“Thank God he’s not DRIVING.” The guy in the business suit said it loud enough for the whole bus to hear, nodding at the man with the prosthetic arm trying to swipe his transit card.
I’ve been on the 44 line for six years, ever since my knees got bad enough that driving hurt. You learn who rides regular. The man with the prosthetic – Carl, I’d find out later – was new. First time I’d seen him. He had a Vietnam Veterans cap and he was taking longer than usual with the card reader, his left hand working the machine while his right sleeve hung pinned at the elbow.
The suit laughed at his own joke. His buddy across the aisle said, “Bro, STOP,” but he was smiling when he said it.
I went completely still.
Carl got the card to work. Sat down two rows ahead of me, didn’t look at anyone.
I watched the suit pull out his phone and I caught enough of what he typed to know he was telling someone about it.
The bus stopped at Clement. I got up.
“Excuse me,” I said to the suit. “You work at Farrell and Associates?”
He looked up. “Yeah, why?”
“My brother-in-law’s a partner there. Dennis Huang. You know him?”
“Dennis? Sure, yeah.” He sat up straighter. “You’re Dennis’s family?”
“I am,” I said. “And I’m also going to call him in about four minutes and tell him what you just said to that man.”
The suit’s face changed.
“That man lost his arm in Fallujah,” I said. “I know because I was THERE WITH HIM. Different unit, same city, same year. I still hear that city in my sleep.”
The buddy across the aisle looked at his shoes.
I walked back to my seat. Carl had turned around. He was looking at me.
“Fallujah?” he said.
“2004,” I said.
He nodded once, slow.
My phone buzzed. A text from a number I didn’t recognize.
Carl, two rows up, was looking at his phone too.
“Brother,” he said, “I think you need to read what I just sent you.”
What the Text Said
I looked at my screen.
It was a photo. Grainy, shot on whatever passed for a camera phone in 2004, which means it was barely a photo at all. Two guys in desert gear standing in front of a blown-out building. One of them was clearly younger, thinner, with both arms. The other one I recognized immediately even though I hadn’t seen him in nineteen years.
Me. Twenty-six years old, about thirty pounds lighter, holding a water bottle and squinting into the sun like it owed me money.
I stared at the photo for probably ten seconds. The bus went over a pothole and I grabbed the seat back in front of me.
Carl was watching me from two rows up, half-turned around in his seat, this look on his face I can’t quite describe. Not quite a smile. Something quieter than that.
“Where did you get this,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Ruiz,” he said.
Ruiz. Eddie Ruiz. Who I’d lost track of around 2009 when he moved back to Albuquerque and we both got busy with the particular business of trying to be civilians again. I’d thought about Eddie maybe a thousand times since then. Looked him up twice, found nothing, let it go the way you let things go when the looking hurts more than the not knowing.
“How do you know Eddie Ruiz,” I said.
“He’s my cousin’s husband,” Carl said. “Married her in 2011. I was at the wedding.”
The bus stopped at 6th. Nobody got on.
The Part I Didn’t Say Out Loud on the Bus
Here’s what I didn’t tell Carl right then, because we were on public transit and I’m not built for that kind of conversation in front of strangers.
Eddie Ruiz saved my life in Fallujah. Not in a movie way. In a very specific, very small, very loud way that lasted about forty-five seconds and that I have replayed in my head approximately ten thousand times since November 2004.
We weren’t even in the same unit. We overlapped for three weeks. The circumstances of how we ended up in the same alley at the same moment are the kind of thing that makes you either believe in something or believe in nothing, depending on your disposition.
I believe in something. I’ve believed in something ever since.
I’d spent nineteen years thinking I’d never find him to say thank you in person. Not because I hadn’t tried. Because life is long and people scatter and some debts you carry so long they start to feel like part of your skeleton.
And now here was this man with a Vietnam Veterans cap and a pinned sleeve sitting two rows ahead of me on the 44 line, holding a nineteen-year-old photo on his phone, telling me his cousin married Eddie Ruiz.
The suit was very quiet. He’d put his phone away.
What Carl Told Me
We rode past 9th, past the park, past the stop where the woman with the three grocery bags always gets off. Carl talked.
He’d been a Marine. Not Vietnam, despite the cap. The cap had been his father’s. He wore it every day. His father died in 1987 and Carl said he’d been wearing that cap for thirty-six years and it still smelled like his dad’s aftershave, which he knew wasn’t possible but which he chose to believe anyway.
He’d done two tours himself. Came home with the arm situation, which is what he called it. The arm situation. Like it was a scheduling conflict.
