Man of the Hour (8 page)

He straightened up and began walking faster, knowing he had little more than eight minutes to leave the
hadduta
. The rhythm of the hammering seemed to quicken. There were red-white-and-blue banners hanging from the scaffolding over the school entrance. More and more students surged past him on the front steps; it was like a dam breaking. So free and easy with the way they moved, swinging their arms and shoulders. As if they were born to rule the wide open spaces. He could never be like that. His steps were small and careful. He’d known confinement for too long. Even today, he felt his collar choking him. But the more he tried to relax, the more he found his legs locking.

Don’t feel anything.

He tucked the bag under his arm as he walked by a band of laughing, singing girls in matching blue Nautica jackets and entered the lobby. He saw the blue plaster walls and the Celebrate Diversity Week posters. That familiar awful ammonia smell hit him.
Trust in God and think like a gun.
This would be the hardest part, getting through the metal detector. He turned, expecting to see the guard who’d let him in without a pass last week, a sluggish, sleepy-eyed Puerto Rican guy named Miguel who’d actually been in his class a few years back. But today, there was someone new; an alert-looking fiftyish black man wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks with sharp creases, carefully checking student ID cards. Nasser looked at those sharp creases and felt his heart jam.

Merciful God! This hadn’t been anticipated, though it should have been. Unlike Miguel, this guard would surely check his ID and make him write his name down on the visitor’s sheet, leaving a direct trail of evidence for the police. They’d find him right away and drag him off to jail with all the
abeeds
and the Spanish criminals.

All at once, the lobby didn’t seem as vast as it once had. It felt as cramped and claustrophobic as a phone booth. His breath stopped in his throat and his intestines seized in torment. He had to get out. Without thinking, he turned toward the big square of sunlight pouring in through the front entrance and walked out. The steps down to the street seemed to go on for miles and miles, like the slope of a mountain.

He imagined he could hear the clock ticking in his bag, while down below the crowd on the sidewalk had thickened, with hundreds of kids leaving. For the first time, he noticed a burly man with a video camera and a slender, blue-suited lady with a microphone talking to a group of students over by a wrought-iron fence twenty feet away. Other kids were behind the woman, pushing one another out of the way trying to be photographed, grinning stupidly and waving.
A television program.
Somebody had actually come here to make a television program, perhaps because the governor was visiting. There was a chance they’d already taken his picture. Nasser looked at his watch again and saw he had a little over six minutes. His heart throbbed in time with the jerky quartz movement of the second hand. That was not scared, what he was before. This was scared.

He turned and started to walk around the side of the school, heading for the back entrance. He remembered there was a hatch for an old coal chute near the doors. But as he came around the side, he saw dozens of students lounging on the back steps, smoking, drinking from brown paper bags, kissing each other blatantly. No, this was no good either. Now that he finally
wanted
to be invisible among the kids, everyone was looking at him. Maybe he’d never been invisible after all.

He ran back around to the front of the school, knowing he probably had less than five minutes. Panicking. He was absolutely panicking. The
hadduta
would blow up in his hands. The camera man and the lady with the microphone were setting up on the front steps of the school, in order to interview students with the amusement park skyline in the background. The carpenters were still banging away at the wooden stage nearby, leaving no opportunity to slip the bag under the slats without anyone noticing. And just to complete the nightmare, here was Mr. Fitzgerald, his former teacher, coming out through the front entrance, trailed by that Jew, Mr. Rosenthal, and two dozen ill-behaved students from his sister’s class.

This was the greatest mistake of all. They were supposed to be gone by now. If he stayed where he was, one of his sister’s friends would certainly recognize him and ask Elizabeth what he was doing hanging around school on a day she was absent. What if Mr. Fitzgerald saw him? But returning to the car with the
hadduta
was out of the question. The shame of facing Youssef would have been killing enough. But he wasn’t even sure if he would make it anyway. There might not be enough time to defuse the device. The throb of his heartbeat came up between his ears. He considered just dropping the bag on the sidewalk and running. But with the way this day was unfolding, someone would pick it up and run after him, shouting: “
Hey, asshole, you forgot something! Hey, sand nigger, this is yours!”

