Tales From A Bus, jwilson136 [best e reader for academics .TXT] 📗

PROLOGUE:

AN INTRODUCTION FROM THE BUS DRIVER


I’ve been stuck behind the wheel of one bus or another for more than half my adult life. And baring an all too brief stint as a delivery man and an all too unsuccessful stint as a salesman it’s the only job that I’ve ever had. And if your looking for a truthful answer well ‘hell yes’ I do want to do it for the rest of my life.
Now you may look at me and ask ‘what about job satisfaction’ or ‘what about promotion opportunity’s’ and I’ll look right back at you and say I have the first one pretty much in full and I have no wish for the second. I just plain like the job. I like the idea of life on the road, it may only be on the road most days from nine to five but it’s life on the road none the less and I guess that in a strange way it appeals to my romantic nature. My dear wife passed away just shy of her forty-first birthday leaving me with two kids as grown up as their ever gonna get and not much else and the driving is the only thing even close to ‘romance’ a guy such as myself is likely to come across.
I’ve got a fair few years to go before the old gold clock day comes round and I often wonder what I’ll do when that day arrives. The day when Mr. Boss-man comes up to me and thanks me for all the hard work and long hours that I’ve put in over the years and tells me that the next time I walk through the door it will be as a fare paying customer. I’d been spending some time toying with the idea of buying a bus of my own and driving around the country in it, stopping off when-ever and bringing hitch-hikers where-ever. It mightn’t be the best of living income wise but it might pay off it that old ‘job satisfaction’ bracket.
The events of that bus journey have gone a long ways towards making up my mind regarding this after retirement plan, thing is I don’t know if it’s been made up towards the positive or the negative.
It was the damm fire that started it all. It the God dammed electric system hadn’t shorted out well they would have never started the storytelling. Maybe I should have reacted slower and just let the whole thing go up in flames, maybe that would have been better all round.........


TALES FROM A BUS
I
THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED


All votes had been cast and democracy had worked it’s wonders, the way it always does, and we were all on way to our various destinations. In fairness to him, the bus driver did react quickly to the fire. It was never going to be anything life threatening but all the same it was good to know that our driver was quick on his feet and quick with his head. The fire was out and we were all safe, a little cold (due to the non-functional heating system) and maybe a little bored (due to the equally non-functional radio) but sure safe none the less. I had voted to go on, as we all had but as I was raising my head and nodding in agreement I got that unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach. You know the type you get just before you do something that you are not totally sure about, like there is wind trapped down by your balls ? Well that was the way I felt just as I voted in the positive. I’ve been around the block for quite a while, and I’ve seen a lot of things that cannot be explained using conventional means and I guess you could say that deep down I knew that something was wrong with that bus journey. Maybe ‘wrong’ isn’t the right word, there was maybe nothing ‘wrong’ with the whole bus journey but I’ll tell you something for nothing; everything was far from ‘right’.
We all sat in without speaking for a few minutes. The only noise coming from the engine and the sound of the driver grinding out the gear changes. It’s a sound that I’ve always found oddly comforting, the sound of the engine revving up, dropping off as the clutch is engaged and then picking up again as the foot goes back down.
I’ll tell you something for nothing, from this day to the end of my time on this earth of ours that the last thing I wanted to do was start talking. But all that kept coming to mind was the story that I felt I just had to tell. The thing was that I didn’t want to tell my story because I knew that if I told a story that the rest would also tell stories and whatever about hearing my story again I knew that the last thing that I wanted to happen was to hear what the others had to say.

