There was a school bus in the woods. If you wanted to go there, you had to cross the wooden bridge at the end of the dead end street, over the canal that ran into the Delaware, and then stay to your left, walk up the ridge, which is what we called it. It ran between the land on the left that belonged to the high school, mostly, and on the right, a couple of houses and then a farm.
When you reached the curve in the ridge where the houses turned into the farm and the field that belonged to the school turned into just woods that belonged to someone (the farm, maybe, or the state), there was a break in the grass and brush, and if you turned into it, to the left, you walked down a path, and across the creek, which was usually dry enough to walk through, mostly. If it wasn't, there were stones to step carefully across, except for one summer when it was nearly waist high, and we went swimming in it. We called it our swimming hole except that it was just a tiny little space where the water was deeper and wider than usual, and probably full of run off from the farm. But we didn't think about that then.
Once you were across the brook, it was only a couple hundred feet to where the forest started, and the trail was as wide going into the forest as it was leaving the ridge, this fifteen foot swatch carved into the side of the mountain, gently sloping up, with electrical wires strung from posts in the middle, and space on either side for walking.
It wasn't far; you walked fifty, maybe a hundred feet up the gentle slope that in the Catskills passes for a mountain, and looking through the trees to the right, the birches and white pines, the hemlocks--a clearing, surrounded perfectly by trees, you see the bus.
I remember the first time, I was with my parents on the hike. We saw the yellow streak of the bus in the clearing, the forest light full of motes and mites and pollen and whatever else streaming down through the trees, and with the sort of surreal combination of uncanny and quiet it might have been mistaken for fairy dust once upon a time. We broke the ring of trees and walked toward it, stepping over stumps and leaf rot, stepped around a fire pit, surrounded by large flat rocks that had been dragged there for sitting, over crushed bottles of whatever cheap beer was in vogue at the time, Bush probably, and at the far end, down the slope of the mountain, perpendicular to the ascending line it sat there.
There were no windows, anymore. Not by the time we got there, and no telling how long it had sat like that. The front of the bus was untouched, the yellow hood down, the engine presumably safe inside, rusted maybe, but otherwise undisturbed. The back doors, however had been torn out, wrenched away in fits of drunken reverie, party after party until finally they broke free, and were thrown down the mountain side, tumbling and crashing through the brush, coming to rest against a fallen trees.
No seats, either, except for the driver's. The rest had been taken out, one by one. Two of them stayed in the circle, and the rest were carried back down the trail, over the ridge and found new homes in basements where the foam filled cracked plastic absorbed the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and pot smoke year after year. I knew this because later I saw one, in my friend Ryan's basement. We were the same age, but he had an older brother Chris in the army and a Captain or something, 36. Chris had been part of the first group at the bus--probably led the rescue efforts, kept the best seat for himself, and when we were teenagers we would sit in that basement and add to the layers of beer and smoke every weekend and some weeknights.
That first time with my parents I was eight, maybe nine. My brother was seven. The dog was with us and my parents let her up into the back of the bus, sniffing around. I remember thinking she would find a body in there, near the driver's seat, or a body part, or something. I don't know how long we stayed, but it was creepy and even though I didn't say anything, my parents must have guessed because quickly they whistled for the dog to come back and she did, with nothing in her mouth, no severed hand or foot, and they put her back on the leash and we walked up the mountain, took one of the trails around, and came out near the high school and walked back home to Elm street.
In the bed room we shared, there were two twin beds on opposite sides of the room, with two tables for lamps and two windows, and between the two windows, a dresser, and above the dresser a five point buck that had come with the house. We'd lived there since we were four, when my father decided he needed to get out of the city and how we ended up in Deposit, NY has always been a mystery to me, but he got offered a job as the head of the English Department at the high school and he took it and there we were. We were surrounded by hunters and fishers and truck drivers, but my father didn't do any of that except sometimes we would drive to the lake and on the way we would pick up a tub of night-crawlers from the bait and tackle shop and cast our little hook the squirmy brown things and cast off into the brown water and come home with a cooler full of sun fish that we'd gut and fry with butter.
My brother and I were terrified of that deer head. Maybe if we'd grown up there, really, or maybe if Dad knew the first thing about hunting or shooting a gun it would have been different, but every night we went to bed terrified that it would come down off that wall and take it's revenge for getting put up there in the first place, and it wouldn't matter that we hadn't put it there because it was a deer and it would just go for the easiest people it could find, which would be me and my brother, sleeping below him.
We made a pact never to leave the room with out backs to the deer, and it was always best if we could leave together. So we would wrap ourselves in blankets to look like high priests, and back out through the doorway together, nodding our heads and bowing at the waist, and with our hands held prostrate in front of us, we would say, "ahso, ahso, ahso," three times, and that would placate the Buck for the day and let us sleep in peace one more night.
