Eye of Flame (22 page)

Outside the Windows

A diner next to a gas station was the small town’s only bus stop. John gazed out of his window as the driver paced near the bus. No passengers had boarded here. The driver stomped out his cigarette, then climbed back inside.

Three boys raced across the two-lane road, followed by an unleashed collie. There was little traffic here; John had seen only three cars and a panel truck moving along the street. People, he thought, should be more careful anyway. Letting dogs off their leashes was risky, and lots of children had never been taught to cross roads safely.

A white Victorian house marked the edge of the town. The bus rolled on, then passed a sign marking the way back to the interstate. John was sure the driver usually took that turn, but instead the bus continued along the narrow road. He had not taken this particular bus in over a year, but couldn’t see why the company would change the route. The interstate would get the bus to its final destination in two hours; this old road would add at least one more hour to the trip.

“Don’t know the way,” a stocky gray-haired man sitting across the aisle muttered. His companion, an old bald man in a plaid shirt, nodded glumly. The stocky man leaned toward John. “That driver don’t know the way,” he continued. “Missed his turn.”

“Are you sure?” John asked. “Maybe they changed the route.”

“Make no sense to change the route.” The man leaned back in his seat and folded his arms; the bald man next to him scowled. Apparently neither of them was going to alert the driver to his error, however annoyed they might be. This road would get them to where they were going, and they did not look like men with pressing engagements. John peered up the aisle. A big auburn-haired woman was the passenger nearest the driver, but from the way her head was lopsidedly resting against her seat, he guessed that she was asleep.

The driver probably was lost. It wouldn’t surprise him; the company had been bringing in drivers from other parts of the country to take the places of those still on strike. John was fairly certain that they would soon come to another sign directing them to the interstate, and that the driver would realize his mistake then.

The sun was dropping toward the western hills; the trees were beginning to show red and orange foliage. A wooded slope suddenly blocked his view. On the interstate, the countryside had seemed spacious, the towns only distant clusters of buildings nestled in hollows. Along this winding road, the hills were barriers hiding what lay ahead.

Air travel was bad enough, John thought, but buses were much worse, and that damned strike hadn’t helped. This trip was too short to justify a plane ticket, and the train had been discontinued some time back. He hadn’t expected much comfort, but this rattling bus with its lousy shocks should have been retired long ago. People were forced into driving cars, with so few other ways to get to where they were going. Sometimes it seemed to him that vehicles operated the people behind their wheels, rather than the other way around, that the metallic beasts had claimed the world.

The bus suddenly swerved; its horn blared. John clutched at his armrest as the trees to his left swelled; their leafy limbs reached toward him as an invisible hand threw him back. He heard a loud, wet smack against the front of the bus before the horn sounded again.

“For crying out loud,” the gray-haired man across from John shouted. The bus hurtled on for several yards, then slowed as the driver pulled over and parked along the shoulder of the narrow road. John looked down at his hands, surprised to find that they were shaking.

The driver opened the door, got up, and left the bus. The other passengers were silent. The big woman near the front of the bus was awake now, leaning across the aisle to say something to the boy in the next seat. John recalled the wet, splattering sound and closed his eyes for a moment.

“What happened?” a voice said behind him. John moved to the seat on the aisle and looked back. A young woman in a down vest and jeans was getting up from her seat; she shook back her long blonde hair. “What’s going on?”

The big auburn-haired woman rose slowly to her feet. “He hit a dog,” she announced in a hoarse voice as she turned toward the back of the bus. “A big black dog—looked like a Lab to me. Run right into him.”

“Is he hurt?” A young black woman wearing a Cornell University sweatshirt was speaking; she was sitting next to the blonde. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” the big woman replied. “The way we hit him—I don’t know. He just run right out in front—didn’t look like he even saw us coming. I’ll go see.”

“I wanna see, too,” the boy near her shouted.

“Then come along.”

The boy followed the woman off the bus. The child, who looked about nine years old, was traveling by himself; John had seen a wan brown-haired woman hug him, then press a luggage claim ticket into his hand. The big woman had been keeping an eye on him since then.

“Gross,” the blonde college student murmured. John assumed that she and her sweatshirted companion were students, with their duffels, jeans, and thick economics textbooks. “Why would he want to see something like that?”

“Good thing the driver stopped,” the stocky gray-haired man said. “I thought he was just going to barrel ahead.” The bald man next to him nodded. “If he had, the state troopers would have radioed ahead and pulled him off at the next stop and we’d be sitting around for God knows how long. Guess he thought better of that. This way, we might lose an hour, maybe.”

A young man in a leather jacket came down the aisle and left the bus. “We’re going to lose more than an hour,” John said, “if that driver doesn’t get back to the highway.”

“Could be. I meant we might lose an hour on top of whatever other time we lose.”

John stood up, stretched, then decided to go outside. At this rate, he wouldn’t have time to do more than call the district manager before he went to bed. John’s supervisor sometimes kidded him about his eccentricity, as did the others in the home office. Luckily, he did not have to take that many business trips, and usually went by air when he did. It gave his co-workers something else to gossip about: his insistence on cabs rather than rented cars, the apartment he had moved into so that he would no longer have to drive to work.

John stepped down to the ground, then took a deep breath of the cool autumn air. The three passengers who had already left the bus were standing by the rear of the vehicle. Farther down the road, the bus driver stood near a fence talking to another man. A long driveway wound up a hill toward a large gray house; John glimpsed a woman and child on the porch.

He walked toward the other passengers. “I don’t see the dog,” he said.

