The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin Page A

coat carefully and put it in the rack above his seat where it would not be crushed by my parcels. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are all very kind to me.’ We smiled at each other and nodded, and then the man in the aisle took his seat and I settled in. In a little while the woman in front offered me her newspaper. ‘Oh, no,’ I said brightly. ‘Thank you. I am looking through the window.’ The woman nodded approvingly and looked where I was looking.
    “‘Those are elm trees,’ she said.
    “‘Oh, yes?’
    “‘Elm,’ she said.
    “‘El m ,’ I repeated.
    “We came to a town and passed a schoolyard where some kids were playing basketball. ‘Those boys are playing the game of basketball,’ the old man said.
    “‘The game of basketball takes much skill,’ I told him thoughtfully.
    “‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There are great universities that will pay for his education if the boy is skillful enough.’
    “‘Ah.’
    “‘They certainly have their energy. I suppose they’d play till the cows came home if no one stopped them.’
    “‘With children it is much the same everywhere,’ I said.
    “We went by an International Harvester agency where the machines were jammed up on the apron outside the store, the great yellow seats on the tractors and harrows like enormous iron catchers’ mitts. I looked out the window at everything, the best guest in history. And indeed, after my isolation and dedication of the last years, there was something profoundly interesting, astonishing even, about it all. I might have been a foreigner, a greenhorn to ordinary life.
    “It was necessary for me to change buses in Des Moines, and over coffee in the Post House my new friends scrutinized my tickets and consulted with each other.
    “‘His best bet,’ one said, ‘would be to lay over in Chicago for a night, look around the city tomorrow morning and catch an early afternoon bus out.’
    “‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ the man said who had helped me off with my overcoat.
    “‘He’d want to see Chicago.’
    “‘Of course. But look. He doesn’t get in till two-thirty this morning. Then, until he gets his bags and finds a locker where he can check them and looks over the bus schedule and hails a taxi cab it’s another forty, forty-five minutes. Then he first has to start looking around for a hotel. It could be four o’clock before he gets into a room. You think he’s going to be up to sightseeing in the morning? And even if he is, how much can he see in a few hours? No. I say if he wants to look around Chicago, fine, but he should make it a separate trip. Not a lousy layover that don’t mean nothing.’
    “‘Well, maybe,’ the old man said.
    “‘What maybe? There’s no maybe about it. I’m right and you know it.’
    “‘If he doesn’t know Chicago it could be very confusing to come in at two-thirty in the morning,’ the woman who had offered me her paper said.
    “Then the driver called for them to reboard the bus and we all shook hands. The man who had helped with my overcoat paid for my coffee. I went with them to the bus and stood by as they climbed on. ‘Everybody is very kind,’ I said, ‘very friendly.’
    “The old man was the last to go up the steps. He turned at the top and looked down at me just before the driver pulled the big steel lever that shut the door.
    “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘good luck to you.’
    “The old man was an old man, no high priest but a stranger with a good wish no stronger than my own, but it made me uneasy. There’s something terrible to have it assumed that one needs luck. And, remember, we were at a crossroads.
    “And, indeed, when I returned to the restaurant where none now knew me, my foreignness seemed gone. No longer an object of interest to my fellow passengers, I was just one more weary pilgrim with all the pilgrim’s collateral burdens—his sour taste, the beginning of sore throat, a sense of underwear and standing oppressed by his