Russell Banks: The Sweet Hereafter

As I was saying, I had picked up the kids on the Flats and was passing by the open chain-link entrance to the dump, when this raggedy old mutt shot out the gate and ran across the road in front of me, and it scared the bejesus out of me, although I could not for the life of me tell you why, as he was ordinary-looking and there was no danger of my hitting him.

My mind must have been locked onto something contrasted — my sons Reginald and William, probably, since I felt that morning particularly estranged from them, and you tend to embrace with thought what you’re forbidden to embrace in fact. For when that dog entered my field of vision, it somehow astonished and then frightened me. The dog was skinny and torn-looking, a yellow-eyed young male with a long pointed head and large ears laid flat against his skull as he darted across the road, leapt over the snowbank, and disappeared into the darkness of the scrub pine woods there.

Although the snow was blowing in feathery waves by then, the road was still dry and black, easy to see, and I gripped the wheel and drove straight on, as if nothing had happened. For nothing had happened! Yet I wanted intensely to pull the bus over and stop, to sit there for a moment and try to gather my fragmented thoughts and calm my clanging nerves.

I glanced into the side mirror at Billy Ansel’s face smiling through the windshield of his pickup, an innocent and diligent man waving to children at play, and I felt a wave of pity for him come over me, although I did not know what I pitied him for. I turned back from the mirror and stared straight ahead at the road and clamped my hands onto the steering wheel and drove on toward the intersection at the Marlowe road, where I slowed, and when I saw that there was no traffic coming or even going, I turned right and headed down the long slope toward town.

The road was recently rebuilt and is wide and straight, with a passing lane and narrow shoulders and a bed of gravel and guardrails, before it drops off a ways on the right-hand side to Jones Brook, which is mostly boulders up there and not much water. Eventually, as the brook descends it fills, and by the time it joins the Ausable River down in the valley it’s a significant fast-running stream. There’s an old town sandpit down there dug into the ancient lakebed, and a closed-off road in from the Flats, near the dump. On the left-hand side, the land is wooded and rises slowly toward Knob Lock Mountain and Giant in the southeast.

Coming down from the Flats on the Marlowe road toward town, the greatest danger was that I would be going too slow and a lumber truck or some idiot in a car would come barreling along at seventy-five or eighty, which you can easily do up there, once you’ve made the crest from the other side, and would come up on me fast and not be able to slow or pass and would run smack into me, or, more likely, first would hit Billy Ansel’s pickup truck lollygagging along behind and then the bus. As a result, since I didn’t have any more stops to make once I’d gathered the kids from the Flats, I tended to drive that stretch of road at a pretty good clip. Nothing reckless, you understand. Nothing illegal. Fifty, fifty-five is all. Also, if I happened to be running a few minutes late, that was the only time when I could make up for it.

After passing through the gloom and closed-in feeling of Wilmot Flats, when you turn onto the Marlowe road and start the drive toward town, you tend to feel uplifted, released. Or I should say, I always did. The road is straight and there is more sky than land for the first time, and the valley opens up below you and on your right, like Montana or Wyoming — a large snow-covered bowl with a range of distant mountains surrounding it, and beyond the mountains there are still more mountains shouldering toward the sky, as if the surface of the planet were the same everywhere as here. This was always the most pleasurable part of my journey — with the bus in high gear and running smooth, enough pale daylight now, despite the thin gauzy snow falling, to see the entire landscape stretched out before me, and the busload of children peaceful behind me as they contentedly conversed with one another or silently prepared themselves for the next segment of their long day.

And, yes, it was then that I saw the dog, the second dog, the one I maybe only thought I saw. It emerged from the blowing snow on the right side of the road, popped up from the ditch there, or so it seemed, and crossed to the center of the road, where it appeared to stop, as if unsure whether to continue or go back. No, I am almost sure now that it was an optical illusion or a mirage, a sort of afterimage, maybe, of the dog that I had seen on the Flats and that had frightened and moved me so. But at the time I could not tell the difference.

And as I have always done when I’ve had two bad choices and nothing else available to me, I arranged it so that if I erred I’d come out on the side of the angels. Which is to say, I acted as though it was a real dog I saw or a small deer or possibly even a lost child from the Flats, barely a half mile away.

For the rest of my life I will remember that red-brown blur, like a stain of dried blood, standing against the road with a thin screen of blown snow suspended between it and me, the full weight of the vehicle and the thirty-four children in it bearing down on me like a wall of water. And I will remember the formal clarity of my mind, beyond thinking or choosing now, for I had made my choice, as I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and slapped my foot against the brake pedal, and I wasn’t the driver anymore, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head, as if the bus were a huge wave about to break over me. There was Bear Otto, and the Lamston kids, and the Walkers, the Hamiltons, and the Prescotts and the teenaged boys and girls from Bartlett Hill, and Risa and Wendell Walker’s sad little boy, Sean, and sweet Nichole Burnell, and all the kids from the valley, and the children from Wilmot Flats, and Billy Ansel’s twins, Jessica and Mason — the children of my town — their wide-eyed faces and fragile bodies swirling and tumbling in a tangled mass as the bus went over and the sky tipped and veered away and the ground lurched brutally forward.

Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur — even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say — at the moment it occurred I was thinking about fucking Risa Walker. My truck was right behind the bus when it went over, and my body was driving my truck, and one hand was on the steering wheel and the other was waving at Jessica and Mason, who were aboard the bus and waving back at me from the rear window — but my eyes were looking at Risa Walker’s breasts and belly and hips cast in a hazy neon glow through the slats of the Venetian blind in Room 11 of the Bide-a-Wile.

So I don’t know anything of what immediately preceded the accident, although once it happened, of course, I saw it all, every last mind-numbing detail. And still do, every time I close my eyes. The swerve off the road to the right, the skid, the smashing of the guardrail and the snowbank; and then the tilted angled plummet down the embankment to the sandpit, where, moving fast and somehow still upright, the bus slid across the ice to the far side; and then the ice letting go and the rear half of the yellow bus being swallowed at once by the freezing blue-green water.

I don’t close my eyes a whole lot now. Unless I’m drunk and can’t help it — therefore, a frequently desired state, you might say.

Many of the folks in Sam Dent have come out since the accident and claimed that they knew it was going to happen someday, oh yes, they just knew it: because of Dolores’s driving, which, to be fair, is not reckless but casual; or because of the condition of the bus itself, which Dolores serviced at home in her barn, and as a consequence it did not get the same supervision by me as the other school buses got; or because of that downhill stretch of road and the fact that there’s almost no shoulder to it on either side of the guardrail; or because of the sandpit below the highway there, which the town had opened up a few years before and then abandoned when it filled with water, thinking no one could get to it except by the old blocked-off access road on the other side of the Flats.