But lying half drunk in the darkness in that king-sized bed in my house on the hill, the twins sleeping soundly in their room at the end of the hall, I’d imagine Risa Walker naked and ecstatic, and it positively thrilled me. Took me straight out of the misery of my daily life and let my hormones run things for a while. Risa released me sexually when no other woman could. Women like Wanda Otto are already so close to naked and ecstatic in public, it’s not much of a thrill to take them one more step alone and in private. In fact, what you imagine is a woman you can’t satisfy—an image that is well known for dousing the fire in a man. But picturing Risa—calm, reticent, controlled, decent, and modest Risa Walker—picturing her wild with passion, sweating and naked, long legs akimbo, hands digging into your back, mouth grunting and licking into your ear … well, that’s a picture a man can cook with.
In time, the fantasies were insufficient. That’s how it is—the more vivid the imagined sex, the less satisfying it is as sex. You have to keep upping the ante, just like they do in pornographic movies, until finally you have to either replace it with the real thing or else rent a different movie. I didn’t want a different movie; by then all I wanted was Risa Walker. Any other woman was a diminishment, and even a slight diminishment was a total loss. I wanted, I needed, Risa.
The trouble was, Risa was thoroughly married to a friend of mine, and in all the years I had known her, she had not once shown the slightest interest in going to bed with anyone other than her husband. Especially not with me. To be fair, I had not given her much opportunity. I am known as a self-contained man and am probably not very approachable, which has always been my choice of character anyhow, insofar as a person can choose his character.
I like to be the strong, silent man in charge, the boss, the point man, the lieutenant, the head of the household, et cetera, a preference that may come from my having been the oldest of five children, with a more or less incompetent mother and a father who took off for Alaska when I was twelve and was never heard from again. Looking back, it seems I spent most of my youth cleaning up my father’s mess and the rest of my life making sure that no one mistook me for him. He was an impractical man, not quite honest, a fellow of grand beginnings and no follow-through, one of those men who present their children and wives with dreams instead of skills, charm in place of discipline, and constant seduction for love and loyalty. When he took off to make a fortune in the oil fields, he left behind a huge hole in the yard that was going to be a swimming pool, a pile of cinder blocks that was going to be a restaurant, a hundred old casement windows that were going to be a greenhouse, a stack of IOUs written to half the people in town, and a promise to return by fall, which no one in town wanted him to keep.
Anyhow, when I began trying to seduce Risa Walker, I found myself behaving like my father, which embarrassed me and made me feel incompetent as well. I felt his phony smile on my face, heard his glib words coming from my mouth, and it made me cringe. I’d be pumping gas into her Wagoneer and mouthing lines like “Gee, Risa, you’re looking swell these days! Life must agree with you, or you must agree with life, or something like that anyhow….” I’d smile and smile and yammer on, playing a part. Then suddenly I’d switch roles. I’d have somehow become a member of the audience, and I’d hear myself yammering on, and it would be my father, and I’d see myself wink and grin and see my father, so I’d break off in the middle and freeze Risa out completely, leaving her somewhat confused, I’m sure. Other times I’d call her on the phone, and if Wendell answered, I’d gab about the Expos and the weather and local politics, like we were close buddies, which we were not; if Risa answered, I’d just ask for Wendell. Passing by the motel in my truck, if I happened to see her outside, I’d slow almost to a stop, wave like a long-lost friend, and when she made a move toward me, I’d speed up and take off, as if I were heading to a fire.
I have never been good with women, that is, skilled at the games that most men play—flirting, cajoling, soliciting their attention and favors—and until Risa, had never especially wanted to be. After all, I had always been able to count on Lydia. Who needed to flirt? Lydia and I in a sense spent our whole lives together: we were childhood friends and then high school sweethearts, and when I came back from Vietnam we discovered that we still loved each other, and so we got married. Technically, I was faithful to Lydia from beginning to end. There were a couple of occasions while we were married when, drunk or stoned or just inattentive, I slipped into what might be called compromising positions with a few local women, who shall remain nameless, but I got out before any damage was done and was even able to come home feeling virtuous. And there were a few sexual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes when I was in the service, Stateside and in Vietnam and once in Honolulu. Sowing wild oats, as they say. But in fact, for my age, I was unusually inexperienced in sexual matters.
The night Risa and I finally got together, it happened not because of anything I did but because Risa simply came up and put it to me at the bar at the Rendez-Vous, where I was sitting over a beer watching an NBA playoff on TV with three or four other men. She’d come through the door and stood there a minute as if looking for someone in particular. Then she walked straight to me, slipped her arm through mine and leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “Listen, Billy, when you’re through here, why don’t you come over and visit me? Room 11,” she added, and patted my forearm and departed. As simple as that.
