“Sean! Sit the hell down!” I yelled. “She’s okay! Now sit down,” I said, and he obeyed.
I slid my window open and called to Risa. “You get his number?” All I’d caught was that the car was a tomato-red Saab with a ski rack on top.
She was shaken, standing there white-faced in the motel lot with her arms wrapped around herself. She shook her head no, turned away, and walked slowly back to the office. I drew a couple of deep breaths and checked Sean, who was seated now but still craning and peering wide-eyed after his mother. Nichole had him on her lap, with her arms around his narrow shoulders.
“There’s a lot of damn fool idiots out there, Sean,” I said. “I guess you got a right to worry.” I smiled at him, but he only glared back at me, as if I was to blame.
Again, I put the bus into first gear and started moving cautiously down the road, with the Grand Union truck rumbling along behind. I said, “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m really sorry.” That was all I could think of to say.
There were half a dozen more stops along the valley, and then I turned right onto Staples Mill Road and made my way uphill to the ridge, where you get a terrific view east and south toward Limekiln and Avalanche mountains. It’s mostly state forest up there, not many houses, and the few you see are old, built back before the Adirondack Park was created.
The snow was falling lightly now, hard dry flakes floating on the breeze. There was enough daylight that I could have shut off my headlights, but I didn’t, even though they weren’t helping me see the road any better. In fact, it was the time of day when headlights make no difference, on or off, but they let the bus itself be seen sooner and more clearly by oncoming cars. Not that there was any traffic up on Staples Mill Road, especially this early. But when you drive a school bus you have to think of these things. You have to anticipate the worst.
Obviously, you can’t control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I’m an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.
Abbott says, “Biggest … difference … between … people … is … quality … of … attention.” And since a person’s quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she damn well better do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you’ve got my philosophy of life. Abbott’s too. And you don’t need religion for it.
Oh, like most people, we go to church—First Methodist—but irregularly and mostly for social reasons, so as not to stand out too much in the community. But we’re not religious persons, Abbott and I. Although, since the accident, there have been numerous times when I have wished that I was. Religion being the main way the unexplainable gets explained. God’s will and all.
The first house you come to up there on the ridge is Billy Ansel’s old cut-stone colonial. I always liked stopping at Billy’s. For one thing, he used me as an alarm clock, not leaving for work himself until I arrived to pick up his children, Jessica and Mason, nine-year-old identical twins. I liked it when the parents were aware of my arrival, and he was always looking out the kitchen window when I pulled up, waiting for his kids to climb into the bus. Then as I pulled away I’d see the house lights go out, and a mile or two down the road, I’d look into my side mirror, and there he’d be, coming along behind in his pickup, on his way into town to open up his Sunoco station.
Normally he followed me the whole distance over the ridge to the Marlowe road, then south all the way into town, keeping a slow and distant sort of company with the bus, never bothering to pass on the straightaways, until finally, just before I got to the school, he turned off at the garage. Once I asked him why he didn’t pass me by, so he wouldn’t have to stop and wait every time I pulled over to make a pickup. He just laughed. “Well,” he said, “then I’d get to work before eight, wouldn’t I, and I’d have to stand around the garage waiting for the help to show up. There’s no point to that,” he said.
Truth is, I don’t think he wanted to move through that big empty house alone, once his kids were gone to school, and I believe it particularly pleased and comforted him, as he drove into town, to catch glimpses of his son and daughter in the school bus, waving back at him. Their mother, Lydia, a fairy princess of a woman, died of cancer some four years ago, and Billy took over raising the children by himself—although believe me, there are plenty of young women who would have been happy to help him out, as he is one fine-looking man. Smart and charming. And a successful businessman too. Even I found him sexy, and normally I don’t give a younger man a second look.
