“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 flames licking along 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. He 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.
“No,” he said. “Wait a minute. That’s a lie.”
They were all looking at him now.
“Keep it rolling,” one of the television men said.
“I spent the night in there. I’ve spent a lot of nights in there lately.”
Silence. Just the sound of the fire engines idling, and then another ambulance pulled off, sending its wail up to the blackened sky of the city.
“Things aren’t so good at home,” he said. And then he was telling all of it—the bad feeling in his house, the steady discouragements he had been contending with. He was telling them all how he had never considered himself a man with much gumption. He heard himself use the word.
The men with the pads had stopped writing. The television men were simply staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” he told them. “It didn’t feel right lying to you.”
No one said anything for what seemed a very long time.
“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s all.” He looked beyond the microphones and the cameras, at the crowd gathering on that end of the street—he saw Smitty, who nodded, and then the television men started in again—wanting to know what he felt when he entered the burning bus. Did he think about the risk to his own life?
“It wasn’t burning that bad,” he told them. “Really. It was just smoke.”
“Have they told you who was driving the Cadillac?” one of them asked.
“No, sir.”
“Wilson Bolin, the television news guy.”
Aldenburg wasn’t familiar with the name. “Was he hurt?”
“Minor cuts and bruises.”
“That’s good.” He had the strange sense of speaking into a vacuum, the words going off into blank air. Voices came at him from the swirl of faces. He felt dizzy, and now they were moving him to another part of the street. A doctor took his blood pressure, and someone else, a woman, began applying some stinging liquid to his cheek. “Mild,” she said to the doctor. “It’s mostly smudges.”
“Look, am I done here?” Aldenburg asked them.
No. Th
ey took his name. They wanted to know everything about him—what he did for a living, where he came from, his family. He told them everything they wanted to know. He sat in the backseat of a car and answered questions, telling them everything again, and he wondered how things would be for a man who was a television newsman and who was driving drunk at seven o’clock in the morning. He said he felt some kinship with Mr. Bolin, and he saw that two women among those several people listening to him exchanged a look of amusement.
“Look, it’s not like I’m some kid or something,” he said sullenly. “I’m not here for your enjoyment or for laughs. I did a good thing today. Something not everyone would do—not many would do.”
Finally he went with some other people to the back of a television truck and answered more questions. He told the exact truth, as best he understood it, because it was impossible not to.
“Why do you think you did it?” a man asked.
“Maybe it was because I’d been drinking all night.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I’ve been pretty unhappy,” Aldenburg told him. “Maybe I just felt like I didn’t have anything to lose.” There was a liberating something in talking about it like this, being free to say things out. It was as though his soul were lifting inside him; a weight that had been holding it down had been carried skyward in the smoke of the burning bus. He was definite and clear inside.
“It was an act of terrific courage, sir.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. If it wasn’t me, it might’ve been somebody else.” He touched the man’s shoulder, experiencing a wave of generosity and affection toward him.
He took off work and went home. The day was going to be sunny and bright. He felt the stir of an old optimism, a sense he had once possessed, as a younger man, of all the gorgeous possibilities in life, as it was when he and Eva had first been married and he had walked home from his first full-time job, at the factory, a married man, pleased with the way life was going, wondering what he and Eva might find to do in the evening, happy in the anticipation of deciding together. He walked quickly, and as he approached the house he looked at its sun-reflecting windows and was happy. It had been a long time since he had felt so light of heart.
His brother-in-law was on the sofa in the living room, with magazines scattered all around him. Cal liked the pictures in Life and the articles in Sport. He collected them; he had old issues going all the way back to 1950. Since he had come back from the Gulf, Eva had been driving around to the antique stores in the area, and a few of the estate auctions, looking to get more of them for him, but without much luck.
“What happened to you?” he said as Aldenburg entered. “Where’ve you been?”
“Where’ve you been today, old buddy?” Aldenburg asked him. “Been out at all?”
“Right. I ran the mile. What’s got into you, anyway? Why’re you so cocky all of a sudden?”
“No job interviews, huh?”
“You know what you can do with it, Gabriel.”
“Just wondering.”
“Aren’t you spunky. What happened to your face?”
He stepped to the mirror over the mantel. It surprised him to see the same face there. He wiped at a soot-colored smear on his jaw. “Damn.”
“You get in a fight or something?”
“Right,” Aldenburg said. “I’m a rough character.”
Cal’s fiancé, Diane, appeared in the archway from the dining room. “Oh,” she said. “You’re home.”
“Where’s Eva?” Aldenburg said to Cal. Then he looked at Diane—short red hair, a boy’s cut, freckles, green eyes. The face of someone who was accustomed to getting her way.
“Where were you all night?” she said. “As if I didn’t know.”
“To the mountaintop,” Aldenburg told her. “I’ve been breathing rarefied air.”
“Gabriel,” she said, “you’re funny.”
