The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  Finally, Billy chanced a self-conscious glance at Abbott and got caught at it. “Pretty good, eh, Abbott?” he said. “The ol’ demolition derby.”

  Abbott didn’t say anything. When he chooses, his gaze alone makes a powerful statement. Without a word, just by sitting there and putting on a hard look, he can set me or Reginald or William to jabbering elaborate apologies and explanations, until finally he smiles and we can stop. Sometimes I think that’s why Reginald moved to Pittsburgh and William joined the army, just to get away from their father’s gaze. For privacy. Me, of course, I never really thought I needed that kind of privacy.

  Billy said, “You’re still wondering about that Nichole Burnell business, I suppose. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s not much more to it than what I already said.

  Their lawyer, this guy Mitchell Stephens, he couldn’t get Nichole to testify the way he wanted her to, that’s all. And then I guess he didn’t feel he had a strong negligence case anymore, so he went home. Since then, other folks have heard about it, and they’ve started having second thoughts themselves, and their lawyers, too, have started dropping out, one by one. So now it looks like we won’t be seeing any lawsuits, after all. Which is fast bringing this town back together,” he said. “The girl has done us all, every single person in town, a valuable service. Even you, Abbott. Even you, Dolores, believe it or not.”

  Abbott said, “Why … us?” Billy looked like he understood him fine, so I didn’t translate.

  What he did, though, was stammer a bit and then say something to the effect that what was good for the town was good for everyone in it, which, by my lights, seemed to evade the question somewhat. Also, he still hadn’t answered Abbott’s earlier question, What did Nichole witness? Down below, the first heat was well under way, and the cars were slamming against one another, making an incredible noise as they roared back and forth in the mud and struggled to smash each other into submission. There were only about half the original sixteen still moving, crawling like huge wounded beasts in the mud to get away or, if they could, lining up to get one more good bash in before giving out themselves. Stacey Gale was hollering along with everyone else in the crowd, shrieking every time one of the remaining cars got in a good loud hit and the car it hit got stopped and couldn’t move again, eliminated.

  Billy put his bottle down on the bench next to him and started wringing his hands, and I felt a wave of sympathy for the man. I already knew what he would say next, and Abbott surely did too. Billy was the messenger bringing bad news, and no one wants that job. In a low, uncertain voice, Billy said, “You ought to know, I guess. Somebody’s got to tell you.”

  I nodded my head yes, but Abbott didn’t even blink.

  “What Nichole said she witnessed,” he said, “was the accident. She was sitting in the bus up front next to you, Dolores. I guess I was the only other witness, but I was driving a ways behind you, and not paying much attention, either. So what Nichole had to say counted a whole lot. Because they subpoenaed me, Mitchell Stephens did, and when they did that, I told him and the other lawyers that I frankly couldn’t say for sure how fast you were driving that bus that morning. When it went over. Which is the gospel truth. All I knew was the speed that I myself usually drive up there. Fifty-five to sixty, is what I told them. Nichole, though, she was very certain. She said she remembered it clearly—she knew how fast you were going when the bus went off the road. That’s what she told them.”

  He paused and looked back down at the track, where the winner of the first heat had been determined: car number 43, a pink beetle-shaped Hudson with “Death to the APA” painted across the roof, “Tatum” on the hood, and “The Bone Rules” along the sides. That was the driver’s name for himself, I guess—The Bone. In reality, it was Richie Green, a good kid, not really a bone. Tatum is Tatum Atwater. Wreckers and pickups with winches were rapidly hauling the smoking carcasses of the losers off the track and onto the field, and a second group of sixteen cars was lining up to enter the arena.

  “How fast did the child say I was going?” I asked him. To save Abbott the trouble, I suppose.

  “Seventy-two miles an hour is what she told them.” He wouldn’t look at me when he said it, but he said it. I have to hand Billy that.

  “She told them I was driving seventy-two miles an hour?”

  “Yes. Dolores, I thought you knew.”

  “How would I know?”

  “No way, I guess. I just figured you knew, like everybody else. I’m sorry, Dolores,” he said.

  “No, don’t be sorry to me, Billy. Not as long as you know the truth.”

