Some Other Town
Authors: Elizabeth Collison
For my family
May 1973
Dawn. I lie breathing hard and stare at the bedroom ceiling. So it has happened again. A white van passes, blasts its horn, disappears just out of sight. And once again I am weightless, midair. That is how always it goes. Although some nights I am driving the truck in the dream, some nights I am driving the van. And sometimes I am in the family's sedan, pale and bawling from the backseat.
Here is how it begins. It is winter, early morning, clear and bitterly cold. There are warnings of windchill, twenty below. Warnings to stay at home.
But I myself am on the way out of town, pushing hard up a hill toward a bridge. Because of the cold, I am the only one out, and it is eerie, alone on that rutty back road. The farmers' fields and the river lie far below, covered in deep new snow. All is stone-still but my truck. So at first, when I spot the white van in my mirror, I am happy that company has arrived.
Then I see the van is coming up fast. It climbs the hill, moves close in, starts to pass. Which is all wrong, I think at the time,
that's why they have put yellow lines there. But because whoever it is in the van cannot wait, can't hold on a few yards for the down slope, he passes me just as we reach the bridge, going well over eighty. And he lays on the horn, long and loud.
It takes me by surprise, that combative sound. I turn to look, long enough to see someone large, angry, staring and gesturing at me obscenely. Which is startling and also when my truck hits ice.
Its old tires cannot hold the road. I feel the truck skid, take a sharp turn to the left. And I remember then a car climbing onto the bridge, a blue Volvo from the opposite direction, in the direct path now of where I am spinning.
We come within inches. I grip the wheel. And as my truck slides on by their passenger's side, I look out to see four white faces, turned and pressed to the glass. A family of four, caught in that instant before recognition, captivated, rapt, agog. Until their car goes into a swerve as well, and the four mouths at the glass twist open wide in one blood-chilling family howl.
My truck spins on past, there is no time to look back, to see what becomes of the family. Still skidding, faster, out of control, my truck makes one last sharp arc. And I feel then and hear all at once a loud crack as my truck strikes the bridge side rails. The bridge is old, the rails are wood, they cannot withstand the force. And suddenly my truck is airborne out over the fields below.
I remember then how terribly silent it is. How I can no longer feel the cold or the wind. I look down at the expanse of rolling white snow, I remember a dried stalk of corn jutting through. Then as my truck starts slowly into its dive, and my body grows buoyant and giddy, I see again four floating white faces, eyes open and staring blindly.
But now my truck picks up speed in its great downward arc and I can feel it start to turn over, nose first, then all four wheels to the sky. For a long moment I dangle inverted, gazing into the glint of fresh snow. Then miraculously the truck continues its arc and rotates back to where it has started, several feet closer to ground. We have done a perfect three-sixty midair, well the farmers will never believe this one. And then with a great crash and creaking of ice, the truck slams into the river.
Which is when I begin to cry. Freezing water rushes in all around me. I see it rising, feel the truck going down. Water swirls at my waist, now my chest, my throat. I fight to push open a door, swim free. And gasping for air, I dive under, and awake, and find I can no longer breathe.
This is generally how it goes. Although sometimes no ice appears on the bridge, sometimes my own hand turns the wheel while the family of four in the Volvo sedan watches and cheers from their seats. But always the van shows up then and passes. Always the wind stops, it grows silent. And always I'm suspended in a sky white and endless, and I can see each snowy crystalline star.
But here is the strangest part. Now in the mornings when I wake from the dream, for an instant it's as if there are two of me. The one that will rise and go off to work and come home again to Mrs. Eberline. And the one that awakes from the dream of the van and feels something inside of her rising. Quickening, yearning, keening.
For the life of me, I do not know what it means.
On the Bus
Our bus skims along the back way leading into town. It is this route's one bus, the day's last run. We fly over the asphalt.