“You sure you want to go through with marrying Cal here?”
“Don’t be mean.”
“What the hell?” Cal said, gazing at him. “You got a problem, Gabriel, maybe you should just say it out.”
“No problem in the world on this particular day,” Aldenburg told him.
“Something’s going on. What is it?”
Aldenburg ignored him and went calling through the house for his wife. Eva was in the bedroom, sitting at her dressing table putting makeup on. “Keep it up,” she said. “You’ll lose your job.”
“They wanted me to take the day off,” he said. “Fact is, they were proud to give it to me.”
She turned and looked at him. “What is it?”
“You see something?”
“OK.”
“Well, do you?”
She turned back to the mirror. “Gabriel, I don’t have time for games.”
“This is serious.”
She said nothing, concentrating on what she was doing.
“Did you hear me?”
After a pause, she said, “I heard you.”
“Well?”
Now she looked at him. “Gabriel, what in the world?”
“Want to watch some tv?” he said.
“What’re you talking about. Look at you. Did you get in a fight?”
“I had a rough night,” he said.
“I can see that.”
“Look into my eyes.”
Diane came to the doorway of the room. “Cal and I are going over to my place for a while. I think we’ll stay over there tonight.”
“What a good idea,” Aldenburg said.
Diane smiled, then walked away.
Eva gazed at him.
“Look into my eyes, really.” He stood close.
She said, “You smell like a distillery. You’re drunk.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not drunk. You know what happened?”
“You’ve been drinking at this hour of the morning.”
“Listen to me.”
She stared. He had stepped back from her. “Well?” she said.
“I saved human lives today.” He felt the truth of it move in him, and for the first time paused and looked at it reasonably in his mind. He smiled at her.
“What,” she said.
“You haven’t heard me,” he told her. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Gabriel,” Eva said. “I’ve been thinking. Once again, I had all night to think. I’ve done a lot of thinking, Gabriel.”
He waited.
“Quit smiling like that. This isn’t easy.” She gathered her breath. “I’m just going to say this straight out. OK?”
“OK,” he said.
“I’m—I’m splitting.”
He looked at her hands, at the mirror with her back and shoulders in it, at the floor with their shadows on it from the bright windows.
“Diane has room for me in her house. And I can look for a place of my own from there. After she and Cal are married—”
Aldenburg waited.
His wife said, “It’s a decision I should’ve made a long time ago.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Haven’t you been listening?”
“Haven’t you?” he said. “Did you hear what I just told you?”
“Oh, come on, Gabriel. This is serious.”
“I’m telling you, it happened,” he shouted.
“Gabriel—” she began.
He went back to the living room, where Cal and Diane were sitting on his couch. Diane had turned the television on—a game show. They did not look at him when he came in. They knew what had been talked about, and they were feeling the awkwardness of it. He went to the door and looked out at the street. The sun was gone. There were heavy dark folds of cloud to the east. He turned. “I thought you were going over to your house,” he said to Diane. He could barely control his voice.
“We are. As soon as Cal finishes this show.”
“Why don’t you go now.”
“Why don’t you worry about your own problems?”
“Get out,” Aldenburg said. “Both of you.”
Cal stood and reached for his cane. Aldenburg turned the tv off, then stood by the door as they came past him. “Look, if it makes any difference,” Cal said to him, “I argued against it.”
Aldenburg nodded at him but said nothing.
When they were gone, he went back into the bedroom, where Eva had lain down on the bed. He sat on the other side, his back to her. He was abruptly very tired, and light-headed.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she said.
He said, “Would it make the slightest bit of difference?”
“Gabriel, you knew this was coming—”
He stood, removed his shirt. He felt the scorched places on his arms. Everything ached. He walked into the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he brushed his teeth. In the room, Eva lay very still. He pulled the blankets down on his side of the bed.
“I’m not asleep,” she said. “I’m going out in a minute.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and had a mental image of himself coming home with this news of what he had done, as if it were some prize. What people would see on tv this evening, if they saw anything, would be Aldenburg telling about how unhappy life was at home. No, they would edit that out. The thought made him laugh.
“What,” she said. “I don’t see anything funny about this.”
He shook his head, trying to get his breath.
“Gabriel? What’s funny.”
“Nothing,” he managed. “Forget it. Really. It’s too ridiculous to mention.”
He lay down. For a time they were quiet.
“We’ll both be better off,” she said. “You’ll see.”
He closed his eyes, and tried to recover the sense of importance he had felt, scrabbling across the floor of the burning school bus. He had been without sleep for so long. There was a deep humming in his ears, and now his wife’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“It’s for the best,” she said. “If you really think about it, you’ll see I’m right.”
Abruptly, he felt a tremendous rush of anxiety. A deep fright at her calmness, her obvious determination. He was wide awake. When he got up to turn the little portable television on, she gave forth a small startled cry. He sat on the edge of the bed, turning the dial, going through the channels.
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