The Number 6, a Novella

By Owen Thomas

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."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Owen Thomas
• Release date: Oct 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737737629

Book preview

The Number 6

A novella

Owen Thomas

The characters and events portrayed in this novella are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2015, 2022 Owen Thomas

Author Website: http://OwenThomasLiterary.com

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

The novella The Number 6 is included in the larger work of short fiction Signs of Passing, by Owen Thomas, Copyright 2015, OTF Literary.

ISBN:  978-1-7377376-2-9

OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska.

The Number 6

The kestrel was soft and muscled. It pulled an elastic, membranous string of something visceral from one of its talons, glistening in the new light as it shortened. It made Harlan think of the wet, over-sauced spaghetti Winifred served on Sundays at The Gravy Boat Inn, just across the line into Clement County. The Gravy Boat Inn was a good ten minutes past the end of Route No. 6. 

When the string was gone, the kestrel gave its halting, chirping cry and hopped off the metal roof of the bus barn and floated down onto one of the seven stacks of tires sitting in the dust near the corner of the fence. The kestrel knew, just as Harlan knew, that the rabbit – a little pink eared, brown and white ball of baby fluff – had made for the tires the moment the dark feathered shadow had crossed the yard. 

The kestrel would lose this one, Harlan thought, yawning. As long as the rabbit was content to live in those stacks of tires. He stretched and sat up in his seat and scratched his head all over with his fingers. 

‘Course, the kestrel stood a good chance if the rabbit ever wanted any kind of a life. That was the dilemma for all of God’s critters, and it wasn’t up to God, it was up to the critter – it was up to the bunny rabbit quivering under the tires what kind of life he wanted. The way Harlan figured, it was only those kinds of choices that kept God interested in the first place.

Harlan looked carefully through the open window and around the bus yard, turning his head this way and that to see if the coast was clear. All was quiet except for the kestrel going on and on about the rabbit. Mr. Janicek was certainly not out and about this early, although he would be there soon enough to make sure all the drivers showed up to work on time. Mr. Janicek was a stickler for his people being on time. 

Mr. Janicek liked to show up at the front gate with all his drivers standing there in a neat line and waiting for him to unlock the padlock and remove the chains and to swing open the iron gate that kept his buses where they belonged overnight. Then Mr. Janicek handed out the bus keys, each one wired to a small slab of pine with words Summit County Busing burned into one side and the bus route number burned into the other side. He handed out the keys like he was handing out bibles or gold bars or loaded weapons or the keys to his own house or the keys to the city – anything more important or valuable than the ignition keys to the rusted silver tubes that daily rattled the people of Summit County to and from their various affairs. Mr. Janicek drove a clean white car with tail fins and red leather seats.

It might have been a smart system Mr. Janicek had devised. If one of his drivers ever lost a key, the finder would know where to return it, but would not know which particular bus it started, only the route number of the bus to which the key belonged. To steal a bus, a felonious opportunist would have to know that, for instance, the key for Route 3 started Bus Number Seventeen. The fact that Summit County Busing Company owned only six operable buses could have only added to the confusion and helped to snuff out criminal impulse before it sparked itself into an action that could not be taken back. 

Of course, if the same opportunist was fortunate enough to ride Bus Number Seventeen along Route 3 every day of his life, then there really would be no mystery in matching key to bus, and even less mystery after Mr. Janicek made blue laminated route number signs to hang from the rearview mirrors. 

None of this, in any event, applied to Harlan, who, for the entire period of his employment by the Summit County Busing Company – had been assigned to drive Bus Number Six to and fro, day in and day out, along Route Number Six. Should the felonious opportunist of Mr. Janicek’s darkest dreams stumble upon the key that he ceremoniously handed to Harlan every morning outside the iron gate, then there would be no stopping him. 

This all assumed that anyone would want to steal a bus in the first place, something that Harlan could never quite fathom.

He slid the window closed until he felt the latch click. Then he bent himself in half at the waist and leaned sideways, reaching under the seat for the sack that contained his personals. He pulled the sack up next to him on the seat and fished out the beech wood frame with a mirror in it that used to belong to his mother. The frame, into which had been carved a tangle of vines and flowers and even a small wren on one corner, had a twine attached to it that Harlan looped around the window latch so that the mirror hung where he could see his face.

He could have used the rear-view mirror up at the front of the bus, but that was too risky. The buses were always parked facing the front gate and anyone who happened to be around, like Mr. Janicek, would see him and he would lose his job for sure. So he tended to stay near the back