Excerpt BACK AND FORTH - A Novel

A Greyhound bus exited from the Interstate and pulled into the forlorn gas station to let off a few passengers.

"Bus?" AK asked the obvious. They had been waiting at the onramp an hour with a score of other stranded hippies. The couple at the head of the line had been waiting a day for a lift.

"Hell, yes."

AK and Sean grabbed their bags and ran to the diner. The Greyhound billowed diesel fumes. Sean banged on the side of the bus and its driver opened the door. The two of them climbed on board.

"How far we go for $5?" AK pulled out his wallet.

"$4.25 will buy you a ride to Needles."

"Make that two."

"I'll be leaving in ten minutes, so if you want any food or drink, this is your chance."

AK and Sean bought cokes inside the diner and they climbed aboard the cool bus. The driver had a schedule and pulled out of the gas station on time. As they rounded the onramp, they stared out the window at the hippies. Ten minutes ago they had been them.

"Good move." AK finished the Coke.

"You boys look hot." An old black woman across the aisle was peeling an orange.

"We were stuck back there." AK wiped the sweat off his face.

"Hitchhiking?"

"Yep." Sean's dry tongue was glued on single syllables.

"You'd have a lot more luck, if you cut your hair. You look like girls and not pretty girls either." The old black woman laughed with a friendly wickedness. "But these peckerwoods out here ain't too particular about pretty after they drunk. They get too much sun out here and too much sun ain't good for no one."

The old lady handed them each an orange. They sucked on the sweet fruit, as if they might not taste another for a long time.

AK and Sean pored over the map, as the bus sped down I-15.

With each mile the desert became more desert and the window was warm to the touch, even though the bus interior was ACed to Alaska. Two rangy cowboys and the old black woman got off in Barstow and the driver announced that the next stop was Needles, which lay on the west of the Colorado River on I-40. Two and a half hours later the bus pulled into the desert town. Sean counted the number of trees in sight on both hands and said, "The Joad family's first stop in THE GRAPES OF WRATH was Needles." "They drove through the night to avoid the Arizona heat and they arrived here in the morning." AK had written a paper on John Steinbeck in college. "The Calif