I left at halftime. Los Angeles was beating the hell out of Utah, and I just said I was going home. It was a cold, clear spring night with a sky full of stars, and my breath puffed out in front of me in little clouds as I walked past my pickup in the parking lot, crossed the road, and practically jogged the hundred or so yards along the road to the motel and went straight to Room 11.
I don’t know how much in fact I had controlled or arranged it, how much I actually had seduced her with my awkward embarrassed onslaughts of alternating attention and withdrawal—probably a lot (sometimes you act a part and don’t realize that the role is of a man who doesn’t know how to act). But that night it appeared to me that Risa alone had made it possible for me to be, once again, not my father but myself, the strong, silent type of man I admired and had grown used to being, and I was deeply relieved and immensely grateful to her.
From then on, I guess you could say we were in love. At least we called it that. From start to finish, though, it was a secret affair. Risa has always assured me that no one knew we were in love; she insists that during the nearly three years we were involved she confided in no one. Consequently, she had her private version of the love affair, and I had mine, and there was no third version to correct them. None that I know of, anyhow.
As a result, until the morning of the accident, Risa Walker and I behaved toward each other as if we could go on like that forever—meeting and making love a couple of times a week in a darkened room late at night for an hour or two, and acting like mere acquaintances the rest of the time. Our love affair seemed to be permanently suspended halfway between fantasy and reality. Our sense of time and sequence was open-ended; it was like a movie with no beginning and no ending, and it remained that way because we did nothing to make our relationship public, to involve other people, a process that would have been started if Risa had ever confided in someone or if I had revealed it to someone. That would have objectified it somehow, taken it outside our heads, and no doubt would have led Risa to choose between me and Wendell, or would have led me to demand it. She would have chosen me, I believe that, and we would have married soon after. And then, by the time of the accident, when we lost our children, we would have had each other to turn to, instead of away from, which is what we did.
Out there on the Marlowe road that snowy morning, I remember at last climbing back up the embankment from the sandpit to the road and seeing her in the crowd. It was by then a large mixed stunned gathering along the shoulder of the road, of parents and local folks trying to calm and comfort one another, and cold exhausted state troopers, fi
remen, and rescue workers, and a pack of ravenous photographers and journalists. There was even a TV camera crew from the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh on the scene, headed by a blond woman in tights and leg warmers and a leather miniskirt who kept shoving her microphone at people’s gray faces, asking them what they were feeling. As if they could say.
Of course, I thought of Vietnam, but nothing I had seen or felt in Vietnam had prepared me for this. There was no fire and smoke or explosive noise, no wild shouts and frightened screams; instead, there was silence, broken ice, snow, and men and women moving with abject slowness: there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now.
And when I saw Risa Walker standing among the others up there by the road, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time in my life—as if seeing her on newsreel footage, a woman from the village who had lost her son, a mother who had lost her only child. She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and in one clot right out of my life too, and as a result I’m sure I was like a stranger to her as well. Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other.
The bus had not been hauled out—you could see the front end of the vehicle up on the ice-cluttered far bank of the pit, like some huge dying yellow beast caught struggling to clamber out and frozen in the midst of the attempt, with the rest of the thing underwater. The snow and the cold made everyone down there—the rescue workers, the wet-suited divers from Burlington, the state troopers—move slowly, hunched in on their bodies as if with fear and permanent resentment, like lifetime prisoners in a Siberian gulag.
On the near bank, covered with dark green wool blankets, were the bodies of the last of the children removed from the bus by the divers, the kids who had been seated near the back. They had been laid out in the trampled snow but had not been brought up to the road yet. And among these were the bodies of Risa’s son, Sean, who had been in front but whose body had got jammed under a seat, and the Ottos’ boy, Bear, and my twins, Mason and Jessica.
I had seen them myself, I looked straight down into their peaceful ice-blue faces, and then quickly drew the blankets back over them again, turned and walked away alone, numb and solid as stone, and climbed slowly, on legs that weighed like lead, the steep side of the frozen embankment to the road. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.
I don’t know where I was going, whom I was looking for. Yes, I do know. Lydia. I was looking for Lydia—to tell her that our children were dead, and that I had not been able to save them, and that finally we were all four of us together again.
The last of the ambulances had left for the medical center in Marlowe, where they were taking the survivors before dispatching the most seriously injured children to Lake Placid and Plattsburgh, and the firehouse in Sam Dent, where they had set up a temporary morgue, and there was a break while the workers waited for them to return for the rest. The wrecker from my garage, driven by Jimbo Gagne, was being brought around by the dump road from Wilmot Flats, preceded by a huge town snowplow, for that road had not been used since fall and was under six or eight feet of snow.
