk. We told stories about college and parties and about people we no longer knew. The afternoon passed warm and happy, consciously unaware of anything. It was a memory before it ever really started.

The wind picked up in the late afternoon and goose bumps ran across my arms and back as I got out of the pool. I grabbed two beers from the cooler and opened them with a towel over my hands to keep the sharp edges of the metal caps from cutting into my pruned skin. I handed one to Sal.

"Tomorrow," he was looking at Romeo who was still eating flowers. "Tomorrow let's go to the Poconos. We'll go down to the river. I'll call Chas and Gerry and we can just hang out."

"OK."

Chas and Gerry went to high school in Pittston with Sal and never went to college, but came up every weekend to meet college girls. It would be good to see them, but for now we were tired. We took naps after the pool and when I woke up my mouth was dry, my head was heavy, and I was exhausted. The evening passed in a blur.

We got Chas and Gerry out of bed at seven the next morning and got on the road into the mountains. I was glad to be out of Pittston. The mountains were green and flashed past the car in a blur. Gerry and Chas talked the whole time, Sal drove, and I just looked out the window and laughed at their stories.

"So the funny thing about all of this," Chas had a hard Philly accent, "is that this woman is bitching about whatever I'm doing, which really was what I was supposed to be doing, and the whole time Gerry's in the backyard clipping the bushes too short and throwing sticks at her dog."

"There's a lesson there, Will. Even if you couldn't get it from this kid's story." Gerry was from the hills, but he talked like Chas from spending so much time with him. "The lesson is that you don't screw around with people who are doing work for ya. Simple."

"So how long have you two been in business?"

"You mean landscaping?"

"Yeah."

"Three months, I think."

"Yeah, we started right when the winter ended. It ain't bad. Gonna be harder in the summer when we're doing yards and it's hot as hell and we're sweating, but it ain't bad. I don't know what we're gonna do in the winter, though."

"Well, the thing is that we can do what we want. This is our business. If we wanna shovel or plow or just get the hell outta here and do whatever, that's cool."

"Are you guys happy? With what you're doing?"

"Hell yeah, man." The landscaping idea had been Chas's and he was excited about it. "We're doing what we want, when we want. Ain't got nobody to tell me when to come to work. We hired some good guys, got a lot of lawns, you know. Some businesses too."

"That's the key—businesses. They always got cash and they don't have some son that's gonna be old enough to mow in two years."

"Well, the thing is, you have to do more than mow. That's why we're getting into landscaping, real landscaping. Ya know?"

Four years and $80,000 had not been enough to buy my way into something that I liked or even tell me what I liked. Chas and Gerry could not name all the Great Lakes, but they had their own business and they loved it.

We got to the river around noon and parked the car in a small gravel lot in the middle of a pine forest. The smell of the trees was sharp and cut into your lungs when you breathed, but it was better than the city and definitely better than the staleness of the bus.

"I think the river's down that way, right?" Gerry only came here twice a summer and he was still lost.

"No, no, no. Numbnuts. That way. Christ, if we listened to you we'd still be in the driveway. Shut up and grab the other side of the cooler."

"Chas, I'll kick your ass right now."

"Will you two shut up? For once? Really." They grumbled and Sal looked to me and said, "Will, can you lock the doors? The keys are in my pocket." He was holding a second cooler and I fished keys out of his shirt pocket and hit the lock button and stuffed them back in his shirt.

"Oh ho. Looks like someone's been hiding smokes." I grabbed a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and stuck one in my mouth.

"You bastard. You been bummin' mine this whole time? Will, give me one of them."

I threw the pack to Chas and he handed one to Gerry and then stuffed the cigarettes back into Sal's shirt and patted him on the chest.

Sal grumbled, "OK, OK. That's great. Just pick that cooler up and let's go."

We skidded down the steep slope of the trail and even with flipflops I scuffed my feet on tufts of grass and bared roots. I got dirt and cuts on my toes and bug bites on my ankles. The sun was full over our heads now and the trees didn't really break the rays that were coming down. Bugs hissed and sang from the grass on both sides of the trail and blocked out some of the yelling between Gerry and Chas.

The river ran across the bottom of a valley, split the trees for a hundred yards across and wound for miles in both directions. We dropped our stuff on the mud and pulled our shirts off and tumbled into the water. The cold current pulled us along the muddy banks past the rocks on the far side. Floating in the clear water in the middle of the stream, the weeds reached up to tickle our backs.

Past the sticks and mud on the edge, Sal climbed up the bank to a small rock formation and jumped into the river. We all followed and jumped off the rocks for a while until we were tired and the shadows were starting to stretch from the base of the trees toward the river.

