Man of the Hour (10 page)

“Why did you keep the kids from getting on the bus in the first place?” asked a stocky young reporter from the
Daily News
, who was wearing a knit tie and jeans.

“I don’t know.” David rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

“I wonder if you can be a little more specific?” asked a girl with black bobbed hair and brown lipstick, whose name tag said she was Judy Mandel from the
Trib
.

For a moment, David stared at her. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but she’d seized on a certain idea of attractiveness so forcefully, it was impossible to ignore her.

“Specific about what?” David inhaled deeply, realizing he was still having trouble catching his breath.

“About why you kept the kids off the bus.”

“There was a bomb.” He felt momentarily confused about the sequence of events, not sure what he was saying. Was it a bomb?

“Yes,” Judy Mandel said gamely, looking up with big brown eyes and trying to hold her position as other reporters jostled her from behind, “but how did you know that beforehand?”

David’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Someone was shining a bright light in his eyes, from on top of a camera. He was aware of people paying inordinate attention to the surface of his face. Students were monkeying around behind him, throwing up gang signs and trying to get on camera.

“So how does it feel to be a hero?” Sara Kidreaux stepped in front of the girl from the
Trib
.

“Oh … I … huh.” He stopped and looked back at the firefighters trying to hose down the remains of the school bus. “I don’t think I was being a hero … I think it was just, you know … life.”

“What subject do you teach at school?” a radio reporter called out from the rear of the pack.

“Um …” David choked and coughed more black phlegm into a handkerchief. “Excuse me. Heroes, heroism. I mean, I’m an English teacher. That’s what we were supposed to be doing on the field trip to the museum today. Studying heroism.”

“But instead, you gave the kids a real-life lesson in heroism. Right?” Sara Kidreaux stood on tiptoe, rising out of her high heels, so she could stay in frame with David’s face.

Even in his confused state, he could tell she was trawling for a sound bite.

“I’d still like to know how he knew it was a bomb,” Judy Mandel said, peeking over the TV lady’s shoulder. “Hey!” She called to David.
“How do you know there was a bomb?”

The other reporters were still pushing and shoving behind her like passengers trying to get to the
Titanic
’s lifeboats.

“So you gave them a real-life lesson in heroism.” Sara Kidreaux maintained her position, trying to get the quote she needed before she got stampeded away.

“I guess I did,” David said absently, as an Emergency Service crew carried Sam’s scorched and shattered body away in a black bag. Poor Sam. David shuddered and tried to focus again on the question. But it was hard. He felt as if he were trapped in a dream and trying to explain it to everyone at the same time.

“And what exactly did you teach them about heroism?” Sara asked, as if he’d already accepted the premise of her question.

“I don’t know,” David said once more. Breathing in, breathing out.

“Come on, give me something.”

David held his breath, watching the paramedics checking out his students by the curb. Then he looked down and saw that a little black kid no more than eight years old had wandered over from one of the nearby housing projects and wedged his way in among the reporters, with a scrap of paper that said “reportr” in brown crayon taped to his polo shirt.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about heroism,” David said finally, exhaling. “The only hero I ever knew before was my father, and he never talked about it.”

“Your father?”

“He was in the war.” David looked across Surf Avenue at a torn and singed red-white-and-blue banner outside Astroland amusement park.

“Your father was a war hero?”

He sensed he’d said something that pleased the group.

“Ah, yeah. He was in the Second World War. He was in the Engineer Battalion. You know, one of the guys who handled explosives.”

“And what did he do that was so heroic?”

“Well, um, I know one time he got wounded running up a hill on Okinawa, to throw a satchel charge at a sniper’s nest when all the guys in his unit were getting picked off—I mean …”

“Oka-what?” one of the reporters further back in the scrum asked.

“And is he alive today?” Sara Kidreaux persisted. “Your father?”

David cast his eyes down, watching the little kid with the homemade press pass pretending to take notes. “Uh, no. Unfortunately he’s not.”

