The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face.  Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas.  The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight.  She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.

Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car.  If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint.  But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk.  Oh, I can drive.  Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely.  But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago.  The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.

Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both.  A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable.  On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.

I became aware that the woman was aware of him, too.  Turning from a story perhaps on Caterpillar to perhaps one on Walmart, her glance communicated volumes.  I, in full chevalier mode, met her gaze and smiled reassuringly, then wondering about the results of rising up to defend a woman with my one eye and the strength of a body that has not seen the inside of a gym since the Carter Administration.

Hoping not to go full Manny Pacquiao on the guy by the time we got to Waco, I sat back against the seat, surveying the rest of the 30 or so souls who earlier had begun gathering at the bus station.  The place smelled like the Dow Chemical factory by that huge bridge near Philadelphia – the result of management’s Cloroxic attempt to keep the station clean.  And that, really, is what a bus station is about these days in America: Attempts – attempts to survive.  You only have to enter a bus station once these days to realize the crushing blow the economy has been dealing American society for years.

The black and HispanicLatino young men who appear to be thugs self-segregate and stand off to one side.  They looked defeated.  And they aren’t thugs except that in a violent world they have to project an exaggerated masculinity in an offensive pose meant as self-defense.  Over time Nature might validate Darwin and incorporate their ludicrous tattoos into their melanin.  They themselves realize they are not thugs, especially when one especially mean-looking dude springs to help an old white lady struggling with a new, too-large suitcase that her son or grandson should be carrying for her.  Caught in the pincer of the glass door, he rescues her and she nervously smiles at him but only for a second.

Some of the faux thugs might be thugs but they know enough to stay away from the diamond-wearing skulks whose smells complement the bus station’s.  Eau crystal meth.  Management has seen enough of them and of others in various states of human emotion and demotion over the years to flood the place with behemoth security officers growing larger still from the brick-sized Hershey candy bars and 20-oz Cokes sold in the shop.

Many of the men and women and children waiting for the buses to take them on the next legs of what seem to be desperate journeys are good people.  Some, however, are the products of bad schools, of bad decisions.  Some of these people never had a chance, and do not have much of a chance in a jobless economy.

The more-normal are the immigrants, sitting rigidly in the vinyl chairs in the lobby that will send them to the chiropractor soon enough.  They sit stoically, perhaps thinking they will make another run at that restaurant on Maple to see if they need table help.  Others check and recheck their bus ticket, making sure they get at least to Dallas.  Perhaps they are on their way to new jobs as far as Pittsburgh only because the jobs are old to others.

One of two immigrant women who had been looking at me finally decides that, yes, I am HispanicLatino and asks politely in wonderfully gracious Spanish if they could possibly borrow my cell phone to make sure their families know the bus is running late.

I cannot help but think as I dial the number that my number will show up on a DEA computer somewhere storing information on the drug-running Zetas.

Hearing the call complete and handing her the phone, I choose to believe otherwise.

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