I swam back to where our stuff was, against the current, and waded until the water was shallow enough for me to kneel in it. I crossed the sticks and mud to sit in the tall grass where I could smoke cigarettes and watch the water pass. Chas and Gerry and Sal followed me out and we sat in the grass and dried in the sun. Chas told stories about times he came to school and stood with the rolling sun to his back and scratched his windblown hair. He blocked the sun from landing on us, but it hit him and outlined him in golden streaks. He fumbled through words and stories and smoked his cigarette and tried to pretend he knew why we were leaving now and why we had left in the first place. We stayed until two then got in the car and left.

By three, we were bored. Following a stream of cars bouncing down a side road led us to a sign for The Mountain Gather-ing: Three Days of Music and Peace.

We rented a campsite and set up our tent next to a small stream to bathe in the water. Only problem was the campers used the stream as a bathroom and so we jumped the fence surrounding a pool on the neighboring campgrounds and swam and washed.
The rest of the daylight hours went to drinking and talking. Men, women, and children sat on blankets, throwing Frisbees, cooking, and laughing. Some of them sat on the ground with huge water bongs in front of them. As night fell, someone lit a bonfire and a group of guys with guitars sat down and started playing.

I took a deep breath, exhaled the city, and took off my shoes. We sat with women who were holding children asleep on their laps, men rolling joints, and dogs that ran everywhere. Someone was spinning neon-colored glow sticks in the night and the trails wove around in patterns. I lost myself in the random order of the colors and the shapes they made. The evening passed and the fire burned.

When I was a child my parents took us to the ocean and we made fires on the beaches. I'd throw logs in to watch the sparks fly from them as they popped. The waves tumbled on the beach and when the tide was out they were far away, constant, dull, rhythmic. When the tide was in the waves crashed fast and close together.

In the morning, I'd wake to the smell of burnt wood in my dirty hair and in my clothes. My hands smelled like it and when I showered I could taste the wood in my mouth as the water dripped from my hair. That smell still reminds me of the ocean and the tumbling waves rumbling far off at a low tide. Those memories rolled over me as I watched the glow sticks twirl and listened to the twang of the guitar and the sound of the wood crackling and the dogs barking.

Stiff joints from the night air and the hard ground greeted me in the morning. I unzipped the tent and stood outside on the dew-covered grass to watch the smoldering fires and the few people that were already awake and cooking breakfast. Another loud pull of the zipper and Sal stood outside, handing me a cigarette.

"I think it's over now."

"Yeah," I said without looking at him. "But at least we won't have to listen to those two bitch."

We stood in the quiet of the morning for a few minutes before Chas and Gerry came out and started arguing again. We packed our stuff back into the cars and drove out of the mountains and back into town

After Chas and Gerry left us to go mow lawns and whatever else made them happy, it was just Sal and me again, wilting on his couch. The tap-tapping of rain on the windows was lulling us to sleep when the door popped open and a tall girl with tanned skin walked in. She dropped down on the couch and pulled her bare feet under her, smiled at Sal and introduced herself to me. You could see in their faces that I was a third wheel.

"I'm gonna buy a Greyhound ticket south. Time for me to go."

Sal made a half-hearted attempt at convincing me to stay. I refused, so he drove me to the bus station.
"Where you gonna go?"

"Don't know. A beach. Anywhere."
"Gonna get a job?"

"No. I'm gonna run away. What kind of runaway gets a job?"

"A broke one."

Sal said he knew guys who went to South Carolina. Charleston. They got jobs at restaurants or on the water. It was far, it was close, it was new enough to be different. We half-hugged in the doorway of the station and I tossed my bag over my shoulder and watched his jeep as he drove off.

The call came for the bus south—first stop DC. I grabbed my bag and made my way to the front of the line. Inside, the bus reeked of fake leather, dirty laundry, and sweaty people.

I found a seat halfway to the back of the bus and sat down next to the window, sighed, and leaned my head against the back of the seat. With a plop, a large woman dropped down next to me. The air in her seat burst out into mine and I rose a little and then sunk back down. She was out of breath and her big leg was sticky with sweat and thumped against mine. I pushed closer to the window. She pushed her bag on the floor under my feet.

"You gonna turn on the AC?" she yelled to the driver.

"I gotta wait to shut the door first. Hot out there, I ain't wastin' all my gas."

"It's friggin' hot back here, too."

The driver ignored her and she pushed back in her seat and cursed him under her breath. She swept her long curly hair behind her shoulders with both hands and looked at me.

"Ain't you hot? It's like a damn oven in here."

I smiled a small smile and said, "Yeah, but you'll only make it worse by getting mad."

Satisfied with my drugstore wisdom, she smiled and told me that her name was Tamra. Tamra who had a boyfriend and a job in North Carolina and an ailing mother in Philly. She split her time between them all and the bags under her eyes showed it.

