Ben said his last good bye. A drunken college drop out going to the city good bye party good bye. The have a good life good bye. The see you in another lifetime good bye. Sad good byes to friends he would never see again. Good bye to people wishing him best of luck, not the call when you get work sort of good bye.
He would never call. He was moving on, doing what you do when you move on. Like Satchel, “Don’t look back because the past might be gaining on you,” Paige said. Ben would never look back.
“Where will you be?”
Good bye.
“What’s your new address?”
Good bye.
“When will you get there?”
Good bye.
He crawled into the backseat of an overloaded sedan the next morning ; suitcases and bags stacked like a hermit’s apartment, enough room to squeeze in. College boy gear jammed the rest of the space jammed floor to ceiling, except for a driver and passenger seat in front.
The three of them rotate driving, stopping for gas and nothing else. Driver moves to passenger, passenger sleeps in back, backseater drives. It worked until Wyoming where, too tired to drive, they laid out in sleeping bags alongside the freeway.
The first guyleft in Cleveland. Shaker Heights. Where to live if you live there. The driver pushed on to Pittsburgh and dropped Ben at the bus station.
“You going to be okay?”
Good bye.
“Man I hate leaving you in a bus station in the middle of the night.”
Good bye
“We had a great trip.”
Good bye.
One bus ride to another bus station, doing the all-my-life-in-my-bags shuffle.
Ben pulled a phone number out of his wallet, a number worth more than any bills he had ever folded in there. It was the number of the future. The number of hope. The number of dreams. He punched it into a mangled pay phone on a wall of mangled phones hung too high to sit and too low to stand.
She picked up on the third ring.
“Ben, is it really you?”
Hello.
“You sound so tired?”
Hello.
“Ben, where are you?”
