Bus Call

The bus is black, the heron on its side is silver, and the man leaning against it at 11:52 a.m. is roughly the size of a refrigerator.

"You the engineer?"

"I'm the engineer. Ava."

"Booker." His hand swallows yours. He's sixty-something, grey beard, reading glasses pushed up on his head, an Aretha Franklin T-shirt stretched over a chest like a barrel. "You're eight minutes early. I like you already, champ."

"Odalys said you'd leave without me."

"Odalys tells everybody that." He takes your duffel and leaves the second case, the walnut one, in your arms. He looks at it, then at you, with something like sympathy. "Ah. You're the one."

"Does everyone know?"

"Champ, the whole city knows."

Inside, the Night Heron is nicer than any apartment you've lived in. A front lounge with leather benches and a tiny kitchen, a narrow hall of bunks with velvet curtains, and at the back a second lounge with a long sofa, a mini studio, and a window wider than your bed.

A lanky guy with bleached curls is sprawled across the front bench, filming you on his phone.

"Oh, she's real. Ava the Destroyer," he says, in a London accent. "Hello, Sparky. Kit. Visuals and lights. I'm also the gossip. Welcome to the circus. I'm going to need you to know that I've watched the video of you blowing up the mixer forty times."

"There's a video?"

"There's always a video." He waves his phone. "Don't worry. It's only on my phone. For now."

"Kit," Odalys says from the kitchen without turning around.

"Only on my phone forever," Kit corrects.

Ivy is the last one on. She comes up the steps at 12:01 in sunglasses and a long black coat she absolutely doesn't need in June, carrying a coffee and a record bag. She stops when she sees you holding the Bellweather case.

"You brought it."

"You told me to."

Something passes over her face too fast to read. Then she pushes her sunglasses up into her hair. "Your bunk's across from mine. Don't snore."

"I don't snore."

"Everyone snores on a bus, Sparky." She walks past you, close enough that her coat brushes your arm. She smells like vetiver and something sweet and dark, like plums. "We'll find out."

By Gary, Indiana, you've learned the rules of the Night Heron.

No shoes in the bunks. Booker picks the music in the front lounge, and Booker's music is Otis, Al Green, and Sam Cooke on rotation. Odalys has a whiteboard. If your name is on the whiteboard, you do the thing next to your name. If Ivy's door to the back lounge is closed, you knock. If it's closed and the red light is on, you don't.

The red light stays on most of the afternoon.

You spend the drive on your back under the front lounge bench with a screwdriver, because the monitor speakers on the bus crackle every time the road bends and you can't stand it. Kit narrates. Odalys hands you tools without being asked, which you appreciate. Somewhere past Kalamazoo you find the problem, a loose ground wire someone fixed with chewing gum, and when you flip the system back on, Sam Cooke comes through clean and warm.

Booker turns around in the driver's seat for a second. "Well, now," he says softly. "Well, now."

When you crawl out, Ivy is standing in the hall in socks, arms crossed, listening.

"The speakers have crackled for two years," she says.

"Somebody used gum."

"Trevor used gum."

"Trevor," Kit and Odalys say at the same time, with deep contempt.

Ivy almost smiles. She turns and goes back to the lounge. The red light, you notice, doesn't come back on.

You park outside Detroit a little after midnight in the lot of a shuttered auto plant, where tomorrow's warehouse show will be. Booker goes to his bunk with a paperback. Kit falls asleep mid-sentence on the front bench. Odalys does twenty minutes of email and then disappears behind her curtain with a soft "night, all."

You're brushing your teeth in the bus's tiny bathroom when the back lounge door opens.

"Sparky." Ivy, in the doorway. Hair down now, glasses on, a big black sweater. "Come here. Bring your ears."

The back lounge is dark except for the blue glow of the studio monitors and the parking-lot lights coming through the window. She sits on the floor with her back against the sofa and pats the carpet beside her.

You sit. Not too close. Close enough to feel her warmth.

"Nobody's heard this," she says. "Not Odie. Not Teddie. Not Trevor, God rest his career."

She presses play.

It starts with rain. Real rain, recorded on a window, then a single low synth note that doesn't resolve. A kick drum comes in so softly you feel it before you hear it. Then a vocal sample, a woman's voice, pitched down, half a word, over and over. The track builds, and you wait for the drop, and the drop never comes. It just opens. It goes wide, like a door in a dark room swinging out onto a summer street.

You realize you've closed your eyes.

When you open them, Ivy isn't looking at the monitors. She's looking at you. She's been looking at you the whole time.

The track ends. The rain fades out. Neither of you says anything for a long moment.

"It doesn't have a name," she says finally, very quietly.

You open your mouth.

"Don't," she says. "Not yet. I want to watch you think about it."

Then she gets up, says "goodnight, Ava," and walks out, and leaves you sitting on the floor of her lounge with your heart going like a kick drum.

Your bunk is narrow and dark and smells like clean sheets and diesel. Across the aisle, behind a black velvet curtain, Ivy's bunk is silent.

You lie there replaying the track. The rain. The note that won't resolve. The way she watched you.

At 3:04 a.m., your phone lights up on your chest.

A text, from an unknown number. Three feet away.