Rubber, Sweat, and Corrugated Metal

 “Well, to be honest, I don’t really think about it much anymore. Because well sure, it was plastered all over newspapers and everything but if it did traumatize me, it did it in a deeply subconscious way, and maybe I’ll end up having a mental breakdown or something at 70, but I’m not a psychologist so how could I know? I don’t want to know.”

            “So you don’t think it affected you in any permanent, long-lasting way?”

            “In the sense that it’s become a part of my life, yes, of course. Now if this woman had held a gun to my head or something, it’d be a whole ‘nother issue. I’m sure I’d have baggage. But also, with something like that, you know, a gun getting held to a kid’s head, I’d be able to write a memoir or something, I could make some money off of it. But what actually happened isn’t enough for a memoir, you know? It’s enough for some journalists with writer’s block to come knocking every couple years for another exposé or article or whatever the f**k it is, but not enough for a book.”

            “And the other students on the bus with you? The other 7^th graders? Do you keep in contact with them?”

            “I do not.”

****

I am sitting on Braintree Public School System’s Bus “U” as it wheezes down Elm Street on its second voyage of the day. It is Wednesday, and the grey, heavy clouds that had kept us inside during recess have finally yielded their contents. I watch absentmindedly as droplets spatter onto the window, each bead of moisture appearing to slowly, painstakingly choose a route with which to proceed down the safety glass.

            And so the bus is bouncing down the street, the suspension heaving and hawing under the weight of nine young bodies and one past-prime body so to speak, as well as 18 years of dutiful service to the Braintree Public School System. In the seat in front of me sits Kayla Nunez: short, brunette, and the first girl in the 7^th grade to develop noticeable buds on the front of her chest.

            The hilly backroads of Braintree are not ideal routes for Bus “U”’s feeble shocks, and in certain locations �" which I and every other student on the bus know quite well �" the road’s rapid change in slope will send those sitting in the back of the bus careening up as gravity ceases to exist for a second. For the vast majority of my 7 years spent riding Bus “U”, I would choose the back simply for the sudden thrill of being vaulted a few inches up, weightless above the faux-leather seats. However, the beginning of this year brought with it the realization that if I stand and jump in just the right position, I have an uninterrupted line of sight right down Kayla’s shirt, enabling me to catch a glimpse of the soft, creamy whiteness which lingers in my mind long after I am dropped off every afternoon.  

            None of us know the full name of the bus driver �" to us, she has always simply been Mrs. S, a letter driving a larger letter.

****

“So up until then, Mrs. S was normal, for all intents and purposes? I mean, she didn’t ever strike you as odd in any way?”

            “Well as a kid, it takes a lot for adults to come off as odd. But even now, looking back, I can’t think of anything that seemed strange. I remember sandy brown hair, a starched blue uniform �" it was always very well starched, and sometimes a quick smile as I climbed on board in the mornings. She wasn’t talkative, but that was normal.”

            “What about on the day of the incident? Was she fine in the morning, when she picked you up? Did she seem off in the afternoon?”
            “I can’t remember that morning, so I suppose nothing stood out to me. And in the afternoon, I’ll admit that I was more focused on the girl sitting in front of me then anything else.”

****

            Kayla Nunez is the only 7^th grader on the bus save for Kyle Wu, a recently arrived transfer student from China. Our town started to fill up with them a few years ago �" first Vietnamese, then a trickle of Thai, and then finally a vast flood of Chinese. Their children are quiet and docile �" Kyle being no exception �" and as a result endure heinous abuse from the mostly Irish-Catholic kids in my school, who delight in flinging about the slurs they pick up at the dinner table from bitter parents.

            I’m about as interested in Kyle as I am in the raindrops plodding down the window �" he is a specimen to study, to contemplate pitifully for a second, and then to look away from. Kayla is the great attraction. Lately, every night in bed has ended with me slipping my hand under the waistband of my boxers as Kayla dances naked in my head. In the mornings, I get on the bus and avoid her gaze as I walk down the aisle; hours of Sunday school have made me ashamed, and I fear that somehow, some physical mark of my pleasure will remain plastered on my forehead for her to see.

****

            “What have you done in the years since?”

            “Well, college, three months of grad school before I realized it wasn’t for me. Started browsing online, looking for something interesting to do with my life. Stumbled on a forum dedicated to female bodybuilding. Do you know how much some guys love that s**t? I mean, love. They love these girls. Women, I should say. Guys on this forum writing about licking the sweat off their thighs after a workout. I said, hey, I’m sure some of these women wouldn’t mind making some cash off throwing some poor obsessed m**********r onto a mat for twenty minutes.

