Ty-Ty came back quietly. Champ grunted something at him the first day back. It might have been, “That’ll teach you,” or maybe, “Son of a bitch,” or even, “Oh Lord, here we go again.”
And if he had said the last, he was absolutely right. Three days later, Ty-Ty stood up to open a window. Champ, who must have been waiting on that moment, roared at him to get back in his seat. Ty-Ty froze.
The bus stopped so fast that Ty-Ty fell over. He hit his head pretty hard on the floor, but popped back up like a jack in the box. His ear was bleeding. He waited for Champ to get there, lips turned in a crooked parody of a smile.
Champ picked him up and started to the door. “Your dad told me I was to leave you on the side of the road next time. And you know what else? You’re done on this bus. Two suspensions equals no more bus riding!” He took two of the steps before tossing Ty-Ty out the door. Ty-Ty hit the ground and sprang back up. Too late. Champ had already slammed the door in his face.
Champ pulled off as fast as the old bus would go. I turned and watched Ty-Ty grow smaller as the bus left him behind.
I felt like Champ had won, and despite my own inert pseudo-rebellion, I was glad that order had been restored. Champ was supposed to be able to handle problems. The idea that he couldn’t scared me. The idea that Champ had been scared frightened me even more.
I fell into the old routine of lying about my toughness. I beat up a college guy last weekend when he caught me with his girlfriend. I played poker with some of the men down at the City Bar, and won so much money they accused me of counting cards. They kicked me out on my ass, and threatened to shoot me if I ever came back. Was I scared? Hell no, I wasn’t scared. Most people talk a bigger game than they act, I informed my hapless listeners (Davy had been joined by a couple of eighth graders who listened with absolute, unquestioning awe). Last weekend, I had sex with Marci Crawford and Beth Smitherman on the same day. Beth squealed like a stuck pig. Marci was the silent type until I made her come; then her lungs opened up like a marching band at half time.
The boys listened to me while Champ drove the bus, grunting at us when we got too loud, scowling at us beneath his moustache, pointing fingers that worked like magic, causing us to scurry back to our seats. And I thought about Ty-Ty. How the magic of authority that Champ held over us, suckled us like infants; how we liked swaying listlessly beneath the yoke of his fingers, his scowls, and his inaudible grunts. How I felt like things were right in the world again. How I couldn’t imagine what had caused Ty-Ty to become the scrawny, defiant ninth grader that he was.
“You ever see Ty-Ty?” I asked Davy one day when my other admirers had already gotten off the bus.
“I see him everyday,” he said. “He lives with us now. His father’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“He got shot. Or shot himself. That’s what my mom says.”
“You’re kidding.”
Davy shook his head. He seemed a little disoriented by this line of conversation, especially coming from me.
“Is he any better?” I said. “You know . . . why does he act like he does?”
Davy puckered his lips. He looked like he had a headache. Squinting, he said, “Don’t know. I guess because he was always getting beat up when he was little. He was so scrawny and all. And his dad liked to beat on him too.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, did you call that guy about your car?”
“No, I didn’t call him.”
“But you said you were going to call him and tell him that if he didn’t have your car ready—”
“I didn’t call him!” I exploded from my seat and shoved Davy against the window. His head thunked against the metal frame and he winced at me, tears streaking his face.
“What’d you do that for?”
“Tell Ty-Ty something for me.”
“What?” Davy said, wiping snot from his lip.
“Tell him, I said he ain’t no chicken.”
Davy nodded and continued to cry.
The spring came, and the reality of being a senior hit me hard. I got depressed about having to ride the bus to school while most of my friends drove new cars. I got down about not having a girlfriend. Despite my lies to Davy, I had never even had sex. The closest I had ever come was junior year with Rebecca Sturgeon. Just before I put it in, I came all over her belly. I tried hard to get her to let me try again, but she wouldn’t. After a while she stopped returning my phone calls, and asked Mrs. Morris if she could move to a new seat away from me in science class.
I thought about Ty-Ty far too much—his snarl mostly, and sometimes those level eyes—and it almost seemed as if I knew then that it wasn’t over yet. A tragedy was spinning out before me like a spool of thread, and I was powerless to stop it.
I ran into Ty-Ty at school one day. I had been cutting English, so I was behind the gym, out near the dumpsters, tipping back a flask of Wild Turkey I’d filched from my mother. I had learned to hide my alcoholism pretty well by this point. I took a few nips between nearly every period. Whenever I felt like the coast was clear, I skipped English altogether and got good and numb before going on to sixth and seventh periods.
I was taking another slug when somebody walked up. I nearly dropped my flask trying to get it back into my pocket before I realized it was Ty-Ty.
“Hey,” I said. “Have a taste.”
Ty-Ty cocked his head at me and frowned, but he took the flask and drank some anyway.
We stood in silence for a while. I was drunk and didn’t care. I took another drink. I said, “I’m sorry about your dad, Ty-Ty.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “You still play chicken?”
I shrugged. “Nah. I don’t have a car. I totalled the damn thing. I never played that much anyway, Ty-Ty.” I tipped the flask back again. “I’m just a damn liar.”
