Camille cried, “It was him! That boy!”
Charles switched stations. Film footage of I-94 near Grand River Avenue was just concluding. “Why should it be I-94? An overpass? The boys on the bus were headed in the other direction. They’d have been off the bus, wherever they were going, hours before. And miles away. It’s just a coincidence.”
Camille shuddered. “Coincidence? My God.”
“You still love me. Don’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Don’t you?”
“Shouldn’t I?” A pause. “I’m so tired …”
Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he must sleep, he had an early meeting the next morning: 8 a.m., breakfast. At his company’s headquarters. Must sleep. They’d gone to bed, exhausted and creaky-jointed as an elderly couple, and Charles lay now stiff as a wooden effigy, on his back. He’d dismissed the incident (urine-colored school bus, smudge-skinned young punks, the ambiguous long-barreled weapon) from his mind, it was over. Beside him Camille lay warm-skinned, ardent. Wanting to push into his arms, to make love, with him, or wanting at least to give the impression of wanting to make love, which, in a long-term marriage, counts for the same gesture, in theory. See? I love you, you are rebuffing me. Charles was polite but unreceptive. What pathos in lovemaking, in stark “physical” sex, when life itself is at stake! Civilization at stake! Charles’s head was flooding with images like the screen of a demonic video game. (He had never played such a game. But he’d observed, in video arcades.) The ugly lumbering school bus he’d been trapped behind. The stink of the exhaust. How had it happened, had Camille been speaking to him? He’d become distracted, hadn’t seen the bus in time to switch to another lane, and if he’d done that, none of this would have happened. Seeing now the rear window of the bus: craning his neck upward, to see. What were those boys doing? The rear window was divided into sections and only the smaller panes could be cranked open. The pane at the left, directly in front of, and above, Charles, had been opened and it was through this window that the long-barreled revolver had been pointed. No! Don’t shoot! Not me! Now Charles saw vividly, unmistakably, the faces of the boys: They were probably not more than twelve or thirteen years old, with dark, demonic eyes, jeering grins, oily-dark hair. As he stared up at them, pleading with them, the gun discharged, a froth-dream washed over his contorted face like an explosion of light. Was he already dead? His face was frozen. And there was Camille screaming and pushing — at him — trying to get away from him, as he restrained her. Brake the car! Get away! He’d never heard his wife speak in so hoarse, so impatient a voice. For the baby was somewhere behind them, and nothing mattered except the baby.
Charles was alone now in the speeding car. A limping-speeding car, as if one of the tires was going flat. Where was he? One of the freeways? Emerging out of Detroit, in a stream of traffic. And there was the school bus, ahead. He’d been abandoned by his family to die in their place. You are born, you reproduce, you die. The simplest equation. No choice except to drive blindly forward even as the gleeful boys, one of them pudgy-fat-faced, a faint mustache on his upper lip, knelt on the bus seat to aim a bullet into his head.
He heard the windshield shatter. He cringed, trying to shield his face and chest with his arms.
It is said that when you are shot you don’t feel pain, you feel the powerful impact of the bullet or bullets like a horse’s hooves striking you. You may begin to bleed in astonishment for you did not know you’d been hit. Certainly you know with a part of your brain, but not the conscious part of your brain, for that part of your brain is working to deny its knowledge. The work of mankind is to deny such knowledge. The labor of civilization, tribal life. Truth is dissolved in human wishes. The wish is an acid powerful enough to dissolve all knowledge. He, Charles, would die; must die at the hands of a grinning imbecile in a black T-shirt. Yet he seemed to know, and this was the point of the dream, that he could not allow himself such knowledge for he could not bear his life under such circumstances. In middle age he had become the father of a baby girl. He had neither wanted nor not-wanted a baby, but when the baby was born he’d realized that his life had been a preparation for this. He loved this baby girl whose name in the dream he could not remember far more than he loved his own ridiculous life and he would not have caused such a beautiful child to be brought into a world so polluted, so ugly a world. As the bullets shattered the windshield of the car, a sliver of glass flew at the baby’s face, piercing an eye for she’d been left helpless, strapped in the child safety seat.
Charles screamed, thrashing in panic.
“Charles? Wake up.”
He’d soaked though the boxer shorts that he wore in place of pajamas. The thin white T-shirt stuck to his ribs and his armpits stank, appallingly.
“You’ve been dreaming. Poor darling.”
Camille understood: Her husband had ceased to love her. He would not forget her behavior in the car, her “abandonment” of him. He was jealous of her acrobatic prowess, was he? — as he was jealous of her way with Susanna who would rather be bathed by and cuddle with Mommy than Daddy.
It wasn’t the first time in nine years of marriage that Charles had ceased to love Camille, she knew. For he was a ridiculous man. Immature, wayward in emotion, uncertain of himself, anxious-competitive in his profession, frightened. He was vain. He was childish. Though highly intelligent, sharp-witted. At times, handsome. And tender. He had a habit of frowning, grimacing, pulling at his lips, that Camille found exasperating, yet, even so, he was an attractive man. He was shrewd, though he lacked an instinctive sense of others. And yet Camille herself was shrewd, she’d loved one or two other men before Charles and understood that she must comfort him now, for he needed her badly. She must kiss his mouth, gently. Not aggressively but gently. She must hold him, his sweaty, frankly smelly body, a tremulous male body, she must laugh softly and kiss him as if unaware that he was trembling. At first Charles was resistant, for a man must be resistant at such times. For his pride had been wounded. His male pride, lacerated. And publicly. He’d been having a nightmare just now, yet how like Charles not to want to have been wakened from it, by Camille.
Panic can only be borne by a man if there is no witness.
Charles’s skin had turned clammy. Camille could feel his heart beating erratically. He was still shivering, his feet and hands were icy. He’d had a true panic attack, Camille thought. She was holding him, beginning to be frightened herself. But she must not let on, of course. “Darling, I’m here. I’ve got you. You’ll be fine.”
Eventually, well before dawn when the baby in the adjoining room first began to fret and flail in her crib, this was so.
Little horses
by Nisi Shawl
Belle Isle
The white candle on top of her dresser had burned dirty that morning. When she stood up from her prayers she saw its glass sooting up black. Big Momma would say that meant danger of some kind. But what? To who? Not Carter. It was after Carter’s funeral that Big Momma had made her promise to burn it.
Uneasily, Leora turned her gaze away from the boy beside her on the car’s backseat. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at him. And sometimes, for the same reasons, it hurt.
It was her job, though, keeping an eye on him. Leora did her duty. Especially today; might be him who the candle had been warning her about. If Big Momma had a phone, she could have called her and found out.