A Slow Bus Ride To A Shallow Grave Scot Walker   © Copyright 2026 by Scot Walker

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The younger man, Charlie, rested his shoulder tentatively against the windowsill, stretching so far that his toes stuck out from the bottom seat cushion in front of him. Then he shifted his weight, forcing lumpy whiteness back into its straw-filled home with his gluteus maximus. . . maximally, he thought!

Charlie was beginning to feel as if the seats and the driver and even the other passengers were shrinking beneath him, as if they were totally insignificant identities. Charlie felt as though everyone around him was a non-entity, except of course, for Lon and himself. Perhaps that was the significance of their return, Charlie thought. Charlie was sure they’d return, he just wasn’t exactly sure where. Actually, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. He was with Lon, and at the moment, he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything. He had enough trouble thinking about returning. More thinking would turn his brain into white cotton stuffing like the seat covers and force it from his head. Charlie laughed as he slipped again into his own private world of reverie. Again, he lived in the peace of his boyish dreams.

Meanwhile, the aged Lon turned toward the window on the opposite side of the bus and stared. And as Lon gazed out of the filthy window, seeing the yellow fields, smelling the newly laid manure, watching the golden stalks of corn, he felt the tawdry earth yield itself to the corn seed’s thrusting motion as it shoved its way to the sky, just as Charlie had shoved his massive corncob into Lon so many times before. And Lon smiled, but for reasons Charlie would never understand.

A red farmhouse suddenly appeared on a hill; an ocher-colored hill, a hill matted with saffron straw and speckled with cotton, filled his sight. Lon glimpsed two small children playing outside. A girl, brown-eyed, dark-haired, plaid-dressed, six. A boy, light-haired. Blue? No, green eyes. Corduroyed and fl161552annelled, nearly eight. The children had built a store, a small country store, complete with sundry merchandise—food, clothing and hardware—emulating their dad, who had once run a country store just outside their town. The boy, a customer, happily spending, looking and laughing as the girl pretended to be the owner, salesman and clerk, serving and selling, smiling as she . . .

*****
A sapphire stream nearly surrounds two marshmallow hills, green and sensual, seeded with alfalfa.

A barn with thirteen doors rises from the yellow grassland.

And another.

Adrift in a blue-green sea, like two AWOL sailors, each with his sensuous thirteen buttons, which Lon had opened so many times before.

One golden moment passed.

And another.

And the old man had nearly forgotten Charlie, until Charlie began to stir restlessly from his unending nightmare. Charlie was oblivious to the real world, to facts, to life, but he was necessary, very very necessary, the old man thought.

“Ya got a cigarette?” Charlie mumbled in the petulant way that only Lon could fully comprehend.

“Yeah, here,” Lon said as he reached into his upper left-hand shirt pocket, slowly extracting, lifting, sacrificially offering the crisp white rolled gratuity to his friend. How could anyone fill his lungs with such crap, Lon wondered, as he took the remaining cigarette and placed it in his mouth. Then Lon dropped the crumpled package to the floor and shifted his feet so he could fit in comfortably with the pile of filth he had accumulated around himself. Even on a short run like this, Lon thought, it’s almost like being back inside—with the iron shackles clamped tightly around my ankles and the smegma smell of a thousand uncut men.

Lonnie kicked the pile of crap behind him. He kicked it hard. Then he kicked it again.

Charlie emulated him, hating white trash almost as much as he hated those who created it.

“Match?”

“Yeah, we’re certainly a match, all right, ain’t we?” Lon answered, allowing his mind to wander further than it should. Shit happens, he thought—ain’t that the story of my life!

“Hey, ya gotta match for my fag?” Charlie snarled. “How in the hell am I supposed to smoke without no God damned light?”

Lon brushed his heavy coat from his lap as he fumbled for a match in the bottom of his pants pocket. His feeble hands shifted around, merging with the material. Caught. Now ensnared. Helpless. Then detoured. Routed and rerouted. Constantly rerouted. Finally, freed, praise God, freed at last! “Yeah, here” Lon replied stoically.

