They sat in the long sideways seat near the back door, because it was the only place with two seats together that wasn't wet. The bus pulled out of the plaza and turned south, and the city went by outside the streaming windows in long smears of neon and red brake light: a pawn shop, a darkened church, a hot wiener place with its windows fogged and a man in a paper hat moving behind the glass with a row of wieners lined up along his bare forearm like a bracelet. The bus was warm and smelled of wet wool and diesel and somebody's oranges. Theda put her shoeless foot over the heater vent under the seat and felt the blood come back into her toes in a long, painful, glorious rush.
Nicky had taken the tape out of his jacket and was holding it on his knee with both hands, like a man holding a plate of cookies on a bumpy road.
"You're very careful with that," she said.
"Handle like a baby. It's in writing."
"Do you have kids?"
"Three nephews. I've been handling them like babies for nine years. Rocco's seven now. He took the transmission apart on his bike last month. He's going to be an engineer or go to prison, Carmela says, and she's not particular which, as long as he's out of the house." He turned the case over. "Do you?"
"No. Me? No. I have an apartment with no electricity and half a chicken."
"You said that."
"It's the main thing in my life right now. I'm very worried about the chicken."
He laughed. It was a good laugh, low and sudden, with no performance in it at all, and the nurses across the aisle both looked over and then looked at each other, and one of them raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch at the other in a way Theda recognized from a lifetime of being a woman on public transportation. She felt her face get warm, and blamed the heater.
"So what do you know about it?" said Nicky. "The movie. Besides the doughnut."
"I know what's in the book of stills. Which is mostly captions." Theda shut her eyes to remember. "She's an heiress. Ellie. Her father's a millionaire and she's married some pilot he hates, and he's got her locked on a yacht, and she jumps off the yacht and swims to shore in Miami and gets on a night bus to New York to go back to the pilot. And he's a newspaperman who's just been fired, and he's on the same bus, and he recognizes her and figures he'll get his job back if he gets her story. That's all in the first two stills. Then there's a lot of pictures of them in hay."
"In hay?"
"Lying in hay. Sitting in hay. Arguing in hay. And then one where he's carrying her across a river on his back. And a famous one where they're hitchhiking, and she's showing her leg. And a whole bunch of them in some kind of cabin with a blanket hung up on a rope between two beds. That's the Walls of Jericho. The caption says so. But it doesn't say why they call it that."
"Joshua," said Nicky.