They got a day off work and left on Friday. The bus was so crammed that Arlys’s toilet kit had to be wedged behind Irini’s knees. Irini was on the aisle, on the driver’s side. She read an Agatha Christie for a while, then dozed. She read some more. It was quite a ghastly murder and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the young couple who were so much in love, because things were certainly pointing in that direction. She reviewed the cast of characters, looking for someone suspiciously inconspicuous. “Arlys,” she said. Arlys had the window seat next to her. “Are real herrings ever red?”
“Hardly ever. Isn’t that the point?”
Norma got caught behind a farm truck with three black dogs in the bed. The road was straight enough to pass, but the truck was occupying the middle of it. The bus inched along while Norma watched for a chance. When the truck swerved, she shot into the open space. The dogs panted at them, bright red tongues, yellow fangs, as they went by. The truck driver honked. He leaned out the window and said something. It was 1947, so it never entered their heads it might be something rude. He waved. They waved back. Norma left him in the dust.
The bus wound through a countryside of fields, not farm fields, not cow pastures, but wild fields, full of high, seedy grass and scratchy mustards and thistle. Then the woods began. Irini looked across Arlys to where acres of small, thin aspens hurled themselves past the bus to shrink again in the distance. It was hypnotic, the dance of the trees. Irini dozed some more and found herself leaning on Arlys’s shoulder. This happened in the movies all the time, except the shoulder was of some young man the heroine thought she didn’t like. Not a girlfriend. She shifted in her seat, dozed again. "It’s a step before a step," she thought she heard someone say.
She woke briefly as they careened across the road, banging her head on the seat back. The bus slammed to a stop, pitching her forward, then rocked sideways and slowly, slowly tipped over. Her vision began to fade, like an old photograph left out in the sun. She could see the suitcases tumbling, but faintly, and then she passed out and it was blacker than sleep.
“Wake up, Irini. Wake up.” For a moment Irini thought she must be late to school. She tried to rouse herself, but it was an effort. The inside of her mouth was gummy with salt and stuck together. She couldn’t open it to answer. She opened her eyes instead. Things had a hazy underwater look to them. There were bits of all sorts of things where they didn’t belong; it was a Picasso of skirts and knees and baseball gloves. “Are you all right?” Arlys asked. Irini’s eyes closed and Arlys shook her. “Don’t go back to sleep.”
Why not? Irini wondered. She forced herself to open her eyes.
Arlys was trapped beneath a suitcase and a seat, both of which were trapped beneath Irini. “I really need you to move,” Arlys said. Her face was so pale you could see all the tiny blue veins around her nose. “Can you do that for me, Irini? Can you get off of me?”
Through the window beneath Arlys, Irini could see dirt, reddish-colored like Arlys’s hair, and little stones and crushed grasses and pine needles. There was a bat broken across Irini’s legs. She tried to remember what it was that Arlys wanted her to do. “What happened?” she asked. She wet her lips.
Coming back a little at a time, as if it were the memory of a dream, she began to hear the other girls. There was Cindy telling Fanny that her arm hurt. There was Sissy crying. She heard Walter talking. “Is everyone all right?” Norma asked loudly. “Please, God, let everyone be all right.”
“We’ve had an accident,” said Arlys. Irini grabbed the side of the seat above her and pulled herself upright. This put her out of alignment with the bus itself. It was the oddest feeling, especially on top of her dizziness, her glassy vision. It was a fun-house feeling without the fun.
“There was a deer,” Norma said. “Big buck. He came leaping out, across the road. It happened so fast.” She burst into tears. “Please let everyone be all right.”
“I’m going to call roll,” Fanny said. “Tracy?”
“Here.”
“Cindy is here. Margo?”
“Here.”
“Arlys?”
“Here.”
“Irini?”
“Here.”
Irini balanced herself on the side of the base of the seat. She leaned down to pull the suitcases off Arlys. She felt stiff when she moved, but she didn’t think she was hurt. Arlys had a scrape on her arm. Irini saw blood, but only in small quantities.
