Aldenburg’s wife, Eva, couldn’t stand it, the sound of it—the fact of it. And while Aldenburg thought Cal should be going out and looking for some kind of job, Eva seemed to think nothing should be asked of him at all. Aldenburg felt almost superfluous in his own house. He was past forty and looked it. He had a bad back and flat feet, and the money he made selling shoes wasn’t enough to support three adults, not to mention Cal’s friends who kept coming around: mostly pals from high school, where he had been the star quarterback. Cal’s fiancée, Diane, ran a small beauty parlor in town and had just bought a house that she was having refinished, so she was over a lot, too. There seemed never anywhere to go in the house and be alone. And lately Eva had started making innuendos to these people about her difficult marriage—fourteen childless years with Aldenburg. As if the fact that there were no children was anyone’s fault.
God only knew what she found to say when he wasn’t around to hear it.
Toward the end of the long night, Smitty said, “Of course, a man doesn’t spend this much time in a saloon if there’s a happy home to return to.”
Aldenburg caught just enough of the sentence to know he was the subject. He said, “Smitty, sometimes I look around myself and I swear I don’t know how I got here.”
“I thought you walked over,” Smitty said.
They laughed.
Sometime after three in the morning he had made coffee, and they had switched to that. Black and strong, to counter the effects of the night’s indulgence, as Smitty called it. He had broken an old rule and consumed a lot of the whiskey himself. It was getting harder and harder to be alone, he said.
Aldenburg understood it.
“Damn monstrosity didn’t last long enough to make any heroes below the level of general,” Smitty said. “My son was a hero.”
“That’s true,” said Aldenburg. “But take somebody like my brother-in-law. Here’s a guy standing on a corner looking at the sights, and this oil burner goes off. You know? Guy standing in the street with a couple of other boys from the motor pool, talking football, and whoosh. Just a dumb accident.”
“I don’t guess it matters much how you get it,” Smitty said, shaking his head. His son had been shot through the heart.
“I’m sorry, man,” Aldenburg told him.
“Hell,” said Smitty, rubbing the back of his neck, and then looking away.
Light had come to the windows. On the polished table between them was a metal ashtray stuffed to overflowing with the cigarettes they had smoked.
“What day is this, anyway?” Smitty asked.
“Friday. I’ve got to be at work at eleven. Sales meeting. I won’t sleep at all.”
“Ought to go on in back and try for a little, anyway.”
Aldenburg looked at him. “When do you ever sleep?”
“Noddings-off in the evenings,” Smitty said. “Never much more than that.”
“I feel like all hell,” Aldenburg told him. “My liver hurts. I think it’s my liver.”
“Go on back and take a little nap.”
“I’ll feel worse if I do.”
They heard voices, car doors slamming. Smitty said, “Uh, listen, I invited some of the boys from the factory to stop by for eggs and coffee.” He went to open the door, moving slow, as if his bones ached. The curve of his spine was visible through the back of his shirt. He was only fifty-three.
Aldenburg stayed in the booth, with the playing cards lying there before him, and the full ashtray. He lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke at the ceiling, wishing that he’d gone on home now. Brad and Billy Pardee came in, with Ed Crewly. They all wore their hunting jackets, and were carrying gear, looking ruddy and healthy from the cold. Brad was four years older than Billy, but they might have been twins, with their blue-black hair and identical flat noses, their white, white teeth. Ed Crewly was once the end who received Cal’s long passes in the high school games, a tall skinny type with long lean arms and legs—gangly looking but graceful when he got moving. He was among the ones who kept coming to the house now that Cal was back from the war. Aldenburg, returning in the late evenings from the store, would find them all in his living room watching a basketball game or one of the sitcoms—every chair occupied, beer and potato chips and a plate of cheeses laid out for them, as though this were all still the party celebrating the hero’s homecoming.
He never had the nerve to say anything about it. An occasional hint to his wife, who wasn’t hearing any hints.