After the bus, we started to associate the deer with the bus and it was even worse, and we kept going on hikes with Mom and Dad and the dog, but we wouldn't go anywhere near that bus. I think we figured that somehow the deer had been hit by the bus and gotten it stuck there somehow and the driver left the bus and took the deer and stuck its head up on the wall like some sort of voodoo protection that it would never happen again. So we kept backing out of the room, bowing and muttering, until we were probably a little too old to do it, until a year or two after we should have known better, but before we were ever old enough to get invited to one of the yellow bus parties.
*******
It was the summer before high school. Mid-July. I had my first kiss with a girl who was spending the summer in one of the nicer houses up on the hill. I would see her walking through town sometimes, alone, and then I was sitting on the bleachers of the football and she came walking across from the other side, from the high school and past that, the houses on the hill. She was wearing cut off jean shorts and a tank top and she had dark hair with a red streak died into her bangs which were pushed back behind her ears, and she was walking straight towards me. I was smoking a cigarette on the bleachers and thinking about the school year ahead and what it would be like to go to school with my father and whether or not he would be my teacher freshman year, or later, and how much shit I would have to take for it.
I looked away, pretended like I didn't see her coming, and then I would look back up and she was walking towards me still. Her hands were in her pockets and she was looking straight at me. I was wearing tight black jeans and converse and a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and I had a bracelet on my left hand that was really the top part of tube socks, with black stripes that I had cut off three inches of. My hair was short and messy and I hadn't washed it in a while and when I saw she was looking at me still I didn't look away. She was almost all the way across the field and she kept walking and when she was only twenty or thirty feet away from the bleachers I said, "Hey," and she said, "hey," and then she climbed up onto the bleachers and sat down next to me. I took a drag of my cigarette, and before I had taken the cigarette away from my lips, she took it from me and took a drag. She blew out the smoke towards me but she didn't give the cigarette back.
"I've seen you before," I said. "Around." She looked at me and took another drag of the cigarette and said, "I know. You're always staring." I didn't know what to say so I took my cigarette back and looked down. "It's ok," she said, "I don't mind." I still didn't know what to say, so I asked her name, and she said it was Chris, and I said that was funny because my name was Charles and then she said, "It's not funny cause it's a boy's name?" I asked her why I would care if it was or it wasn't, and anyway isn't it short for Christine, and she said it was. "Where are you from," I asked her, and she said, "New York." I laughed. "What's so funny," she asked me, and I said, "No it's just that . . . well, me too. Sort of. I moved here when I was really young. It's just whenever people say New York, it's like they forget that they're already in New York, and they never say, 'New York City,' just "New York," like it's the only place in the world." She looked at me funny. She had a sort of half smile, and she took my cigarette back and she said, "Well, isn't it?" And then I said, "yeah, I guess," and then she kissed me and it was wet and I could feel her chapped lips and her lip ring and then her tongue finding its way into my mouth and I could taste the smoke on her mouth different from the smoke on my mouth and we leaned into each other for what seemed like forever and then she pulled away and stood up and walked to the bottom of the bleachers. When she got to the bottom she turned and smiled up at me and said, "Seeya."
******
The next time I saw her was at a party at Ryan's house. Ryan was my only real friend in town; we hung out most of the time. We had some stuff in common, I mean we listened to the same music and neither of us were really into video games, but it was mostly because his father was an artist and my father was an English teacher. His father was a potter. He had a little studio behind their house which was just around the corner from our house. The house was big and red, with a front porch that was wood but built on a foundation of river stones, all different sizes fit together to create this swirling effect.
Ryan was played pee-wee football, and was going to try out for the high school J.V. team, which was cool, but I didn't know what it meant as far as our friendship, because I wasn't going out for any teams. Maybe track, but probably not. I didn't go for any of the team sports.; I didn't like much of anything that I was forced to do with other people.
I'd seen "Breaking Away," and that summer my father and I took our bikes out for a ride. He had an old ten speed orange Raleigh from the seventies, and I had a BMX bike that Ryan and I liked to jump off a ramp that his father built for us sometimes. I had also read a book about bicycle racing and I guess I thought maybe it was something I could be good at.
So we went out for a ride. First, down by the river, to where the railroad tracks and the highway passed over it, and to the end where the farmhouse stood, guarding the rows and rows of corn behind it. Then back, and we weren't tired so we kept going. We rode all the way to Walton, over the highway and the state routes. We stopped once and shared an energy bar and the one bottle of water we'd brought with us. That was when we decided that we had gone far enough that we might as well keep going, because to turn back would be the same distance anyway and there's no point going backwards when you can just move forward.