“Claire?”
“Here.”
“Helen?”
“Here.”
“Walter?”
“I’m here. I’m fine.”
Arlys stood up. Her feet were on the glass of the window. Irini heard it crack. Arlys reached for Helen who had fallen all the way from the seats opposite. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“I think I am,” said Helen. “Scratched and scraped. It’s lucky I’m so well padded. I bounced. It’s lucky we fell so slowly. Don’t you think that was lucky?”
“Ruby?”
“I’m okay.”
There was a pause. It was a long pause. Irini had discovered a bump on the back of her head. It was soft and it was getting larger. She rubbed it gently. Sure enough, it hurt. Arlys was examining the blood on her arm, licking her thumb and wiping it away to see what was underneath. Helen was rotating her head slowly on her shoulders, feeling along her neck with her fingers.
There was the sound of sobbing. “Sissy?” Fanny asked finally.
There was another long pause, this one even more awkward. “Here,” Sissy said. She gulped and sniffled. “I’m here.”
Well, it was a moment. But it was not a moment to be enjoyed. The day was muggy in a threatening, prestorm sort of way. The only door was on the ceiling. The bus had seemed crowded and hot when it was upright. Now with the contents all jumbled together, it was much worse. “I have to get out of here,” Arlys said, her voice strung tight. “I can’t breathe.”
There were batting helmets and balls and canvas bags everywhere, suitcases and people all mashed together, but not as they had been, not with the people on top and the suitcases on the bottom or the helmets and the balls in the bags, but everything the wrong way around.
“Thank You,” said Norma. Tears were streaming down her face. “Thank You.” She stood with one foot on the dash and the other balanced on the back of the driver’s seat and tried to reach the door. Her legs were shaking so that she had to sit down again. “How many deer have I shot in my life?” she asked. “Would it have been such a big deal if I hit one? What’s the difference?”
“Don’t think like that,” said Claire. “Everyone is fine. We’ve had an accident, but everyone is fine. Who knows what would have happened if you’d hit the deer? Maybe this was best.”
“He had a magnificent rack,” Norma said. “I was thinking how it wouldn’t be sporting to hit him with a bus.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I have to get out of here,” Arlys said. “Please. Right now.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Norma. “I’m so sorry.”
The door on the ceiling was stuck. It took the agility of Ruby to ascertain this. She scrambled up a tower of suitcases, rocked back and forth at the top. She was Errol Flynn, with a rakish gash beneath one eye. She leapt for the door, hung from it like a chandelier, pushed and jerked on it. She did everything but open it. “I need a place to stand,” she said.
“So now what?”
“Maybe we could knock out a window,” Sissy suggested.
Neither Helen nor Fanny was ever going to fit through a window even if they could climb up to one. Knocking out a window would involve flying glass. “Give her a bat,” said Norma. “Maybe she can lever the door.”
“You do it, Irini,” said Walter. “If you can’t do it, none of us can.”
Irini stepped from seat side to seat side to the front of the bus. Norma and Claire held a stack of luggage in place; Ruby waited for her at the top. The suitcases were offset like stair steps, but extr
emely unstable. It was a sort of cartoon escalator—the stairs slid away and disappeared as she stepped on them. She scrambled for a reliable handhold and Ruby offered her one. Ruby’s fingers were warm and callused.
Irini was afraid she might fall and hurt herself and this struck her as funny. She looked down to where Norma stood and she could feel herself smiling idiotically. It alarmed Norma. “I’m so sorry,” Norma said again, with obvious sincerity.
“Take a deep breath,” Walter suggested. “Tell yourself you can do it.”
Irini reached up with her right arm. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and tensed her muscles. They bulged. She pushed. The door opened easily, opened all of sudden, throwing her off balance, tipping the cases. Ruby held onto her with one hand and stuck the bat through the opening with the other. She levered the bat, throwing the door wide.