“But do you think he’d be proud of you?”

For a moment, David didn’t know what to say. The reality of his father was too dense and complicated to explain here. On the other hand, he was aware of all these people looking at him anxiously, wanting him to be interesting.

So he said: “Uh, yeah, I guess he’d be proud … Sure. I hope so.”

As he said the words, David felt part of himself shredding and then splitting off. An inauthentic self had suddenly risen out of him. Now it was flying through the air, jumping through the camera lenses and into the radio microphones. That was the self that would be broadcast around the city tonight.

The real David Fitzgerald was still crouched down inside himself, stunned and frightened by what he’d been through.

But the impostor was blustering on. “U.S. Marine Corps, Private First Class Patrick V. Fitzgerald, Sixth Division, Engineer Battauon,” he said, answering a reporter’s question about his father’s name and rank. “He won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart, and a bunch of other medals I can’t think of at the moment … Yes, I think he would be pleased.”

In truth, David knew his father had always been quietly disappointed that his only son had turned out to be a lowly public school teacher.

“Where did the sniper thing happen again?” asked a
New York Post
reporter.

“Okinawa,” said David. “O-K-I-N-A-W-A.”

He tried to swallow, but his throat felt tight and dry. His eyes were still stinging and his teeth were chattering. The little boy with the crayoned press pass was smiling at him. More than anything, David wanted to go home, hug Renee, and hold his son close enough to smell the playground in his hair.

“What do you want?” someone was saying, “he’s a teacher.”

David turned and saw Nydia Colone and three other girls from his class coughing and weeping on the school steps. The hip-hop girls were keening and in one case heaving into the gutter. Yuri Ehrlich stood by the curb, watching smoke dissipate above the remains of Dreamland with a kind of stoned-looking admiration.

The sky, however, was exquisite and indifferent. It was just going on with the business of being a beautiful day.

David looked out at the crowd and saw that black-haired girl from the
Trib
, Judy Mandel, staring at him with her brown eyes half-closed and her head tilted, as if seeing things just a little differently from the rest of them.

“Listen, I think that’s about all I have to say right now,” David said. “I have to go see about my kid.” He caught himself. “I mean, I have to see about all my kids.”

He turned and found himself facing a short, gaunt, balding man in a gray suit. The first image that came into David’s mind was from F. W. Murnau’s film
Nosferatu the Vampire
. The long hawk nose and the vulnerable bare scalp. The lonely and haunted eyes that looked as if they were rimmed with tight red rubber bands.

“I’m gonna need to talk to you,” he said quietly, putting a strong, sinewy hand on David’s shoulder. “I’m Detective Noonan, from the six-oh precinct detective squad. We’ve got a few questions.”

David felt jolted. Every time he thought he’d settled on the reality of the situation, there was another aftershock.

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he said, collecting himself as he started to push his way out of the crowd.

A small angry-looking young woman with a blunt hedge of auburn hair shoved a card at him that said she was a producer with one of the network morning shows.

“Call us,” she said in a voice full of certainty. On the card, she’d written in sprightly red ink: “Top-rated in our slot! 30 million viewers.”

A wiry young man in a white shirt and khaki pants cut in front of her. “We’ll call you later,” he said, pressing a card for CBS Morning News into David’s palm. “We have your number.”

“How?” David asked.

It was all too confusing. The explosion, the smoking remains of the bus, the attention to surfaces, the relentless friendly questions from reporters needing his help. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to put two coherent thoughts together again.

In the meantime, the detective began pushing him lightly but firmly through the crowd.

“Come on, come on,” Detective Noonan grunted. “Let’s get away from these parasites.”

“Parasites” seemed a little strong, David thought, as he walked with the detective to an unmarked navy Ford parked across the street. These were just people doing their job. On the other hand, the detective needed him now. This was fine, the feeling of being needed. It gave him a momentary sense of groundedness. A chance to plant his feet and place himself amid all the confusion. Okay, here was what he needed to do next He needed to be with the kids, who were no doubt upset and shaken up, and with the police, who needed a precise and accurate description of what had just happened.