Her boyfriend was Jerome, a construction worker born and raised in Charlotte. They met on a cruise and Tamra quit her job in Philly and moved to Charlotte to be with him. He was a good guy. She loved him, but her mother couldn't take the heat, so Tamra traveled back and forth. Bad luck was typical for Tamra. From fourteen on she raised her younger brothers when her mom's second husband took off. Her mother had diabetes and daily doses of medication, regular hospital visits, and needles were too much reality for every man she met.

"So what are you going south for?" Tamra asked.

I told her about how I quit my job and left home without any idea of where I was going. She laughed when I told her I'd never been to Charleston and was shocked that someone could just pack up and go. But what she really couldn't understand was why I had chosen to take the bus. For her the bus was a cross to bear, a sign of her poor background, and she'd much rather have been on a plane with the rich white people she served at the country club.

"So what do you do? For fun, I mean. Do you, like, take safaris and stuff?"

"Actually, this is the first time I've ever done anything like this. This is my first time away from home. I went skydiving for the first time this summer, though. That was fun."

"Skydiving? You're crazy, boy. There's no way I'd do that. I'm scared of planes anyway. No way I'm gonna jump outta one."
"You're not even curious?"

"Me? What? White people stuff—that's what my boyfriend says. White people are always doing crazy stuff. You won't catch black people doin' all that. Too dangerous."

"How about scuba diving or camping or hiking?"

"White people stuff. I don't wanna get eaten by no sharks. I don't like bugs and I walk too much anyway." She looked at me and put her finger up and shook her head.

I leaned back and laughed.

I asked her, "So what else won't you do?"

If it was dangerous or cold or sweaty, it was white people stuff. She never went camping or stayed in dirty places or stepped down a level. She had risen above dirty or broken down or beaten up. To go back meant to step back and she wanted none of it. Her voice was soft, but her pride was hard and she'd bitten down on a cold morning with not enough blankets or not enough food too many times.

Tamra turned away and pushed herself against the arm of the chair and chewed on her gum. I turned back to the window and stared at the mountains until they were out of sight and then watched the cars. I thought about my family and friends and what stories I'd have if I went home. It was all adventure and it made my stomach flutter, the way a child gets standing in the dim light of his living room counting presents on Christmas morning.

Squealing brakes woke me up as the bus jerked to a stop. Bags, soda cans, shoes, and a Walkman slid up the aisle, some of it making it far enough to hit the front and tumble down the stairs to the door. I sat up and looked around. The early evening sun was low enough to splash through the windows and the bus was golden and blinding. Everyone was confused and asking questions. I tried to relax but the bus was getting hot again and Tamra started to fidget and pushed her sweaty thigh against mine.

"Looks like we got some traffic coming into DC," the driver yelled over the intercom.

"No shit," yelled the man who had been slapping his crying son in the terminal back in Philly.

"We're only about thirty miles from the beltway, but it looks like it's gonna take some time to get there."

"You've gotta be kidding me." Where were we? Not even to DC?

"That's nothing," Tamra said. "You know what that means on the Greyhound? It means we're gonna miss the connection in DC. And that means we're gonna have to catch another bus when we get there. But everything will be delayed. I bet it's another day to North Carolina."

And so we sat. After an hour the driver told us to get out and stretch our legs. I leaned against the back of the guardrail with Tamra and we smoked cigarettes and traded stories about home. We had nothing in common and yesterday we never would've said a word to one another. But there, on the side of the highway, thirty miles outside of DC, we were friends. I leaned back and smiled as the sun shined on my face. I could be at work right now staring at my computer, I thought as I flicked the cigarette into the street.

Next to us, the driver sat on the guardrail listening to his portable radio.

"Aw, man. Damn," he said looking at the radio. "We're gonna be here all night." Then he looked up at us. "Some guy got shot in the head in his own damn car. Some kind of drug deal or something. Hell, by the time they clean that mess up, it'll be morning."

My heart sank. I couldn't believe it. We hadn't even really started.

"Are you serious?" I asked him. "I mean, shot in his car?"

He flashed a gold-toothed grin and slapped his knee. "Welcome to DC, son."

We passed time sitting on the grass in the median with the empty cans and broken bits of plastic from traffic accidents that were swept off the road. We told dirty jokes and tried to guess where the other passengers were going. The bus moved forward a little bit in the beginning, but that stopped when the police arrived and quartered off the highway as a crime scene. It took more than an hour to get a new route.

Sitting there I could taste the exhaust and dust and listen to bus riders arguing with car owners. And there I sat. Waiting. Listening to the sounds of anarchy. The fighting, looting, and loathing. Well, not so much looting. Tamra sat quietly in the grass and watched the light blue run across the sky to the west. I threw rocks at the bottles and smoked cigarettes and was happy I was in the dirty grass instead of my clean office.

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