When Irini had settled, Ruby climbed through. Everything was so easy for Ruby. She pulled up, swung her legs out, and passed over. It was much harder for the other Sweethearts, even with Ruby outside to help them. There was little panache in anyone else’s exit.
Getting Cindy out was a nightmare. The only arm she still had use of was the one with no hand. “Here,” said Sissy suddenly. She was wearing a printed blue scarf over her thick, black hair. She unknotted it and handed it to Tracy. “You can make her a sling out of this,” she said, and she was the one who would know.
Tracy didn’t answer, but she took the scarf and fastened it around Cindy’s neck for her, just as if she had heard Sissy.
Irini was the last one out. Once she was through the door she still had to get down. It was surprisingly high, the scariest moment of the whole scary episode. She sat on the bus, her feet dangling over the windshield, for the longest time. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, felt along her head to see how big the bump was now. It was coming right along. “You can do this, Irini,” Claire encouraged her. “Come on.”
Eventually the Sweethearts all stood in a jumbled row on the ground, with their hair tangled and their makeup smeared, and their scrapes and bruises just starting to hurt for real. “What about the luggage?” Fanny asked, trying to comb her hair out with her pearl-tipped fingers, and Walter told her it was a little late to be asking. “But I left my cigarettes inside,” she said and Helen told her it was time to quit smoking.
They had yet to see another car. “How long has it been since we passed anyone?” Irini asked Norma.
“You remember the farmer? With the dogs? He was it,” she answered. They had passed that truck hours ago.
“It’s going to rain,” said Walter. He was looking up at the sky. He had one red eyeball, a thin red border on the skin all around it. “In another hour we’re all going to wish we were back on that bus.”
The sky directly above them was blue with large, floury puffs of white. A good luck sky. But far away to the west there was a solid, undifferentiated sheet of gray. A wind swept through their hair and the trees by the road, rattling the leaves, ticking in the pine needles. From somewhere inside the distant gray sky came a faint sound like growling.
“I had a raincoat,” said Fanny. “I had clothes for damned everything. I could go dancing if anyone asked. I had two packs of cigarettes.”
Cindy threw up. It happened all of sudden and only the once. She kicked leaves over the evidence.
“I’m so sorry,” said Norma.
“There’s going to be lightning,” Walter said. “We have to find a place to get out of it.”
They walked ahead since they knew there was nothing behind. They walked single file down the edge of the road, armed with a single baseball bat, and the wrong half of the sky rushing toward them.
After they had walked a long way, with a rest here and there, none of which proved restful, they came to the end of the afternoon. The road was edged with Queen Anne’s lace. Yellow butterflies skimmed over them. By now the clouds had spread and thickened like boiling gravy.
They found a side road. It was not altogether promising. It was made of dust, small enough to maybe be nothing more than a driveway, although they could not see through the trees to a house of any kind. But there was a wire fence with a gate swinging open, and this was encouraging. Where there was a gate there had to be a reason.
Cindy was leaning against Fanny and breathing heavily. Her face had become quite pale and she held her arm in the fold of the blue scarf. "I’m afraid it might be broken," Fanny told Tracy. "She says it hurts like the dickens."
“Can she move it?” Tracy asked.
“Yes. I’m fine. I need to lie down,” Cindy said crossly. “I can’t keep walking forever.”
A few fat drops of rain hit the dust and lay round as pearls until sinking in. The ground was the color of cinnamon. “It’s starting,” said Claire and Irini felt the first drop hit her hand.
Irini was euphoric. It had come over her as she walked. First she was frightened and then she was worried and now she could find nothing to complain of. Everything was perfect. The glassy vision after the accident had been replaced by an exaggerated clarity. She saw the silver undersides of leaves, cut out quite vividly against the black sky. The wind tossed the leaves from green to silver; they sparkled like water. She saw her own feet, the shape of one toe through the shoe, the cinnamon dust coating the leather.
