And now this.
Complaints about the point of the whole enterprise.
The complaints seemed to be increasing in volume and duration. By the end of the week, Abby had a feeling she’d be limp, sweating with her attempts at persuasion.
Unless they were gone by then. Please, let them be gone by then.
The nail-gun precision of Bill’s routine would’ve prevented any such arguments. But then, the nail-gun precision had also left them both punctured and bleeding.
“Mama?” Cody was shaking more flakes into his bowl.
“Yes, Bun?”
“I’m supposed to get dressed now.”
Abby looked at the clock on the thirty-dollar microwave. Cody was right.
Wicket Road was mean and curving, and Earl had always hated it. They included it on his route because he was the most experienced driver in the fleet—a nice way of saying he was the oldest driver in the fleet—and so they figured he could handle it. And he could. But that didn’t mean he liked it. It was September now and frost laced the shoulders most mornings. Earl kept to the middle, which meant that whenever a car appeared he had to edge over onto one of the sharp bends. He liked to be courteous to other vehicles; besides, he’d never get into a game of chicken with kids on board. Earl used to feel completely in command of his ride, keeping it steady at the steepest juncture of a switchback like another man held the reins on a stallion. But that feeling had been receding on him. Now Earl was weightily aware of what he held in check. An eleven-ton vehicle that could go hurtling down the mountain as easily as a leaf blew away in the wind.
He wasn’t sleeping well these days. Woke up sweaty and gasping, the missus stirring beside him. He had to make water, but he couldn’t make water, and it kept him awake all night after that. He and the missus were both tired out. For the first time, Earl began to consider retirement. He’d always said he would drive his route one day, die the next. But he didn’t have a good feeling about this year. He started bargaining with something he had never believed in.
Let us make it through this year. Me and the kids. And then I’ll let one of the young bucks take over my route, and the hellish Wicket Road.
He didn’t want to let the missus see him uneasy so he stopped going home between runs. The middle of the day used to be the best part of his job, that and getting to know the children. When they were young, kids themselves really, he and the missus would make love right in the afternoon. And even once they were older, and neither of them had the appetite anymore, the core of Earl’s day gave them a chance to talk, catch up before the exhaustion of the evening was upon them.
“Refill, Earl?”
The waitress behind the flecked countertop paused by his cup.
Earl brought a napkin to his mouth. “No, thanks, Audrey. Time for me to be going.”
Audrey looked at the round clock on the wall. “School day over already?”
“Seems it gets earlier every year, don’t it?”
“I’ll say. If my Petey had been let out now when he was school age, I wouldn’t have earned enough to feed him.”
Earl made sure to leave a generous tip by his plate. He went to the lot behind the Crescent Diner and started up his bus.
The bus was loaded; they were on their way. Behind Earl’s seat, the noise was reaching headache level. Afternoons were loud, mornings quiet, the kids disbelieving that another day had come around.
“Hey, hold it down back there, okay?” Earl called out good-naturedly.
No one answered, of course.
Earl thought to ask the kids sometimes, How do you think this bus gets you where you need to go? Most of them wouldn’t have a reply. But that was his job. To get them to school and back home so seamlessly they didn’t even have to think about it.
He didn’t mind the volume actually. He tried to do his part in keeping everyone to the code of conduct the board had set, but in truth, the noise faded into the background for him. Engaged in the act of driving, Earl’s doubts tended to ebb away, drowned out by the engine and the laughter. The children’s shouts and cries told him that life couldn’t be the dread, lonely battle he had started to picture, not if the kids were this happy and unseeing.
Although maybe they were happy because they were unseeing. That hadn’t occurred to him before, and it didn’t help his mood. For all of his adult life, Earl had been the unseen, unheard companion to children, most of them now grown and in the muddy midpoints of their lives. Where did that leave him?
He made the turn onto Wicket Road.
A kid hurled a balled-up jacket; Earl caught sight of it in the mirror.
“Uh-uh,” he called out as the owner of the jacket started to stand up. “Sit. You can pick that up when you get off the bus.”
The kid obeyed.
The switchbacks were upon him now, but a car was coming around the bend. Earl pulled over to the side of the road. At least the scum of frost had melted under the midday sun. Shoulder didn’t feel as slick as it had this morning. Earl waited for the car to pass.
But the car didn’t pass. It stopped.
It was a little green sports car, or what passed for a sports car these days. Nothing muscley or strong.
A man got out, approaching the bus.
He didn’t walk up to Earl’s window, but headed over to the other side, where the door was. Earl frowned. He stood and took a look down the aisle. The kids hadn’t noticed anything amiss and were making use of the pause to shimmy up as high as their loose seatbelts—really only a nod to buckling—would allow. Taking quick, furtive peeks behind them, trading punches with their friends.
The man stood before the accordion door, separated only by a barrier of glass. Earl peered through his windshield and saw that the sports car blocked the bus’s access to the road.
