Nursery Tale (16 page)

Hog lay with his belly on the steering wheel, his face mashed against the side window. He was dimly aware that he was urinating spontaneously and he hoped the kids in the bus couldn't see that. "Okay," he grunted, though his voice was barely audible, even to himself, "everyone stays calm, right?—'cuz everything's gonna be A-okay if we just—"And he died.

T
rudy Wentis made an effort to look as if she were actually thinking over what Janice McIntyre had just told her, that she hadn't merely rejected it out of hand. She wondered how convincing she was. Janice pursed her lips and shook her head slowly—Trudy realized she hadn't been very successful at all. "Damn!" she said. "I'm sorry."

"Me, too," Janice said. She shook her head more quickly and smiled a small, self-condemning smile. "I really didn't expect you to accept any of that, but it was good to let it come out."

They were in Janice's living room, Janice in a huge, oval-backed, brown wicker chair —she looked very small in it—and Trudy across from her on a dark, oriental-print love seat. Trudy leaned forward in the love seat and said, as if repeating a confidence, "And you've already asked Miles about leaving Granada?"

"Yes, I have. He says, 'Let's wait and see,' and that's fair enough. I mean, what reasons can I give him?—'Hey, Miles, there's this ghost that's trying to tell us to leave'?" She harrumphed. "I can't say that."

"Then what did you tell him?"

Janice waved at the air as if waving away a bothersome insect. "I don't know—something about being pregnant and maybe it'd be better if we lived closer to the city."

"That's plausible, anyway."

"More plausible than a ghost in the breakfast nook, you mean?"

Trudy sat back in the love seat. "Yes," she said without hesitation. "More plausible than that." The doorbell rang.

Janice pushed herself out of the big, wicker chair; she looked Trudy squarely in the eye. "You're a good friend," she said. "You don't lie to me. I like that."

"I try not to lie to anybody, Janice."

R
obert Graham sat down hard on the embankment and studied the dark underside of the overturned bus for a long while.
Jees
, he thought,
what is all that stuff?
He knew, from mechanics class, what the transmission was, and the drive shaft, and the muffler and tailpipe. But there was so much other stuff, too—wires and springs and little iron wheels. What was it all for?

He looked about. To his right, the embankment gave way to gnarled underbrush. To his left, erosion had begun—the result of poor drainage from the road bed—and there were twenty yards or so of bare, red soil. Close to him, the heavy, sliding bus had gouged into the dark brown clay just inches beneath.

He shivered and, for the first time, wondered how, exactly, he'd gotten out of the bus, and what he was doing here, in back of it. He had a fleeting glimpse of kicking the emergency window open and pulling himself out. That glimpse showed him Hog's body, as well, and the folded-up body of the smart-assed kid behind him. And he thought, obliquely, that they were both probably dead, though not the little girl in front, he realized. Because he could hear her crying even now.

The "right thing" (a phrase, he remembered wistfully, that his mother had often used) would probably be to go back inside the bus and help that poor little girl somehow. Pull her out the same window he'd come out of, maybe. Or make sure she was comfortable. Not too badly hurt. Or, if she
was
hurt, to soothe her. That would be the "right thing."

He stood. "Hey, little girl in the bus," he called, hands cupped around his mouth. "Hey, little girl there in the bus!"

He heard her crying slowly stop. She called back, "My name is
Loretta
!" as if being called "little girl" offended her.

"Yeah, Loretta. Are you hurt bad?"

Silence.

"Loretta, I said are you hurt bad?"

"No. I don't know. I cut my finger on something. On the seat, I think. I cut my finger on the seat."

"Is your finger bleeding?"

Silence again.

"I said is your finger bleeding, Loretta?"

"I don't know. You think I wanta
look
at it?"

"Jesus!" Robert whispered. "Loretta?" he called.

"I'm going away now. I'm going to go and find Robin." He started around the front of the bus, through the twenty-yard slice of erosion.

Loretta called shrilly, "Who's Robin?"

Robert called back, "He's my brother," and his tone lowered, became smooth and conversational. "My twin brother." He smiled. "Yeah. I'm gonna find him." He called. "I won't be a minute. You stay there, Loretta."

"Don't go away," Loretta pleaded. "Oh, please don't go away! There's something wrong with the bus driver. What's wrong with the bus driver? Oh
please
don't go away!"

Robert made his way quickly around the front of the bus, his arms high to balance himself on the eroded embankment.

"A
nd so," Norm Gellis explained; he had seated himself next to Trudy Wentis on the love seat. "My theory is—there's a gang. A gang of country kids. And these kids"—his head bobbed as he talked, caught up as he was in what he was saying, and his wide-eyed gaze flitted from Trudy to Janice—"have got this initiation. Like an initiation in school. And a part of this initiation is to terrorize us. All of us."

"In what way?" Janice asked.

"Ha!" he exclaimed, and he jabbed at the air with his forefinger for emphasis, "that's where they've got us, because, up till they snatched the Graham kid all they did was diddly-shit stuff—pardon my French. You know, runnin' 'round naked, tryin' to scare the daylights outa people. Diddly-shit stuff. But when they snatched the Graham kid, hell, that was a declaration of war! No doubt about it!"

"You think the Graham boy was kidnapped, Mr. Gellis?" Trudy asked, turning her head slightly to hide her flickering, nervous smile. "Why would someone kidnap him?"

Norm Gellis looked as if the question had taken him by surprise. "Hey," he said, "you think I should know? You think I can get inside these kids' heads?" He paused and looked from Janice to Trudy. "Huh?" he went on. Both women stayed quiet. He was vaguely aware that they both seemed very ill at ease. He continued, "I'll tell ya—I was a security agent at a kids' detention home for twenty-five years before I retired." Which was partially true; he had been a security agent for six months, many years before, until being fired; cruelty was alleged, but not proven. "And I seen all kindsa kids—kids that'd stab you in the back for your last quarter, and I could never figure out one of 'em. Not a one. And you want me to get inside the heads of these kids around here?! Fat chance.
You
go and try. All I'm doin' is sounding the alarm, that's all—just sounding the alarm!"