“I’ve been playing.”
“You can’t even drive a car,” I said.
“Been playing without one.”
“You mean like you played with Champ.”
“Fuck Champ. He’s chicken of me, anyway.”
I held the flask up. “Damn straight, Ty-Ty. Damn straight. But, you gotta admit, in the end he won.”
“I’m not scared of him.”
I nodded. I didn’t doubt it. “Ty-Ty, does anything scare you?”
He seemed to consider this, a look of deep concentration covering his normally melancholy face. “Yeah, being scared scares me.”
“You’re a champion chicken player, Ty-Ty. A champion.”
He reached for the flask and took another swallow. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and walked off. I sat down against the dumpster and drank myself silly.
“I saw Ty-Ty yesterday,” I told Davy as the bus lumbered off. It was raining hard and steam clouded the windows. Champ was moving slowly, wiping the windshield with an old rag so he could see.
“He stayed home today,” Davy said.
“Skipping?”
“Sick. Woke up throwing up. Said you gave him some whiskey.”
I smiled. I wanted to ask if Ty-Ty was doing all right, if he was managing. Losing his dad the way he did had to be hard. I had lost mine a few years ago when he left my mom and me. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose your father to suicide. I didn’t ask because I knew that Davy or the other kids that gathered around me thought I was tough. And tough guys don’t ask questions like that. So I sat in silence, ignoring the eyes on me, appealing to me to tell them more lies.
By the time the bus pulled up to Davy’s house, the bottom had dropped out of the sky. Visibility was bad, and the only sound was the kettledrum rain on the roof of the bus. There were only a few of us left: Davy, me, a couple of seventh grade kids in the front, and Pete Turner, a sophomore nobody liked. Champ stopped and opened the door. A gust of rain blew in, soaking him. “Damn it,” he muttered in his deep voice.
This was when I usually made my way to the front each day. My stop was only about a mile or two away, and I usually anti
cipated it by sitting in the front seat, waiting impatiently for Champ to get to my house. Davy told me bye, and I nodded to him. The seat nearest the door, where I usually sat was wet with rain, so I climbed in right behind Champ. Champ started to close the door when I heard him say, “Son of a bitch.” He took his towel and rubbed the glass, though by this point the steam was not really a factor, the rain was. So I couldn’t blame him for doing a double take when he saw the figure standing in the road.
Through the slashing rain, I could tell that it was Ty-Ty. He was just standing there, looking at Champ through the rain streaked glass.
Champ rubbed the window with the towel again. Then he turned to me. “Is that somebody in the road?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
He sat on the horn. “You’d think they’d have sense enough to get out of the rain not to mention the road.”
I didn’t say anything. I waited, holding my breath.
When Ty-Ty didn’t move, Champ crept closer. “Motherfuck,” he said beneath his breath. “That little punk.” He stepped on the accelerator. Ty-Ty didn’t flinch.
“He won’t move,” I said.
Champ barely turned his head. “Huh?”
“He won’t move. He’ll just stand there.”
“We’ll see about that,” Champ said again. He floored the bus, and the wheels ground the wet asphalt for purchase. We lurched forward. Almost as soon as we moved, Champ slammed the brakes again. He whipped his belt off, set the emergency brake and leaned out of the door into the sheets of rain. “Get out of the way, you stupid kid!”
Ty-Ty shook his head slowly. Champ lost what little self control he had left then. “Kid thinks he can stand me down. I’ll stand him down.” He looked back at me. “He’ll move this time, by God.”
“No,” I said, weak, barely audible, easy to ignore. I should have stood up and said it loudly and with swagger—that’s how I’d told all my lies about being tough, but I said it softly, inaudibly even.
Champ didn’t floor the bus this time. Instead he put it in gear and moved forward gradually, increasing his speed as he closed the twenty or so yards that lay between the bus and Ty-Ty.
As the bus got closer, I could see Ty-Ty’s face better, how he was really only a boy with a snarl, how his blonde lick of hair had at last been tamed by the hammering storm, how beneath his tough exterior, back in the depths of his eyes, he was as afraid as the rest of us.
More afraid, I think.
I closed my eyes just as Champ hit the brakes again. I was thrown forward, and since I had been standing up, I went up and over the seat. My head hit Champ’s head, and I landed in the aisle near the step well.
The bus came to a rough stop. “Jesus,” I heard Champ saying. “Sweet Jesus.”
He stepped over me out of the bus, into the rain. I pulled myself to my feet and followed.
“Get back in the bus,” Champ said, but he didn’t look at me, and there was no conviction in his voice.
I watched as he knelt to look under the bus. He collapsed to his knees and began to crawl underneath. I heard him sobbing. He stayed under the bus for a long time, so long that I gave up waiting for him to come back out. Since I was only a mile or so from my house, I began to walk. If I felt the rain on my shoulders that day, I do not remember it. Later, people talked about the storm and how hard it had rained that day. Some people even believed, for a short while, that the rain had played some part in Ty-Ty’s death. Champ put an end to that. He never tried to hide what had happened, never tried to sugar coat it. I saw him interviewed once or twice on the local news after he got out of jail years later. He told it like it happened. He seemed, even then, to be baffled by Ty-Ty’s behaviour and how he had ended up running the boy over with a school bus. Most of all he still seemed frightened.
