The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (2 page)

A
bout six months ago, in this armpit town outside Austin, Texas, Mickey Goodman of Tel Aviv killed a seventy-year-old minister and his wife. Goodman shot them in their sleep at point-blank range. To this day nobody knows how he got into the apartment, but he must have had a key. The whole story sounds too far out. I mean, how does a guy with no record, an Israeli paratrooper, just get up one morning and put a slug into the heads of two people he's never even met, in some armpit town in Texas—and someone called Goodman no less. The night they announced it on the news, I didn't even know, because I was with Alma at the movies. Later, in bed, we were really getting into it when suddenly she started crying. I stopped right away, 'cause I thought I was hurting her, but she said
I should go on, and that her crying was a good sign actually.

The prosecution said Goodman had been paid thirty thousand for the murder and that the whole thing had to do with some local feud over an inheritance. Fifty years ago the fact that the minister and his wife were black would only have helped him, but nowadays it's the other way around. The fact that the old man was a minister also worked against him. His attorney announced that after the trial, if Goodman was found guilty, he'd ask to serve out his sentence back home in Israel, because with all the blacks in US prisons, his life wouldn't be worth a used teabag. The prosecution, on the other hand, claimed that Goodman would be dead much sooner anyway. Texas is one of the few states where they still have capital punishment. I haven't had any contact with Goodman for ten years now, but back in high school he used to be my best friend. I'd spend all my time with him and with Dafne, his girlfriend back in junior high. Once we got into the army, we lost touch. I'm no good at keeping tabs on people. Alma's great at it, though. Her best friends are people she's known since kindergarten. I kind of envy her for that.

The trial lasted three months. Loads of time considering that everyone was convinced Goodman did it. I told my dad that something about the whole story just didn't make sense to me. I mean, we knew Mickey. He'd spent a lot of time at our house. And my father said: “You never know what goes on in people's heads.” My mother said she always knew he was riding for a fall. He had that sick-dog
look in his eyes. She said it made her shudder to think that this murderer had eaten out of her dishes, had sat down to the table with us. I thought back to the last time we'd met. It was at Dafne's funeral. She'd been sick, and died. We were fresh out of the army. I came to the funeral, and he made me leave. He was so open-and-shut in the way he told me to beat it that I didn't even ask why. That was about six years ago, but I still remember the hateful look in his eyes. We haven't spoken since.

Every day when I got home from work, I'd look for a report about the trial on CNN. Once every few days, they'd give an update. Sometimes, when they showed his picture, I'd miss him a lot. It was always the same one, this old passport photo—his hair parted, like some kid at a Memorial Day ceremony. Alma was pretty excited that I'd known him. It was on her mind all the time. A few weeks ago she asked me what was the worst thing I'd done in my whole life. I told her how after Sarah Gross's mother drowned, Mickey and I wrote this graffiti on the wall of her house:
Your mother goes down.
Alma thought that was a pretty awful thing to do, and that Goodman didn't exactly come across as a nice guy in that story either. The worst thing Alma ever did was while she was in the army. Her commander, who was fat and repulsive, kept trying to ball her, and she hated him, especially because he was married and his wife was pregnant at the time. “Get the picture?” She took a drag on her cigarette. “His wife carrying his baby around inside her, and all he wants the whole time is to fuck other women.” Her commander was
totally hung up on her, so she made the most of it and told him she'd agree to do it with him, but only if he paid a bundle, a thousand shekels, which looked like a lot to her back then. “I didn't care about the money.” She cringed as she recalled. “I just wanted to humiliate him. To make him feel like no woman would have him unless he paid. If there's one thing I hate it's men who cheat.” Her commander arrived with a thousand shekels in an envelope, except he was so excited that he couldn't get it up. But Alma wouldn't give him his money back, which made the humiliation twice as bad. She told me his money disgusted her so much that she buried it in some savings plan, and to this very day she won't go near it.