            “So…what, you became the middleman between the bodybuilders and these men?”

            “You got it. It was easy. Find a ring, book a time, bring them in, take their money, pocket 75%. Listen, when I say these guys loved these women, I mean it. They loved them in the thousands, if you get my drift.”
            “Did you ever think that maybe what happened on the bus influenced this career track? I mean, maybe in some way �" “

            “ �" Listen, this thing on the bus wasn’t the most singularly important experience of my life. When I started in that business I was broke, cut off from home, and drowning in too many habits to name. Not that I’m for one second ashamed of it.”

            “But powerful women…I mean, your life was in the hands of the bus driver on that day. And she was a woman. She held the power.”

            “Maybe it might sound better for your piece, and honestly I don’t really give a f**k if you put that in. I’m just telling you the two things don’t correlate.”

****

I am not made aware of the rapidly decaying scene on the bus until I realize that the normal bumpy route is surprisingly smooth today, making it nigh-on impossible to engage in the voyeurism that has become the highlight of the ride.

            Mrs. S has not dropped a student off in the past 38 minutes. Normally, when the sun is shining and there are no funerals, her route takes her under 35 minutes, and she is back at East Middle School by 3:45 with an empty bus.

            I peer out into the drizzle, my brain taking a moment to process the scene. We are on the highway, sitting in traffic as the smell of diesel fumes wafts into the corrugated interior. Judging by the mass of sedans and SUVS surrounding us, it appears as if we have caught the very beginning of the daily mass exodus out of Boston.

            I hear Kayla’s voice and wrench my gaze away from the baffling scene outside. She is leaning over her seat with her elbows propped up, staring at me with the beginnings of panic written on her face.

            “She’s not stopping, Patrick. Why isn’t she stopping?”

            I take a minute to answer, looking past Kayla to the head of the bus. The redheaded 3^rd grader who always chooses the seat closest to Mrs. S has begun to cry hysterically, snot streaming out of his nostrils. Mrs. S, however, is sitting stock-still in the driver’s seat, her neck taut and unmoving, seemingly completely oblivious to the cacophony that is now beginning to pour out from the increasingly frantic students behind her.

            I know in this situation that I am supposed to act like how my father would act, supposed to comfort Kayla.

            “There was probably a detour or something, I’m sure we’re okay.”

            Kayla stares at me for a second, expressionless, before abruptly standing. She steadies herself with both hands on opposite rows of seats, and I watch as she begins to proceed up the rubber walkway of the bus.

****

            “What was the immediate aftermath like? I mean, from the time you were rescued at Buzzard’s Bay”

            “Well, I remember a whole lot of cop cars. Too many. They were taking us off the bus and giving us hot cocoa and I remember thinking aren’t there other crimes going on? But I guess it was for the smaller kids more than us. I tend to forget about them.”

            “Was it hard to adjust back at school? How did the other students react to you three?”

            “It was fun. We were like celebrities for a while. Well, Kyle wasn’t really but at least they stopped bothering him. But like everything else, it faded pretty quick. No one even remembered the story by the time high school started.”

****

Kayla has reached Mrs. S, and the eyes of every single student on the bus are on her back. Besides myself and the two other 7^th graders, Bus “U” contains two 3^rd graders and four 4^th graders, who are presently clustered together near the middle of the bus.

            “Mrs. S? Where are we going?”

            No response. I find myself thinking back to last Christmas, when I had pleaded with my parents for a small, red flip-phone to no avail. How easy it would be to play the hero, flip my phone open, and dial 911.

            Kayla has now asked Mrs. S a total of nine questions, five of which are variants of the first. After each question, I hold my breath, waiting for some rhyme or reason to follow, some answer that will allow me to sit back and smile at how stupid I was to have doubted the rationality of an adult.

            Kayla finally turns around with tears in her eyes. She looks at me, at Kyle, at all the other children in turn. Her expression screams at us do something, to stand up and charge the front of the bus, to attack Mrs. S as one and wring her neck until we get some answers. I begin to pick at a crack in my seat, pulling out the cotton stuffing poking through the little hole.

            By this point, Bus “U” has passed the majority of the bedroom suburbs that lie to the south of Boston, and as traffic clears up I feel the bus accelerating. Kayla does not return to her seat, but instead chooses to throw herself down on another seat near the middle, as if she cannot muster up the energy to make it all the way back again.

