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veered away and the ground lurched brutally forward.
     
    35
     
    B just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur-even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say-at the moment it occurred I was thinking about fucking Risa Walker. My truck was right behind the bus when it went over, and my body was driving my truck, and one hand was on the steering wheel and the other was waving at Jessica and Mason, who were aboard the bus and waving back at me from the rear window-but my eyes were looking at Risa Walker’s breasts and belly and hips cast in a hazy neon glow through the slats of the venetian blind in Room 11 of the Bide a Wile.
    So I don’t know anything of what immediately preceded the accident, although once it happened, of course, I saw it all, every last mind numbing detail. And still do, every time I close my eyes. The swerve off the road to the right, the skid, the smashing of the guardrail and the snow bank; and then the tilted angled plummet down the embankment to the sandpit, where, moving fast and somehow still upright, the bus slid across the ice to the far side; and then the ice letting go and the rear half of the yellow bus being swallowed at once by the freezing blue green water.
    I don’t close my eyes a whole lot now. Unless I’m drunk and can’t help it therefore, a frequently desired state, you might say.
    Many of the folks in Sam Dent have come out since the accident and claimed that they knew it was going to happen someday, oh yes, they just knew it: because of Dolores’s driving, which, to be fair, is not reckless but casual; or because of the condition of the bus itself, which Dolores serviced at home in her barn, and as a consequence it did not get the same supervision by me as the other school buses got; or because of that downhill stretch of road and the fact that there’s almost no shoulder to it on either side of the guardrail; or because of the sandpit below the highway there, which the town had opened up a few years before and then abandoned when it filled with water, thinking no one could get to it except by the old blocked off access road on the other side of the Flats.
    It’s a way of living with a tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. I could understand that. But it irritated me to hear it, especially with so many journalists poking microphones in people’s faces and with all the downstate lawyers crawling around looking for someone to blame, so I want to say right out front that I was the person closest to the accident and I never saw it coming.
    I knew that stretch of road as well as anyone in town, and I knew the bus inside and out, and I knew better than anyone what Dolores’s driving habits were, because one of my habits was to follow her into town every morning; and believe me, I was not in the slightest afraid of an accident.
    I would be now, of course, because the accident has changed everything, but back then, even though I expected death in a general way as much as the next person probably even more so, since I am a widower and a Vietnam vet and had already learned a few things about the precariousness of daily life-I was able that morning, while I drove along behind the school bus, to let my mind fix on the image of the woman I happened to be sleeping with, a woman I was having an illicit affair with. Illicit because she was married to a friend of mine.
    I feel guilty for it, of course-for conducting the affair, I mean, not for having a fantasy about sex with her at that awful moment in my life, in her life, in the life of everybody in this town, practically.
    I could as easily have been thinking about money, which I did not have much of, as sex with Risa, which at that time I had quite a lot of, owing, I suppose, to my