So why did part of him still feel disappointed and resentful about having to leave the reporters and TV cameras so soon, as if he’d been hustled out of his own birthday party just as the fun was starting? The little boy with the press pass waved good-bye to him.

The detective’s car smelled from the absence of women. Stale air, exhaust fumes, old upholstery, an overflowing ashtray, food wrappers on the floor, streaky windows. A speaker dangled from the passenger-side door like an eye out of its socket. Just the threat of a female sitting here should have shamed Noonan into cleaning it up a bit.

“Okay, you mind if I go through this one more time with you?” Noonan asked, taking notes with his pad resting against me steering wheel.

“No problem,” said David, though he’d already gone over the narrative twice with the detective.

“You come out of the school with the kids. You let one of them get on first. You have a short conversation with the driver. You come off and line the kids up. And then the bus blows up. Is that it?”

“As far as I can remember.” He stared at a large green vein in the detective’s temple. “But like I said, I’m not thinking that clearly.”

“And let me ask you again. Did you see anybody suspicious hanging around me bus before or after the explosion?”

“Not that I can recall.”

David turned and saw more reporters interviewing his students outside the window. The who, how, and why of what happened were still flying around him like fragments. He hadn’t had time to put it all together in his mind.

“You got off to a late start,” said the detective.

“What?”

“You were running late. I wondered if there were mechanical problems with the bus.”

“There might have been,” David said, noticing there was a constant distant ringing in his ears. “I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.” He forced himself to pay attention. “Why, are you thinking that’s what could have caused the bus to blow up?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s something we’re going to have to look at.”

“Of course, of course.”

The detective began to write faster in his notebook and the green vein in his temple started to throb.

“And so it was, what, just some kinda hinky feeling that you kept the kids off the bus for a few extra seconds,” Noonan said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah. Hinky. I guess. I didn’t want to lose anyone.”

Noonan gave him a sidelong glance, and David wondered if by some instinct the detective knew that he’d been drinking heavily the night before.

Cops had always made him a little ill at ease. As a teenager, he’d halfheartedly taken a car from a beach club parking lot on Long Island and had almost gone to prison for it. The episode was enough to scare him straight and keep him away from the cretinous junior division thugs who’d talked him into the stunt in the first place. But to this day, he still often felt officers looking at him just a bit longer than they needed to, as if some aura of suspicion lingered.

“Detective, can I ask you something?” he said, trying to shift the focus.

“Yeah, all right.” Noonan flipped a page in his notebook. “What?”

“Are you thinking it could have been a bomb?”

The detective put his pen down and stared at him for a long beat. “I don’t know. You know anybody who’d want to do something like that?”

Something in that look made David’s joints ache. “No. Not that I can think of.”

“You sure about that?” The detective held his gaze for a few more seconds. “You’re a teacher. You must know plenty of angry kids.”

“Not that angry, I don’t think,” David said quickly, the moldering stuffiness of the car starting to get to him. He needed some fresh air.

“How about anybody who was upset about the governor’s visit?”

“Nobody who said anything to me.” David coughed once more. It felt like weasels had been scratching the inside of his throat.

The detective took out his wallet and gave David a card with his number at the precinct. “You call me if you think of anybody or anything relevant. I’ll be in touch.”

“All right. Whatever you need.”

Yes, Nosferatu. The throbbing vein and the heavy eyelids. The pale luminescence of the undead. David reached for the door handle, feeling some irrational need to be free of this man’s presence.

“Oh, one more thing.” Noonan grabbed his elbow.

“What?”

“How should I put this?” The detective let go of him and gestured rhapsodically with both hands. “A lot of people are going to be asking you about what just happened. Media people, I mean. Now I can’t really tell you not to talk to any of them, though I’d like to. But just do me a favor. All right? Be careful about what you say. Because if this turns out to be a bomb or something, and this case goes criminal, you better make sure you have your story straight.”