All Tom Jones wanted in life, at this moment, was to get the Hell away from the Iron Ranch bus stop and he saw his delivering conveyance in the night gloom, glaring it’s white lights, the console red. Then he held up his bus pass and the console turned yellow as it neared, then, as it hissed to a stop, turned green, stopping before him like a kneeling giant, no one apparently within. Unable to avert his eyes from the half-fleshed, half-clothed skeleton of the yo-punk, Tom turned bodily to place himself between the welcome sight of the bus and the unwelcome sight by the bush.

The door slid open.

He stepped aboard and the bus was silent, as if he were not being noted—indeed were not there. The door shut behind him as he limped along the rail and the bus started up, with no “Valued Senior” handicapped bullshit to keep him in this hellish place one more moment, but rolling off just like the old days when a bus driver gave not a single never mind to the poor fools trying to get a seat while they learned how to drive from behind the wheel of a 45-foot bus.

Ah, for the good old days. he thought, wearily.

“Exactly my thought on the matter, Sir.” came a stentorian tone to his right, a deep resonant voice of strident authority and keen intellect, the words perfectly formed to clearly infuse the hearer’s mind with their meaning. Immediately overcome by the thought that every word that this man said was worth a listen, Tom looked to the blind seat, the seat behind the console, behind where the bus driver used to sit, where Jackie Mason used to role his joints in high school.

The occupant was a slightly built, black man of medium height and sharp features, his beard trimmed neatly into a point, his mustache twirled out into two greased points below his well-defined cheeks, his eyebrows dark and upward pointing above the outside of the eyes—eyes of jet black on slate gray, eyes like he had never seen. The man was dressed in a black tuxedo with silver shirt and red bowtie. His shoes were jet black with silver heels and shoestrings of red silk. His high forehead was overshadowed by a black derby hat. The man had slight creases next to his eyes, but no other sign of age, yet he gave the appearance of elderly vitality, seeming to be in late middle years, perhaps 25-years younger than Tom.

He held, between his dark hands, the rounded pommel of a scepter like cane, apparently made of stainless steel inlaid with mahogany. The pommel was a richly stained globe of mahogany carved with pyramids, dunes, a palm-fringed oasis, and crowned with a silver pendent, imbedded in the mahogany of the globe-like pommel, as if the long ago cut and stained wood had grown over the edges of the pendent, the likeness of which he could not make out, as the man’s dark hand rested upon it.

“It is a fine cane, is it not, Sir?” came that deep, soothing voice.

“Yes, yes it is,” stammered Tom, as he hobbled past the fellow, who then stayed him with a cool hand upon his wrist.

“Sir, if you please, sit by my side, for I would converse with a man with some years on his bones. Besides, you seem weary and—infirm of hip if I do say so.”

“Yeah, on my last leg—destined for the dirt farm soon enough.”

The man placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and helped him ease into the seat, all the furies of Hell playing through his hip and back and making this simple process an agony. Finally, repose, a measure of half-pained relief—rest. He almost fell asleep immediately.

“Thank ye, Sir. It’s been a rough night on an old boy.”

“Indeed,” intoned the rich voice, far outsized for the slight frame that housed it. Perhaps you require rest. Tell me your stop and I shall wake you at the proper moment, give you a lift. Why, it seems ages since I’ve done a favor. I have lived a life of double-dealing and sin. You, Sir, do not mind being my redemption, do you?”

Tom looked into the hard face, striking kind pose and saw a sincere need to be liked, the need for approval, that Tom had seen so many times in the eyes of fighters who fancied they had failed him somehow.

“Hell no, Son. I’ve spent most of my life on the wrong side of the tracks. I appreciate the nap.”

And so Tom fell right off to sleep, not a bit worried about his snoring afflicting the pretty ears of some girl, for it was just he and this Good Samaritan—Sammy Davis Junior with a guilt complex, on this bus to Asquith—