But it was more than sexy; there was always something noble about Billy Ansel. In high school, he was the boy other boys imitated and followed, quarterback and captain of the football team, president of his senior class, et cetera. After graduation, like a lot of boys from Sam Dent back then, he went into the service. The Marines. In Vietnam, he was field commissioned as a lieutenant, and when he came back to Sam Dent in the mid-seventies, he married his high school sweetheart, Lydia Storrow, and borrowed a lot of money from the bank and bought Creppitt’s old Sunoco station, where he had worked summers, and turned it into a regular automotive repair shop, with three bays and all kinds of electronic troubleshooting equipment. Lydia, who had gone to Plattsburgh State and knew accounting, kept the books, and Billy ran the garage. The stone house up on Staples Mill they bought a few years later, when the twins were born, and then renovated top to bottom, which it sorely needed. They were an ideal couple. An ideal family.
Billy Ansel, though, was always a man with a mission. Nothing discouraged him or made him bitter. When he came back to Sam Dent, right away he joined the VFW post in Placid, and soon he became an officer and went to work making the boys who had served in Vietnam respectable there, at a time when, most places, people still thought of them as drug addicts and murderers. He got them out marching proudly with the other vets every Fourth of July and Veterans Day. In fact, until recently, to work for him at the garage, you yourself had to be a Vietnam vet. He hired young men from all over the region, surly boys with long hair and hurt looks on their faces. At different times he even had a couple of black men working for him—very unusual in Sam Dent. His men were loyal to him and treated him like he was their lieutenant and they were still back in Vietnam. It was strange and in a way thrilling to watch a lost boy get rehabilitated like that. After a year or two, the fellow would have learned a trade, more or less, and he’d brighten up, and soon he’d be gone, replaced a week later by another sad-faced angry young man.
All the way across the back ridge on Staples Mill Road, Billy followed the bus. Whenever I slowed to pick up a waiting child, I’d look into the side mirror, and there he’d be, grinning through his beard at the kids in the back seat, who liked to turn and make V-for-victory signs at him. Especially Bear Otto, who regarded Billy Ansel as a hero, and of course the twins, who, because of Bear’s protection, were allowed by the older boys to sit in the back seat of the bus. Bear dreamed of going into the Marines himself someday and working afterwards in Billy’s garage. “Can’t go to no Vietnam no more,” he once told me. “But there’s always someplace where they need the U.S. Marines, right?” I nodded and hoped he was wrong. I have a son in the military, after all. But I understood Bear Otto’s desire to become a noble man, a man like Billy Ansel, and I respected that, naturally. I just wished the boy had more ways of imagining the thing than by becoming a good soldier. But that’s boys, I guess.
Out there on the far side of Irish Hill, just before Staples Mill Road ties onto the old Marlowe road and makes a beeline for Sam Dent, three miles away, there’s a stretch of tableland called Wilmot Flats. Supposedly, in ancient times it was the bottom of a glacial river or lake, but now it’s mostly poor sandy soil and scrub brush and jack pine, with no open views of the mountains or valleys, at least not from the road. The town dump takes up half the Flats, with the other half parceled into odd lots with trailers on them and a couple of hand-built houses that are little more th
an shanties, tarpaper-covered clusters of tiny rooms heated by kerosene and wood. The folks who live in them are mostly named Atwater, with a few Bilodeaus thrown in. Every winter there’s a bad fire up on the Flats, and at town meeting for a spell everyone talks about instituting regulations to govern the ways houses are heated, as if the state legislature hadn’t already tried to regulate them from down in Albany. But nothing ever comes of it—there’s too many of us who heat with kerosene or wood to change things. They’re dangerous, of course, but what isn’t?
Anyhow, I was making my stops up along the Flats, picking up the last of my load—nine kids up there, except when there’s a virus going around—boys and girls of various ages who are the poorest children in town, generally. Their parents are young, little more than teenaged kids themselves, and half of them are cousins or actual siblings. There’s intermarriage up there and all sorts of mingling that it’s better not to know about, and between that and alcohol and ignorance, the children have little chance of doing more with their lives than imitating their parents’ lives. With them, says Abbott, you have to sympathize. Regardless of what you think of their parents and the rest of the adults up there. It’s like all those poor children are born banished and spend their lives trying to get back to where they belong. And only a few of them manage it. The occasional plucky one, who happens also to be lucky and gifted with intelligence, good looks, and charm, he might get back, before he dies, to his native town. But the rest stay banished, permanently exiled, if not up there on Wilmot Flats, then someplace just like it.