  “Well, yeah, I know the truth.”

  “That’s two of us, then,” I said. There were three of us, of course, counting Nichole. Well, four, actually, counting Abbott. But Abbott knew the truth because he happened to believe me, and I only assumed that. Abbott hadn’t been there with me that January morning, out on the Marlowe road with the snow coming down and the sight of the mountains and the valley so lovely that when you see it your legs go all watery and you have to hold your breath or you’ll say something foolish, with the children all easy and at play in the school bus, and me in charge of picking them up on time at their homes scattered across the town and carrying them over those narrow winding roads for miles, until we came to the big road and began our descent to the school in the valley below. Abbott wasn’t with me then; I was alone.

  Now, in addition to the truth, I knew what nearly everyone else in town knew and believed, and if they didn’t, they were learning and coming to believe it this very minute, probably, from the person standing or sitting next to them here at the fair—they were learning that Dolores Driscoll, the driver of the school bus, was to blame for the terrible Sam Dent school bus accident last January. They were learning that Dolores had been speeding, that she had been driving recklessly, driving the bus in a snowstorm at nearly twenty miles an hour over the limit, that Nichole Burnell, the beautiful teenaged girl who’d come out to the fair in her wheelchair, a child who herself had almost died in the accident, had sat next to the driver, that Nichole had seen how fast the vehicle was moving, that she had told it to a court. Dolores Driscoll was the reason why the bus had gone off the road and tumbled down the embankment and into the icy water-filled sandpit. Dolores Driscoll was the reason why the children of Sam Dent had died.

  What did I feel then? I remember feeling relieved, but that’s a weak word for it. Right away, without thinking once about it, I felt as if a great weight that I had been lugging around for eight or nine months, since the day of the accident, had been lifted from me. A huge stone or an albatross or a yoke. One minute it was there, and because it had been there for so long, I had grown used to it; and the next minute it was gone, flown away, disappeared, and I was suddenly able to recognize what a terrible weight I had been carrying all these months. That’s strange, isn’t it? You’d expect me to feel angry, maybe, unjustly accused and all that. But I didn’t. Not at all. I felt relieved. And, therefore, grateful. Grateful to Billy Ansel, for revealing what Nichole had done, and grateful to Nichole for having done it.

  And for once, possibly for the first time in our life together, I did not know what Abbott was thinking or feeling. Even more peculiar, I didn’t care, either. He might be angry, he might be resentful, he might even think I had lied to him. I didn’t care; it didn’t matter what Abbott thought. I felt myself singled out in a way that had not happened to me before, and although I have never experienced such a solitude as that, I have also never felt quite so strong.

  I looked over at Abbott; he had no idea what I was feeling, and it actually pleased me that he didn’t.

  As soon as Billy had ceased speaking, Abbott had swung his attention back to the derby. The second heat was now almost over. Billy was concentrating on his bottle, and when he wasn’t drinking, he appeared to be studying his feet. Stacey Gale was like Abbott, all caught up, apparently, in the smoke and the furious sound and sight of the cars smashing one another
to bits.

  I said nothing. I just sat there and contemplated my strange new feelings, letting them wash over me—relief, gratitude, aloneness—naming them to myself as they came, one hard upon the other, in a series, or a cycle would be a better word, for each wave of feeling seemed to be the direct and sole cause of the next. Down below, the single surviving car, a mangled old Impala with a front fender crumpled and dangling off it, was pronounced the winner, and the tow trucks rushed into the arena and hauled the losers off, and the cars in the third heat came roaring in.

  Suddenly, Abbott raised his left arm, his good one, and pointed. I followed his finger down to the arena and saw what he saw, old Boomer, my Dodge station wagon. Number 57, it was. Jimbo Gagne had painted the car black and had written the number and his first name and a peace symbol across the hood in big yellow letters. Along the side was the name of the sponsor, not-quite-free advertising for Billy Ansel’s Sunoco station. And on the top of the wagon, in huge letters, he had painted the word boomer. I might not have recognized it otherwise. All the window glass was gone, of course, and the trim and hubcaps, and with no muffler it was blatting like the others, but I could identify its beat, and it sounded pretty good to me: Jimbo had not just got it running again, after it had sat dead on cinder blocks for years, but got it running smoothly. It looked good too—glossy black all over, with no chrome, no gaudy decorations; like a ghost car, it was dark and unadorned and all business. The car was positioned in the middle of the pack, not an advantageous spot in a demolition derby, but it was bigger than most of the others in the heat, and like Jimbo had said, it had a good power-to-weight ratio—plenty of both.