Brad was bragging now about how he and Billy and Ed had called in sick for the day. They were planning a drive up into the mountains to shoot at birds. Billy turned and saw Aldenburg sitting in the booth.
“Hey, Gabriel,” he said. “You’re early, ain’t you?”
“Yep,” Aldenburg told him, glancing at Smitty, whose face showed no reaction.
“Have a seat at the bar,” Smitty told them. “I’ll put the bacon on. Help yourself to the coffee.”
“I was over at your place last night,” said Crewly. “Didn’t see you.”
“Didn’t get in till late there, Ed.”
“I think I’d like to start the day with a beer,” said Brad.
“Me, too,” his brother put in. The weekend was ahead of them, and they were feeling expansive.
Smitty put the beers down on the bar.
“I didn’t leave your place till pretty late,” Ed Crewly said to Aldenburg. “Eva figured you were down here.”
“I was here last night, Ed. That’s true.”
“Stayed late, huh.” Crewly had a dour, downturning kind of face, and a long nose. His skin was dark red, the color of baked clay.
Aldenburg shook his head, smoking the cigarette.
“I bet Gabriel’s been here all night,” Billy Pardee said.
“The whole night,” Aldenburg said, not looking at them.
“Damn, Gabriel,” Brad Pardee said. “What’re you paying rent for, anyway?”
Aldenburg looked at him. “I’m paying it for my wife, my brother-in-law, and all their friends.”
Billy put his beer down and shook one hand, as if he had touched something hot. “Whoo-ee,” he said. “I’d say somebody’s been told the harsh truth. I’d say I smell smoke.”
Aldenburg watched them, wishing he had gone before they arrived. It had been plain inertia that kept him there.
“Wife trouble,” Smitty said. He was leaning against the door frame, so he could attend to the bacon, and he held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like a cigar. The smoke curled up past his face, and one eye was closed against it. The odd thing about Smitty was that whenever these other men were around, nothing of the kindness of the real man came through; something about their casual hardness affected him, and he seemed to preside over it all, like an observer, a scientist—interested without being involved. The others performed for him; they tried to outdo each other in front of him.
“Hey, Gabriel,” Brad Pardee said, “come on. You really spent the night here?”
Billy said, “You going to work today, Gabriel? I need some boots.”
Aldenburg held his empty coffee mug up, as if to toast them. “We sell boots, all right.”
“What’re you drinking there, Gabriel?”
“It’s all gone,” said Aldenburg. “Whatever it was.”
“You look bad, man. You look bleary-eyed and real bad.” Billy turned to the others. “Don’t he look bad?”
They were having fun with it, as he could have predicted they would. He put his cigarette out and lighted another. Because Ed Crewly was in Aldenburg’s house a lot, they all knew things, and perhaps they didn’t have much respect for him—though they meant him no harm, either. The whole thing was good-natured enough. When he got up, slow, crossed the room to the bar, and poured himself a whiskey, they reacted as though it were a stunt, whistling and clapping their hands. He saw that Smitty had gone into the kitchen, and was sorry for it, wanting the older man as an audience, for some reason.
They wa
tched him drink the whiskey for a little time—it was almost respect—and then they had forgotten about him. Smitty brought their breakfasts, and they scarfed that up, and a few minutes later they were going out the door, all energy and laughs. Like boys out of school.
They weren’t gone five minutes when the accident happened.
