Ash Wednesday (15 page)

"That had, huh?"

"That had."

"Hell. Bill, I've tried to get them to buy."

"I know you have. I'm not blaming you at all. But
goddammit
. . .” Gingrich paused. and Jim sensed a frustration and a self-hatred that was alien to the man. When he spoke again, the words came slowly, painstakingly, an apology in each syllable. "I didn't know how I was going to tell you. I guess there's no easy way." He turned and looked Jim full in the face. "I'm not going to be able to keep you full-time anymore. Jim. I just can't afford it."

Jim Callendar felt as if he'd suddenly swallowed a lump of ice, but he said nothing.

"Maybe," Gingrich went on, "maybe if I kept you on and the economy got better real fast, I could make it. But that's a pretty big maybe." He put his hand on Jim's arm, the only time other than a handshake that they had ever touched. "It's not you, okay? I mean you've done a wonderful job, and you deserve a
helluva
lot better than this. But I just . . . have no choice. I've been working on the
Messenger
for forty-one years, Jim—"

"No, look, I understand." He didn't want to hear a speech, not now. He was angry, hurt, bitter, and though he was also displeased with himself for feeling that way, he could not help it. Gingrich still had his paper; Jim had nothing.

"
Forty-one years
," Gingrich pressed. "I can't risk losing that."

"You don't have to
justify
it, Bill," Jim said, snappishly enough to make Gingrich draw back. Jim added, more gently, "I understand. Really I do."

They sat in silence for a time, watching the foam dry into moist, white webs on the insides of their beer glasses.

"If you could," Gingrich finally said, "I'd like you to keep doing your own column and 'Around the Square.' "

"Look, you don't have to—"

"I didn't just think of that," said Gingrich, the old spark returning. "I'd intended to ask you all along, okay?"

Jim stared at him, then nodded. "Okay. Until I find something else." Gingrich nodded back. "How much?" Jim asked. ,

Gingrich pursed his lips, but his eyes relaxed, as though he were once more on familiar ground. "Fifty for the 'Square,' Thirty for yours."

Jim shrugged. "All right."

"And one more thing," Gingrich said. "As soon as I can afford to hire you back, I want you back."

"We'll see."

"
Goddammit
, I'm
sorry
." The word was so loud that even the regulars turned. Gingrich noticed and returned his tone to normal. "You are the only guy except for me who has ever liked both newspaper work and this fucking
blindered
town enough to maybe be able to make a go of the
Messenger
. Now
someday
I am going to die—"

"Aw, come on, Bill—"

"I'm
serious
. I've got no family, nobody I can trust this rag to. . . . All I've got is Thelma for the secretary stuff and Clarence for the shit work, and they're both two years
older'n
dirt and not much brighter. So where does that leave me? You may not be much, kid, but you're all I've got."

"All you
had
, you mean."

"I can't apologize forever. You gonna let me talk? Okay, then, what I'm saying is that you stick with me and the paper's yours someday. That simple. If you want it."

"Jesus Christ, Bill, you just fired me. Now to make up for it you're leaving me the paper?"

Gingrich looked puzzled, as if he hadn't seen it in that light. "Yeah," he said. "I guess that's what I'm doing."

Jim shook his head. "I'm sorry, I can't deal with this right now. You do whatever the hell you want. It's your paper. I'm going home." He put the money for his beer on the bar. Gingrich tried to return it to him, but he wouldn't take it. "You'll have my columns on time," he said, and left.

Beth was reading
TIME
and Terry was watching
The Muppet Show
when Jim came into the
rec
room. He dutifully kissed them both, but Beth sensed the tension inside him. "Get it put to bed?" she asked.

"Yeah," he answered. "Did I ever." She looked at him, and he gestured upstairs. A minute later, at the kitchen table, he told her about losing his job. She stood, came around the table to where he sat, and embraced him from behind.

"It's okay," she said, stroking his hair as though he were crying. But he was nowhere near tears. The feeling was too empty for that. It was as though someone had taken a freezing metal scoop and dug pieces out of his stomach, and the places where the chunks had come out were now cauterized, not by fire, but by ice. "We'll be all right."

Dully, he told her about the eighty dollars a week his columns would bring, and she brightened. "Maybe if you don't find anything right away you could get something part-time." He listened while she rattled off several possibilities, praying that she would not suggest trying to return to Linden and loving her when she did not.

It was not until much later, when they were both in bed, that she thought of it. "Buses . . ." she said, propping herself on an elbow.

"Hmmm?"

"I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Otto Floyd is retiring soon."

"Who's Otto Floyd?"

"Our garbage man. But he also drives the Hatch Road school bus. And they don't have a replacement for him.”

“Me? I never drove a bus before."

"Oh, it'd be easy. It's just like a car, only bigger. Isn't it?"

He lay quietly in the darkness, thinking.

"It's a couple of hours in the morning and some in the afternoon. And you get a lot of extra time for trips and things. Five dollars an hour is what Otto's getting."

"How do you know all this?"

"I make all the bus arrangements."

"You do the hiring?"

"The board. You can't buy a pencil without the board. But I'm
your
in
, right?"

"Only a hundred a week," he mused.

"Plus eighty for the columns plus whatever extra there might be for field trips and sports and such. It's almost as good as a full-time job."

