Man of the Hour (9 page)

The wave ebbed away. He had a son to take care of. If anything happened to him, who would look after Arthur? Surely that was justification. He began to back away from the scene. So now he had his answer. He was a coward, after all: the lifeguard who would never save anybody.

Seniqua was almost disappearing in the cloud of toxic smoke surrounding the bus.

“Oh Lord, somebody save her,” he heard one of the other girls say. “She was gonna keep that baby.”

David coughed into his hands and found he couldn’t back up any farther. What would his father the war hero say about this retreat? No. It took nerve to be a true coward and David wasn’t sure he had it.

The tide began to draw him in.

With a heart full of misgivings and a mouth mumbling curses, he made his way around to the back of the bus, where a sign said:
IF THIS VEHICLE IS BEING OPERATED RECKLESSLY, PLEASE CALL
555-1000. He hesitated a second, then saw the hip-hop girls staring at him, expecting him to do
something. “
Oh, look!” one of them shouted. “He’s gonna do it now! He gonna save her fat ass. I told you he was all right!”

With the bus tilting forward, its back was slightly elevated, and David had to stretch to reach the yellow door handle. Finding it surprisingly cool to the touch, he yanked on it, expecting nothing to happen, absolving him of all responsibility. But to his amazement, the door fell open easily and more black smoke billowed out, almost solid in mass. He choked and coughed, feeling as if he’d just had motor oil poured down his throat. The undertow had him.

I’m not really going to do this, am I?

“Here, I’ll help you get up.” Ray-Za was kneeling before him in the street, offering his back as a stepping stool.

David looked down at the black cloth of the T-shirt stretched across the boy’s back. Here was a thing of moment; more than anything in the world he didn’t want to get on the bus. Every muscle and nerve ending in his body was resisting. But he couldn’t let them all down. He had to somehow force himself to act. Trying to ignore his wildly beating heart, he placed one foot on Ray-Za’s shoulder and hoisted himself the rest of the way up onto the bus.

It was like stepping into a blast furnace. The heat wrapped itself around him, compressing his organs and curling his hair. He heard a sound like a giant breathing. More smoke came rushing at him, choking him, making him hack uncontrollably. He began to duck down, imagining a voice saying:
Go back, send someone more qualified.
Okay, fine, he thought.
Let me get out of here. I have a child of my own.
But the pull of circumstance was too strong and the slope of the floor sent him spilling toward the front of the bus where Seniqua was still screaming.

He was almost drowning in smoke and could hardly see anything. But every step he’d taken forward made it harder to take a step back. The bus’s hard landing had jarred seats out of place and left cushions in the aisle. David tried to feel his way around their hot coverings as he crouched down, making his way toward the girl.

Why am I doing this? Why can’t I just turn back?
His head was getting light as his body started to shut down. But the undertow wouldn’t release him. It kept dragging him farther and farther out. And then just as he began to grow dizzy and faint, he finally found her, still stuck halfway out the window near the front of the bus. He put his hands on her big churning thighs and tried to yank her free, to little effect. How was he going to do this? It was like trying to pull a pipe organ away from a church wall. He stepped between the seats to get a better grip on her from behind.

“Okay, honey. I’m just gonna give you a little tug.”

He circled his arms around her waist, set his legs for traction, and pulled with all his might. As she fell back onto him, she shrieked in terror, thinking he was dragging her back into the fire and certain death.

“It’s all right. It’s all right.” He squeezed her shoulder, trying to calm and reassure her. “We’re gonna make it out of here.”

But that was by no means a sure thing. The back emergency exit was at least thirty feet away, at an incline. It couldn’t be seen. His heart was punching the walls of his chest. The smoke was stinging his eyes and quickly suffocating him. And he heard two sharp pops, telling him windows were breaking, letting more oxygen in, feeding the flames. At any second, the whole bus would flash over.

This was the middle of the cold dark sea, he thought paradoxically.
You’re going to die.
The idea was overwhelming. You thought your life was about turning forty and getting a divorce. But it was about dying on a school bus. Everything else was just preamble.