“Thanks a lot,” the young man mumbled sarcastically.

Lon knew he was a worthless hunk of shit, but he wondered why he craved Charlie’s humiliation, why he longed to be abused. Instead of bravely facing his young companion, Lon mumbled, “You’re welcome,” and settled back into the wiry straw that stuck into his rotund lardass.

Charlie thought, while Lon tried not to think, wondering if he’d be better off thinking or not thinking.

Thick silence and more golden moments streamed past the men as the heat of the day became icy night, enveloping them, consuming them before it moved on to a cheerier place near the back of the bus.

Yet both the iciness and the passion were a living part of the man-men known as Lonnie-Charlie. They had been together so long they behaved as one—like the lovers they were, neither was completely whole without the other.

*****

Two ragged sailors stood together in their piss-stained yellowing Navy whites alongside the road, hitching a ride home. A short weekend pass, a week’s furlough, Lon didn’t know. The bus floated by yellow streams, the yellow centerline, yellow barns as it tore past the stolid yellow men standing alongside the road—passed and passing by.

Sensitively and seductively both men’s phallic-like thumbs moved monolithically, rocketing rapidly as the bus moved on. The soldiers stood still while the yellow dust saturated the yellow sky as they coughed spastically into the yellow air.

Again Lon’s vision overcame Charlie. Again Lon’s vision and thirst for unquenchable sights made Charlie rear from his dreams like a trapped schoolboy rears when faced with the certainty of a strapping at the end of the day.

“Forget them, Charlie,” the old man ordered, “they wasn’t really there, you know. It wasn’t really two soldier boys you just seen there, it was just the yellowness of the day. It was only the yellowness creeping in again. It was just the yellowness a-drying out the day.”

The old man was always trying to spare the boy, but Charlie was too stupid to be concerned with the yellowness or the day. So the old man had won again, temporarily at least, he had won again. And Charlie leaned onto the old man’s shoulder and serenely fell back to sleep.

Two purple barns crept like caterpillars from the distant hill. They crept across the horizon with their crimson silos, large like phalluses in the Indian summer sky, bulging with their siloed crops, erect and ready to ejaculate.

Fields of lemons and oranges blossomed, treeless. . . yes lemons and oranges alone in time. The world stood still. Alone. Lost and alone.

A woman with long blond hair stood erect, waiting. Then she encircled the barn, lunging upon the phallic towers, spreading her thighs, fighting off the men who stood around and gawked at them, as she squeezed the yellow corn’s strength callously away.

And blessed rest came to Lonnie at last. And filled up his day. Rest. Blessed. Sweet. Rest.

*****

Restaurant. Dark. Beanery. Greasy Spoon. Two men, surly, brawny, stand, thumping their chests in rage. Sniff their man sweat perfuming the air as they fight for the honor of one woman. Watch their sweet sweat trickle valueless and wasted into the yellow parched ground in the arena just outside the beanery.

*****

Lon remembered the yellow and orange flames bursting from the glowing rooftop of the navy barracks as they turned the wanton wasted lives inside to carnage. “The flames of God will destroy us all,” Lon thought half to himself and half to the window on the opposite side of the bus, as he remembered his youthful days of onanism, manlove and obsession with the sailors who showed him the best way for a man to get a nut. And Lonnie creamed his pants as he remembered the bodies heaped high into the saffron sky.

Softly Charlie, still a child, laughs behind the burning building, without sight of the activity within, but sensing the fun, the pain, the terror, seeing the fire and wanting to caress the flame.

As a young boy, Charlie had listened to the degenerate cries that became angry, vile and unstoppable screams. Most evenings, shortly after sunset, Charlie heard the yellow screams from the dirty yellow men. Charlie still sees the degenerates turn ashy gray, their bodies burned beyond recognition. Charlie knew he’d done the right thing back then, but he dreaded the day when someone would return the vengeance of his yellowness by turning him into coal black ash.

