Russell Banks: The Sweet Hereafter

My heart was pounding furiously. I was standing now, everyone was standing, and if he hadn’t been positioned at the top of the stairs, Abbott wouldn’t have been able to see. I hoped that Nichole, at the other side of the grandstand, could see this. Everyone wanted to see Boomer get hit, and again and again they got their wish, as Jimbo seemed unable to get free of the pack long enough to do any of the hitting himself. The other drivers were ganging up on Boomer, going around one another, abandoning good clear shots at nearby cars for a glancing shot at Boomer. Its front bumper had been torn off, and the right front fender dangled like a broken limb. Jimbo kept working, though, and the old engine wouldn’t let go, and every time one of the other cars slapped Boomer from the side or rear and sent it into the guardrail or against one of the stilled cars piled up in the middle, Boomer would come to life and chug back for more.

Until finally there were only three cars left that could still move, and they were moving slowly, like prizefighters with all the fight gone out of them, coming forward on instinct now, bashing one another blindly, stupidly, straight ahead, again and again. There was a torn-up Ford Galaxie four-door from Chick Lawrence’s garage in Keene, with Tom Smith driving, and I recognized JoAnn Bruce’s old brown Eagle, sponsored by Ethel’s Dew Drop Inn in Willsboro and driven by JoAnn’s cousin Marsden. All the other cars were smoldering in dented and bent heaps, permanently stopped and eliminated. The Galaxie was at the left of Boomer, and the Eagle was at the right, and at last it looked like certain elimination for Boomer and Jimbo Gagne.

The crowd started to applaud then, clapping hands the way they had when Nichole Burnell had first arrived. They didn’t cheer; they just applauded. The drivers in the Galaxie and the Eagle revved their motors and spun their wheels and lurched toward Boomer, stuck in the middle, and suddenly it seemed like everyone in the stands stopped clapping at once and the grandstand went silent, as the two cars crossed the space between them, on a line toward the black station wagon sitting at the center of that space. Boomer was held by the mud, with its rear wheels blurred and tires sending up dark gray smoke and chunks of dirt. Jimbo wrestled with the gearshift but couldn’t seem to shift and rock the car free. It was a terrifying moment — in my memory, it takes place in utter silence, and everyone is watching with great seriousness, as if a matter of terrible importance is being settled before them, instead of this dumb smalltown demolition derby.

And then it happened. Boomer backed slowly away, a few inches, a foot, three feet — just enough to miss the charge first of the Galaxie and then, a split second later, of the Eagle — and unable to swerve away in time, the two cars hit each other instead of Boomer, and when Jimbo saw that, he shifted into first gear and shot straight ahead, right against the two of them, spinning them away and half around again. The crowd erupted joyously, filling the night air with wild shouts and cries, and when Jimbo had Boomer lined up on the Eagle, with the rear bumper headed straight toward the right front end of the other car, the people hollered for him to do it! Do it! Do it! and when he smashed into the fender and wheel and tore the steering rods of the Eagle, stopping it dead where it stood, and the official smacked it with the flag, the crowd jumped up and down and yelled with delighted approval and slapped each other on the shoulders and backs.

Then Jimbo went after the Galaxie, which was struggling in the mud to turn and protect its front end. Boomer was moving smoothly now; Jimbo had control of it. He spun the steering wheel, got Boomer backed away from the wreckage of the Eagle, and turned and aimed its rear end, which still had the bumper attached, toward the Galaxie. The black station wagon came on slowly, chugging and slogging across the open ground between them, while the Galaxie tried to turn, to take the blow from behind. People were calling out Boomer’s name now, almost chanting it: Boo-mer! Boo-mer! Boo-mer! At that instant Jimbo squeezed a last burst of speed out of the old station wagon, and it slammed into the Galaxie cleanly, catching it on the rear door, just behind the driver, driving it sideways through the mud into the heap of cars beyond it, where it ended jammed tightly against them, unable to move. The official scrambled across the arena and whacked the Galaxie on the hood, and Boomer had won.

Everyone in the place was happy. Even Abbott had a grin on his face. I myself was neither happy nor disappointed. I remember having decided beforehand that as soon as this heat was over, regardless of how it ended, we must leave this place. Or I must, and Abbott would have to leave with me. Naturally, I was glad when it turned out that my old car had emerged victorious over the others. Glad for Jimbo Gagne, glad for the town of Sam Dent, glad, I suppose, for Billy Ansel’s Sunoco station too. But that’s a trivial kind of pleasure. Not what I’d call happiness.

To tell the truth, up there in the stands, after Billy had revealed to me what everyone in town now regarded as the truth, in the passage of but a few moments’ time I had come to feel utterly and permanently separated from the town of Sam Dent and all its people. There was no reason for me to want to stand up there alongside them in the grandstand, to help them cheer first to see a car once owned and driven by Dolores Driscoll get destroyed by a bunch of other cars and then join in when the very same people cheered to see it turn and destroy the others. This demolition derby was a thing that held meaning for other people, but not for me.

I do not believe that Nichole Burnell could have joined them, either; nor would any of the other children who had been on the bus with me that morning. All of us — Nichole, I, the children who survived the accident, and the children who did not — it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter, and no matter how the people of Sam Dent treated us, whether they memorialized us or despised us, whether they cheered for our destruction or applauded our victory over adversity, they did it to meet their needs, not ours. Which, since it could be no other way, was exactly as it should be.

Nichole Burnell, Bear Otto, the Lamston kids, Sean Walker, Jessica and Mason Ansel, the Atwater and the Bilodeau kids, all the children who had been on the bus and had died and had not died, and I, Dolores Driscoll — we were absolutely alone, each of us, and even our shared aloneness did not modify the simple fact of it. And even if we weren’t dead, in an important way which no longer puzzled or frightened me and which I therefore no longer resisted, we were as good as dead.

“Abbott,” I said, “let’s go now. It’s time for us to leave.”

Without waiting for an answer, I stepped behind his wheelchair, released the brake, and tipped it toward me on its rear wheels, preparing to thump it down the stairs, one step at a time. It would be a bumpy ride for him, but I knew he could take it. He’s not as fragile as he looks.

But as I rolled him to the edge of the landing, a young fellow seated in the row in front of me stood up and, to my surprise, turned to help. I recognized him but did not know him personally. He was from Sam Dent, one of Carl Bigelow’s sons, I think, a bearded potbellied young man wearing a John Deere duck-billed cap, a squinty-eyed fellow who looked like he did a lot of beer drinking down to the Rendez-Vous, one of a hundred young men in town just like him. He wanted to give me a hand. Another man suddenly appeared on my other side, an older man who looked like a summer person, gray-haired, trim, in sandals and Bermuda shorts and blue dress shirt. Then a third and a fourth man moved into place, and before I could say a word, they had lifted Abbott’s chair and were carrying him smoothly down the stairs.