Some instinct made him lock the door. He couldn’t recall ever doing that before in the course of his career. He hadn’t even been sure the mechanism would operate, and he wondered how it would hold if put to any sort of test.
“Help you?” he called out.
“Can you open up?” the man said.
“Sorry,” Earl replied. “Short of time. Got a busload of kids to get home.”
“I know that.” The man raised his voice. “This won’t take too long.”
Now the kids were starting to become aware, not fooling around as much and craning their heads to see what might be going on in front.
“Why don’t you tell me what you need?” Earl chose the word carefully. Need, not want. Make this man think Earl was taking him seriously.
“I’ll be happy to,” the man said. “I’d just rather do it face-to-face.”
“I’m sorry,” Earl said after a moment. “I can’t do that.”
The man squinted at him, but sunlight glinted off the glass, blocking sight of his features. Then he stepped out of the glare, and Earl saw his eyes.
“Can I ask you to move your car?” Earl said, hoping the quaver in his voice couldn’t be heard. Good God, he really was an old man.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I can’t do that.”
Earl caught the eerie echo of his own words. It seemed to escalate things somehow, confirm that this wasn’t just a slightly out-of-the-ordinary encounter. It held the potential for something bad, which Earl could feel swinging slowly, like the heavy bag at the gym.
Without revealing what he was doing, Earl put his hand beneath the dash and reached for his radio. Also not something he’d ever had cause to do in his thirty-plus-year career.
“This is Earl,” he said, low, when it crackled to life. “I got a situation here on Wicket Road.”
A spurt of static, then: “What kind of situation, four-twenty-oh?”
“Don’t know for sure. Vehicle blocking my path. Manned vehicle. The driver won’t move.”
“Can you get out and direct him to leave?”
Earl hesitated. “Don’t know that I want to do that.”
The man was trying to peer inside the bus,
but the descending sun blocked his vision. He seemed to catch sight of Earl, though, or else just piece together what Earl must be doing, because he began pounding on the door with his fist. The bus shook.
In the rear, one of the children screamed, while others started to laugh. Some began banging on their own windows.
Earl turned in their direction.
“Quiet,” he commanded. “Settle down. Let me take care of this.”
The children were still straining to see, but they quit making any noise.
Outside the doors, the man took out a handgun.
Earl registered the sight with a single jolt of fear, then weary resignation.
So this is what it’s come to, he said to the being he’d never believed in. Yep. Something bad was coming down the pike. He’d known it for a while now, hadn’t he?
“Four-twenty-oh, are you clear?” whoever was on call at the bus yard asked.
“Negative,” Earl said. “Not clear. This is an emergency situation. Repeat. Emergency. Man with a gun trying to board. Send the police.” He spoke hushed and fast so as not to alert the children, who at least for now hadn’t yet seen the gun.
Earl clicked off the radio. He didn’t want it putting out blurps of static or demands for information. There was nothing anyone at radio’s distance could do for them now.
“I want my son,” the man was saying. “If you send him out, nobody gets hurt. If you don’t, then I kill people, one by one, till I get my son.” A pause. “You’ll be last.”
He meant Cody, the new kindergartener. The rhythm of the school year—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in succession—had already begun lulling Earl into a state of complacency. Dispatch had told him about the little boy’s situation, but he’d just about forgotten.
Earl drummed his fingers on the warm dash. This was the oldest member of the fleet—just like him—and her dashboard was cracked and worn. Oh, Nellie, he thought, let’s get out of this, and then we’ll retire together. One last ride, girl.
He glanced at the road, wondering what eleven tons of metal would do to that little sports car, presuming he could keep the man from getting off a lucky shot. An unlucky one.
The children all seemed possessed by the same collective impulse at once. The ones on the left side unlashed themselves and scrambled over to the side where the man was standing.
They saw the gun, and their voices rose in a volley of screams.
Earl strode to the middle of the aisle and shouted to be heard over the screams. “Quiet! It’s going to be all right!”
Almost as one, the kids looked at him.
“But I need you to buckle into your seats—those over there, on the left. Crowd in three, four apiece if you have to. No one stays on this side.”
The side where the man was. He could walk around, of course, but Earl intended to give him a reason not to. Safer would’ve been to have the kids lie down under the seats, but not if Earl was able to drive off. Then the steep pitch of Wicket Road would send them all hurtling to the back of the bus in one broken crush.
“And lash ’em tight, not like you usually do,” Earl commanded. “You got that?”
All of the kids nodded except for Cody.
“You gotta stay quiet. Think you can manage that? If you can, then I promise you, we’re gonna be just fine.”
The kids began cinching in their belts, older ones helping younger.
“One more thing,” Earl said.
Everyone looked up.
“At least one of you has a cellular phone. I know you do.”
No phones at school was a rule, but the kids had been pushing the policy, especially over the last year or so.
“I do, sir.” An eighth-grade boy began digging around in his knapsack.