  What happened then surprised me at the time but seems natural now. The flag was dropped, and the cars commenced to smash into one another, ramming each other from behind, the stronger cars quickly driving the weaker against the heavy steel railing in front of the stage and grandstand, shoving them sideways and backward through the mud, with wheels spinning and tires smoking and clods of dirt flying through the air. And every time Boomer got hit, no matter who hit it, the crowd roared with sheer pleasure. A car with the words “Forever Wild Development Corp.” painted over the hood slammed Boomer from the side, driving it into another car, the Cherokee Trail Condominium car, and everyone in the stands stood up and cheered. I could see Jimbo wrestling with the wheel, frantically trying to regain control, shoving the gearshift forward and back, rocking Boomer until it was freed from the Cherokee Trail car, when another car hit it from the front and sent it up against the rail, pinning it there, and everyone cheered happily to see it. But somehow, before the referees were able to slap it with one of their flags and pronounce it out, Jimbo got it moving again, and Boomer charged back into the pack in the middle. Seven or eight of the cars were dead by now, stalled, trapped against the rail or boxed in between two other dead cars and unable to move. But Boomer was still alive.

  My heart was pounding furiously. I was standing now, everyone was standing, and if he hadn’t been positioned at the top of the stairs, Abbott wouldn’t have been able to see. I hoped that Nichole, at the other side of the grandstand, could see this. Everyone wanted to see Boomer get hit, and again and again they got their wish, as Jimbo seemed unable to get free of the pack long enough to do any of the hitting himself. The other drivers were ganging up on Boomer, going around one another, abandoning good clear shots at nearby cars for a glancing shot at Boomer. Its front bumper had been torn off, and the right front fender dangled like a broken limb. Jimbo kept working, though, and the old engine wouldn’t let go, and every time one of the other cars slapped Boomer from the side or rear and sent it into the guardrail or against one of the stilled cars piled up in the middle, Boomer would come to life and chug back for more.

  Until finally there were only three cars left that could still move, and they were moving slowly, like prizefighters with all the fight gone out of them, coming forward on instinct now, bashing one another blindly, stupidly, straight ahead, again and again. There was a torn-up Ford Galaxie four-door from Chick Lawrence’s garage in Keene, with Tom Smith driving, and I recognized JoAnn Bruce’s old brown Eagle, sponsored by Ethel’s Dew Drop Inn in Willsboro and driven by JoAnn’s cousin Marsden. All the other cars were smoldering in dented and bent heaps, permanently stopped and eliminated. The Galaxie was at the left of Boomer, and the Eagle was at the right, and at last it looked like certain elimination for Boomer and Jimbo Gagne.

  The crowd started to applaud then, clapping hands the way they had when Nichole Burnell had first arrived. They didn’t cheer; they just applauded. The drivers in the Galaxie and the Eagle revved their motors and spun their wheels and lurched toward Boomer, stuck in the middle, and suddenly it seemed like everyone in the stands stopped clapping at once and the grandstand went silent, as the two cars crossed the space between them, on a line toward the black station wagon sitting at the center of that space. Boomer was held by the mud, with its rear wheels blurred and tires sending up dark gray smoke and chunks of dirt. Jimbo wrestled with the gearshift but couldn’t seem to shift and rock the car free. It was a terrifying moment—in my memory, it takes place in utter silence, and everyone is watching with great seriousness, as if a matter of terrible importance is being settled before them, instead of this dumb smalltown demolition derby.