The bus groaned and seemed to crush in around him. You’re never going to see your wife again, never going to see your son again. He tried to remember the words to the Lord’s prayer …
Our father … my father …
Oh, how did it go anyway?
Hail Mary, full of grace …

No, he wouldn’t accept death. Arthur and Renee still needed him, didn’t they? He had to get back to shore. With a sharp surge of strength, he balled up his fists and started pushing Seniqua back toward the emergency exit.
Live, baby, live.
What else was there? He looked once over his shoulder and, through the smoke, glimpsed little flames moving toward them along the floor runner. He began pushing Seniqua harder, threatening to steamroll her if he had to. His heart beating with fierce shuddering force.

And then it appeared before them, a silvery rectangle of light. The doorway, through the smoke.

Seniqua, however, had stopped moving, as if she’d been overcome by the fumes and gases less than ten feet away from safety. “Come on, you can do it!” David pleaded.

But she was hunched down and unbudgeable. This system was no longer responding. David heard the loud pop of yet another window blowing out. This was either the beginning or the end of something. What had his father said about facing the machine guns on Okinawa?
Just keep going.
He bent down, reared back on all fours and slammed ahead into her with his full weight. Seniqua pitched forward and went tumbling out into daylight.

A group of her classmates caught her and pulled her off the bus, and David quickly jumped down behind her, hacking mightily and hurting his knee with an awkward landing. His eyes were still stinging and black mucus streamed from his mouth and nostrils, but he’d made land.

Good man yourself, Fitzgerald!
as his father used to say on the rare occasions when David pleased him. But then he looked over and saw Seniqua’s friends laying her out on the sidewalk some twelve yards away.

“Hey, is she okay?” he called out.

His words were swallowed up in the mass of kids huddling around her while the cameraman maneuvered for position among them.

David came staggering over and the circle parted for him. He heard grim murmuring. Merry Tyrone, usually exuberant and chatty, looked at him, ashen-faced and silent. Seniqua was lying on her back, in the middle of the group, with her mouth slightly open and her Hilfiger jacket unzipped. David knelt beside her and put his hand over her mouth.

“She ain’t breathing,” said Merry, finally breaking the silence. “She must have got too much of that smoke in her lungs.”

David looked at the other kids. They were staring at the sky, glancing back at the bus, retreating into themselves. He put his ear down to Seniqua’s mouth, hoping somehow she’d start breathing on her own.

But all he heard was the sound of the fire burning nearby and glass breaking. Where was everybody? Where were the ambulances and fire trucks?

“Anybody here know CPR or mouth-to-mouth?” he asked the group.

The kids were slack-jawed and wordless. The burly cameraman was pushing several of them out of the way for a better angle.

“Hey, back off, will you?” David coughed. “This kid isn’t breathing.”

He looked down at Seniqua’s dry useless mouth, a white crust forming in the corners. Couldn’t someone else do this? Sure, he’d been a lifeguard, but even firemen didn’t perform mouth-to-mouth anymore, because of AIDS. On the other hand, he couldn’t bear having his student, this pregnant girl, die on him.

He bent over Seniqua and blew tentatively into her mouth. Come on, girlfriend. You can do it. You got the power. He felt the heat of the fire at his back and an ocean breeze in his hair. The presence of death nearby.

He pinched Seniqua’s nose and exhaled hard. It was like kissing, it wasn’t like kissing. He thought of Arthur’s first blue moments in the world. Struggling in the nurse’s arms, trying to catch his breath.

He turned his head, listening for a response, and then breathed in harder, desperately trying to blow open all the little hatches and constricted passageways. But it was like trying to blow up a Macy’s Day balloon with a bicycle pump. The girl remained motionless, lifeless. David coughed and tried to clear his own throat. Remembering his father dead in the hospital, right after his heart attack. A bloated copy of what he’d been. He felt the cameraman shadowing him, kneeling to capture the real-time drama, the lens lapping up what life was left in the girl.

The roughnecks in the group began to withdraw, not able to face this. The girls, always more honest, fell into each others’ arms. And David bent over Seniqua once more. Come on, baby, don’t die on me. Don’t die on me with everyone watching. He inhaled deeply and blew out with all his might, pushing the breath up from the very pit of himself, bringing along whatever horrible toxins and gases he’d taken in on the bus, and leaning into her, trying to will her back to life. Having exhaled everything that was inside him, he fell sideways, exhausted.

