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whaleshit and playin the jukes and callin home every hour. She never answered the phone and I realized that I didn’t really know much about her, didn’t know where she came from, where she might of run. I didn’t know her folks. I didn’t even know the name of the damned church. All I knew was she was gone. And I was through. By sundown, I was loaded. I couldn’t hardly walk, but I got on a bus and went to Mission Street and went to the house to pack my clothes. I kept writin a note to her in my head, all about how I was goin back to the Navy where I belonged and I was sorry I was so rotten to her and she should find a nice guy for herself and let him put the papers on the floor once in a while. And of course I was gonna sign this letter sincerely. I opened the door with my key. And heard a noise from upstairs. From the bedroom. Not the kind of noise a burglar makes. I tiptoed up them stairs and when I opened the door, she was naked on the bed, goin down on a fat bearded guy I’d seen one day at the bank. The fat guy looked scared shitless, but Susan didn’t stop. She looked at me with her eyes all crazy and her mouth full of dick and kept goin at it with the fat guy. I went out in the hall and packed my clothes and never saw her again. A week later I got a good-bye letter from her, typed and neat. It was like the charges in a court martial. Or a bank statement. She never said nothin in it about the fat man .

Chapter
    4
    I hear his voice now. Hear the warnings. Hear the Old Salt telling that boy something about the price of love. Or sex. Or both. And the boy thought: That’s his story; those were Turner’s mistakes, and I won’t repeat either. I’ll find my own woman. I’ll know . Such courage makes the young fight old men’s wars. But the woman was not far away, waiting in the shadows of the South. I remember that we changed buses outside a large, badly lit bus station in downtown Atlanta. We had about an hour to wait. And then Turner said it would be better if we got on board the second bus and found window seats. That way, he said, if it ain’t a full bus, we can stretch out and sleep the rest of the way. I thought he must be right. He had been on a lot more buses than I had. And a lot more women too. I found a seat in the seventh row, Turner in the second. There were more Negroes sitting in the rear, and a lot more empty seats. Pensacola. I was almost there.
    She got on just before we left.
    I first saw her standing beside the driver, her skin almost olive in the diffused light from the terminal. In all the years since, that simple image has remained in me. I’ve photographed models standing in empty buses, bathed in that oblique light. I’ve tried to capture the same mood on buses in the hills of Nicaragua, or the highlands of Kenya, or moving around Washington Heights. It’s never worked. The pictures in your head are always more powerful than the ones on paper. But there she was, with curly black hair and an oval face and the sort of long, thin nose that I’d once seen described as aquiline. She was wearing a black turtleneck and bluejeans and she was lugging a small, beat-up suitcase. Come to me , I thought, trying to send messages to her through the dark air of the bus. Sit here, woman. Sit beside me and learn to love me and I will meet you every night and you can wear a veil and look at me with dark eyes and I will love you more than all the earth. Here. In this empty seat. Beside me. Please . She started down the aisle, looking left and right, and stopped at the empty seat beside me.
    “This taken?” she said. There was something scared in her hoarse voice. If she was wearing makeup, I couldn’t see it. Her lips were full, and she had a mole on her left cheekbone.
    “No, it’s open,” I said, standing up. “Need a hand with that?”
    I took the suitcase and heaved it up into the baggage rack. The bus was moving now.
    “Thanks, sailor,” she said. I sat back down and she seemed to