He had walked back to the bar to pour himself another whiskey, having decided that whatever badness this would bring, including the loss of his job, was all right with him. He was crossing the space of the open door, holding the whiskey, and motion there drew his attention. He saw a school bus entering slowly from the left, bright morning sun on the orange-yellow metal of it, and in the instant he looked at the reflected brightness, it was struck broadside by a long white speeding car, a Cadillac. The Cadillac seemed to come from nowhere, a flying missile, and it caved in the side of the bus with a terrible crunching, glass-breaking sound. Aldenburg dropped the glass of whiskey, and bolted out into the cold, moving through it, with the whiskey swimming behind his eyes. In what seemed no space of time, he had come to the little water-trickling place between the Cadillac’s crushed front grill and the door of the bus, which must have flown open with the collision, where a young woman lay on her back, partway onto the street, her arms flung out as though she had taken a leap from her seat behind the wheel. There was something so wrong about a lovely woman lying in the road like that, and Aldenburg found himself lifting her, bending, not really thinking, bracing himself, supporting her across his legs, his arms under her shoulders. It was hard to keep from falling backward himself. Somehow he had gotten in there and lifted her up where she had been thrown, and on the metal step before his eyes, a little boy lay along her calves, one arm over her ankles, unconscious, blood in his dark hair, something quivering in the nerves of his neck and shoulders. There was a crying, a screeching. Aldenburg held the woman, tried to take a step, to gather himself. She looked at him, upside down, but did not seem to see him. “Take it easy,” he heard himself say.
The boy was still now. The screaming went on in another part of the bus. Was it screams? Something was giving off a terrible high whine. He looked at the woman and thought, absurdly, of the whiskey he had drunk, his breath.
She moaned, “Is everyone all right?” But she didn’t seem to be speaking to him.
He lifted slightly, and she said, “Don’t.”
“Hold on,” he told her. “Help’s coming.”
But she wasn’t breathing. He could feel the difference. Her weight was too much. He put one leg back, and then shifted slow, away from the bus, and the full weight of her came down on him. Her feet clattered on the crumpled step, slipping from under the boy’s arm, and dropped with a dead smack to the pavement. And then he was carrying her, dragging her. He took one lurching stride, and another, and finally he got her lying on her back in the road. The surface was cold and damp, and he took his coat off, folded it, and laid it under her head, then remembered about keeping the feet elevated for shock. Carefully he let her head down, and put the folded coat under her ankles. It was as though there were nothing else and no one else but this woman and himself, in slow time. And she was not breathing.
“She’s gone,” a voice said from somewhere.
It was Smitty. Smitty moved toward the bus, but then shrank back, limping. Something had gone out of him at the knees. “Fire,” he said. “Jesus, I think it’s gonna go.”
Aldenburg placed his hands gently on the woman’s chest. He was afraid the bones might be broken there. He put the slightest pressure on her, but then thought better of it, and leaned down to breathe into her mouth. Again he was aware of his breath, and felt as though this was wrong; he was invading her privacy somehow. He hesitated, but then he went on blowing into her mouth. It only took a few breaths to get her started on her own. She gasped, looked into his face, and seemed to want to scream. But she was breathing. “You’re hurt,” Aldenburg told her. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“The children,” she said. “Four—”
“Can you breathe all right?” he said.
“Oh, what happened.” She started to cry.
“Don’t move,” he told her. “Don’t try to move.”
“No,” she said.
He stood. There were sirens now, far off, and he had a cruel little realization that they were probably for some other accident, in another part of the city. He saw Smitty’s face and understood that this moment was his alone, and was beautifully separate from everything his life had been before. He yelled at Smitty, “Call the rescue squad.”
Smitty said, “It’s gonna blow up,” and moved to the doorway of the bar, and in.
Aldenburg stepped into the space between the Cadillac, with its hissing-radiator and its spilled fluids, and the bus, where the boy lay in a spreading pool of blood in the open door. A man was standing there with his hands out, as though he were afraid to touch anything. “Fire,” the man said. He had a bruise on his forehead, and seemed dazed. Aldenburg realized that this was the driver of the Cadillac. He smelled alcohol on him.
“Get out of the way,” he said.
From inside the bus, there was a scream. It was screaming. He saw a child at one of the windows, the small face cut and bleeding. He got into the space of the doorway, and looked at the boy’s face, this one’s face. The eyes were closed. The boy appeared to be asleep.