Charlie, as oblivious to Lon’s perceptions as he was to his own surroundings, easily took a match from Lon’s pocket and struck it against his shoe. Ssssshhhhhhhhhh, the flame burst forth. As he watched the cotton stuffing and the straw beneath Lon, Charlie thought how pleasant and beautiful it would be to watch them both burn. Burn in hell for what they had done to each other! Burn in hell for what Lon did to the sailors so many eons ago!

Charlie shielded the match, wondering why and wondering why not. Charlie lifted the match slowly to the Marlboro dangling from his Mick Jagger lips, sucking on the long thin white fag, smiling with thoughts of the past and future as he lit it and then rejoiced in its warmth.

For a moment, Charlie wondered why this cigarette wasn’t as good as the one he’d just smoked until he remembered the last one had come from Lon and anything Lon gave him was always better since it, like Lonnie’s body and soul, was given freely and sacrificially by the man Charlie controlled.

Charlie wondered now why he bothered to wonder—from that first night when he was just a boy, until the times he and Charlie had gotten it on, until the times they had spent in prison with so many customers waiting at their cell door. Charlie was tired of wondering. He was too screwed up to wonder about anyone or anything. So for the moment, Charlie ceased to wonder. Perhaps tomorrow when he’d be awake enough to wonder some more, but not today . . . Not now. Now, he didn’t care. Charlie didn’t want to know why things happened or why they didn’t happen. To hell with all the whys and with all the reasons for them, Charlie thought. To hell with all the whore whys and wherefores. To hell with them all! Crap happens, and me and Lonnie is the best damned examples of that anywhere.

“Whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, this cigarette would sure taste better if Lonnie had gave it to me!” Charlie repeated loudly enough to wake up his blind and aged friend. “Are we almost there? We’ve been run—ah—riding now for days. Are we almost there, Lon?”

“There?” Lon snapped peevishly, “where in the hell is there?” But the more alert Lon became, the more quickly he changed his attitude as he continued in his habitual sheepish yet, sarcastic tone. “Yeah, I guess we’re almost there—wherever in the hell there is. We’re almost ‘there’, boy, just hold on. Just like always, light your fires. Smoke your cigarettes. Don’t worry about nothing. Not nothing at all. Not the world. Not men. Not other people. Not nobody. Just keep on smoking boy, don’t give a God damn about nothin’.”

A drop of raw, fresh sweat dripped down Charlie’s cheeks before it slowly dribbled down his arm and mingled with the Coca Cola stains beneath his feet.

The bus’s trotting slowed like a tired nag at the last leg of a hopeless race until it finally sputtered and stopped, emulating its weary running counterparts, dying more rapidly than they as its lesser life forms struggled to the front, the door belch-farted open and puked out its passengers, one by one.

Lon and Charlie waited until the very last—until the bus was quite dark and totally empty—and very quiet. Then Charlie helped the blind man with his disfigured face and fire-withered body. Charlie led Lonnie from his seat, down the aisle, toward the door, toward the steps of the real world.

Lon slipped and knocked the boy into the mud.

The boy cursed.

Lon, who had survived rape, arson, prison and virtual imprisonment by this snot-nosed boy, grumbled a reply, inaudible to the youth,

“You’re the blind one, boy, not me, you jus’ blind ‘n yellow, that’s all there is to it. You’re as blind and yeller today as you was yesterday and the day before that. You ain’t see’d nothing, you know that. If you’d only let me, I’ll tell you what you been missing, ‘cause I’ve dreamed things you’ve never dare dream.”

And the boy continued cursing as he scrambled to his feet, wiping the stinking mire from his buttocks and legs as he planned to avenge the embarrassment the old fool had caused him.

And Lon dreamed dreams only the blind can dream.

And, as he thought of his revenge, Charlie smiled

And, for a different reason, so did Lon.