“Good boy,” Earl said. “If you can get a signal, call 911. Tell them we’re on Wicket Road. And make sure whoever you get stays on the line till we see the first police car drive up.”
He offered his flock a smile, and one by one, they smiled back.
Except for Cody. The boy was hunched over, small shoulders showing that he was crying without looking to stop.
“Somebody share his seat,” Earl said roughly. If he started trying to comfort the boy himself, he wouldn’t be able to leave him. And he had to get up to the front of the bus. “Tell him it’s okay, and his dad’s gonna be just fine, too.”
Earl was going to have to steer the bus over the obstacle in its way. It would mean entering the switchback at a bad angle, but Nellie could handle that. He looked out at the engine, thrumming under the hood all this time. His girl. After the missus, this bus had been the biggest constant in his life.
Earl sat down, shifting into gear while trying to calculate the physics, figure out how he could get up the most speed.
A sharp crack split the air. The man was outside the doors, so close that for a hallucinatory moment it seemed to Earl he had made it inside.
Earl’s heart clutched in his chest, hurting bad enough that he began to beg that being. Please don’t take me yet. I’ve got these kids to protect.
“That shot didn’t hit anyone,” the man yelled. “But the next one will. Give me my kid, or you can explain to someone else’s father why you let me kill him.”
A quaking cry came from the rear. “I’ll guh-go with you, Daddy!”
“Yes, that’s right, son. Everyone’s happier when they do what they’re told.”
“No!” Earl said. He looked around so fast that he saw pinprick dots. He could barely make out Brian Rudolph sitting beside Cody. “Rudolph, you don’t let him up, you hear?”
The children had gone quiet, unresponsive; their eyes were glazed and staring.
The man fired twice and the bus gave a groan, sinking down heavily on one side. He had shot out her tires. Oh, Nel, I’m sorry.
But another thought came hard on the heels of that one.
He doesn’t want to do what he says he’s going to do. I’ll bet he’s never killed anyone.
Earl stood up. “I’ll come out. Okay? We’ll talk, man to man. Figure this thing out.”
He looked back at the children. Now was the time to get them under the seats.
None of them looked capable of moving.
And Earl guessed this man didn’t mean to give them much of a chance for maneuvering.
“I’m going to unlock the door,” Earl said. “But only if you move twenty feet back—”
“You old fuck. Nobody tells me what to do—”
“I said, get back!” Earl roared. “Because the next thing I’m going to do is get every single one of these kids to lie down. You’ll have to shoot your way through me to try and find your son. That’s if you can make it onto this bus. And the police are already on their way.” Dear God, let the police be on their way.
For the first time, the man looked uncertain. Then he took a few steps backward, gun thrust out to the side.
“That’s right. Keep going,” Earl said.
He looked up and down the road. Empty.
He twisted the key in the ignition, feeling the engine die with a shudder. Wouldn’t do to leave the kids on the bus, engine running, even crippled as she was.
Earl heaved back on the arm that opened the accordion door. He climbed down the steps, hiding the pain in his knees caused by the descent.
The man rushed him.
Earl surged forward, trying to drive the man as far away from the bus as possible. Pushing him backward like a tackle, every foot, every inch a precious bit of space away from the children.
The two of them went down in a ditch.
The gun felt fiery against Earl’s neck, heated from the man’s grasp.
Was that the hum of an engine?
And a silvery piping note. It sounded like a whistle.
Or was it sirens at long last?
Earl smelled exhaust that wasn’t diesel.
They were going to be okay. All of them. He and the missus, too. Once he got out of this, Earl intended to share th
e thoughts he’d been having lately, about the end, how fast it came upon you. The two of them would face it together.
They still had time.
The man fired.
Earl felt resounding pressure between them, then the weight on top of him was gone. Borne away or lifted or maybe left of its own accord, for he heard the slapping of feet.
“Daddy!” Cody cried from the back of the bus. “Where are you going?”
There came the sound of more beating feet, and then a roar, not of gunfire, or from an engine, but a human one.
“Stop and throw down your weapon! Now!”
“—went into those woods over there! Draw your weapon, Officer, and proceed—”
“Yessir, Chief—”
“Landry! Accompany him!”
There were too many voices for Earl to make sense of.
So many wonderful voices.
“Sir, are you all right?” He felt the press of two fingers against his neck. Then everything ramped up in urgency again. “Medic! I need a medic over here! Now!”
“Bus is clear, Chief—”
“What’s your name, sir?” said the voice beside him, a whole hand pressing down on him now. Hard. Too hard. It hurt.
“Don’t worry if you can’t tell me,” the voice went on easily. “You can just call me Tim. Can you hear me, sir?”
Earl thought he could.
“I want you to listen real close, because I’ve got something to tell you. You listening? Here’s the thing. I’m the Chief of Police and I have never lost a man. I don’t intend to lose one now. Sir, I hope you won’t mind my saying, but you accomplished a goddamn miracle here today, not a single child hurt. I want you to hang on for me, sir, hang on, can you do that—”
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