I went out for a walk on Friday just when the sun was starting to go down. The air was chilly, but much more pleasant than it had been the whole week before.
My mind was kind of wandering, and I tried to empty it while I walked. From my apartment complex, I crossed the road, turned right, went by a wastewater treatment plant, and continued over the bridge into Winooski.
I’d been cooped up inside all day. I didn’t really need to be in class, so I had skipped it to sit and do nothing.
I left the apartment for the new record store in Winooski. It was a fancy spot, and my interest had piqued when my friend played me some records that he’d gotten there recently, four for twenty dollars. One of them was in a blank jacket with some highly abstract black and white designs on an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper sketchily taped around it. The music was screeching noises and loud sharp synthesizers. Another one was labeled as an unknown artist, some twelve year old child. He was playing profane songs he’d composed along to the stock backing tracks of a cheap casio-type keyboard. The back of that album– which had a real, factory-printed sleeve– read, “this album was found recorded over a bootleg Primus tape in a Bangor, Maine basement in 1993.”
But at the halfway point of my walk, at the top of Winooski’s roundabout, I walked past the store without going inside. I’d remembered an economic boycott was supposed to happen that day, and I’d determined not to spend any money.
As I crossed the street to continue around the large circle in the center of the downtown, two firetrucks passed me in the other direction, heading up towards St. Michael’s College.
I started to hear sirens, far off up the hill in the direction they’d gone. They were quiet, but they were getting louder. I skipped sideways a little bit when I slid on some black ice at the bottom of the roundabout. I righted myself and stared carefully at the brickwork as I started back off again. I pushed the little button to turn on the crosswalk warning lights and I crossed the road to complete the circle of the roundabout.
I was about halfway back across the bridge on the right side, walking slowly as I inspected some of the gaping cracks and holes in the bridge. There was one chip out of the concrete so big you could see through a crack to the frozen river below.
I kind of started when a car pulled up next to me, slower than the other cars that had been whipping by. It was a big white GMC SUV, pretty old. The person inside had the double blinkers on, and was driving about ten miles an hour across the bridge. I watched curiously as it slowed down until it came to a rest with the front passenger side wheel about halfway up the little right triangle of dirt and snow and ice built up against the curb. It was in the rightmost lane, about halfway through the intersection. There was clearly something wrong with the driver.
The car and intersection were about fifty yards away from me, and I watched as some impatient drivers, anxious to get home, pulled around it. The cars coming in the other direction had to swerve in their lanes to avoid collisions.
I thought about my old elementary school bus driver, a guy named Wayne. He’d been a real asshole, and had brilliant white hair that shot straight up out of his head. We hated him because when we were being too loud, he’d stop the bus on the side of some dusty dirt road, heave himself from his towering front seat, come down the aisle, and yell at us raspily for being too loud. He’d threaten to turn the goddamn thing around and leave us all at the school overnight.
One day when I was in high school, I was talking to my dad. He said, Remember your old bus driver, Wayne? He died a little while ago. Apparently his wife wasn’t doing very well, she was at Woodridge for a long time. He would drive to visit her every day. He had a heart attack, alone in his car. He pulled over and died right in the driver’s seat, still buckled in. My dad speaks really descriptively sometimes when he’s talking about sad things. I imagined Wayne quietly taking his last breaths in a small car, thinking of his wife, wearing a blaze orange seatbelt like the one he wore while driving the bus.
When I looked up again, the white SUV was still stationary, still had its hazards on, but had shifted into reverse. I strained my ears, willing them towards the car, trying to sense what was going on over the sirens behind me. I could hear loud, booming, sounds from inside the dirty white vehicle, but they were muffled by the clatter of the cars all around and the river. I could see the shadow of a head diagonally through the back window, and it was moving. When I came level with the passenger window, I looked in. There was a big, fleshy guy in a sweaty white polyester tank top. He was bellowing at the top of his lungs, turned around in the driver's seat towards the rest of the car’s interior. Through the car’s closed windows, his rage was muffled but still terrifying. The whole car jostled as his body bounced around in anger.
I didn’t break my stride or stop to rubberneck at the car for very long. I tried to analyze my brief glimpse into the car as I continued past it– was there a kid or someone in there? The passenger seat was definitely empty.
The sirens continued to get louder and louder. I looked back over my right shoulder, past the blinking car, across the bridge and into Winooski. There were fire engines, ambulances, state troopers, armored military vehicles, and bulletproof SUVs with flags, all crowding onto the sloped roundabout that I’d just circumnavigated. They were starting to stretch down onto the bridge I’d just walked across. There was a big ugly square military hummer at the very front of the column. It had an American flag on a short flagpole at the front of its hood. It was painted matte black and had ugly piping reinforcements across its front grille. Going probably thirty-five, it led the rest of the emergency vehicles down onto the flat of the bridge towards the intersection, the white car, and me.
As the column approached, the white car shook slightly, impelled from the inside again. Then, as the unreflective, squat war vehicle had almost finished across the bridge, the rear driver-side door fell open. A slight form tumbled out of the car and under the hummer’s wheels as it blew by the SUV at full speed. None of the vehicles, with their sirens going and their lights flashing, slowed down or broke file as they followed through the intersection and whisked past me where I stood on the sidewalk.
