Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

That done, though, I kept myself away from all town functions, church affairs, meetings, bake sales, and so forth, and more or less oriented myself west and south, faced our life toward Lake Placid, where I had to take Abbott twice a week for his physical therapy anyhow. Naturally, I no longer drove the school bus; two weeks after the accident, the school board mailed me a certified letter saying my services were no longer required, but I had already made that decision for myself, thank you. And since Eden Schraft never called me, the way she usually did, about carrying mail in the summer months, I gave that up too; a bit more reluctantly, however, than I gave up the bus, for I had no terrible associations with that particular job. Now, whenever I saw one of those big yellow International school buses on the road, I simply had to look away or else concentrate on a single detail, like the sum of the numbers on the number plate or the poker hand the numbers made, until the thing was gone from view.

I did all our grocery shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid, and even started reading the Lake Placid newspaper, which is how I got my job driving for the hotels. We needed money — since Abbott’s stroke, I have been the sole breadwinner in the family. I started with the Manor House, who’d advertised for a part-time driver with a van to carry guests in from the Saranac airport. They did not connect my name to the well-known accident in Sam Dent, and naturally I did not give the school board as a reference. Then on my own initiative I added a few more hotels and got me one of those belt beepers and a CB, until soon I was on call twenty-four hours a day and in Lake Placid five and six full days a week, lugging folks back and forth from the airport, cruising in and out of the downtown shopping area with a load of Canadian souvenir hunters and off to view the local sights — Whiteface, the Olympic ski jumps, the John Brown house, and Kate Smith’s grave. Lake Placid can be an interesting town when you see it from a tourist’s perspective.

Sometimes, out of the goodness of his heart, because he’s easily bored and would have preferred staying home with his radio and books and magazines, Abbott came along, and that cheered me somewhat. I was very lonely in those days, still in a kind of shock from the accident, I think, and Abbott was the only person I could communicate with. But soon winter passed over, and spring appeared and rolled on a few weeks later, and then it was summer, and now in late summer I had begun to feel more like my old self — although I knew, of course, that I would never be the same person again. You can’t raise the dead. I knew that.

Anyhow, it seemed like an appropriate time and way for me to reenter the life of my town — coming out here to the fairgrounds with my husband and joining the crowd and not making anything large of it, just saying howdy to those folks who seemed willing to speak with me, and enjoying ourselves for a few hours, like normal people, and then going home. Tired but happy, as they say.

Was I nervous or scared? Yes, of course I was. My son Reginald had warned me off it. “Ma, forget it, forget that damned town. C’mon up here, you and Dad, sell the house, for God’s sake, and move up here to Plattsburgh with me. I can build you an apartment upstairs or renovate the basement or something, and I’ll look after you both.” As if we were a helpless pair of elderlies. I think he had his own motives, now that he and Tracy were separated and he was living alone in their house. Reginald has always been something of a mama’s boy and secretly ashamed of it; and while he’d never move back to Sam Dent just to be near me and his father, he was not above trying to talk us into moving near him.

The large oval field in front of the grandstand is ringed by a dirt track that’s generally used for racing trotters. Tonight, though, the racetrack, along with the field itself, was entirely covered by old banged-up cars hand-painted in garish colors, slapped-on shades of pink and aqua and yellow, with slogans, mottoes, girls’ names, and huge numbers on the doors, hoods, and roofs. Parked around the cars in no evident pattern or order I saw flatbed trailers and tow trucks, pickups, and even some fancy new Z cars here and there, with what looked like a couple hundred people lounging around the vehicles, all drinking beer and having a fine time together. They were mostly young men and women and teenaged boys and girls, all of whom love cars and machinery. The boys and men, and many of the females too, moved and mingled among the tow trucks and pickups and Z cars and the old painted-up clunkers familiarly, as if the vehicles were beloved and admired animals that they had raised themselves. It was a whole pack of muscular good-looking youths in excellent health showing off to one another, with the boys’ sleeves rolled practically over their shoulders so as to expose their tanned arm muscles and new tattoos and the girls in tight shorts or jeans and halters, their hair all moussed and swirled and curled in the newest styles from the TV singers and soaps. They had tape decks set out, blasting rock ’n’ roll and country and western songs from the hoods of their vehicles, and coolers of iced beer all around, and here and there a couple was dancing together.

It was almost dark now. Huge spotlights in front of the grandstand had been turned on to illuminate a short section of rain-soaked track that had been blocked off between the stands and the raised open stage facing it. From the field, the pale glow of the spotlights and the flashing lights from the midway and the rides — strips and circles of red, yellow, purple, and green — passed like firelight from a huge bonfire across the faces of the young people hanging out in the field. I cut between a pair of beat-up sedans right onto the field among them and pushed Abbott’s wheelchair over the grass between pickups and flatbeds and knots of kids clutching beer cans. In the distance, I heard the announcer start to call out the order of the upcoming heats.

Abbott swung his head around and said to me, “Can’t … be … late.” I started to hurry, but while I wheeled him through the vast conglomeration of cars, trailers, and trucks toward the stands, I kept peering around in search of my old station wagon, Boomer, which I had good reason to hope would be entered in the derby tonight, resurrected and driven by Jimbo Gagne. It would have been difficult to recognize it — they take out all the window glass and lights, and you can barely tell what brand or model car it was originally, except by the shape of its fenders and grille and so on. Forget telling who owned the car originally.

All the way across the field to the stands, I kept an eye out, but I never caught sight of anything that resembled Boomer more than superficially. Boomer was, of course, the name my boys and I had given to that old Dodge wagon, which had served back in the 1970s as my very first bus and which, after 168,000 miles, had finally thrown a rod and generally collapsed. I’d pushed it out behind the barn and stashed it on blocks, in case Abbott or I or one of the boys ever needed parts from it, which need never arose, as my boys were by then obsessed with off-road vehicles and four-by-fours and I was driving first the GMC and then the International. And then Abbott had his stroke. The old Dodge got more or less forgotten over the years that it sat back there, and in time meadow grass and tall weeds and berry bushes grew around it. Until one day in June of this year, when Jimbo Gagne came out to the house unannounced and asked to buy it. He said he liked its power-to-weight ratio, it had plenty of both, and he would like to get it running again and enter it in the demolition derby at the fair.

I said, “What the heck, Jimbo, just take it. Haul it out of here and keep it,” I said, and on the spot wrote him a bill of sale for one dollar. He was the first person from town who had come out to the house in a normal way and on his own since the accident, and I was so grateful to him for that, I’d probably have given him my almost new Voyager van for a dollar, if he’d asked me for it. Jimbo is one of Billy Ansel’s Vietnam vets, the one who’s been working at the garage the longest, nine or ten years now, and though he still lives over in Ausable Forks in a trailer with his wife and a dozen sled dogs that he houses in oil drums spread around the yard, he’s practically a local person now, because of his association with Billy Ansel’s garage. People talk against the way he uses oil drums for doghouses, but I can’t see how they’re any worse for dogs than house trailers are for people. Jimbo is a lanky brown-eyed man with stringy black hair who wears one of those long Fu Manchu mustaches and a gold earring and looks downright evil. But he’s actually a very shy and sensitive man, a respectful soft-spoken gentleman, underneath that pirate’s costume, and when he came with Billy’s wrecker to haul old Boomer away, he treated me with courtesy and kindness. He knew that I would take one look at that tow truck and remember the last time I’d seen it, when it had slowly drawn the bus out of the water-filled sandpit that snowy morning last January, and so he telephoned before coming out and in a joking way said he was calling ahead in case I didn’t want to be there when he took old Boomer away.