The ending of the trial came as a surprise, for me at least, and Goodman got the death sentence. The Japanese announcer on CNN said the prisoner had cried quietly when he heard the verdict. My mother said he had it coming, and my father said the same thing he always says: “You never know what goes on in people's heads.” The second I heard about the sentence, I knew I had to fly over there and visit him before they killed him. We used to be best friends once, after all. It was kind of strange, but everyone except my mother understood. My older brother, Ari, asked me to smuggle in a laptop on my way back from America, and said that if worst came to worst I could just leave it in customs and go.

In Texas I went straight from the airport to Mickey's prison. I'd set it up before I left. They gave me half an hour. When I went in to meet him, he was sitting on a chair. His
hands and legs were tied up. The guards said they had to tie him up because he kept going wild, but he seemed perfectly calm to me. I think that they were just saying it, that they just got their kicks from coming down on him. I sat facing him. Everything seemed so ordinary. The first thing he said to me was “Sorry.” He said he felt bad about what happened at Dafne's funeral. “I was just plain mean to you,” he said. “Shouldn't have done that.” I told him it was ancient history. “It must have been bugging me for a long time, and suddenly, with her death and all, it just came out. It wasn't because you were sleeping with her behind my back, I swear to you. It's just because you broke her heart.” I told him to cut the crap, but I couldn't make my voice not tremble. “Forget it,” he said. “She told me, and I forgave you long ago. The whole business at the funeral—take it from me, I was acting like a jerk.” I asked him about the murder, but he didn't want to talk about it, so we talked about other things. After twenty minutes, the guard said the half hour was up.

They used to execute people by electrocution, and when they'd throw the switch, the lights in the whole area would flicker for a few seconds, and everyone would stop what they were doing, just like when there's a special newsflash. I thought about it, how I'd sit in my hotel room and the lights would go dim, but it didn't happen. Nowadays they use a lethal injection, so nobody can even tell when it's happening. They said it would be on the hour. I looked at the second hand, and when it reached twelve, I told myself: “He must be dead now.” The truth is that I was the one
who wrote the graffiti on Sarah's wall. Mickey had just watched. I think he was even kind of against it. And now he was probably not alive anymore.

On the return flight, the seat next to me was taken by this fat guy. His seat was a little broken but the attendants couldn't move him to a different one because the flight was full. His name was Pelleg, and he told me he'd just gotten out of the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he was returning from a special course where they train people for senior executive positions in hi-tech.

I looked at him leaning back, with his eyes closed, struggling to find a comfortable position in his broken seat, when suddenly it came to me that maybe this guy could have been Alma's commander in the army. Her commander was fat too. I could picture him waiting for her in some stinking hotel room, his sweaty hands counting up the thousand shekels. Thinking about the lay that was to happen, about his wife, about the baby. Trying to give himself some excuse, why it's really OK after all.

I looked at him squirming in his seat beside me. His eyes were shut the whole time, but he wasn't asleep. Then he gave a kind of groan, for no reason. Maybe he was remembering it too. I dunno, suddenly I felt sorry for the guy.

O
n Bernadotte Avenue, right next to the Central Bus Station, there's a hole in the wall. There used to be an ATM there once, but it broke or something, or else nobody ever used it, so the people from the bank came in a pickup and took it, and never brought it back.

Somebody once told Udi that if you scream a wish into this hole it comes true, but Udi didn't really buy that. The truth is that once, on his way home from the movies, he screamed into the hole in the wall that he wanted Dafne Rimalt to fall in love with him, and nothing happened. And once, when he was feeling really lonely, he screamed into the hole in the wall that he wanted to have an angel for a friend, and an angel really did show up right after that, but he was never much of a friend, and he'd always
disappear just when Udi really needed him. This angel was skinny and all stooped and he wore a trench coat the whole time to hide his wings. People in the street were sure he was a hunchback. Sometimes, when there were just the two of them, he'd take the coat off. Once he even let Udi touch the feathers on his wings. But when there was anyone else in the room, he always kept it on. Klein's kids asked him once what he had under his coat, and he said it was a backpack full of books that didn't belong to him and that he didn't want them to get wet. Actually, he lied all the time. He told Udi such stories you could die: about places in heaven, about people who when they go to bed at night leave the keys in the ignition, about cats who aren't afraid of anything and don't even know the meaning of
scat.
The stories he made up were something else, and to top it all, he'd cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die.