“He got drug off the road.” The big woman pointed. “That must be the owner. He came and drug the dog off the road—he was a Lab, sure enough.” She pulled her long brown coat more tightly around herself. “That dog’s dead.”

A gray car with emblems on its doors passed the bus, then pulled up next to the two men in the distance; a uniformed man got out. “There’s the cops,” the boy said as he tugged at his baseball cap. “What’ll they do?”

“Probably not much,” the young man in the leather jacket replied. “Ask questions, maybe write out a report.” His mouth hung open after he stopped talking, as if he had simply forgotten to close it.

“It weren’t the driver’s fault,” the woman said. “I woke up just before he hit. That dog was standing by the road, and then he run right out in front like he didn’t even see us coming. The driver tried to miss him, but he run right out in front. Must of killed him right away, the way we hit, but it really weren’t his fault.”

“He was going kind of fast.” The young man brushed back a strand of his long brown hair, then thrust his hands into his pockets.

“He weren’t going over the speed limit.”

“He was going the wrong way, though. Why didn’t he head back to the highway?”

“I would of told him to, if I’d been awake. Why didn’t somebody else pipe up?”

John wandered away from the others and their pointless discussion. The policeman was writing in a notebook; the bus driver shifted from one foot to the other as he spoke to the dog’s owner. The trees near the house swayed as the wind picked up; the woman and child who had been standing on the porch had gone inside. The child would be crying, his mother trying to console him.

He turned and walked back to the bus, then climbed inside. “Anything going on?” the stocky gray-haired man asked.

“A policeman’s there,” John said as he sat down. “The owner seems to be talking to the driver calmly enough, so we should be on our way soon.” He looked back at the college students. “I couldn’t see the dog. That red-headed woman said the owner dragged him off the road.”

“This is all we needed,” the blonde student said. “Some poor dog going about his business, then getting hit by a bus.”

“Chill out, Sloane,” the black student said.

John settled back in his seat. He had brought some work in his briefcase, but felt too distracted to pull it out. The incident had unnerved him. He wouldn’t have been on the damned bus in the first place if those penny-pinchers in Accounting had been willing to cough up enough for a plane ticket.

The leather-jacketed man came back aboard the bus, followed by the big woman and the boy. “Don’t you worry none, Ted,” the woman said.

“Tad,” the boy said. “My name’s Tad.”

“Well, don’t you worry none, Tad. I’m sure your father’ll wait till the bus gets there.”

The boy took one of the seats in front of John, then leaned over the armrest to peer back at the other passengers. The big woman sat across from the boy. The passengers were all grouped in the middle of the bus now, as if hoping for reassurance from one another. John opened his briefcase and rummaged among his papers, hoping the others wouldn’t try to drag him into conversation.

The driver soon came back. He stood in the front, rubbing at his face. “Er, we had a little accident,” he said, telling them what they already knew. “I tried to avoid that dog, but if I’d gone any farther left, we’d have gone off the road and into a ditch. I just thought you ought to know. My responsibility’s to my passengers.” He looked around thirty years old, and had a southern accent. John wondered if he was an experienced driver or a strikebreaker the company was still training. “We’ll be running about half an hour late. Sorry for the delay.” He wiped his brow, then turned to sit down. John pitied him a little. Obviously shaken by the accident, he would still have to drive the bus to its destination.

The bus rolled back onto the road. The sky was growing darker; dusk shadowed the trees and made the distant hills look black. John turned on the light above him, then pulled out his newspaper.

“They shouldn’t let dogs run around near roads like this,” the young man in the leather jacket said in the seat just behind John’s.

“Well, there isn’t that much traffic.” John recognized the black student’s voice. “If it had been my dog, I would have assumed—”

“He might have been old, maybe going deaf,” the blonde student said. “Dogs can’t see very well, and maybe this one couldn’t hear well, either. Poor thing.”

The big woman leaned out from her seat. “Look at it this way.” Her voice was loud enough to be heard above the bus’s engine. “Thank the good Lord it weren’t a human being.” John’s hands tightened on his newspaper.

He looked toward his window, unable to concentrate on reading. The unfortunate incident had apparently given his fellow travelers a sense of camaraderie; they would probably review the matter during the rest of the ride. The bus was slowing. An intersection lay ahead, and another large sign marked “I-88” with an arrow pointing east, but the driver continued along the old road.

“Missed another way back,” the stocky gray-haired man said. “Somebody better tell that young fella what to do.”

“Don’t look at me,” the big woman replied. “I ain’t about to go up there and tell that man where to go. He’s probably jumpy enough already.”

John stared at his paper. He could not get up and move to another seat without seeming downright hostile; the only way to avoid getting drawn into the conversation was to pretend to be reading. He was about to shift to the seat nearer the window when he saw the dog.

The animal was standing at the side of the road near a field. It was a large dog, a Labrador retriever, and before John could wonder what it was doing in that empty, overgrown stretch of land, the dog vanished.

“Whoa,” somebody shouted. The boy named Tad peered around his seat at John. “Did you see that, mister? That dog—did you—”

“Lordy,” the big woman cried. The dog was in the aisle. It turned and trotted toward the front of the bus, then disappeared.

John’s mouth was dry. The driver, intent on his driving, had apparently not seen the dog. John glanced at the men across from him. The gray-haired man gaped; the bald man was leaning over him and staring into the aisle.

“What was that?” the young man behind John said. “What the hell—”

“A Lab.” The big woman’s hands tightened on her armrest. “A Lab, just like the one we hit.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What’s going on?” the blonde student called out. “Are we all going crazy?”

“Chill out, Sloane,” her companion said.