Her feet were tired. They hurt all the way up to her knees. Her head pounded. She treasured every ache in her body. She lifted her wrist, smelling for the rain as if it were French perfume. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. They were all alive and she was not about to get upset over something as right as rain. She saw the lovely, furry weeds at the sides of the road—Russian thistles, wild catnip, old man’s pajamas. You could eat some of those, she thought, and she would have liked to, just for the sensation of it, just to be sure she was living fully, but she wasn’t certain which were the edible ones.
The road rose slowly and the girls walked to the top. Beneath them, through the thickets of thin, leafy trunks, there was a lake, tea-colored like the sky. On its bank was a set of low, cinder-block houses with roofs of corrugated tin. There was no sign of life at the houses—no lights, no cars, no bicycles, no dogs. But there was a rowboat sunk in the mud of the bank and filled with water. And near it, in the shallow, algaed edge of the lake, a heron trolled, its elastic neck twisting, one leg up, one inside-out knee locked and stiff. A faint and final stream of sunlight rolled down the small feathers of the heron’s throat. The light hit the water and broke like a mirror into glittering pieces. The heron paused and looked at Irini.
It was a miracle this bird should be here at this exact moment and that Irini should also be here, seeing it look at her, knowing it had seen her looking back. Of course, when you stopped to think of it properly, it was also a miracle every morning when Irini woke up to find herself in her bed on Brief Street. What were the odds against any one person being in any one spot at any one moment? They must be astronomical. Every step of every day of every life took place against tremendous odds. Irini said some part of this out loud, but only part, so it made less sense than when she thought it. No one else was in the mood. Sissy was sniffling and Cindy was moaning.
“What are you babbling about, Irini?” said Margo. She didn’t like nonsense. “Did you bump your head or something?” At the sound of her voice the heron lifted off, and Irini could hear the pump of its enormous wings.
They continued down the road, and while they still had some distance to go, the distance between the bases and back again, the downpour began.
Two minutes later and they could have stayed dry. What were the odds? The rain was a deep, gray veil over the trees by the time they arrived at the first building. There was an overhanging eave, one step up to the door, which was warped, with a screen window and a hook latch that wasn’t latched. Walter opened it. “It’s perfect,” he called back out. “Wait till you see. Like it was made for us.”
The girls crowded inside, wiping their faces, drying their hair with their wet sleeves. They st
ood in a single rectangular room with a stone floor and cracked incompetent windows. The only furniture was fortuitous. Irini saw it all at once, lit up with lightning. Six rows of bunk beds, no bedding, but the mattresses were intact. When the lightning vanished a little pair of eyes shone on for a moment in the corner, then blinked off.
There was a scuttling sound. “Yeesh,” said Helen. “I do not want to sleep on a bed I can’t see.”
“This must be a summer camp,” Arlys said. “All these beds.”
Irini didn’t think so. Nothing of games and comic books and candy bars and sexual misinformation was in the air here. The room smelled of mold and dust and wet stone. Rain thrummed on the tin roof until the whole building vibrated with the noise.
“But it is summer,” said Margo. “So where are the kids?”
“A work camp,” said Irini. “And abandoned.”
“Something has been nesting in the beds,” said Fanny.
“I don’t care,” said Cindy. She sat on the closest lower bunk. “Come sit with me, Tracy,” she asked. “I just wish I was dry. One wish. Why can’t I even have that?” Tracy put her arms around Cindy, rocked her ever so slightly.
“You’re all right,” she said. “I’m here.”
“I wish I had a cigarette,” said Fanny. “Just one lousy cigarette.”
“What now?” asked Margo. She took the bunk opposite the Mays. It creaked loudly when she sat on it. “No one is going to realize we’re missing until game time tomorrow.”
“Even then,” said Arlys, “we can’t count on them thinking anything of it. They’ll be disappointed, they’ll be annoyed. I wonder if they’ll be worried, though.”
The Sweetheart Season Page 27