So we rode to Walton, up and down the rolling hills, past the reservoir, and on the hills I would have to stand up and do the biker's dance that I'd read about, swaying from side to side, standing on my pedals, pushing myself harder and harder to keep up because my bike had no gears. And when we got to Walton, we went straight to the diner because we were starving and I ordered a Lumberjack's special and ate the whole thing in about three minutes, and when it was time to pay, my father realized he hadn't brought his wallet with him, so he went outside to call my mother from the pay phone, and she came to get us. I guess Dad had asked her to drive down the river to the farm house first, to see how far our whole trip had been, and when she got there she yelled at us for being so stupid, for biking 35 miles with no wallet and hardly any water, but I could tell that secretly she was a little proud, of me and Dad both.
But in September, Ryan would try out for the J.V. football team, and make it. He would hang out with the kids on the football team, at practice and they'd have parties on the weekend, and maybe we'd still see each other sometimes, do homework together on weeknights, jump our bikes off the little wooden ramp, but it wouldn't be the same. I wouldn't go out for a team, because it's not like the Deposit Middle-Senior High School had an bicycle racing team, or a rock climbing team, or a hiking team. I would just be Mr. Rastelli's son, from New York City.
In September things would change, but it was July, and Ryan was having a party and he was my best friend. When I got there, I went straight to the basement and there she was, sitting on the torn out bus seat. She was wearing a little plaid skirt and little black fishnet leggings that went up to the middle of her thigh, but the way she was sitting I could see about three inches of skin between where her fishnets ended in a band of solid black and her skirt started and I thought it was just about the most incredible thing I had ever seen. I grabbed a beer from the mini fridge under the stair case and said hi to Ryan. She hadn't seen me yet. I leaned in to him and whispered, "What's she doing here?" Ryan smiled at me like he had a big secret and said, "Dude, I told her we were having a party. I thought you'd be into her. You know she fucking asked about you? I mean I know you've been checking her out all fucking summer, but you could get some tonight." I took a sip of my beer. Then I took another sip, a bigger one. "Well, thanks, man," I said.
And then I grabbed another beer from the fridge and went outside, behind the pottery shed. I leaned back against the wall and slid to the floor, and chugged the first beer and then I opened the second one and I drank most of that, too. I lit a cigarette and smoked slowly, blowing the smoke up into the summer sky, watching the stars and finishing my beer. I stood up slowly, walked back to the house, down to the basement, grabbed another beer and sat down next to Chris. She was still on the bench, alone, staring around at the little clusters of people drinking in dark corners of the basement, that half smile drawing the left corner of her lips slightly up, wrinkling her eyes just a little bit, this devilish, aloof grin. I was starting to get a little drunk. I put my hand on her thigh, where the black elastic met her bare leg. "Hey," I said. "Nice to see you." She looked sideways, smiled and said, "you too. Nice shirt." I was wearing the same Smashing Pumpkins shirt I'd been wearing at the football field the day we met. "Get you a beer," I asked? "No," she said, "I'm good." I took another sip of mine and looked down at the ground. I was really pretty buzzed and bummed that I was dumb enough to wear the same fucking shirt I'd worn the first time we kissed, even though I had no clue she'd be there at the party. Then I realized my hand was still on her leg, and I could feel her skin and it was warm and my hand started to sweat as I realized how close I was to her, and I went to pull my hand away but she grabbed it, and put it back where it was and kissed me hard on the lips.
********
Chris was kissing me for a while before she pulled away, our breath short, my hand on the back of her her head, our lips held close together--as if we were afraid to be pulled apart, as if we would never again close that gap. Ryan told me once that sometimes when dogs were screwing they got stuck together, that when it was over they would hop around together, the male on two feet, the female trying to pull away, unable. We weren't stuck, not quite, but I didn't want to be any further from her, not yet.
When we had calmed down a bit, we were both smiling, laughing, relaxed back into the yielding foam of the bus seat. We laughed together, I let my fingers trace the skin above her fishnets, marveling at the goose pimples forming as my fingers passed, circled, passed again. The twist of her lips, the red in her hair, the ring in her lip, splitting her mouth symmetrically except for the half smile; I was captivated, rooted in place.
"You know it's funny," I said, leaning into her, "I've always been a little freaked out by this seat. But here we are, making out on it." She laughed. "Freaked out? Haha, why?" I laughed a little bit, and told her the story of the bus in the woods.
When I was finished, Chris jumped up, turned to face me still sitting down and grabbed my hands. "Hey," she said, a wicked spark in her eyes. "Let's get out of here. Let's check out the bus." I looked back at her. There was nothing I could say. Nothing I could do. I was in her orbit. I would be for as long as she'd let me. And I'd follow her anywhere. It wasn't quite dark out; it was mid July, and the party hadn't gotten too crazy yet (not that it would--we were fourteen, not yet in high school; it was 12 of us in a basement and it would be over by eleven). It was eight thirty. The sun was falling, spreading across the cobalt sky, a line of ocher slashed above the hills.
