The King of Diamonds
By: Kurt Reno
Tags: Short Story, Short Fiction, Las Vegas, Desert, Bus Trip

The Conestoga Line bus to Las Vegas pulled into the parking lot, slowly but purposefully. It rolled up to the exact spot where I was standing, marked by a paint strip on the pavement. So when the door opened, all I had to do was step aboard right from there. That’s a skilled driver, I thought. I was the only one waiting at this pickup point, but I could see there were a few people already on board. “The King of Diamonds” was hand-lettered red on the bus door, in a very fancy way. It opened, I climbed up the steps, handed my ticket to the driver, and happily discovered that the shotgun seat was open. Sometimes they save those seats for other drivers or supervisors. Or for people who have trouble walking. But not this time. I slid in, and nobody said anything. I didn’t even need to take the window seat, because the whole big windshield was right in front of me, unobstructed. This is going to be great, I thought. I love seeing the road in front of us, not just the landscape to the side. It’s almost like driving. This is going to be great.

The pickup point was a lonely corner of a large parking lot shared by a discount department store, a hardware store, several motels, and a couple of fast-food places, just off the Interstate in Flagstaff. We waited for a few minutes, door closed, engine running, air conditioner blasting. It was hot outside in the late afternoon.

Nobody else showed up at my pickup point, and the driver pulled away exactly on schedule. We were already at the outskirts of town, and in no time we were driving through arid Arizona heading West. There were a lot of “Land for Sale” and “Lots for Sale” billboards on the side of the highway. I can’t recall any of the large-print phone numbers, but thinking about it now, I bet they all went to the same office. There were dead snakes and dead scorpions on the road, too. Flattened. You see everything from the shotgun seat.

After a couple of hours, the bus pulled into a truck stop complex just outside Kingman. We rolled past the gas pumps, past the part of the parking lot where there were more cars than trucks, past the part where there were only trucks. All the way back to where a few bus company signs and benches were set up temporarily. Set up temporarily, but they looked like they’d been there for years. Five spaces were marked out by bus company logos painted on the pavement, facing benches. There were already four busses there, so The King of Diamonds took the last open space at the very end. We pulled right up over the “Sunrise Bus Lines” logo. There were two men sitting on the bench.

The driver turned off the engine, opened the door, stood up, and faced the passengers. “Six thirty exactly”, he said, loud enough for everyone on the half-full bus to hear. That gave us fifteen minutes. He went down the steps and started walking towards the sprawling low-level facility. I guessed he was going to the bathroom.

That was the last stop before Vegas. Six or seven people got out to smoke. I got out to move around a little, walking past the pavement into the desert, which was right there. After twenty feet or so, I remembered the snakes and scorpions, and headed back to the pavement. I stood near the front of our bus, and scanned the desert from left to right until I was looking right at the two men sitting on the Sunrise Bus Lines bench.

It seemed to me they were Native Americans, father and son. They had the same face, the same hair, the same build, and even wore similar clothes. Lines were beginning to form on the younger man’s face, in the same places as on the older man’s. Less deeply cut, but there. Maybe they think about the same things, I thought. Maybe they worry about the same things.

I wasn’t too far from them, but I took a few steps closer. “I guess you’re not going to Vegas”, I said.

The older man spoke, looking straight ahead. “Nope, not going to Vegas”, he said. The younger man turned and looked straight at me, but didn’t say anything.

“Sorry, I don’t think our bus is supposed to be here”, I said to the older man, motioning to the parking spot in front of the Sunrise bench.

“Yup, probably not supposed to be here”, he said.

“Is yours late?” I asked. “It must be late.”

“Ours must be late,” he answered, blankly. In fact, he hadn’t moved much, if at all, the whole time I spoke to him.

Their bus, wherever it was taking them, couldn’t do what it had to do as long as The King of Diamonds was taking up the spot.

“Sorry to block your way”, I told them. “We’ll be gone soon enough.”

“You’ll be gone soon enough”, the older man repeated back to me, still looking straight ahead. The younger man was still looking right at me.

I looked down at my feet, turned, and took a few steps back to my desert view vantage point. There was road noise behind me, and truck stop noise behind me, but the desert in front of me was silent. The sun was getting close to the horizon.

In any direction there was dust, rock, snakes, maybe even gold. In every other direction, the opposite. How to pick the right direction, I wondered?

Back in my shotgun seat at 6:29, I was happy. By 6:35, we were on the highway again. It got dark out after about an hour, and I saw a yellowish-pinkish halo across the whole sky ahead of us. The highway brought us closer and closer, and I started to see the source of the glow: Las Vegas. An oasis of motion and light in a desert of stillness and dark.

Soon the bus was moving among the glittering, radiating structures. They were shooting light of every color in every direction into the pitch black sky. It was dazzling.

The bus made several stops, letting a few people out each time. I stayed on til the last one. As I left the bus, I said “Thank you” to the driver, who nodded. The bench there had “Welcome to the Frontier Casino” painted on it, even though that particular one was long gone. I stood for a moment, deciding which way to walk. It was all so glorious, I knew I couldn’t go wrong no matter which way I went. Just then, I thought about the younger man at the bus stop in Kingman. He let the older man do all the talking. Why would he look at me, right at me, and not say anything? Who would do something like that, I thought?

Who?