Except for Dolores Driscoll, who was uninjured and had remained down by the sandpit, lost and mumbling in a kind of shock but refusing stubbornly to leave the scene, there were no more survivors. Everyone knew that now. Those of us who had not left with the ambulances knew what we were waiting for—the removal of the last of the bodies of our children. Some people sobbed and wailed into the arms of friends and strangers, whoever would hold them; a few had been placed in the back seats of friends’ cars; a few others, like Risa, just stood among friends and relatives and stared silently at the ground, their minds emptied of thought or feeling.
I guess I was one of these, although at first I had tried to keep on working down below alongside the other men, as if my own children had not been on the bus, as if this had happened to someone else and not me. At first, a few people—Jimbo and Bud from the garage, who had raced out at once with the wrecker when they heard on the CB that there’d been an accident (a message that in fact I myself had called in, although I don’t know how I managed that; I don’t even remember it), and Wyatt Pitney, the state trooper, and a couple of guys on the rescue squad—had tried to get me the hell out of there, but like Dolores, I wouldn’t leave.
Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That’s not courage.
It was still snowing pretty hard; close to half a foot of it had fallen since the bus had gone over. There was no horizon. The sky was ash gray and hung low over the mountains. Within a few hundred yards the spruce trees and pines in the wide valley below the road and the thick birch trees and the road itself quickly dimmed and then simply faded into sheets of falling snow and disappeared entirely from view. There was a long disorderly line of cars, pickups, snowmobiles, and police cruisers parked on the shoulder, while several troopers wearing fluorescent orange jackets stood out in the middle of the road directing traffic, hurrying onlookers—skiers mostly, up for the weekend, delighted by the new snow, slowed suddenly and properly sobered by the sight of our town’s disaster, memorizing as much of it as they could, so as to confirm it to their friends later, when it appeared in the newspapers and on television—past the scene and on to their weekend.
When I reached the top of the embankment, I stepped over the orange plastic ribbon the state troopers had hung along the roadway to keep people from scrambling down to the crash site. One of the troopers, a man I knew vaguely, came toward me, as if to escort me, and when I looked straight through him and waved him off, he backed quickly away, as if I had cursed him. That’s when I saw Risa, standing a few feet in front of Wendell, who looked as though someone had punched him in the chest: all the force had gone out of him, and his face was twisted with the pain of the blow. By comparison, Risa was solid and resolved, already mourning, and slowly she looked up and then saw me when I passed near her. We could no longer pretend to love each other or even pretend to be hiding our love. Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second, and then we both looked away, and I moved on.
After that it was as if no one dared to talk to me or come forward in any way; I walked straight down the line of parents and other townspeople, the onlookers, cops, and reporters, until finally I was alone, plodding along the side of the road, moving uphill, back the way barely two hours earlier the school bus had come and then right behind it I had come in my pickup, idly daydreaming of sleeping with Risa Walker.
The snow continued to fall, and from the perspective of Risa and the others back at the accident site, I must have disappeared into it, just walked straight out of their reality into my own. In a few moments I was utterly alone in the cold snowy world, walking steadily away from everyone else, moving as fast as I could, toward my children and my wife.
For a long time that’s how it was for me; perhaps it still is. The only way I could go on living was to believe that I was not living. I can’t explain it; I can only tell you how it felt. I think it felt that way for a lot of people in town. Death permanently entered our lives with that accident. And while some people simply denied it, as poor Dolores Driscoll seems to have done, or moved to another part of the state and attempted to start their lives over, l
ike the Lamstons, or tried to believe that death had been there all along, like Risa, claiming no difference between then and now, which is a way of denying it too—for me, and perhaps for some of the children who survived the accident, like Nichole Burnell and the Bigelows and Baptistes and the several sad little Bilodeau kids whose older brothers and sisters had been killed, for us there was life, true life, real life, no matter how bad it had seemed, before the accident, and nothing that came after the accident resembled it in any important way. So for us, it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sandpit, and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.
We didn’t have available to us the various means that many of our neighbors and relatives had for easing the blow. At least I didn’t. The Christians’ talk about God’s will and all—that only made me angry, although I suppose I am glad that they were able to comfort themselves with such talk. But I could not bring myself to attend any of the memorial services that the various churches in Sam Dent and the neighboring towns invited me to. It was enough to have to listen to Reverend Dreiser at the twins’ funeral. He wanted us all to believe that God was like a father who had taken our children for himself. Some father.
The only father I had known was the one who had abandoned his children to others.
The Sweet Hereafter Page 6