That last, mad dash for freedom isn’t on a schedule; you either recognize opportunity when it climbs aboard the bus, or you don’t. The odd bend in Harlan Buck’s left leg turned out to be an odd blessing. It had caught him a lot of grief growing up in the hot summers and bitter winters of Summit County – a lot of funny looks from the girls who would have nothing else to do with him and a lot of beatings from the boys – but it had also kept him out of the war, so he figures maybe it had saved his life. While his contemporaries are off driving Adolf out of Europe, Harlan Buck is driving a bus along the dusty highways and byways of Summit County, shuttling passengers hither and yon, looking at them in the mirror and imagining details about their better lives. He has a burlap sack for all his belongings that he keeps up front and every last nickel to his name in the back, stuffed away inside the foam of a seat cushion next to a half-full bottle of whiskey. At night, long after the Summit County buses have stopped running and Harlan has turned in his key, he slips through an opening in the back fence of the bus lot, climbing back aboard the bus that is his home. He makes a bed out of the back bench and gazes out the window at the summer stars, burning cold through the hot night air. He drinks and reads his mystery novels and waits for sleep to take him. But sleep is increasingly a stranger for Harlan. The darkness that gathers around his makeshift home is now somehow heavier, potentized by feelings that a period of waiting has come to a sudden end. He can’t stop worrying about Christopher Dupree, working out at the prison on his birthday. And then there is the electricity of the events surrounding Mr. Gray and Mr. Black, two brutish passengers he doesn’t know from Adam but who, from the moment they had taken a back seat on the Number 6 bus, set the wheels of Harlan Buck’s life in motion, pushing him forward for destinations he can neither predict nor control. The Number 6 is a novella. While it is here available for purchase separately, The Number 6 is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled Signs of Passing.
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