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The summer sun hung heavy over Fort Stockton like it always did—burning through clouds, paint, and whatever plans Cutter Bridges thought he had for his life.

He was eighteen, freshly graduated from Jim Bowie High School, where the mascot was a snarling Bowie knife and the football team had a better record than the school board. Cutter hadn’t made the honor roll, hadn’t been voted Most Likely to Succeed, and hadn’t kissed a girl since Trudy Hatch let him behind the bleachers sophomore year out of what she later described as “pity and curiosity.”

Still, he wasn’t dumb. He just wasn’t… sure. And being the son of Fort Stockton’s only funeral directors meant that not being sure was an issue.

“You’ll come around,” his mother said with an almost maternal confidence, the same tone she used when explaining to grieving families that yes, the deceased could be buried in their football uniform if they wanted.

“You’ve got the temperament,” his father, Jeremiah, added. “You know how to listen. How to keep still.”

But Cutter didn’t want stillness. Not yet. Not forever. He wanted motion. Laughter. People who weren’t laying still under a sheet.

So he asked for a summer. Just one. To figure out if embalming was really in his blood—or just the residue of living over a prep room for eighteen years.

His mother hesitated. “You’re not taking that wagon. That car’s older than you are and more unpredictable.”

His father smirked but said nothing, which in Bridges-speak meant he half-agreed. They compromised.

“You can take the bus,” Jeremiah finally said. “The ‘Dillo Flyer.”

Cutter grimaced. “The city bus?”

“It’s statewide,” his dad said. “Goes more places than you think.”

“And it’s safe,” his mom added. “Safer than letting you barrel down the highway in that orange coffin.”

They laid down the rules: he could go anywhere the ‘Dillo Flyer took him, be gone as long as he wanted, but he had to call every couple weeks, write weekly, and end his journey in Fort Worth. His Uncle Red owned Bridges Eastside Funeral Home there, and if nothing else, it would be a chance to see how the other half buried.

Cutter agreed. Begrudgingly.

The ‘Dillo Flyer wasn’t built for comfort. It was a blue-and-white 1954 GMC TDM-4512 transit bus with rounded windows and a farebox that looked like it could eat fingers. The interior smelled like a mix of cracked vinyl, old cigarettes, and whatever passed for air conditioning in 1954.

But it ran. It bounced down Texas highways with a snort and a roar, and Cutter sat by the window, backpack wedged beside him, notebook in his lap.

His first stop was Sonora, population barely enough to fill the bleachers. He wandered the square, got a haircut he didn’t need, and spent two hours watching an old man in a feed cap paint a mural of Jesus riding a longhorn on the side of an old limestone building just off the square.  Neither Jesus nor the longhorn seemed to be particularly enthralled with Sonora in the painting.

When he asked the man why, the old-timer replied, “Because he damn sure never rode a donkey through here.”

In Brady, Cutter helped a woman at the café who couldn’t open a jar of pickles. She offered him a free piece of pecan pie, which he accepted, and they talked for nearly an hour about the best places in Texas to die. She was a retired nurse.

“San Angelo’s nice,” she said. “Hospice has windows.”

By the time the bus lurched into Lampasas, Cutter had traded a pocketknife for a book of cowboy poetry and a half-eaten bag of peanut brittle.

Each town gave him something: a voice, a rhythm, a taste. He found joy in jukebox songs, shade trees, and the way people looked up when a bus rolled in. The ‘Dillo wasn’t glamorous, but it carried stories. Lives in motion. And Cutter had a window seat.

One morning outside Llano, the bus blew a tire and everyone had to wait while the driver changed it with a jack the size of a cinder block. Cutter sat in the gravel with a boy named Darrell who’d just left a job selling gravestones in Marble Falls.

“Ironic,” Darrell muttered, “considering I nearly got buried under student loans.”

He pulled out a harmonica and played something Cutter didn’t recognize. Sad, but sweet. When the bus finally groaned back to life, Darrell tipped his hat and said, “Hope you find what you ain’t looking for.”

Cutter wrote that down.

In Fredericksburg, he found a festival he hadn’t meant to find. Polka music. Bratwurst. Old couples dancing like teenagers and teenagers dancing like they were old. He met a girl named Liesel who sold hand-painted birdhouses. They drank lukewarm beer behind a barn and kissed once, then laughed about it.

“You’re going somewhere,” she said, tilting her head.

“Not sure where yet.”

“Well, when you do, write it on a birdhouse.”

The bus rumbled on. New Braunfels, Gonzales, Elgin, Rockdale. Towns with antique stores and window signs that read “Closed for Inventory” when everybody knew it meant they’d just given up for the day.

Cutter watched kids play baseball in dusty parks. He shared fried pies with a grandmother in Burnet. He got sunburned in Waco and had to bum aloe from a gas station clerk named Misty who kept hers in the employee fridge next to the Vienna sausages.

Each stop felt like a small heartbeat. Tiny rhythms in the chest of a state too big to understand in one lifetime.

And Cutter was listening now.

In the back of the bus, near the emergency exit, he found a sweet spot. The air didn’t circulate well and the shocks had long since quit, but it gave him the view he needed. Between cracked vinyl seats and the hum of rubber on asphalt, Cutter began to feel something like clarity.

People weren’t just stories that ended at the funeral home. They were moments strung together—some mundane, some ridiculous, and some filled with meaning you didn’t understand until long after the bus had pulled away.

One night, somewhere between Cleburne and Burleson, the driver pulled over to let Cutter pee in a field. No rest stops for fifty miles, and Cutter had been crossing his legs like a Boy Scout under siege.

As he stood in the tall grass, the sky stretched wide and black and scattered with stars. Texas stars. The kind you could fall into. The kind that reminded you how small you were, and how good that could feel.

Finally, after three weeks and twenty-one towns, the ‘Dillo Flyer pulled into Fort Worth under a pale blue sky. The terminal was half-empty, its faded signs hanging crooked and its soda machine humming like it had something to say.

Waiting in the lot, arms crossed beside a long black Cadillac hearse, was Uncle Red.

He wore aviators and a bolo tie and didn’t smile until Cutter stepped off the bus and adjusted the backpack on his shoulder.

“You look taller,” Red said.

“Bus adds perspective.”

Red nodded like he understood, which—being a Bridges—he probably did.

“You ready?”

“Nope,” Cutter said. “But I’m here.”

Red opened the passenger door of the hearse. “Then let’s go home.”

Cutter hesitated a moment, looked back at the bus, now coughing dust and diesel into the Fort Worth breeze. A driver with gray stubble leaned on the wheel, already flipping through a paperback. The door whooshed shut.

And just like that, the ‘Dillo Flyer rolled on.

But Cutter stayed behind.

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