            I smell piss, and the cries of disgust from those around the redheaded 3^rd grader lead me to believe it was him. Cranberry bogs fly past outside the window. Kayla is half-standing, half-kneeling in her seat, and as her head whips around in a frenzy of helplessness we make a sudden, brief eye contact, and somehow, the horror of the moment, the adrenaline coursing through my veins �" somehow this translate to lust, and I feel this massive, churning force bubbling up from within. I want to stand, to grab Kayla, to slip my hand under her blouse and feel the warmth beneath me. And I do not care if Mrs. S is going to send Bus “U” tumbling into the cranberry bogs of this now one-lane highway, so long as Kayla’s lips are on mine and with it the skin that I have reached out for every night in my bed. I close my eyes and her body comes into focus. I can no longer feel the bus moving.

****

            “So you got off the exit and what? She headed straight to the beach?”

            “I’ll admit, by that point I had stopped paying attention. I mean, I was kind of numb. I just wanted it all to go away. And so I don’t really remember much, until we parked.”

****

            The sand is fine and flat, dark with saturation. The rain has mostly stopped by now, and as the bus crunches its way onto the beach I catch a sharp whiff of brine.

            The crying has mostly ceased, save for a few whimpers. The smaller children appear shellshocked, eyes wide and skin blanched. Kyle Wu has the side of his head to the window, unmoving, so that I cannot see if he is shocked or scared or even (maybe, somehow) sleeping. All I can see of Kayla is a pair of bright red Converse All Stars sticking out from her seat. Mrs. S stands up.

            The driver’s actions are oddly stiff, mechanical, as if she is being jerked around by some unseen puppet master high in the sky above us. She reaches over to a button, and as she presses down the doors to the bus wheeze open. Haltingly, she turns towards her captives. Her face �" blank as a sheet for one split-second �" cracks into a giant grin.

            “Now, who wants to go swimming?”

            We stare, silent, and without waiting for an answer, Mrs. S turns, walks down the small flight of stairs, and steps onto the sand.

            While the 3^rd and two of the 4^th graders are nigh on catatonic at this point, the remaining students rush to the right side of the bus, noses pressed against the windows as they strain to see the scene on the beach.

            She is walking upright, confidently, hips swaying as they carry her towards the water. In one fluid motion, she removes her cap and undoes the bun in her hair, letting the sandy locks cascade down her back. And she begins to undress, never breaking stride. The surf is crashing in front of her, heavy and angry after the storm, and she takes off the uniform that she has worn almost every day for 12 years, piece by piece flying away as throws it into the wind.

            And as she lowers the pièce de résistance off her ample thighs and a broad, dimpled a*s greets the assembled prisoners of Bus “U”, I hear sirens in the distance. The salt is in my nose, in my mouth, and Mrs. S walks into the water and keeps walking, buffeted but unbowed by the waves. The sirens grown louder and her head disappears under the foam.

***

            “You mentioned that you had a history of substance abuse. Do you think that could be a result of what happened that day?”

            “Listen, you keep trying to search for a motive, a nice little underlying thread that you can find and tie a bow around and serve up to your editors. But the fact is that there is no rhyme or reason sometimes. Do you know how many articles I’ve read that try to give a motive to Mrs. S, to explain why a happily-married middle-aged woman with a stable job and no apparent mental illnesses or conditions would hijack a bus and then drown herself in Buzzard’s Bay? Yeah, I smoked weed, I snorted coke, I drank anything I could get my hands on. Wanna know why? It was fun. You know why I retired? One of those chicks I found was apparently a f*****g mess inside, you know, not something that I could have known or predicted. And this rich Australian guy, this businessman, he came all the way to Boston for her, pretended it was a business trip so his wife wouldn’t find out. And he gets in the ring, and of course I’m there because I’m running the show and I need to be, and this crazy f*****g b***h just grabs him around the neck and falls at just the right angle so that he hits the floor and it cracks, and he’s just lying broken on the mat with this psycho above him, and after all this is done all she does is wipe the sweat out of her eyes and step over the ropes out of the ring. And I spent the next four months dealing with reporters and lawyers and his poor pathetic wife who had to wake up in Melbourne at 4 AM to a call that her husband would never walk again, that he was laid up in a hospital because some overgrown Hulkette Hogan severed his vertebrae. And do you think that made any sense to her?”