That’s when I saw the dog. The actual dog, I mean—not the one I thought I saw on the Marlowe road a few minutes later. It’s probably irrelevant, but I offer it as a possible explanation for my seeing what I thought was a dog later, since both were the same dull red color. The dog on Wilmot Flats was a garbage hound, one of those wandering strays you see hanging around the dump. They are often sick and vicious and are known to chase deer, so the boys in town shoot them whenever they come across one in the woods. Over the years I’ve come up on four or five of their rotting corpses in the woods behind our house, and it always gives me a painful chill and then a protracted sad feeling. I don’t like the dogs one bit, but I hate to see them dead.
As I was saying, I had picked up the kids on the Flats and was passing by the open chain-link entrance to the dump, when this raggedy old mutt shot out the gate and ran across the road in front of me, and it scared the bejesus out of me, although I could not for the life of me tell you why, as he was ordinary-looking and there was no danger of my hitting him.
My mind must have been locked onto something contrasted—my sons Reginald and William, probably, since I felt that morning particularly estranged from them, and you tend to embrace with thought what you’re forbidden to embrace in fact. For when that dog entered my field of vision, it somehow astonished and then frightened me. The dog was skinny and torn-looking, a yellow-eyed young male with a long pointed head and large ears laid flat against his skull as he darted across the road, leapt over the snowbank, and disappeared into the darkness of the scrub pine woods there.
Although the snow was blowing in feathery waves by then, the road was still dry and black, easy to see, and I gripped the wheel and drove straight on, as if nothing had happened. For nothing had happened! Yet I wanted intensely to pull the bus over and stop, to sit there for a moment and try to gather my fragmented thoughts and calm my clanging nerves.
I glanced into the side mirror at Billy Ansel’s face smiling through the windshield of his pickup, an innocent and diligent man waving to children at play, and I felt a wave of pity for him come over me, although I did not know what I pitied him for. I turned back from the mirror and stared straight ahead at the road and clamped my hands onto the steering wheel and drove on toward the intersection at the Marlowe road, where I slowed, and when I saw that there was no traffic coming or even going, I turned right and headed down the long slope toward town.
The road was recently rebuilt and is wide and straight, with a passing lane and narrow shoulders and a bed of gravel and guardrails, before it drops off a ways on the right-hand side to Jones Brook, which is mostly boulders up there and not much water. Eventually, as the brook descends it fills, and by the time it joins the Ausable River down in the valley it’s a significant fast-running stream. There’s an old town sandpit down there dug into the ancient lakebed, and a closed-off road in from the Flats, near the dump. On the left-hand side, the land is wooded and rises slowly toward Knob Lock Mountain and Giant in the southeast.
Coming down from the Flats on the Marlowe road toward town, the greatest danger was that I would be going too slow and a lumber truck or some idiot in a car would come barreling along at seventy-five or eighty, which you can easily do up there, once you’ve made the crest from the other side, and would come up on me fast and not be able to slow or pass and would run smack into me, or, more likely, first would hit Billy Ansel’s pickup truck lollygagging along behind and then the bus. As a result, since I didn’t have any more stops to make once I’d gathered the kids from the Flats, I tended to drive that stretch of road at a pretty good clip. Nothing reckless, you understand. Nothing illegal. Fifty, fifty-five is all. Also, if I happened to be running a few minutes late, that was the only time when I could make up for it.