Udi was nuts about him and always tried hard to believe him. Even lent him some money a couple of times when he was hard up. As for the angel, he didn't do a thing to help Udi. He just talked and talked and talked, rambling off his harebrained stories. In the six years he knew him, Udi never saw him so much as rinse a glass.

When Udi was in basic training, and really needed someone to talk to, the angel suddenly disappeared on him for two solid months. Then he came back with an unshaven don't-ask-what-happened face. So Udi didn't ask, and on Saturday they sat around on the roof in their underpants just taking in the sun and feeling low. Udi looked at the other rooftops with the cable hookups and the solar heaters
and the sky. It occurred to him suddenly that in all their years together he'd never once seen the angel fly.

“How about flying around a little,” he said to the angel. “It would make you feel better.”

And the angel said: “Forget it. What if someone sees me?”

“Be a sport,” Udi nagged. “Just a little. For my sake.” But the angel just made this disgusting noise from the inside of his mouth and shot a gob of spit and white phlegm at the tar-covered roof.

“Never mind,” Udi sulked. “I bet you don't know how to fly anyway.”

“Sure I do,” the angel shot back. “I just don't want people to see me, that's all.”

On the roof across the way they saw some kids throwing a water bomb. “You know.” Udi smiled. “Once, when I was little, before I met you, I used to come up here a lot and throw water bombs on people in the street below. I'd aim them into the space between that awning and the other one,” he explained, bending over the railing and pointing down at the narrow gap between the awning over the grocery store and the one over the shoe store. “People would look up, and all they'd see was the awning. They wouldn't know where it was coming from.”

The angel got up too, and looked down into the street. He opened his mouth to say something. Suddenly, Udi gave him a little shove from behind, and the angel lost his balance. Udi was just fooling around. He didn't really mean to hurt the angel, just to make him fly a little, for
laughs. But the angel dropped the whole five floors, like a sack of potatoes. Stunned, Udi watched him lying there on the sidewalk below. His whole body was completely still, except the wings that were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.

T
here's this village in Uzbekistan that was built right smack at the mouth of Hell. The soil there isn't any good for farming, and the minerals aren't too great either, so whatever small income the inhabitants can earn to make ends meet comes mostly from tourism. And when I say tourism I'm not talking about rich Americans in Hawaiian shirts, or grinning Japanese who take pictures of everything that moves. Because what would anyone like that be looking for in a godforsaken place like Uzbekistan. The tourism I'm talking about is domestic. As domestic as you can get.

The people coming out of Hell are very different from one another, and it's kind of hard to give an exact profile. Fat/thin, with/without a moustache—a very mixed crowd.
If they have anything in common at all, it's the way they act. They're all kind of quiet and polite, always giving you the exact change and everything. They never try to haggle over prices, and they always know just what they want—no hemming and hawing. They come in, ask how much, gift wrap/no gift wrap, and that's that. They're all kind of very short-term guests, spending the day and then going back to Hell. And you never see the same one twice, cause they only come out every one hundred years. That's just how it is. Those are the rules. Like in the army when you only get one weekend off out of three, or on guard duty, when you're only allowed to sit down for five minutes every hour on the hour. It's the same with the people in Hell: one day off every hundred years. If there ever was an explanation, nobody remembers it anymore. By now it's more a matter of maintaining the status quo.

Anna had worked in her grandfather's grocery store for as long as she could remember. Apart from the villagers, there weren't that many customers, but once every few hours someone would come in smelling of sulfur and ask for a pack of cigarettes, or chocolate, or whatever. Some of them asked for things that they'd probably never actually seen, and had only heard about from some other sinner. So every once in a while she'd see them struggle to open a can of Coke or try to eat cheese with the plastic wrapper still on it. Things like that. Sometimes she'd try to chat them up, to make friends, but they never knew Uzbek or whatever you call the language she spoke. And in the end, it would always wind up that she'd just point to herself and say
Anna
and
they'd point to themselves and mumble
Claus
or
Su-Ying
or
Steve
or
Avi
, and then they'd pay and take off. Sometimes she'd see them again later that evening cruising the neighborhood or hanging out on some street corner, staring out into the evening sky, and the next day she wouldn't see them anymore. Her grandfather, who suffered from a condition that wouldn't let him sleep more than an hour a night, would tell her how he'd see them at dawn going back down through the opening, which was right next to their front porch. It was from this same porch that he also saw her father, who was a pretty nasty piece of work, going down through the opening like the others, stone drunk, and singing some really off-color song. Ninety-odd years later he too was supposed to come back for a day.

