“Settle in, fellars. Next stop is Morgan City, but it’ll take me a good forty or so minutes to get y’alls there,” croaks the driver.

“I am telling you it’s him,” says the roughneck, pointing at the old man piloting the bus. If his finger was a gun, the driver’d be dead. Mike’s scowl never misses.

“This is why you never got a promotion, Mike, cuz you’re always making shit up,” I respond.
His furious focus shifts to me, and I briefly feel twelve years old again, shrinking in my window seat just before the mighty Mike Fontenot beats the snot out of me for making some smart-ass comment. Why do I always do that?

Lucky for me, this time Mike relaxes into a grin.

“I thought it was because of my drinking,” he says. The guys explode into deep belly-laughs. We are all full grown adults now, most of us with wives and kids, yet still we gang together in the back of an empty bus like we have something to hide. Something to whisper and giggle about. And I guess when you put it like that, that is kinda what we do all day. We whisper and giggle and we wait for the next bus ride. When we’re on the rig, we wish we were heading home. When we’re home, we wish we were on this bus again. Just so we can have someone to talk to.

“I am not lying though, Scrawny. That’s the guy that stole my boots.” The intensity is back. You have to give it to him, he is nothing if not focused.
“That’s not how I remember it,” rumbles someone from the back corner. “He won ’em off ya, didn’t he?”
“Cheating ain’t winning, it’s stealing. And you weren’t even there,” Mike quips.
“You told this story so many times, it kinda feels like I was.”
Another burst of raucous laughter. Mike doesn’t join in. He gets up out of his seat, and if it wasn’t for Stephen getting in his way, he would’ve had the driver in a choke hold by now.
“Take it easy, Mike. We’re all just trying to get where we’re going.” Stephen has always had a calming presence on Mike. Even when he wasn’t six foot five yet.
“I was just gonna talk to him.”
“That’s what I tell my boyfriend every time he catches me coming out of the Snake-charmed Saloon with glitter all over my face.”
This makes Mike sit down, pull a flask out of his pocket and take a sip of something that reeks like motor oil and vanilla beans. He has always had strange tastes.

“Y’all never stand up for me,” he mumbles through gritted teeth.
Groans sound from all around me.
“I’m forty-eight years old, Mike,” snaps a voice in the back, “I don’t stand up for nothing anymore unless I absolutely have to."
"I’ll remind you of that next time that pool-cue-looking bouncer grabs your wife’s butt again.” The groaning subsides. “That’s right,” mumbles Mike, before he takes another sip.
“Same goes for you, Scrawny. Maybe I won’t pick up the phone, next time you need to talk to your landlord.”

I had forgotten about that. The guy that owns my building had quietly stolen my parking spot and pretended it was never mine. He parked a wheel-less Mustang there, waiting to be fixed up. It was Mike who suggested we tow the car and present him with the bill. “Be a backbone, not a wishbone,” he had said. It worked. The slumlord had only gently nodded to me ever since we towed his “beauty.” It wasn’t until six months later that Stephen told me him and Mike had gone to see “the beauty” and her owner at the tow-lot that same night. “Just to talk to him.” Sure.

Me and Mike never discussed it.

In complete silence we traverse the last twenty-odd miles to Morgan City. I am sure all of us remembering a moment when Mike was standing right behind us. So we stay quiet and we try to count the herons in the bushes racing by.

The squeal of the brakes wakes me up.

“Morgan City, final stop, six minutes early,” the bus driver yells over the hiss of the pneumatic doors, “but I gotta piss like a racehorse, so y’all have to see yourselves off.” He opens the little swing door and steps out into the aisle.

And there they are.

All eight of us see them at the exact same time: the faux-crocodile leather boots. Still shiny. Still ugly. And definitely still Mike’s - but on the feet of this Hare Lines bus driver. His shirt calls him Jeff. We make sure he does not make it to that lavatory before pissing his pants. I don’t think I saw Mike wear another pair of shoes after that day.

We rode this bus twice a week for the next twenty years but we only ever saw the driver again at the end of Mike’s stories where “Barefoot Jeff limps off into the swamps.”