Several asphalt arteries curled in on themselves like black snake fireworks before merging into the single ramp leading to the Pulaski Skyway. Traffic crept along the thin ramp, past a homeless man acting as a private toll collector, and merged into fifty-five-mile-per-hour traffic.
But at least it wasn’t the blind merge that rose from the bowels of Route 1 & 9 and into the skyway.
Jasper remembered a news story—a drunk, off-duty cop with a six-pack on the passenger’s seat at the ready took the blind merge without yielding and knocked a minivan onto its nose, killing a mother and child.
Such a terrible design. Jasper found the traffic grid for Jersey City peculiar. It was as if the city’s planners cracked an egg and attempted to fit the two halves of the broken shell back together again. The city layout sat slightly askew. Streets bent at odd angles across intersections. Wide roadways spilled out between vacant lots and died a hundred feet away.
It was here Jasper entertained an alternate existence. If he had gone to college… If he had become an engineer… If he had gotten the chance to test his potential… If, if, if… If engineers for the New Jersey Department of Transportation could have designed something as flawed and incomprehensible as this, surely he could have been up to the task.
Jasper was surprised there weren’t more deaths on the Pulaski Skyway, even sober ones. High speeds. Narrow skyway. The barriers were high piles of concrete. In a car, the effect on the driver was tunnel vision—an infinite hurtling toward disaster. For a bus driver, the terror was compounded. The Pulaski Skyway hovered one-hundred-and-fifty feet above Jersey City and the wet trails of Meadowlands waste Winds gusted up to thirty- or forty-miles-per-hour at that height. And as the road gave way to the bridge, the rusted grates were liable to catch a tire and jerk the bus that spare inch from the lane’s edge.
So, Jasper avoided the Pulaski Skyway. It was the route of last resort.
The February snowstorm started late in the afternoon and NJ Transit was cancelling trains because of the icing. The early commuter bus was standing room only by the time he left Journal Square. (Adding the route wasn’t worth the extra money on a day like today.) Another twenty squeezed on at Grove Street before he reached capacity.
A finance guy—the Brooks Brothers suit, face in the iPhone and earbuds in place were the giveaway—didn’t see Jasper’s hand up, didn’t hear him say, “At capacity.”
Jasper closed the accordion door on him as he took a step onto the bus. The finance guy shoved the door flat. He flipped the earbuds off. “What are you doing, asshole?”
“At capacity,” Jasper said. He wagged a finger toward a sign listing the maximum the bus could carry and closed the door again. The finance guy stumbled back before he could argue and the door caught in front of him. He shouted but the sound was muffled. He smacked his briefcase against the side of the bus as Jasper pulled into the traffic lane.
“He’s not having a good day,” a woman in an aisle seat said and the passengers around her tittered. They were relieved to not be out there with him. Those in the aisle wrestled off their coats and excused a wild sleeve flapping into another passenger’s face.
“Would you mind?” A messenger bag passed across the row and hoisted into the overhead bin. There was a camaraderie—they’d formed a community fed by gratitude. A warm bus for them and the memory of their faces being pelted by snow as they anxiously sought a ride home fresh in their minds. They were the lucky ones and they knew it.
Thick flakes had been coming down for hours but slowly. Now the snow poured over the windshield and started sticking to the pavement. The roads were getting sloppy.
The CB radio crackled—it almost never came on but when it did, it meant a road closure or a bad accident. There was a multi-car crash on I-78 and the thing was going to be impassable for hours. He’d have to take the Pulaski. No way around it.
You could get a read on the energy with certain busloads, Jasper thought. He caught parts of phone calls home:
“I got the alert about the train. I took the PATH to Grove Street and grabbed the bus—”
“—standing room only but it’s fine. I’m just glad I got out now. It’s really coming down now.”
“—figure about two hours. Love you too.”
The polite calls of passengers aware of their surroundings—short and whispered. They were only civil because they had gotten a seat on the bus and didn’t have to contend with the traffic, Jasper thought. Put them outside behind the finance guy and they would be flipping off the bus as he pulled away. Anyone’s a few bad turns away from becoming a savage.
The energy soured in the second hour.
“Can you see anything?”