After passing through the gloom and closed-in feeling of Wilmot Flats, when you turn onto the Marlowe road and start the drive toward town, you tend to feel uplifted, released. Or I should say, I always did. The road is straight and there is more sky than land for the first time, and the valley opens up below you and on your right, like Montana or Wyoming—a large snow-covered bowl with a range of distant mountains surrounding it, and beyond the mountains there are still more mountains shouldering toward the sky, as if the surface of the planet were the same everywhere as here. This was always the most pleasurable part of my journey—with the bus in high gear and running smooth, enough pale daylight now, despite the thin gauzy snow falling, to see the entire landscape stretched out before me, and the busload of children peaceful behind me as they contentedly conversed with one another or silently prepared themselves for the next segment of their long day.
And, yes, it was then that I saw the dog, the second dog, the one I maybe only thought I saw. It emerged from the blowing snow on the right side of the road, popped up from the ditch there, or so it seemed, and crossed to the center of the road, where it appeared to stop, as if unsure whether to continue or go back. No, I am almost sure now that it was an optical illusion or a mirage, a sort of afterimage, maybe, of the dog that I had seen on the Flats and that had frightened and moved me so. But at the time I could not tell the difference.
And as I have always done when I’ve had two bad choices and nothing else available to me, I arranged it so that if I erred I’d come out on the side of the angels. Which is to say, I acted as though it was a real dog I saw or a small deer or possibly even a lost child from the Flats, barely a half mile away.
For the rest of my life I will remember that red-brown blur, like a stain of dried blood, standing against the road with a thin screen of blown snow suspended between it and me, the full weight of the vehicle and the thirty-four children in it bearing down on me like a wall of water. And I will remember the formal clarity of my mind, beyond thinking or choosing now, for I had made my choice, as I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and slapped my foot against the brake pedal, and I wasn’t the driver anymore, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head, as if the bus were a huge wave about to break over me. There was Bear Otto, and the Lamston kids, and the Walkers, the Hamiltons, and the Prescotts and the teenaged boys and girls from Bartlett Hill, and Risa and Wendell Walker’s sad little boy, Sean, and sweet Nichole Burnell, and all the kids from the valley, and the children from Wilmot Flats, and Billy Ansel’s twins, Jessica and Mason—the children of my town—their wide-eyed faces and fragile bodies swirling and tumbling in a tangled mass as the bus went over and the sky tipped and ve
ered away and the ground lurched brutally forward.
Billy Ansel
Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur—even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say—at the moment it occurred I was thinking about fucking Risa Walker. My truck was right behind the bus when it went over, and my body was driving my truck, and one hand was on the steering wheel and the other was waving at Jessica and Mason, who were aboard the bus and waving back at me from the rear window—but my eyes were looking at Risa Walker’s breasts and belly and hips cast in a hazy neon glow through the slats of the Venetian blind in Room 11 of the Bide-a-Wile.
So I don’t know anything of what immediately preceded the accident, although once it happened, of course, I saw it all, every last mind-numbing detail. And still do, every time I close my eyes. The swerve off the road to the right, the skid, the smashing of the guardrail and the snowbank; and then the tilted angled plummet down the embankment to the sandpit, where, moving fast and somehow still upright, the bus slid across the ice to the far side; and then the ice letting go and the rear half of the yellow bus being swallowed at once by the freezing blue-green water.
I don’t close my eyes a whole lot now. Unless I’m drunk and can’t help it—therefore, a frequently desired state, you might say.
Many of the folks in Sam Dent have come out since the accident and claimed that they knew it was going to happen someday, oh yes, they just knew it: because of Dolores’s driving, which, to be fair, is not reckless but casual; or because of the condition of the bus itself, which Dolores serviced at home in her barn, and as a consequence it did not get the same supervision by me as the other school buses got; or because of that downhill stretch of road and the fact that there’s almost no shoulder to it on either side of the guardrail; or because of the sandpit below the highway there, which the town had opened up a few years before and then abandoned when it filled with water, thinking no one could get to it except by the old blocked-off access road on the other side of the Flats.
The Sweet Hereafter Page 3