"I'm not a bus driver, though."

"Otto can teach you. He likes me."

"Oh, yeah? Why?"

"He says I'm pretty."

"You're—“

"And he likes my garbage bags. Says they never split open."

He laughed, then stopped suddenly.

"What's wrong?" Beth asked.

"It's crazy." he said. "Here I am, a thirty-five-year-old college graduate, and a garbage man is going to teach me a trade."

"Well," Beth said after a moment, "recessions make strange bedfellows."

They retreated then to their individual thoughts, and Jim wondered if he would be able to drive a bus, wondered if the board would think his hiring smacked of nepotism, wondered if it would all come easy.

And it did. It was so simple that he could hardly fathom it. It seemed that he, who had never driven anything larger than a Mustang, had been born to drive a bus. After Otto had shown him the basics, the big orange-yellow box became an extension of his body, going nimbly where he wanted it to, turning, twisting, stopping precisely as his hands and feet guided it. "Jesus, but you got the touch there, Mr. Callendar," Otto told him. Jim had asked him to call him by his first name, but Otto ignored the pleasantry, as if sensing a caste separation that the necessity of sharing the same duty was not enough to bridge. "Jesus Christ, you got it sure."

Jim backed the bus into the allotted space where it seemed to nest, engine purring lovingly. "I'll tell you, Otto, it handles better than a car. Hell, I can barely parallel park in my Dodge.”

"Don't matter." Otto grinned through a mouthful of worn and broken teeth like a battered picket fence come to life. He pushed his Schmidt's beer cap back up on his forehead, revealing a vast expanse of mottled leathery skin. "Ain't the same thing. Now, you get your truck drivers and they think right off they can handle buses. Why shit, man, '
tain't
the same thing at all. Bus is in
one
piece and a truck's in
two
. Ain't got no hitch on a bus, see what I mean. And that's why your car drivers is often a
helluva
lot better at buses than your truckers. 'Cause of the pieces. Leastways that's what I think." He wiped his nose with a dirty sleeve. "Let's take her out again."

Later, Jim thought of the bus the same way he thought of a Harlem whore. Everything is so easy until you step into that dark hallway, and
bang
. You know suddenly that all those smiles and come-ons and having everything so easy was only to lure you in, to draw you to that dark place where the force comes out of the black corners and cuts you down, tears out your heart, steals everything worth having. The scene was carved into his memory, slammed with chisels and mallets into the tough granite of his mind never to fade or to be eroded by years.

It was three days away from the shortest day of the year. It was cold and grim and gray, and the clouds spat snow instead of letting it drift down. It was a cruel day, and the wind bore knives that cut through the thickness of even his down jacket. The darkness had started to close in before four o'clock, and as he guided the massive hulk of the bus down the road on the last leg of its journey, he turned the lights on full bright. The children were in the back, only five of them not yet home: Tracy
Gianelli
, a third grader with eyes so black and large that Jim fancied her a changeling; Bobby Miller, a sixth grader, tall, thin, aviator glasses perched on his aquiline nose like a wide-eyed bird about to take off; Jennifer
Raber
, short, fat, freckled, the butt of second-grade jokes because of her stuttering, jokes that Jim would not permit on his bus; Frank Meyers, loud, a troublemaker, forgivable only because he came from a broken home, an excuse that became more tiresome and less acceptable as the weeks passed.

And Terry. Terence John Callendar. Flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood. Only son and heir of the Driver, the Man Behind the Wheel, the Guardian of these five lives, sworn to protect and defend them from the tempest raging outside, pledged to give up his own life in the service of God and country and five little kids in the back of the bus, one reading a Hardy Boys book, two singing a Dolly Parton song, two talking quietly, looking out the streaked windows, watching the snow descend solidly onto the two-lane where
Ginder
Road met
Kaylor
Hollow Road.

They began themselves to descend the hill, for perhaps the seventieth time that school year and for the seven thousandth in Jim
Callendar's
determined memory. Nothing changed. No giant magical hand (Tracy
Gianelli's
sorcerous
friends?) scooped the bus up out of harm's way. Harm fell again, in the shape of the rusting farm truck that slipped down
Kaylor
Hollow Road, skidded through the stop sign, and slammed into the right rear of the school bus, swinging its huge mass over the snow-covered slope as lightly as a skater, so that the rear of the bus splintered the spindly guardrail.

The bus did not poise and hover over the edge, as in a movie or a dream. There was no millisecond of breath for God or Superman to yank it back onto the road. It simply went over, rear end first, rolling down the forty-degree bank like a mammoth
Tootsietoy
. Jim was aware of many things at once—his own disbelief, a sharp jolt to his shoulder, sudden cold, a rain of sparkling crystals, and cries.

The cries were wordless, mere animal noises of fright and panic. And as the bus rolled over and over again they seemed to ebb and flow, as though he were putting his hands over his ears in rhythm with the turning of the bus. Then just before it suddenly stopped rolling, he felt himself being lifted and turned once more, thrown against cracking hinges on the other side of the cab, and he was lying in the snow, his right arm and leg tangled in a thorn bush that gave him up with a hiss of ripping nylon as he tore away from it, thinking for a moment he had been trapped by some beast.