Hamilton hung up the receiver. It started to beep and snarl at him at a volume louder and more aggressive than he’d ever heard from something automated. He withdrew his phone card, as prompted, and then waited, back propped against the metal sides of the booth. It was the first time he had heard his wife’s voice in seven months.
He was coming home. It was getting dark, a putrid dark that seemed to rot and turn colour slowly, the air still holding its muggy, polluted smoke from the summer’s procession of automobiles. With his back against the telephone booth Hamilton faced the Glad Star Car Wash, where he’d risked his life to work, god only knowing why. (He was bitter now, but his wife wasn’t- the fact that her husband had found work among those in the pioneer’s Great Land made her cheeks rosy with happiness). Hamilton couldn’t stand to hear her brag childishly about his far-away life to those friends they’d both grown up with, because he knew hosing down old clunkers with his mouth clenched shut, his heart pounding in his throat, wasn’t any kind of life at all.
With the lights off, and all the doors barred and closed, the Glad Star looked almost peaceful, its corrugated-iron siding a shiny rusting silver. In the daytime, made beautiful by the spray of water from the hoses and the glitter of soap suds thrown from buckets, it gleamed. It was a big enough building, about the size of a two-car garage, with windows in front and three parking spaces out back. The main point of interest, though, was the huge signboard which hung over all of them as they worked- a huge and obnoxious silver-white star with several frosty points and a cartoonish convertible sports car drawn inside.
The street being empty, Hamilton walked in the middle of the road until he reached the station. It gave him a taste of danger more satisfying than the eternal sense of peril which marinated constantly somewhere near his large intestine. He passed Anderson’s pawn shop and the diner where, every afternoon, the Glad Star men gathered to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. After those two buildings there was a long stretch of badly paved road, with ramshackle houses on either side, their windows having been cracked through by rocks or baseballs long ago. They looked like old blind people with cataracts, their sagging porches breasts or bellies.
Hamilton was a big man. He had swelled up within a month of arriving in this new country, suddenly ravenous. His skin turned sallow from the cheap fast food. Hamilton ate quickly and without regard for flavour. He found no pleasure in it, but a necessary ablution, like a sacrament. He ate, and, already tall, his stomach filled. He grew jowls, cheeks the size and shape of moons.
On the bus the seat fit him snugly, and his knees kissed the one in front of him. He fell asleep heavy with the kind of joy that dangles precariously, wondering if his wife would be able to stand the sight of him, her homegrown husband, now with alien features and a belly like a globe.
When the final bus of the three he’d taken pulled into the depot, it was nighttime. They’d halted in front of a three-walled building, rain slicked, and containing only a few staring people who sat on plastic chairs as they waited for those they’d come to collect. The man Hamilton had been staring at dully for the last half hour, he with the green-and-yellow golf shirt, slicked-back hair and aviator sunglasses, got up and stretched. He made his way down the aisle and outside. After him the others followed, leaving the bus in waves, until Hamilton was alone. He turned to face the window slowly, wondering if she had come.
And then he saw her, leaning against the station with her head cocked to one side. She was a bit plumper than he remembered, and wore an unfamiliar dress, patterned all over in flecks of violent reds and blues. Unable to see his face through the glass, she was standing now, scanning each row in turn. Hamilton stood too and the seat in front of him shook, grateful to be free.
The bus station was at the furthest edge of a dead-end gravel road. Two pieces of lean-to corrugated iron served as a roof, decorated only with a signboard painted red and blue and emblazoned with the decal of the town’s favourite brand of beer. This was the center of town, and being faced with it now, after so many months, made Hamilton feel like he had stepped into an old photograph. He remembered the scattered collection of stores which seemed to have grown like barnacles around the bus station, but their wares were different- watermelon where he remembered oranges, shoes instead of watch straps.
His wife’s eyes skimmed past the big man in the last row and then started again at the front, counting. The first two rows were filled with weary-looking old women who carried their grievances on their faces, lines etched deep as thumb marks in clay. Past them were a scattering of couples, shadowy shapes that emerged one at a time from the front of the bus and stretched their arms and legs self-consciously. She waited with her arms crossed over her chest to keep her heart where it should be. But the big man was coming towards her, and so she shifted. She was conscious of the way her dress stretched tight against her hips. She looked past him again and craned her neck to find her husband, but the bus driver was the only one left. He leaned languidly against the door frame, smoking a cigarette with burnt-black fingertips.
“Angela?” The man said to her, and her neck snapped upright, adrenaline flushing the heart she kept protected beneath both of her strong arms. She stopped skimming surfaces and looked at him, this person in front of her, whose eyebrows leaned away from each other like footprints, their subtle arch littered with coarse hairs.
“I thought you’d screwed it up somehow,” She said after a silence, her heart sinking as she took him in. The full lips she’d loved on his handsome, lean-cheeked face now the moist fish lips of a fat man.
“No,” he said. His voice was the same, pitched low and intimate, with the rumbling of thunder in it. “Everything was fine.” She couldn’t hold his gaze. Didn’t want him to notice that she was shocked by how much time had altered him.
“Do you want a smoke?” His wife asked, pulling out a carton from her purse and tapping a cigarette out from one creased corner.
The bus station parking lot spread behind them, dark and empty. “No,” Hamilton said, looking at her. He was watching the way her gaze shifted and fluttered, the way her fingers shook. She was trying to light her cigarette, but the match wouldn’t catch.
“No, I quit. Remember, I told you? Called you that day after I chain-smoked those cigarettes at work and said I’d never touch another one. And I didn’t.” (He’d been feeling horrible that day and the smoke in his lungs was too soothing, a cream-black cloud pulling him down into the soap crusts and flecks of dirt under his feet).
“I don’t remember you telling me that,” His wife said. She scuffed the road with one sandal and took a long draw. The moment paused and lengthened between them until it was almost opaque, and Hamilton’s eyes stung with everything he wished he could say.