“Nothing. I can’t see a damn thing. The bridge is blocking—”
“—got to have a way to get a lane moving.”
Jasper could only remember a handful of times when traffic stopped completely. The tangle of off-ramps and services roads near these major thoroughfares in North Jersey meant there was usually some way to get a tow-truck to clear the blockage. Even if it was a fatal crash and they had to do a full accident scene investigation, the State Troopers could manage one flow lane.
Those times traffic had stopped entirely, his ex-wife Denise watched him. She joined him on the days when he picked her up from her overnight shift at the nursing home. He could sense her staring during the heavy traffic, and it both irritated and comforted him. When his shoulders tensed and he cracked his knuckles, she would pull a pack of Nicorette and a Butterfinger out of her bag. The only time he would eat that candy bar was when they were stuck like this, and the Nicorette took enough of the edge away so he could enjoy the rare treat.
Jasper craved that analgesic burn of the nicotine gum inside his mouth. He never carried it himself, though. He couldn’t breathe all of a sudden, or he could but it didn’t move through him. The air got to the base of his throat and held there. He sipped it down as if it were a thick milkshake in a straw.
Hail pelted the bus. Jasper could feel the bus shift with the wind, and his window rattled against the rubber casing. He was on a bridge over a hundred feet in the air, open to the elements but he felt claustrophobic. The sun had set an hour ago and he could only see a few sets of taillights bleeding out in front of him while the storm raged.
The phone calls in the bus got louder. Politeness was a posture, and it didn’t take long to strip a person down to where that civility slackened. Two hours stuck on the Pulaski in a snowstorm would do it, Jasper thought.
“Excuse me.” A guy sitting in the first row, in Denise’s seat leaned forward. “Is there someone you could radio to find out how long we’re looking at here?”
Jasper pretended not to hear. The guy in the front row gave him the benefit of the doubt and stood up and stepped closer to repeat his question.
Jasper hooked his regular glasses into his front pocket and put his prescription sunglasses on. Sunglasses and staring out into the darkness. Closest he could get right now—or at his temporary homestead—to solitude.
“Unbelievable,” a woman who stood in the aisle and observed the exchange said.
Jasper raised his arm and pointed, stabbing emphatically toward the sign warning passengers not to talk to or distract the driver.
“It’s just a question. I know there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re all in the same boat here. You don’t need to get rude.”
The front of the bus, bored by their conversations with the home front, turned their heads to the raised voices. They whispered to one another to glean what was happening.
“Somebody’s asking about the driver calling the terminal and he’s ignoring him.”
Further down the bus, a game of telephone turned the interaction into something more sinister. The passengers standing and the ones in the aisle seats had seen something of the exchange — the guy in the front reaching over to touch the bus driver, the driver gesticulating wildly. The rumor escalated and the passengers in the back had determined there was a fight.
Lamarr Orens had tired of the bus commute five years ago. He had wanted to get another three years in before retirement — get to sixty-seven, get to full Social Security — but he was being tested. Six months ago there was that idiot getting a hand job across the aisle and trying to hide it with a messenger bag.
Now, he was stuck on a bus on the Pulaski Skyway next to an animated woman in her mid- to late-fifties named Donna, who was experiencing a moral crisis. He knew her name was Donna because she announced herself loudly during each of the seven or eight phone calls she placed—“Hi Rachel, this is Donna”; “Hi Andrew, this is Donna”; “Hi Rachel, this is Donna again.”
Didn’t matter if they answered the phone with, “Hey, Donna.” Didn’t matter if the Andrew answering the phone was her husband. Didn’t matter that every receiving cell phone displayed her name boldly. She had spent the better part of her life talking in a flip and cordless phone era and the mannerism was embedded into her subconscious.
“Yes, still stuck on this bus,” she said in her best imitation of a whisper, something her voice was incapable of producing. “I don’t know what to do. I think there was a fight or some hands and words with the bus driver and a passenger. What do I do? Do I call somebody? Do I call NJ Transit?”
With each phone call, she worked herself into more of fervor, peering over the seats or hovering and then slouching back down to report on the mood of the key parties in the front. Her black bob of hair, puffed up at the top and trimmed down at the nape of her neck, didn’t shift from its frozen shell of Aquanet.
