Free Man of the Hour by Peter Blauner Page B

“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