From far away, he finally heard the loopy whistle siren of approaching fire trucks and ambulances. The bus exploded again, much more powerfully this time. It was as if a fist had come down from the sky and smashed what was left of the vehicle. Everyone jumped back and a dense mushroom cloud rose from the front of the bus, filling the air with dark oily smoke. Only now did David allow himself to remember that Sam Hall was still on board.

“Oh shit, lookee, look at that.” Ray-Za was dancing around, pointing.

David stared at him blankly and then looked back at Seniqua. Just in time to see an eyelid flutter. He leaned in close, heard a short cough and then another longer one. The cameraman stood up to get a wider angle as Seniqua suddenly sat up, retched violently, and took her first deep gasping breath.

“Oooooaaaaa!” Merry Tyrone cried out. “You go, girl!”

David steadied himself and saw Henry Rosenthal back at his side again. Where had he been these last few minutes? Somehow he looked smaller and older in the aftermath of the explosion.

“You did it, man,” he said, patting David on the shoulder uneasily. “You saved her. You must be out of your fucking mind.”

7

JUDY MANDEL, TWENTY-FOUR
years old, wearing a jean jacket and a skirt just a little too tight for her, already had a splitting headache and vicious menstrual cramps before she even got to the scene of the explosion.

She’d been out at the Red Hook housing projects, covering a granny-fell-down-the-elevator-shaft story when her editor at the
New York Tribune
city desk beeped her and told her to get her hyperactive butt out to Coney Island.

It was, like, ridiculous, trying to get over there and cover it. Ten minutes before she could get a car to come to the projects, and then the driver instantly ran into mega-major gridlock traffic on the Gowanus Expressway. By the time she got to the school, John LeVecque, the pompous and deliberately unhelpful police spokesman, had finished briefing the rest of the daily reporters about what had happened, and the detective in charge—who truth be told looked a little like death warmed over himself—wasn’t speaking to any of the press. All Judy could get out of anyone was that a teacher named David Fitzgerald had somehow saved one of the kids and stopped more of them from getting hurt. Which officially made him hero of the day, until someone else came along.

All the other reporters were already mobbing him in front of the school steps. A billowing mass of people. Just the sight of it made Judy’s cramps worse as she came running over, orange laminated press I.D. bouncing against her chest. How was she going to get a piece of this story with all these other people around? They were already breaking her shoes at the city desk, threatening to send her back to celebrity stalking and covering Lotto mania. Within five minutes there wouldn’t be so much as a nuance or a half-quote left to chew over. She recognized the short guy from the
Daily News
, the wild cowboy from the
Post,
the stylish political lady from the
Times.
And worst of all, that swanky bitch Sara Kidreaux from Channel Two with her beefy crew guys in tow and her broadcast truck parked by the curb, ready to go live.

All her life, Judy had been around long-legged, Chanel-wearing goddesses like that one; a merely decent-looking girl among the city’s legions of beauty queens. She’d accepted that it was her lot in life to be the underdog, to have to work harder and fight dirtier just to stay on par. So she launched herself into the crowd like a heat-seeking missile. Fighting her way to the front, pushing bigger and more established reporters out of the way, making sure she wouldn’t be ignored.

“Hey, what happened?”

“Hey, what happened?”

David Fitzgerald—still dazed and wobbling before the school’s front steps—was slowly becoming conscious of a kind of frantic animal effort going on around him. Paramedics had just finished examining him and putting salve on his hands and face, when the rugby scrum of reporters and camera people suddenly closed in around him. There were at least twenty-five of them, pushing and shoving to get near him. Where had they all come from? At first, he was frightened and confused by the surge.
What did they want from him?
Were they going to trample him? He thought of the Who concert in Cincinnati and English soccer tragedies. But gradually things came into focus. He began to recognize individual faces and questions. People he’d seen fleetingly on the few occasions when he watched television news as well as names of famous newspapers on laminated press passes. They wanted to understand what had just happened.
They wanted him to help them.