I was frightened too.
I am still frightened, thirty years later, even though I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in nearly ten years, nor have I lied to anyone about how tough I am for even longer.
My wife asked me the other day what I was afraid of. I thought for a while before remembering Ty-Ty—my mind always seems to turn back to that scrawny ninth grader with the defiant sneer, and the way he looked just before the bus hit him. I must have been silent, pondering this for a long while because my wife had to poke me in the ribs and say, “Hello, Trent. I asked you a question.”
“I am afraid of people who are so scared they don’t care anymore,” I said. “I’m afraid of apathy, defiance, and . . .” I paused not even sure what I was trying to say. Ty-Ty, that’s what I wanted to say. That look in his eyes. Whatever can make you look like that. That’s the thing that scared me, still scares me. Only this was too difficult to explain, so I simply trailed off, leaving a sentence that I would likely never finish.
James
(James at 12)
James had his hand up again. I almost called on him, but I hesitated. Calling on him could bring the lesson to a grinding halt, not to mention that I would have to deal with the derision of his classmates when he inevitably said something irrelevant, something that could only come from James.
On the other hand, James was still new in class. He had social issues, and if the classroom couldn’t be a safe place for him to participate and feel included, then I suspected no place could.
“James,” I said. “Go ahead. But make it quick.”
But it was never quick with James. It was almost as if he had been silenced in social circles for so long, shunned by his peers so completely, that the classroom had become his outlet, his last place where someone would listen to him.
Moments later, after several ponderous and inappropriate comments, I found myself in the awkward position of having to stifle James, so we could move on with class.
“Okay, James. We need to get back on topic.”
“One more thing. The dragon. That dragon is really cool.”
Somebody snickered.
“What?” James said. “What? That dragon has two heads. I can just see it talking to itself. ‘Hello head one. Hello head two.’ And what if it got in a fight with itself?”
“And what if you shut up?” a voice from the back said softly. I chose to ignore it, but James couldn’t.
“Who said that?”
“James,” I warned. “Let’s get back to reading.”
“But . . .”
“I’m sorry.” I went on, reading aloud from the novel; he kept talking too, trying to be heard, trying to stand up for himself. I raised my own voice to drown his out and eventually he fell silent.
I first met James a few weeks ago when he had been plucked from another teacher’s room, because of behavioural issues. He came with a whispered warning from the counsellor: “Something’s not right with him. The kids really pick on him. He just can’t seem to fit in. We thought he might do better with a male role model.”
As time went on, I saw what she meant. He was an easy mark, the kind of kid destined for conflict. He was a magnet for bullies and kids who needed someone to exclude. He made things harder on himself because he was always antagonistic. He never knew when to back off, when to recede to the background like so many kids who don’t fit in. Try as they might, his peers couldn’t force him to be an outsider because he would stay in their face, agitating them until he became public enemy number one of bullies and cool kids alike.
But James’s interactions with his peers were only half the story. Like many teenagers that struggle with socialization, he was extremely smart, and he related better to adults than kids his own age. In fact, I found him affable and friendly between classes. He liked to talk to me about books and was enthusiastic about whatever subject we were covering at the time. He was a band kid, and I drove one of the band busses on Friday nights to the football games. So we had that too.
In our next seventh grade team meeting, I reported to my fellow teachers that the class change had been a success. Not an unqualified success, of course, but besides some minor issues, I thought J
ames and I would get along fine.
But even as I spoke the words, I had my doubts. I knew James might be okay in the controlled environment of a classroom, but I wondered what his life would be like outside it. For some reason, I thought of my own son, Peyton, who is two and a half and sometimes very difficult. What if he became a James? What if one day, his teachers would listen to counsellors whisper words about him? The thought shook me up a little. I decided to be even kinder to James, to reach out to him, to try and help him fit in.
The next Friday, I sat behind the wheel of a school bus, waiting for the band to load up for an away football game. It was going to be a long trip. The kids were already in another gear, hopped up on adrenaline, sugar, and hormones. A bad mix for James.
As we started to pull away from the school, I saw him—hell, everybody saw him—sitting on a bench in front of the school, bawling his eyes out. In ten years of teaching middle school, I had seen just about everything there is to see, but I had never witnessed a face so contorted with pain, sadness, and utter frustration.
“Mr. Roswell must have had all he could handle,” one of the chaperones seated behind me said. Roswell was the band director. A nice guy, but James could try even the most kind-hearted teacher’s patience.
“Is he leaving him?” I said.
“Looks that way. He warned him the last time if he couldn’t behave, he would leave him. He probably called his mother to come pick him up.”
I had to look away. His face—it hurt me just to see his face like that. But it wasn’t only the pain that made it difficult; it was also a face I knew somehow. A face from a long time ago, a face I recognized because of the eyes. They were the distant, unfocused eyes of an outsider who would come inside if only he could find the key.
The Shoebox Trainwreck Page 17
