At six the next morning, a disagreeably frosty Christmas, Charlie Clark was the lone passenger on the Q11 bus rattling past a desolate stretch of Queens Boulevard discount stores, fast food restaurants, and office buildings in decline or awaiting demolition. He saw that the driver, a pleasant, fresh-faced man around his own age-thirty-was looking him over in the rearview mirror. Even when Charlie wore old sneakers and jeans torn at the knees, like now, strangers mistook him for a yuppie.
The driver called back, “Going out to the island to be with family?”
Charlie weighed telling the truth. The thing was, over the engine rumble and the thumping of tires in and out of potholes, he’d heard a certain wistfulness in the driver’s voice. Also, when boarding, he’d noticed the driver’s thick wedding band and a snapshot of two little girls taped to the fare box. Charlie figured that, preposterously early this morning, the guy had had to pry himself away from the warm bosom of his family to come spend his Christmas breathing icy diesel fumes, dodging tipsy holiday drivers, and enduring the recorded voice’s plodding recitation of the rules of disembarkation at every stop, even when no one disembarked. So probably he wouldn’t be cheered to learn it amounted to chauffeuring an inveterate gambler to the track.
“I’m going to see Great Aunt Edith,” Charlie said.
Great Aunt Edith was a filly.
The bus driver glowed as if his fare box had been replaced by an open fire. Charlie was warmed as well. To keep the poor bastard’s buzz going, he got off a stop before Aqueduct Racetrack, at a neighborhood of quaint but tired little brick and shingle houses that might well be populated exclusively by great aunts.
It meant walking a couple of extra blocks. He shivered, but not because of the cold.
It was the debt.