The hammering was so loud now it was as if the carpenters were inside his head. He found he could not move. Indecision had frozen him. Was this his destiny? To blow himself up in front of his old high school? Was this what God wanted?

He saw himself, as if from far away. A lonely Arab boy in a crowd, holding a thunderbolt.

But then salvation came. It literally pulled up right in front of him. A yellow school bus stopping by the curb and opening its doors.

The path was clear. It was obvious what he had to do. Nasser waited for another wave of at least thirty students to come down the front steps, and then he joined them as they crossed the sidewalk and passed in front of the bus. Lowering the bag and carefully shoving it under the front wheels next to an empty Snapple bottle took less than a second. In the midst of the crowd, no one noticed. They were too busy shoving, giggling, touching each other within their little cloud.

Nasser moved past the bus, broke off from the group, and ran across the street without so much as a glance over his shoulder. Yes, he’d never gotten along with Mr. Fitzgerald. Perhaps this was God’s will, after all.

“Come on, you guys! Let’s keep it together.”

As the school bus pulled up to the curb, David, sweating out vodka and lugging his Jansport bag, full of library books for Arthur, called to his class to line up on the sidewalk, but it was like yelling into the surf.

Three girls he thought of as the hip-hop sisters were on the front steps, doing a hip-swinging, booty-waggling dance for the TV news crew. Ray-Za, whose hair today was shaped like an English tea service, chanted the words to the latest rap hit, which seemed to be a kind of Sears catalog of bitch names: “Horny bitch, nasty bitch, crazy bitch, bitchy bitch, female bitch …” And the rest of them just dissed each other. Even the Chinese kids dissed the Korean kids about their mothers’ hairy backs and loose ways. This was the style now: I dis, therefore I am. “All right, party people,” he said. “I’ll wait.” This should have been one of those soaring anything-is-possible days. He loved getting the kids outside the school, opening new vistas to them. But something kept casting a shadow over his brain.
What was wrong?
It was something bigger than his divorce. A feeling that he was barely keeping a hold on things. There was too much pulling the kids away. Corrupt administrators, outdated textbooks, electronic billboards, HDTV, computerized banking, CD-ROMs, beepers and cell phones, eight-year-olds with handguns, teen pregnancy, indeterminate sentencing, Prozac, New Age philosophy, crumbling and overcrowded classrooms, incurable viruses, and broken homes. Most days it didn’t bother him, the Great Divide. But today he felt rubbed raw. He just wanted to tell everyone to stop and listen for a second.

“Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Fitzgerald.” Seniqua Rollins was tugging on his sleeve. “I wanna ask you something.”

“What?”

She moved closer to his side, and he noticed she was wearing patchouli today. “I want to know if I can get on the bus first.”

“Why do you want to do that?” He was a little sore and suspicious from the way she’d been acting up in class.

She lowered her voice. “I’m five months’ pregnant. I like to sit at the front near a window so I don’t get sick.”

“For real?” David gave her the famous Fitzgerald hairy eyeball.

“Oh yeah, it’s for real,” she sighed, rolling her eyes and blowing out two big cheekfuls of air. “Didn’t you notice I put on weight?”

Actually, she’d always been built like a water tank, but no matter. David regarded her with a mixture of tenderness and exasperation. He wondered if the father was Amal or King Shit in jail, and then decided he didn’t want to know the answer. “You going to be all right?”

“Yeah, just gimme some space to breathe.”

“We should talk later.” David gestured for the bus driver, Sam Hall, to open the yellow doors. “Hey, Sam,” he called out. “You don’t mind if this young lady sits by you, do you?”

“I appreciate all the company I can get.” Sam, a courtly man in his early sixties with a face like old mahogany and beautiful long tapered fingers, waved for both of them to get on board.

David followed Seniqua up the stairs and set his heavy book bag down next to Sam. It was the
New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology
weighing him down, he realized. The thing had to weigh ten pounds all by itself.