“Son?” Aldenburg said. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing. But he was breathing. Aldenburg took his shirt off and put it where the blood was flowing, and the boy opened his eyes.
“Hey,” Aldenburg said.
The eyes stared.
“You ever see an uglier face in your life?” It was something he always said to other people’s children when they looked at him. He was pulling the boy out of the space of the door, away from the flames.
“Where do you hurt?”
“All over.”
The sirens were louder. The boy began to cry. He said, “Scared.” There was a line of blood around his mouth.
The seat behind the steering wheel was on fire. The whole bus was on fire. The smoke drifted skyward. There were little flames in the spilled fuel on the road. He carried the boy a few yards along the street, and the sirens seemed to be getting louder, coming closer. Time had stopped, though. He was the only thing moving in it. He was all life, bright with energy. The sounds went away, and he had got inside the bus again, crawling along the floor. The inside was nearly too hot to touch. Heat and smoke took his breath from him and made him dizzy. There were other children on the floor, and between the seats and under the seats, a tangle of arms and legs. Somehow, one by one in the slow intensity of the burning, he got them all out and away. There was no room for thinking or deciding. He kept going back, and finally there was no one else on the bus. He had emptied it out, and the seat panels burned slow. The ambulances and rescue people had begun to arrive.
It was done.
They had got the flames under control, though smoke still furled up into the gray sky, and Aldenburg felt no sense of having gotten to the end of it. It had felt as though it took all day, and yet it seemed only a few seconds in duration, too—the same continuous action, starting with letting the little glass of whiskey drop to the floor in Smitty’s, and bolting out the door….
Afterward, he sat on the curb near the young woman, the driver, where the paramedics had moved her to work over her. He had one leg out, the other knee up, and he was resting his arm on that knee, the pose of a man satisfied with his labor. He was aware that people were staring at him.
“I know you’re not supposed to move them,” he said to the paramedics. “But under the circumstances …”
No one answered. They were busy with the injured, as they should be. He sat there and watched them, and watched the bus continue to smoke. They had covered it with some sort of foam. He saw that there were blisters on the backs of his hands, and dark places where the fire and ash had marked him. At one point the young woman looked at him and blinked. H
e smiled, waved at her. It was absurd, and he felt the absurdity almost at once. “I’m sorry,” he said.
But he was not sorry. He felt no sorrow. He came to his feet, and two men from the television station were upon him, wanting to talk, wanting to know what he had been thinking as he risked his own life to save these children and the driver, all of whom certainly would have died in the fumes or been burned to death. It was true. It came to Aldenburg that it was all true. The charred bus sat there; you could smell the acrid hulk of it. Firemen were still spraying it, and police officers were keeping the gathering crowd at a safe distance. More ambulances were arriving, and they had begun taking the injured away. He thought he saw one or two stretchers with sheets over them, the dead. “How many dead?” he asked. He stood looking into the face of a stranger in a blazer and a red tie. “How many?”
“No deaths,” the face said. “Not yet, anyway. It’s going to be touch and go for some of them.”
“The driver?”
“She’s in the worst shape.”
“She stopped breathing. I got her breathing again.” “They’ve got her on support. Vital signs are improving. Looks like she’ll make it.”
There were two television trucks, and everyone wanted to speak to him. Smitty had told them how he’d risked the explosion and fire. He, Gabriel Aldenburg. “Yes,” Aldenburg said in answer to their questions. “It’s Gabriel. Spelled exactly like the angel, sir.” Yes. Aldenburg. Aldenburg. He spelled it out for them. A shoe salesman. Yes. How did I happen to be here. Well, I was—
They were standing there holding their microphones toward him; the cameras were rolling.
Yes?
“Well, I was—I was in there,” he said, pointing to Smitty’s doorway. “I stopped in early for some breakfast.”
Some people behind the television men were writing in pads.
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 3