The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Number 6

A Novella

Summary

Harlan Buck drives The Number Six bus for the Summit County Bussing Company. Every day he follows the long, dusty seams in the earth through the fertile croplands that surround the town of Summerfield like he was tracing the rangy black legs of a spider. Actually, Harlan does more than drive The Number Six. Unbeknownst to his employer, he sleeps in it. Dreams in it. Props his head up beneath an open window and reads Jack McMannis detective mysteries with a flashlight or by the light of the full moon. Not trusting the banks, Harlan also stores his life savings in the Number Six; all one hundred and twenty-three dollars of it stuffed with a bottle of whiskey and some toiletries into a hole cut in the cushion of the very last seat where he makes his bed. One day, Harlan will have saved enough to buy some land and grow his own crops. But until that day, he spends every day driving the Number Six from one end of the county to the other and back again.

Like any bus route, the Number Six route has its regulars. The quiet, pretty woman that all of the men like to look at and tip their hats to as she is passing down the aisle for a seat. Harlan likes to imagine she is a nurse who works at the hospital and that her husband has died in the war; the same war that Harlan was spared because of his leg,  a deformity of birth that has given him a pronounced limp and a largely solitary existence.

And then there is Christopher Dupree, who works out at the prison with his big blue eyes and his broad smile and who always seems to be late for the bus. Harlan usually waits as long as he can, idling the Number Six at the end of Nightingale Boulevard just to see the music of Christopher running, rounding the giant pin oak on the corner, his body as fluid as a young sapling in the wind, moving like Harlan had never been able to move in his entire life. Christopher Dupree is a likeable sort, with never a bad word for others and full of dreams about moving to California where the ocean washes up on beaches of gold powder and every other person is a movie star. For Harlan, who has never once been out of the cornfields of Summit County, it is the stuff of science fiction.

But Harlan sees the way people look at Christopher and the way Christopher doesn’t seem to notice how different he is from the others on the bus. Harlan can’t help but worry about his friend, the only person who seems to know he even exists. Certainly the only person who cares.

It is on one of those days that Harlan picks up Christopher and they talk about the golden beaches of California that the Number Six picks up two men that will change Harlan’s life forever. They carry lunch pales, one gray and one black, and choose to sit all the way in the back of the bus, on the very seat Harlan does not want anybody to sit. He has never seen them before and does not know their names. He knows them only as Mr. Gray and Mr. Black and he has nothing to do with their mischief. That, anyway, is what he tells the police.

In the end, Harlan Buck will need a 1940, Detroit Diesel inline six-cylinder engine to carry him the inestimable distance between dying and living, longing and loving, captivity and freedom.