  And then it happened. Boomer backed slowly away, a few inches, a foot, three feet—just enough to miss the charge first of the Galaxie and then, a split second later, of the Eagle—and unable to swerve away in time, the two cars hit each other instead of Boomer, and when Jimbo saw that, he shifted into first gear and shot straight ahead, right against the two of them, spinning them away and half around again. The crowd erupted joyously, filling the night air with wild shouts and cries, and when Jimbo had Boomer lined up on the Eagle, with the rear bumper headed straight toward the right front end of the other car, the people hollered for him to do it! Do it! Do it! and when he smashed into the fender and wheel and tore the steering rods of the Eagle, stopping it dead where it stood, and the official smacked it with the flag, the crowd jumped up and down and yelled with delighted approval and slapped each other on the shoulders and backs.

  Then Jimbo went after the Galaxie, which was struggling in the mud to turn and protect its front end. Boomer was moving smoothly now; Jimbo had control of it. He spun the steering wheel, got Boomer backed away from the wreckage of the Eagle, and turned and aimed its rear end, which still had the bumper attached, toward the Galaxie. The black station wagon came on slowly, chugging and slogging across the open ground between them, while the Galaxie tried to turn, to take the blow from behind. People were calling out Boomer’s name now, almost chanting it: Boo-mer! Boo-mer! Boo-mer! At that instant Jimbo squeezed a last burst of speed out of the old station wagon, and it slammed into the Galaxie cleanly, catching it on the rear door, just behind the driver, driving it sideways through the mud into the heap of cars beyond it, where it ended jammed tightly against them, unable to move. The official scrambled across the arena and whacked the Galaxie on the hood, and Boomer had won.

  Everyone in the place was happy. Even Abbott had a grin on his face. I myself was neither happy nor disappointed. I remember having decided beforehand that as soon as this heat was over, regardless of how it ended, we must leave this place. Or I must, and Abbott would have to leave with me. Naturally, I was glad when it turned out that my old car had emerged victorious over the others. Glad for Jimbo Gagne, glad for the town of Sam Dent, glad, I suppose, for Billy Ansel’s Sunoco station too. But that’s a trivial kind of pleasure. Not what I’d call happiness.

  To tell the truth, up there in the stands, after Billy had revealed to me what everyone in town now regarded as the truth, in the passage of but a few moments’ time I had come to feel utterly and permanently separated from the town of Sam Dent and all its people. There was no reason for me to want to stand up there alongside them in the grandstand, to help them cheer first to see a car once owned and driven by Dolores Driscoll get
destroyed by a bunch of other cars and then join in when the very same people cheered to see it turn and destroy the others. This demolition derby was a thing that held meaning for other people, but not for me.

  I do not believe that Nichole Burnell could have joined them, either; nor would any of the other children who had been on the bus with me that morning. All of us—Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not—it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.

  Nichole Burnell, Bear Otto, the Lamston kids, Sean Walker, Jessica and Mason Ansel, the Atwater and the Bilodeau kids, all the children who had been on the bus and had died and had not died, and I, Dolores Driscoll—we were absolutely alone, each of us, and even our shared aloneness did not modify the simple fact of it. And even if we weren’t dead, in an important way which no longer puzzled or frightened me and which I therefore no longer resisted, we were as good as dead.

  “Abbott,” I said, “let’s go now. It’s time for us to leave.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I stepped behind his wheelchair, released the brake, and tipped it toward me on its rear wheels, preparing to thump it down the stairs, one step at a time. It would be a bumpy ride for him, but I knew he could take it. He’s not as fragile as he looks.

  But as I rolled him to the edge of the landing, a young fellow seated in the row in front of me stood up and, to my surprise, turned to help. I recognized him but did not know him personally. He was from Sam Dent, one of Carl Bigelow’s sons, I think, a bearded potbellied young man wearing a John Deere duck-billed cap, a squinty-eyed fellow who looked like he did a lot of beer drinking down to the Rendez-Vous, one of a hundred young men in town just like him. He wanted to give me a hand. Another man suddenly appeared on my other side, an older man who looked like a summer person, gray-haired, trim, in sandals and Bermuda shorts and blue dress shirt. Then a third and a fourth man moved into place, and before I could say a word, they had lifted Abbott’s chair and were carrying him smoothly down the stairs.