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died in the fumes or been burned to death. It was true. It came to Aldenburg that it was all true. The charred bus sat there; you could smell the acrid hulk of it. Firemen were still spraying it, and police officers were keeping the gathering crowd at a safe distance. More ambulances were arriving, and they had begun taking the injured away. He thought he saw one or two stretchers with sheets over them, the dead. “How many dead?” he asked. He stood looking into the face of a stranger in a blazer and a red tie. “How many?”
    “No deaths,” the face said. “Not yet, anyway. It’s going to be touch and go for some of them.”
    “The driver?”
    “She’s in the worst shape.”
    “She stopped breathing. I got her breathing again.” “They’ve got her on support. Vital signs are improving. Looks like she’ll make it.”
    There were two television trucks, and everyone wanted to speak to him. Smitty had told them how he’d risked the explosion and fire. He, Gabriel Aldenburg. “Yes,” Aldenburg said in answer to their questions. “It’s Gabriel. Spelled exactly like the angel, sir.” Yes. Aldenburg. Aldenburg. He spelled it out for them. A shoe salesman. Yes. How did I happen to be here. Well, I was—
    They were standing there holding their microphones toward him; the cameras were rolling.
    Yes?
    “Well, I was—I was in there,” he said, pointing to Smitty’s doorway. “I stopped in early for some breakfast.”
    Some people behind the television men were writing in pads.
    “No,” he said. “Wait a minute. That’s a lie.”
    They were all looking at him now.
    “Keep it rolling,” one of the television men said.
    “I spent the night in there. I’ve spent a lot of nights in there lately.”
    Silence. Just the sound of the fire engines idling, and then another ambulance pulled off, sending its wail up to the blackened sky of the city.
    “Things aren’t so good at home,” he said. And then he was telling all of it—the bad feeling in his house, the steady discouragements he had beencontending with. He was telling them all how he had never considered himself a man with much gumption. He heard himself use the word.
    The men with the pads had stopped writing. The television men were simply staring at him.
    “I’m sorry,” he told them. “It didn’t feel right lying to you.”
    No one said anything for what seemed a very long time.
    “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s all.” He looked beyond the microphones and the cameras, at the crowd gathering on that end of the street—he saw Smitty, who nodded, and then the television men started in again—wanting to know what he felt when he entered the burning bus. Did he think about the risk to his own life?
    “It wasn’t burning that bad,” he told them. “Really. It was just smoke.”
    “Have they told you who was driving the Cadillac?” one of them asked.
    “No, sir.”
    “Wilson Bolin, the television news guy.”
    Aldenburg wasn’t familiar with the name. “Was he hurt?”
    “Minor cuts and bruises.”
    “That’s good.” He had the strange sense of speaking into a vacuum, the words going off into blank air. Voices came at him from the swirl of faces. He felt dizzy, and now they were moving him to another part of the street. A doctor took his blood pressure, and someone else, a woman, began applying some stinging liquid to his cheek. “Mild,” she said to the doctor. “It’s mostly smudges.”
    “Look, am I done here?” Aldenburg asked them.
    No. They took his name. They wanted to know everything about him—what he did for a living, where he came from, his family. He told them everything they wanted to know. He sat in the backseat of a car and answered questions, telling them everything again, and he wondered how things would be for a man who was a television newsman and who was driving drunk at seven o’clock in the morning. He said he felt some kinship with Mr. Bolin, and he saw that two women among those several people