Funny, but you could say these people were the most interesting thing in Anna's life. Their faces, the ridiculous clothes, the attempts to guess what terrible thing they were supposed to have done to deserve Hell. 'Cause the truth is that it really was the only thing going on. Sometimes, when she got bored in the shop, she'd try to picture the next sinner who'd walk through the door. She'd always try to imagine them very good-looking or funny. And once every few weeks there really might be some gorgeous hunk or else some guy who'd insist on eating the contents of a can without opening it first, and then she and her grandfather would talk about it for days.

Once, this guy walked in who was so gorgeous that she knew she simply had to be with him. He bought some white wine, some soda water, and all sorts of hot spices,
and instead of adding up his bill, she just took him by the hand and pulled him toward the house. And the guy, without understanding a word she was saying, followed her, and tried his very best, but when they both realized that he just couldn't, Anna hugged him and gave him her biggest smile, to make sure he understood it didn't really matter. But that didn't help, and he cried right through the night. From the moment he left, she prayed every night for him to come back and for everything to be alright. She was praying more for him than for herself, and when she told her grandfather about it, he smiled and said she had a good heart.

Two months later, he was back. He came into the shop and bought a pastrami sandwich, and when she smiled at him, he smiled back. Her grandfather said it couldn't be him, because everyone knows they only come out once every hundred years, and that it must be his twin or something, and she wasn't really completely sure either. In any case, when they got into bed, things actually went fine. He seemed content, and so did she. And suddenly she understood that maybe it wasn't only him that she was praying for after all. Later, he went into the kitchen and found the bag he'd left behind the last time, with the soda water and the spices and the wine, and he took it and mixed a drink for Anna and himself, that was fizzy and hot and cold and wine too. A kind of spritzer from Hell.

When the night was over, and he was getting dressed to go, she asked him not to, and he shrugged like someone who had no choice. And after he left, she prayed he'd come a third time, if it was really him, and if not, that someone
would come who looked enough like him that she'd be able to make the same mistake. And a few weeks later, when she started throwing up, she prayed it would be a baby, but it turned out just to be a virus. It was just about then that people in the village began talking about plans to close up the opening from the inside. This had Anna very worried, but her grandfather said it was just a rumor being spread by people who had nothing better to do. “You've got nothing to worry about,” he said and smiled at her. “That opening has been there for so long that neither devil nor angel would ever have the nerve to close it.” And she believed him, except one particular night, she remembers, when she suddenly felt, for no special reason, and it wasn't even in her sleep, that the opening wasn't there anymore. She ran out in her nightgown and was happy to see that it still was. And then, she remembers, there was a moment when she had this urge to go down there. She felt as though she was being sucked in, because of how she felt about her special visitor, or maybe because she really wanted to see her father, who was a nasty piece of work, or maybe more than anything, it was because she didn't want to go on being alone in this boring village. She put her ear to the cold air coming out of the opening. In the distance she could make out something that sounded like people screaming, or water running—it was impossible to tell just what it was. It was coming from really far away. Eventually she went back to bed, and a few days later, the opening really did disappear. Hell continued to exist down below, but nobody came out anymore.

Ever since the opening disappeared, it became harder
to make ends meet, and also much more tired and serene. Her grandfather died, she married the fishmonger's son, and the two shops merged. They had several children, and she loved to tell them stories, especially ones about the people who used to walk into the shop smelling of sulfur. Those stories would scare them, and they'd start to cry. But still, even though she couldn't understand why, she went right on telling them.