I’m no longer what you would consider a young man. I’ve had a long life and I’ve seen a lot of things that I would be hard pressed to explain using rational means. I’ve never seen any UFO’s or aliens, and I’m pretty sure that regardless of all that you might have heard or read in the papers, that Elvis is dead (and dead quite a long while at that). But as I’ve already said I’ve seen some things that I could not explain.
I’ve fought in two wars and I seen more that enough men die in a few years than a whole army of men should see in a lifetime. I had a good friend during the war, (war is both the best and the worst place to make friends), but this one guy, John Keanney was his name and I fought with him at my side for over thirteen months and I can tell you that we saved each others butts so many times that it went beyond count. If there is someone else on this planet that I would feel safer fighting beside I have certainly yet to meet him. John was the perfect soldier, the type of guy that you just pray that your platoon is going to be made up of. He was calm under pressure, was deadly accurate with his rifle and had a great head for small unit tactics. The men of the platoon respected him coz’ he always got involved in the fighting and never left a man behind. I met him when I was less than a week in the place and I guess you could say that we hit it off almost straight away.
There was one time that we got stuck in some shitty little village in France (there are loads of shitty little villages in France) and we’d been ordered to stay behind we about nine other guys to hold a road. We were short in platoon by three; one who was dead, another was on some R&R and another had fallen off a jeep and broken his shoulder (Aaron Tyndel was his name). There were re-enforcement’s due within three days and until they arrive this dead little French village was to be our home. Talk was that HQ had planned to use it as a new BOO (Base Of Operations) but this might well have been just talk. Whenever we were on duty like that the men wanted some reason for putting their asses on the line. Fact was that nobody knew why that shitty little town in that shitty little town was so important to anyone, and if anyone one did know they were saying nothing.
There had been very little German activity in the area and over the past two weeks we’d been having things pretty easy. It was late summer of ‘forty-two and it was still warm and generally we all were feeling as good as you can feel when you’re out there looking to kill people and there are people out there looking to kill you. So there we sat taking shelter behind a wall (only this time it was shelter from the sun and not Gerry bullets) and smoking a bit and maybe sleeping a bit more. The only down side was John. That morning he woke up all pale and worried looking but he wouldn’t say why. We’d been on the job for the last two days or so and it was expected that the replacements would arrive within the next ten hours or so. It took me a long while to get him to talk but when he did he gave me his watch and ring and asked me make sure that his brother back home got them. He said that he didn’t know how but he was sure that the Germans were going to attack and by the end of the day he’d be dead. Another present sent home all wrapped in a big black bag.
Sure enough the Germans came and they hit use fairly hard. They outnumbered us by about four to one and a bloodier fight I never saw. We hit, ran and hid then hit, ran and hid some more. At some stages it degenerated into nothing more than hand to hand combat. It dragged on for well over three hours and I can honestly say that when it was over I had never felt so drained in all my life. John fought like a man possessed that day and I know that if it wasn’t for him we would have all died. Towards the end of the battle the remains of the Gerry attack squad had the last of our platoon (five men in total, one of whom had gone and died on us without so much as a ‘goodbye’) hemmed in some old shack and we were all pretty sure that we would all soon meet whatever Maker was n favour at the time. John, figuring himself to be a dead man already, volunteered to be the distraction that would allow us to get a few shots off before we went down. I didn’t agree with his plan but he did outrank me and all the others left so he got to call the shots. We readied ourselves for the famous ‘final push’ and John made his move.
He kicked open the front doors of the house and ran out with both guns blazing. It was a sight that I will never forget and the image had me so entranced that I almost froze looking at him. One of the others woke me out of my trance and we attacked. One from the rear while one went round either side. When I came around the front of the house I was sure that I’d find the body of my good friend lying in a pool of blood and bullets with bodies pilled high on either side, but I didn’t. The son of a bitch was still standing, which was more than could be said for the Gerry forces. Their bodies lay all around and the wall behind John had just about collapsed with the number of Gerry bullet holes in it. Yet John still stood. The Huns fled and we stayed.
Our platoon, while victorious was in tatters. Myself and two others survived, John was one of the two. Oh he been shot alright, he’d been shot twice, once in the arm right on the elbow and another time right through the hand. I remember him holding that hand up to