street corner

When the huge bus wheezed and then shuddered, and the engine finally quieted, Dwayne was frozen to his seat. "Port Authority," the fat bus driver called over his shoulder. Dwayne had been on the Greyhound for two days, rolling out of Kentucky, watching the green landscape morph, lose its softness, and then finally congeal, dark and hopelessly solid, into this utterly foreign mass. It had been his dream to come here, but now his legs were losing strength. The feeling reminded him of the day when his big brother Roscoe made him carry that dead buck clear out of Deer Cross Hollow. He nearly cried that day.
When Dwayne stepped out onto Eighth Avenue the assault was almost final. He gulped in the dirty air. It fairly closed his throat.
"Hey son, you lookin' for a nice cheap hotel?"
The man was tall and dangerously thin, and talked with his lips drawn down over his teeth. If indeed he had teeth. He reached to take Dwayne's bag.
"Hold on," Dwayne said.
"A stranger can use a friend in this place."
Dwayne searched the man's eyes.