Janice stood abruptly. She smiled stiffly and stuck her hand out. Norm Gellis stood unsteadily and took her hand. She said, "Well, you have warned us, haven't you?!" She let go of his hand and nodded at the front door. "Thank you, Mr. Gellis."

He looked stunned. "Don't you wanta know what we should do? About these kids, I mean. I've worked it all out and I was thinking I could come back later, when your husbands are home, and we could all sit down and talk about it."

"My husband's going to be working late, Mr. Gellis," Janice said, the stiff smile still on her lips. "Every night this week, in fact."

He turned to Trudy. "And how about you? Is your husband going to be busy, too?"

"My husband's always busy, Mr. Gellis."

He stared at her a few moments, then, "We got a problem here, a big
problem
, and you
females
just sit around
laughing
about it!"

"Mr. Gellis," Janice said, "we really are not laughing at you—"

"Shit on that!" he cut in, and he moved quickly to the living room entranceway. He turned back: "Laugh!" he hissed. "Go ahead! You're all gonna die laughing!"

A moment later, he had slammed the front door behind him.

E
vening came quickly. It erased the green of evergreens, the yellows and reds of deciduous trees and autumn flowers, and transformed all of it to gray and black—a fuzzy and aged daguerreotype come to life. Except in Granada itself, thanks to the street lamps, and spotlights, and the blaze of lights in the houses.

No one had yet discovered the overturned bus, though several had passed it—Miles McIntyre, on his way home, Dick Wentis and Larry Meade, also on their way home. (Malcolm Harris had come down with a slight fever shortly after waking that morning and so had not gone to work.) They had missed seeing the bus for several reasons: the darkness, most importantly, and the fact that it lay a full fifty feet down the embankment and could only be seen by someone actually walking on the edge of the road. And exhausted, anyway, from a day's work, and in need of being home, each man had even failed to see the telltale skid marks on the soft shoulder.

Inside the bus, rigor mortis had stiffened Hog up; it would begin to fade by daybreak.

Just behind him, fifteen-year-old Eric Miller, Robert's tormentor, lay confused and in pain, and very hungry. He had suffered a slight concussion and a fractured wrist in the accident—and the resulting fall from his seat to where he now lay—and, for the three hours since, had been utterly afraid to move or speak.

At the middle of the bus, Loretta sat on a window, her feet against the bus roof, and sucked her thumb hard; the thumb had become shriveled and white. Every fifteen minutes or so she took it from her mouth and called angrily, her voice quaking, "You . . . You . . ." and then stuck her thumb back into her mouth.

R
obert Graham sat up straight against the Empire fence, his legs outstretched, his hands folded on his thighs. He had come to realize, dimly and reluctantly, that his search for Robin was at an end, and he felt guilty for it, as if weak and unworthy; Robin would not have ended the search so quickly. He'd have looked until morning, for sure, maybe even until afternoon, because he was strong and heroic.

"Fuck you, Robin!" Robert said, and smiled uneasily, as if he had swallowed an odd kind of poison that was soothing him first.

And in the darkness, he felt something sit beside him against the fence and touch him, shoulder to shoulder. An elbow poked hard into his rib cage. "I don't know," he heard. "I guess she was thirteen or fourteen. And she had these great little boobs, like Mom has."

Robert turned his head very slowly, in stark disbelief. The face in profile beside him was little more than a pale half-oval. "Mom . . . is going to be . . . worried about us, Robin," he said haltingly, for lack of anything better to say.

"Get home, then."

"I can't." This was a trick! Some kind of trick! This wasn't Robin beside him. It couldn't be Robin! "Not unless you come with me."

Silence.

"She's taking those stupid pills, Robin."

"Those stupid pills."

"She takes them all the time. She walks around like she's made of butter, like she's a freakin' zombie!"

"A freakin' zombie."

"Yeah, Robin. She'll stop taking them if you come home." But it
was
Robin beside him. Jesus, it was, it
had
to be!

"Like she's made of butter."

"Bones and everything, Robin."

"Yeah. A freakin' zombie. Like she's made of butter."

"She misses you real bad. Come on home, why don'tch a?"

"Little boobs, just like Mom has." The voice changed pitch suddenly and became a woman's voice. "I can't do that, Clyde."

A game, Robert decided. Sure. This was a game. "Can't do what, Robin?" He smiled tentatively—games were supposed to make you smile.

"I can't go prowlin"round out there in the pitch dark."

"Then we'll wait till the sun comes up. We'll wait right here."

Silence. "Okay?"

"Right here."

"Uh-huh, till the sun comes up."

"Till the sun comes up. Right here. Uh-huh."

"Robin?"

The creature's hand moved very quickly in the darkness. Hunger moved it, and desperation. Its fingers touched Robert's windpipe, very gently at first, as if in a caress; and it was a caress, a kind of thank you from one creature to another for the gift of itself

Then the creature's fingers stiffened and came together on Robert's windpipe. Robert made several small, dry, hacking noises.

And felt great surprise that death could happen so easily and so quickly, like spilling a glass of milk at dinner. He had supposed that huge black clouds should have formed at the horizon, and that sad music should have been playing for days beforehand. At least in his head.

From
The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
, November 25:

ONE DEAD, TWO HURT, ONE MISSING IN BUS CRASH

One man is dead, two children are hurt, and one child is missing following the crash Thursday of a Penn Yann school bus.