The Boy in the Tunnel

The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

27.

Red, yellow, blue, green. Orange, purple, pink. Green again, blue, red, blue, blue, blue. The only bus whose post-7:00 pm route included both Wintertree Hall and the Student Union was the Black Line, and Dick had waited over thirty minutes at the Wintertree stop without a single sighting of the solid black bus, a Kubrickian monolith on eight wheels. More Blue Lines than seemed necessary, all circling the truncated Night Blue route between the Family Delmonico and West Campus, their seats empty, ferrying no one to nowhere.

On weekdays from 6:00 am to 7:00 pm, all but the Green and Pink Lines serviced both Wintertree and the Union, but at nightfall and on weekends the routes changed to accommodate the assumed drop in ridership. However, as any student could tell you within a week of his arrival on campus, this assumption made an ass out of everybody—the number of students trying to get to the Union did not drop after dusk, and maybe even increased. Movies, student organization meetings, lectures and performances, ping-pong tournaments, etc.—except for the first-floor administrative offices, the Union came alive at night.

The fact was that the night buses’ neglect of the Union stemmed from obscure Department of University Transportation bylaws put into effect by Anthony “Three Teeth” Delmonico IV, the Founder’s great-grandson, at the turn of the century, when the nascent DUT boasted a fleet of three horse-drawn wagons. At the time, the Union was little more than a barn, which played host to a host of unregulated, semi-legal activities of which Three Teeth did not approve. The wagons ran constantly between the Union and the dorms on weekend nights, loaded with students soused on Purple Thunder, the local moonshine. In one semester, three horses died—two of exhaustion and one of alcohol poisoning.

In an effort to deter students from participating in the bacchanals at the Union, Three Teeth amended the DUT’s bylaws, to wit: “No more than one Public Conveyance may operate on any path between the Dormitories and the Student Union after the hour of Sunset, nor on Saturday, nor on the Sabbath.” The law remained in effect in 1997, thanks largely to the efforts of Three Teeth’s illegitimate descendants, who still ran DUT with the entitled sadistic glee of dictatorial heirs.

Another Yellow Line pulled up to the stop, discharging no passengers and accepting none. Over the last half hour, Dick had been joined in the little rain shelter by a dozen young women, all in purple t-shirts bearing the slogan “WE ARE EVERYBODY”—the uniform of The Everybody, UNWG’s only officially recognized “secret” society. The only secret, Dick thought, was how they managed to convince anyone to join their lame club, whose activities seemed to consist mainly of fortnightly Box Socials at the Union. Dick rolled his eyes at the white cardboard boxes each girl carried, and had Dick been a truly curious person, he might have considered that The Everybody’s real secret was what exactly those boxes contained.

Another Blue, followed by another Yellow. I could have walked to the Union by now, Dick thought. That every bus stopped at Wintertree, no matter how out of its normal route the dorm was (for example, the Yellow Line orbited the perimeter of campus, yet Wintertree sat in the exact geographical center of campus), was the result of a power struggle in 1973 between then-DUT President Hollister Meadows, Three Teeth’s illegitimate son, and then-DUH President Stanley Wintertree, the man for whom the dorm was named. Wintertree felt that his namesake was the figurative as well as literal center of campus, and as such, students should feel themselves drawn to it, should find themselves in the vicinity of Wintertree Hall at least once a day. Wintertree felt that the best way to accomplish this was to run every bus past the dorm, to plant the building in every student’s mind as an unavoidable landmark, a sort of psychic magnet whose presence they would eventually come to ache for.

Meadows did not share this view. He understood that including Wintertree on every bus route would only result in chaos. But, as has been the case with nearly every power struggle at UNWG, the victor was the party most willing to fight dirty. Meadows had few scruples, was borderline sociopathic, but Wintertree was a true believer. Meadows had no cause beyond his own satisfaction, but Wintertree served a greater good that forgive even his worst sins.

A sound wafted down Somerhalder Street—the anguineous hiss of a bus’s brakes. The thirteen heads at the bus stop all turned toward the source of the sound, hoping to see not a standard bus shape but the floating yellow windows that identified the Black Line. So far, nothing, only the low churning rumble of a bus somewhere around a corner.

The ghostly appearance of the Black Line buses had naturally given rise to rumors of phantom buses, forever circling campus with their benches full of the spirits of those already graduated. Or, perhaps, the Black Line buses were the vessels of the Nine Dead Men and the Living Creatures, ferrying the University’s secret rulers to their dark appointments. In 1985, sophomore Eric Harris filed a report with campus police stating that he witnessed a Black Line bus piloted by Milo Kirby driving along the Milligan Pass at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night; the same police report listed Harris’s BAC as .22, so administer grains of salt as necessary.

Two cones of light illuminated the end of Somerhalder, and then a glowing windshield appeared above two headlights—the Black Line. It pulled closer, and the Everybody girls jostled expectantly closer to the curb. The windows of the bus floated closer to the stop, and Dick realized it was full, the windows crammed with faces. The bus stopped at the shelter, and a streetlight glinted off its black body, finally revealing its solidity.

The door hissed open, revealing a stairwell full of students. There was room for maybe one passenger to ride illegally on the bottom stair. Dick turned and looked at the Everybody girls. He raised his eyebrows, frowned.

“Go ahead,” the girls said in perfect unison. “We’ll get the next one.”