“How you doing?” he asked Sam.

He hadn’t seen the driver the last few field trips, and he remembered hearing that Sam had been operated on for prostate cancer last spring.

“Just keeping on keeping on,” Sam said with an easy smile and only a slight tensing of the jaw. All the gangsta rappers in the world put together could never be so cool.

Most of the kids didn’t know that Sam had been a singer in the late fifties. He’d even had a number three hit on the R ’n’ B charts, a haunting echoey ballad called “The Loneliest Man in the World.” But that was a long time ago and hence not worth much in the up-to-the-minute culture of Game Boy and Home Shopping Network.

“Hey, Sam, you mind if I leave my bag a second?” asked David. “I don’t want to drag it around.”

“Be my guest.”

David started back down the stairs, still feeling as if he was coming at life from an odd angle. Everything he did and said seemed too slow and lugubrious for the world at large. The rest of the class, seeing Seniqua was already on board the bus, started to rush past him.

“Hey, not so fast, crew.” He blocked them with his big leaden body and started pushing the group back toward the steps. “I want to do a final head count. Make sure we didn’t lose anybody.”

Yes, exactly. Everyone needed to slow down, stay in one place. Not move around so much, to sun-blasted cities three thousand miles away. He made them stand in single file and started to call the roll again. He wasn’t sure why he felt such a need to impose order on them today. Maybe with the threat of losing Arthur and Renee, he was experiencing some existential need to prove that he, David Fitzgerald, could still have a minor effect on the world.

But then he heard it, or rather he felt it: a hammer blow to the ear.

He turned and saw the front of the bus suddenly rising up three or four feet off the ground and then coming down with a sickening crunch. The sound of the explosion seemed almost incidental.

For a second or two, his mind refused to accept the information. Of course, this wasn’t happening. They were all going to get on the bus and make the long queasy ride into Manhattan with kids screaming, beating on each other, and probably committing various misdemeanors at the back.

But then the bus sprawled forward like a drunk with one elbow up on the bar, and the right front wheel went flying off. Broken glass came flying at David and he threw an arm in front of his face. He took a step back and saw that the whole bus was tilting forward. The engine was on fire and a column of charcoal-gray smoke was rising from under the hood. The front of the bus had crumpled with the force of the landing. Sam Hall had been thrown against the windshield, and his face was mashed and bloody against the cracked glass.

A wave of panic swept David up and put him down again.
What was this?
A second ago he was going on a school trip, now he was in a war zone.
All right, what am I supposed to do here?
He saw Seniqua trying to wriggle out a window near the front of the bus. A group of her friends ran over and stood under her, flapping their hands like bridesmaids throwing rice after a wedding. She’d managed to squeeze her head and shoulders through the frame, but that was as far as she could get. There was too much of the rest of her.

The wave of panic came in again.
Okay, you should try to save her. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
David coughed, feeling the heat pushing him away like a hand. Heavy black, acrid smoke was beginning to stream back from the engine, enveloping the rest of the bus. It dawned on David that soon the whole thing would be in flames.

“Seniqua, try the back door!” he shouted, approaching her.

But she was too busy screaming to hear him. The sidewalk around him was bedlam. Hundreds of kids had come running, from down the boardwalk and out of the school, to see the spectacle. But the hot reality of it kept them at a respectful distance of at least a hundred feet—the girls crying and shrieking, the boys staring and cursing in useless shock. The only calm one was the burly tattooed TV cameraman, who stood halfway up the school steps, anchored and efficient, keeping the burning bus in steady focus as if he were drawing strength and serenity from all the commotion.

“It’s all right, David!” yelled Henry Rosenthal as he ran back toward the school building. “I’m going to call nine one one!”

For what? There wasn’t time. David stood there, paralyzed with fear. He kept waiting for the disaster to subside, but it just went on and on. All his life, he’d waited for The Moment when he would discover whether he was a coward, as he’d always suspected, or whether there was a secret part of himself that was capable of great, thoughtless courage. But now that the moment had arrived and the beast had sprung, he wasn’t ready.