Our driver is new, young, a student from the university. Reckless boy. We are miles over the limit. But it is Tuesday, the day the sheriff leaves work early. Everyone in town knows this about the sheriff, it is the perfect time to speed.
The driver reads my thoughts, he accelerates. I can see his eyes in the rearview mirror, he is smiling, excited, thrilling to this little joyride into town.
He checks the mirror, catches me staring. “Too fast, ma'am?”
“No,” I tell him. And in a voice the others cannot hear, “Faster,” I say.
The driver drops his eyes from the mirror.
We are almost to town now, I see. We have reached the last of the farmland. I know these fields, the rolling hills beyond. They are at their best these last few weeks of spring. Narrow green rows of young beans, new corn, ripple over the black earth, wave after
wave, relentless. Windbreaks of old oaks stand behind, fogged in the chartreuse of new buds, while along the field fences, wild roses leaf out, wild apples above them.
And oh, some days I do not think I can bear it. I cannot bear all the lushness, this dark fertile soil, hopeful spring. The dogged, futile reawakening. I cannot bear that I know it all so well, that it goes on and on as it does, when in fact nothing now is the same.
I rise. It occurs to me there's a point to be made here. I have something to announce to this bus.
“Ma'am?” the driver says to the mirror. His eyes are stern. There are rules on this bus, we are to keep to our seats. He does not, he thinks, need to remind me.
I sit back down and return to the view. The light has turned soft, the horizon unusually far. I am reminded to give thanks for this window, this second-row-right window seat. I try to be patient and grateful.
Still, to be clear, there is something else now that is bothering me. Although I do not of course say it to the driver, this is not where I prefer to sit, it is not where I normally ride. Generally I sit fourth-row window-seat left. People on the bus understand this by now, they take their places elsewhere.
Except for the bread man, that is, a spindly fellow with a concave chest who carries his lunch in a bread bag. Lately he hurries on ahead of me if he can and eases himself into my exact same spot, four rows back, behind the driver. It is an unremarkable seat, it is not that the view is any better from that row. But it is where I like to ride, and if I do not line up for the bus early now the bread man beats me to my seat.
“What is wrong with that bread man?” I say to the mirror. The driver does not look up.
I slide down in my seat, feel the vinyl at my back, an uncomfortable fit.
So, it happened again this morning. First thing. Not the bread man, I do not mean the bread man edged me out on the ride into work. The bread man and I do not take the same bus in the mornings. What I mean is it happened this morning and when I awoke there it was, again just out of reach.
A great sneeze from the rear of the bus. I turn, take a quick, wary look back. We are all mindful this spring of the flu.
The others sit facing front and stare blankly. We do not know one another well here, we are not a friendly lot. But we have seen each other around. We all board at the sanatorium. If you ride this bus at all, you get on at the sanatorium. There is nowhere else the bus goes but from the sanatorium back into town.
We are not many today, Tuesdays are always light. Mostly we are just the regulars. The bread man of course. The woman in the blue coat. A nurse I am pretty sure, you can see the white stockings below her coat's hem, although not a cheerful, willing sort of nurse. She spends the ride slumped and muttering. Across from her, the other, louder woman in the light green safari hat. We do not any of us know why she wears that hat on our bus. And at the back, the round and grinning Chinese man, the one extrovert among us. He looks up, spots me, gestures wildly.
I nod, turn back around. The driver twitches once in his seat.
A rise in the road and the bus flies up onto the old Center Street bridge. We are crossing the river that circles our town, that takes a curve not far from here and doubles back on the other
side. It is a wide and slow-moving river, with banks always muddy where each spring it always floods. Indians once camped on these banks, canoed the waters, Sioux and Sauk, the Meskwaki after them, descendants of Black Hawk. They called the river the Drowsy, the Big Drowsy.
The bus rushes over the brown water below. Our driver does not slow down.
I look up at the mirror, meet his eyes there. He looks away, concentrates instead on the route. But I know he has been watching, stealing little glances as he drives.