A click, then silence.
I opened my eyes. My hand was still shaking as I set the receiver back in its cradle.
Something wakes me. A sound in my dreams or something outside? I can’t tell. I jerk awake, my eyes searching the darkness.
But it isn’t really dark. There is a gray light in the corners of my room, creeping in from the edges of the window. I throw the sheet aside and go to the window.
Not dawn. Not yet. Still night but almost there.
And then I hear it. The roaring. But it sounds different now, still edged with anger, still deep with pain. But now with a strong pulse of relentless strength. The lions will never be quieted.
I go back to my bed. The sound is in my ears. I sleep.
Panic
by Joyce Carol Oates
Chrysler Freeway
He knows this fact: It was a school bus.
That unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine.
A lumbering school bus emitting exhaust. Faulty muffler, should be ticketed. He’s gotten trapped behind the bus in the right lane of the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the exit for I-94, trapped at forty-five goddamned miles an hour. n disgust he shut the vent on his dashboard. What a smell! Would’ve turned on the A/C except he glimpsed then in the smudged rear window of the school bus, a section of which had been cranked partway open, two half-heifer-sized boys (Hispanic? Black?) wrestling together and grinning. One of them had a gun that the other was trying to snatch from him.
“My God! He’s got a—”
Charles spoke distractedly, in shock. He’d been preparing to shift into the left lane and pass the damned bus but traffic in that lane of the freeway (now nearing the Hamtramck exit) was unrelenting, he’d come up dangerously close behind the bus. Beside him Camille glanced up sharply to see two boys struggling against the rear window, the long-barreled object that was a gun or appeared to be a gun, without uttering a word or even a sound of alarm, distress, warning. Camille fumbled to unbuckle her safety belt, turned to climb over the back of the seat where she fell awkwardly, scrambled then to her knees to unbuckle the baby from the baby’s safety seat, and crouched on the floor behind Charles. So swiftly!
In a hoarse voice crying: “Brake the car! Get away!”
Charles was left in the front seat, alone. Exposed.
Stunned at how quickly, how unerringly and without a moment’s hesitation, his wife had reacted to the situation. She’d escaped into the backseat like a panicked cat. And lithe as a cat. While he continued to drive, too stunned even to release pressure on the gas pedal, staring at the boys in the school bus window less than fifteen feet ahead.
Now the boys were watching him too. They’d seen Camille climb over the back of her seat, very possibly they’d caught a flash of her white thigh, a silky undergarment, and they were howling with hilarity. Grinning and pointing at Charles behind the wheel frozen-faced in fear and indecision, delighted as if they were being tickled in their most private parts. Another hulking boy joined them thrusting his heifer face close against the window. The boy waving the gun, any age from twelve to seventeen, fatty torso in a black T-shirt, oily black tight-curly hair, and a skin like something smudged with a dirty eraser, was crouching now to point the gun barrel through the cranked-open window, at an angle that allowed him to aim straight at Charles’s heart.
Laugh, laugh! There were a half-dozen boys now crowded against the bus window, observing with glee the cringing Caucasian male, of no age in their eyes except old, hunched below the wheel of his metallic-gray Acura in the futile hope of minimizing the target he made, pleading, as if the boys could hear or, hearing, be moved to have pity on him, “No, don’t! No, no, God, no—”
Charles braked the car, desperately. Swerved into the highway shoulder. This was a dangerous maneuver executed without premeditation, no signal to the driver close behind the Acura in a massive SUV, but he had no choice! Horns were sounding on all sides, furious as wounded rhinos. The Acura lurched and bumped along the littered shoulder, skidded, began to fishtail. Both Camille and Susanna were screaming. Charles saw a twisted heap of chrome rushing toward them, tire remnants and broken glass, but his brakes held, he struck the chrome at about ten miles an hour, and came to an abrupt stop.
Directly behind Charles, the baby was shrieking. Camille was trying to comfort her, “Honey, it’s all right! We are all right, honey! We’re safe now! Nothing is going to happen! Nothing is going to happen to you, honey. Mommy is right here.”
The school bus had veered on ahead, emitting its jeering exhaust.
Too fast. It happened too fast.
Didn’t have time to think. Those punk bastards …
Had he seen the license plate at the rear of the school bus? He had not. Hadn’t even registered the name of the school district or the bus company in black letters coated in grime at the rear of the bus.
Hamtramck? Highland Park? As soon as he’d seen the gun in the boy’s hand he’d been walloped by adrenaline like a shot to the heart: rushing blood to his head, tears into his eyes, racing his heart like a hammering fist.
He was shaken, ashamed. Humiliated.
It was the animal panic of not wanting to be shot, not wanting to die, that had taken over him utterly. The demonically grinning boys, the long-barreled object, obviously a gun, had to be a gun, the boy crouching so that he could aim through the cranked-open section of the window straight at Charles. The rapture in the thuggish kid’s face as he prepared to pull the trigger.
Camille was leaning over him, concerned. “Charles, are you all right?” He was cursing the boys on the bus. He was sweating now, and his heart continued to beat erratically, as if mockingly. He told Camille yes, of course he was all right. He was fine. He was alive, wasn’t he? No shots had been fired, and he hadn’t crashed the car. She and Susanna were unhurt.
He would climb out of the overheated car as, scarcely more than a foot away, traffic rushed by on the highway, and he would struggle with the goddamned strip of chrome that had jammed beneath the Acura’s front bumper, and then with mangled hands gripping the steering wheel tight as death he would continue to drive his family the rest of the way home without incident.
Camille remained in the backseat, cradling and comforting the baby.
Comforting the baby — she should be comforting him. She’d abandoned him to death.
He laughed. He was willing to recast the incident as a droll yet emblematic experience. One of the small and inexplicable dramas of their marriage. Saying, teasing, “You certainly got out of the passenger’s seat in record time, Camille. Abandoned your poor husband.”
Camille looked at him, eyes brimming with hurt.
“Charles, I had to protect Susanna. I only—”
“Of course. I know. It was remarkable, what you did.”
“I saw the gun. That’s all I saw. I panicked, and acted without thinking.”
“You acted brilliantly, Camille. I wish we had a video.”
Camille laughed. She was still excited, pumped up.
Susanna, eighteen months old, their first and to-be-only child, had been changed, fed, pacified, lain gently in her crib. A miracle, the baby who usually resisted napping at this hour was sleeping.
She’d cried herself into exhaustion. But she would forget the incident in the car, already she’d forgotten. The bliss of eighteen months.
Camille was saying, in awe of herself, “Charles, I don’t think I’ve ever acted so swiftly. So — unerringly! I played high school basketball, field hockey. I was never so fast as the other girls.”