He’d moved to the city eight months ago to be closer to his daughter, who’d just had a baby. First grandkid. He was still figuring out the bus system, which is why he’d been slow with the card. He’d had the card for three weeks. He was still getting used to doing certain things with his left hand.
“Does it take long?” I asked. “Getting used to it.”
“Depends on the thing,” he said.
He said it the same way he’d nodded. Slow, and like he’d thought about it for a long time before answering.
The suit got off at the next stop. He didn’t say anything when he left. His buddy gave me a look I couldn’t fully read, something between embarrassed and defensive, and then they were both gone and the bus felt different without them. Lighter, maybe. Or just quieter.
The Call I Made
Carl got off four stops before mine.
Before he stood up he pulled out a pen, an actual pen, from his jacket pocket, and wrote a phone number on the back of a receipt. Handed it to me across the seat backs.
“That’s Eddie’s cell,” he said. “He still talks about the alley.”
I held that receipt for the rest of the ride. Folded it once. Put it in my shirt pocket, right side, where I’d feel it against my chest.
I called Dennis that night. My brother-in-law. Not to report the suit, though I did mention what happened. Mostly I called because Dennis had been trying to get me to come to dinner for three weeks and I’d been putting it off the way I put things off when my knees hurt and the days get short in February. I told him I’d come Saturday.
Then I sat at my kitchen table for a while.
Then I took the receipt out of my shirt pocket.
I called Eddie Ruiz at 8:47 on a Tuesday night in February, nineteen years after the last time I’d seen his face, and he picked up on the second ring.
He said, “I wondered when you were going to call.”
Not who is this. Not hello. Just that.
I wondered when you were going to call.
Like he’d been waiting. Like this was already the middle of a conversation we’d started a long time ago and just set down for a while.
What I Keep Coming Back To
I’ve thought about the suit a lot since then. Not with anger, exactly. Anger took about twenty-four hours to burn through, which is faster than it used to take me.
What I keep coming back to is the buddy. The guy across the aisle who said Bro, STOP and then smiled anyway. Because that’s the easier thing to do. To register that something’s wrong and then smile because the other guy is your friend and you don’t want the friction and the bus is moving and it’s easier to let it go.
I’ve done that. I’ve been that guy. Not on a bus, not about something like this, but I’ve let things go because the friction felt like too much that day.
I don’t know what the suit said to Dennis. Dennis hasn’t mentioned it and I haven’t asked. That’s not why I told Dennis. I told Dennis because the suit needed to know there are consequences to a mouth like that, and sometimes the consequence is just that someone knows. Someone who matters to you professionally, or personally, or both. Someone whose opinion of you is going to be slightly different now.
That’s enough. That’s the whole consequence. I’m not interested in the man’s job or his reputation or his life. I just wanted him to feel, for thirty seconds, what it’s like to have a stranger make you smaller in public.
Whether it landed, I can’t say.
Carl would probably tell me to let it go. Carl seems like someone who has made a practice of letting things go. Thirty-six years wearing a dead man’s cap, two tours, an arm situation, and he’s on a bus in a new city learning the card reader so he can get to his grandkid.
That’s not someone who has time for small men on buses.
The Photo
Eddie texted me a better version of it. Higher resolution, which just means you can see how young we were more clearly, which is its own particular kind of strange.
I texted him back a current photo. He said, “You got old.” I said, “You too.” He said, “Yeah but I was already old when you met me.” He was twenty-nine in 2004. He’s forty-eight now.
We’re having dinner in March. Him, his wife, Carl, Carl’s daughter, the new baby. Dennis said we can use his place, which is bigger.
The receipt with Carl’s handwriting on it is still in my shirt pocket. Different shirt now, but I moved it. Some things you keep in a specific place until you figure out where they actually belong.
I haven’t figured that out yet.
The 44 line runs every twelve minutes on weekdays. I’ll be on it Thursday morning. I don’t know if the suit takes it regular or if that was a one-time thing. Doesn’t matter much either way.
Carl won’t be on it. He figured out a different route that saves him six minutes, which he texted me Tuesday. He said the 44 is scenic but inefficient.
I told him that was the most Marine thing I’d ever heard.
He sent back a single thumbs up.
—
If this one got you, pass it along. Someone you know needs to read it today.
For more unsettling encounters, check out what happened when my best friend answered on the first ring, or the time I had two pills left to keep my daughter from having a seizure. And don’t miss the story about the manager who told a hungry man to get out.
