Free Man of the Hour by Peter Blauner Page A

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.