We ran across the street to my parents house, giggling, sneaking in the back door, in through the tool shed. I turned back to her, my finger to my lips, closed the door slowly behind her. It was dark. We took our time, and I held her hand in the dark as I let my eyes adjust to the room. Shadows started to emerge, slowly fading in to focus, and when I could make out the work bench, I pulled her along behind me, to the far right corner. Grabbed the two flashlights, and a bottle of seltzer from the K-mart in Binghamton that we kept under the green bench.
We turned around, opened the door and ran down through the gate of the lawn, down past the yellow house on the left, the mayor's house (perfectly manicured hydrangeas; immaculate white 1950s thunderbird), the length of the football field, 200 yards to the bleachers where we'd kissed, past the tool shed at the ten yard line, past the goalpost, back-lit and casting its shadow towards the school on the hill, by the nearly full moon. Over the bridge, and bearing left to follow the grass, the red sun fading into night time, the rising moon taking its place above us, and down, past the stream, turning right at the farm, the red sky falling around us. We turned down the path towards the mountain, still running full strength, our breathing fast, regular--the energy of youth and lust--of her gravity, her magnetism, unlike anything I'd ever known. We jumped the stream, made it almost all the way over, our feet just catching the last couple of inches of muddy water, splashing up around us, flecks of mud catching my jeans, and her bare skin through her stockings, our shoes, running still, and reaching the tree line, we turned on our flash lights and entered the wood, past the white pine and birch, past hemlock and larch, up, past stumbling electrical post after stumbling post. Tripping once, catching each other, she rolled over me, her skirt touching the rocky grass, over my legs, bent down, kissed me once, quickly and jumping up, dragged me behind her. I let the weight of my hand pull her back, and fell to my knees, gasping, desperate with laughter. "Stop, stop, stop, " I told her, "you don't even know where we're going! Look," I said. I pointed, up, behind her--"two o'clock," I said. "It's right there."
********
We looked up through the green twilight, the pollen settling through the last refracted rays of sunlight. I grabbed her hand, held it tightly, pulled her close to me and we left the path together, shoulder to shoulder, stepping over moss covered logs and the everywhere rocks of New England, towards the bus.
Past the fire pit, circled with crushed cans of beer, past the crudely sharpened circle of fallen birch limbs, inverted and jammed into topsoil. There was a bra hanging from one of the sticks. Pants from another. Stained from a season in the woods and the front of the pants stained darker yet with the boozy piss of some townie. We reached the bus in the almost dark, Chris climbing into the open back before me, the plaid of her skirt rising past her thigh-highs, turning to face me and pulling me up behind her. We fell into each other, fell on to the hard floor of the empty bus, the leaf litter blown in, the crushed empty cans, the cigarette butts everywhere.
I was on top. I kissed her once, quickly, gently on the lips, and sat on my knees above her. I was shy, now. We had made it, finally. "I should have grabbed a blanket or something," I mumbled towards her, "this place is a shit storm." I took her flashlight, and set both of them up on opposite ends of the bus, leaned against the steel walls, their beams hitting the roof head on and what I hoped would be create an aura of warmth and safety, nothing more than a series of bizarre shadows in an empty bus.
I drank from the bottle of seltzer, the hiss of its opening and the cool drink spilling over my trembling hands. Chris sat up, her legs together, arms behind her, head tilted to one side. I came towards her, laid beside her in the Bachanallian detritus of the empty bus. We kissed, tentatively. We were truly alone for the first time and in the fun house shadows cast over us by the flashlights refracting off the ceiling of the bus, the veil of confidence fell away and we were fourteen, and alone in a bus in the woods, and really, really shy.
But we kissed, and I felt her body warm to me and we moved closer together and with my hand at the small of her back, I pulled her towards me, and we moved together, the warmth of our pressing into spreading over us until it was too late. I didn't stop kissing her, but slowed and what the French call a little death didn't feel so little, the big death of embarrassment, of hiding and excuses and rejection.
Finally I pulled away. I took a swig of seltzer and lit a cigarette and offered her a drag. She took it, flushed, and if she saw the misshapen silver dollar sized spot on my jeans she didn't mention it, or ask why we'd stopped, and passing the cigarette back to me took my hand and followed me from the bus. I walked her home, past the green of the trees, fluorescent in the high sodium street lamps, past giant oak trees and the crooked slabs of ancient slate sidewalk pulled from their path by the roots of trees, stepping over them. Up the hill, curving gently around the outskirts of town, and stopping at the mailbox. We held our hands together and there was a good night kiss, a friendly kiss, and we hugged and I said, "I'll see you," and Chris said, "Yeah, you too," and I turned around and walked home.