After she’d polled her address book, she assessed the situation with her neighboring passengers.
“We should alert somebody, don’t you think? I’d feel terrible if something happened and we didn’t do something,” she said.
“It looks like everything’s calmed down now,” Lamarr said. “I don’t think we need to call anybody.”
He sympathized with the driver, who had no doubt been burdened by the passengers in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine and borne hundreds of indignities over the years. He also felt indebted to the driver for taking action during that indecency episode last year.
Lamarr’s opinion did little to sway Donna. She announced herself to a recording before learning she was on hold with the NJ Transit Customer Service line.
Jasper’s face burned as he heard the passengers talking about him. He enjoyed the occasions when he got to put one of them in their place and tolerated the ripples of commentary that followed, but he generally couldn’t stomach any attention directed his way. In the absence of anything else of interest happening around them, the busload focused on the tense twenty seconds between Jasper and the man in Denise’ seat.
Jasper heard the murmurs, the opinions on his stability. Some passengers who had stored their dislike of his grizzled appearance and attitude for years felt emboldened to voice their opinion.
“He’s always been an angry asshole,” one said.
Why didn’t he carry around any nicotine gum after Denise left? How had she always anticipated what he needed before he knew he needed it? Why had she put that expectation into his world and then ripped it from him? He’d had over thirty years of knowing he didn’t quite fit anywhere and steeling himself so we could bear any social interactions. She’d seeped in through the cracks and become a part of him. For fifteen years, he felt like he belonged somewhere. Now he realized he’d just been victim of a long con and was worse off now than he’d been before it.God, he needed a cigarette right now. He put the emergency brake on and stood to get his bag from the small storage closet between his seat and the first row behind him. This was a big violation. So would be sticking his head out of the window to get a couple hits on a cigarette. He didn’t care. Let them report him.
“What’s he doing?”
He reached into the duffle bag to feel for his jacket pocket. In doing so, he brushed up against some bubble packaging for medicine in an interior pocket of the bag. Cold medicine? Antihistamine? Any kind of mild sedative would be welcome right now. He pulled out a strip of Nicorette Denise must have snuck in. He stared at and turned it over as if he’d discovered a dead mouse and was looking for some hint at a cause of death. The CB radio came on. His sister’s voice.
“We’ve gotten reports of a physical altercation on number three-one-five-one. Three-one-five-one, can you call in with your status?”
Jasper felt the plastic bubble around the gum and then threw it on the ground. He tossed the duffle bag on the driver’s seat as he put on his coat. Then, he opened the accordion doors and grabbed the straps of the bag.
“Three-one-five-one, call in with—”
“Where are you going?”
He lifted his empty hand and gave the finger to the stunned passengers as walked off the bus. The slush was an inch deep and he could feel the dampness in his boot.
The snowflakes were still massive but the pace had slowed and they floated down like cottonwood seeds. The car radios and running motors were muffled under metal and the layer of heavy, wet snow. The sound merged, an accidental symphony of discordant instruments. He’d heard about audio geeks who struck parts of bridges with mallets to produce a song. He understood now why somebody would take the time to do that. The drone of all the stranded cars echoed off the steel beams of the bridge. Something soothing and resonant in it. Jasper tried to light a cigarette but the snow had soaked through the paper. Shouldn’t have thrown out that gum, he thought. No matter. He managed a few puffs before the coal sizzled and snuffed itself out.
He negotiated the narrow gaps between the cars. A few honked and somebody yelled out, “You ran out of gas?” He waved them off with the dead cigarette hand, conducting an orchestra only he could hear. The refinery lights blinked white and red on the outer edge of Kearny. That stretch of Turnpike could be intimidating and awe-inspiring if you could just take in the look of it—industrial revolution, man’s mastery over machinery to usher in his own destruction. Of course, you couldn’t just take in the sight of it. This was the swamps of Jersey territory and the dampness and snowfall held the smell of it. Jasper had a mile to go before he could find shelter at the Turnpike interchange, a mile to go and not a dry cigarette to be had, shuffling through the wet fart of New Jersey.
