My father being
out of town on business, the job of driving Harry and me
to school fell to my mother. She seemed even less happy
to be taking us than we were to go, but then, trying to
pinpoint the cause of my mother’s mood at any given
moment was a fruitless game. Harry and I took note of her
pursed lips and her cautious, deliberate driving style as
we pulled out of the driveway and headed down the road,
leaving behind a trail of white exhaust. Then we gazed through
the light fog and mist at the swishing tails and lowered
heads of the cows, at the old farmhouses and barns, and
at the tall brown grass drooping with moisture that covered
the fields stretching from both sides of the road. Soon
we approached the crossroads, where three thoroughfares
came together to form a large triangle, creating an ideal
site for a local developer to build a three-sided strip
mall. A red light and heavy traffic brought us to a stop
and then a crawl as we made our way through the construction
zone. We were moving at two miles an hour, stuck between
a pickup truck in front and a station wagon to our rear,
when, suddenly, although from my perspective it all happened
as if in slow motion, a backhoe on the right side of the
road swung its long arm and bucket in a wide circle, first
away from us but then coming around directly toward our
car. There was nothing we could do but sit and watch as
our fate unfolded. By my calculations, the steel bucket
was destined to hit our car and smash through the side window
in a second or two. But it didn’t concern me much.
First of all, I figured the man driving the backhoe knew
what he was doing and would probably come very close to
hitting us without actually doing so. On the road, you can’t
worry about every near miss because near misses occur all
the time. But secondly, it appeared that the backhoe bucket’s
trajectory was leading to our back window, and both my brother
and I were sitting in the front seat. The thought raced
through my mind that sometimes my brother or I would sit
in the back seat, for no particular reason, so it was a
good thing that today we were crammed together into the
front. And thirdly, I thought, since I was sitting in the
middle of the seat while my brother occupied the window
seat, he would be the one to receive the blow if the backhoe
bucket did indeed hit us and if my estimation that it would
hit the back side window rather than the front side window
turned out to be wrong. And so again, I had nothing to worry
about, and I sat there quite relaxed as the arm of the backhoe
continued to pivot toward us. And when the bucket swung
through the back side window and smashed it to bits and
rested there above the back seat, I thought, No big deal,
it’s just a car window. No one is hurt. In fact I was
somewhat pleased that it happened, because suddenly yet
another dreary school day had turned into a small adventure.
But you would have thought one of us had been killed,
the way my mother reacted. She screamed, “Aaaaahhhhhh,”
at the top of her lungs, and my mother had powerful lungs.
She looked at us and stretched her arm out in our direction,
as if to protect us from a second attack. She put the car
into park and began to cry. Her head fell forward onto the
steering wheel, but the impact seemed to bring her back
to her senses; she looked up, and then she pressed her thumbs
into the car horn until they turned white. Harry and I were
fine, except that our ears were ringing. We sat there quietly,
looking straight ahead, ignoring the unwelcome guest in
our back seat.
“Let’s get out of the car, before they kill us,”
my mother said. “Be careful. Come this way.” My
mother opened the door and got out, and I followed her,
and Harry slid across the seat and got out through the driver’s
door as my mother held it open. But traffic was moving along
in the opposite direction, and the cars behind us were trying
to squeeze by, and the dust and fog were so thick in the
air that other drivers couldn’t see us until they came
within fifteen feet. We sidestepped along our car and took
a position a few steps in front of our right headlight,
the low-beam of which was still shining. We heard more of
the construction site than we could see; the roar of equipment
moving over a terrain of dirt, rocks, and ditches, filled
our ears. Then came the honking of car horns. Who were they
angry at? Yes, our car was blocking the lane, but it was
not our fault, and there was nothing we could do. Dust continued
to fly around us in intermittent clouds as Harry and I stood
in front of our car, using it as a barrier, our faces sullen,
our hands in our pants pockets. I took a look at Harry.
Out of our car, we were spectacles now; people driving by
could see me standing in my green blazer and super-wide
tie underneath my mop of long wavy blond hair, next to my
dufus of a brother wearing a burgundy sport jacket with
a super-wide red tie under a mop of long, greasy, thick,
straight black hair, thick brown glasses resting high on
his nose, and sporting his first outbreak of acne on his
chin. We looked like fools and losers. Why, I wondered,
had the backhoe singled us out, when so many other candidates
were passing by without a scratch? Now that I realized people
were looking at us and perhaps blaming us for their commuting
delays, I no longer appreciated our adventure. Our jackets
and ties must have made them think we were rich kids, and
that probably gave them pleasure in our misfortune. I wanted
to explain to them that we were not rich but poor, destitute,
almost. We only went to private school because we had scholarships,
and because my father was a college administrator who placed
an inordinate value on education, and because my father’s
parents had saved a pot of money for our schooling. But
we were still regular folk – “Just look,”
I said silently to those passing us by, “at our inexpensive
and now dented and broken box of a car!”
My mother, wearing a long, dull pinkish polyester knee-length
overcoat with a belt tied around the middle, marched toward
the men who had gathered beside the backhoe. We felt sorry
for them. They had done wrong, they had made a mistake,
and they were about to get a tongue-lashing to which rebuttal
would be futile. Her voice boomed over the background noise
-- the traffic and the ongoing construction. “What
are you trying to do, kill us!” my mother demanded.
“Why’d you stop! Why not pull back and smash us
again! Smash the car to bits, for all you care. You don’t
even look. Don’t you realize there’s traffic going
by here! Don’t you care about other people at all!
Nobody wants you and you’re stupid mall here anyway,
and now you’re trying to kill us!”
“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,” said a
man with a hard hat and a clipboard.
“Sorry? You nearly killed my children, and all you
can say is, ‘Sorry?’ You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves.” And she began to cry again as she turned
away and dropped her head, so all we could see of her, other
than her coat, was her thick, curly black hair.
The men wanted their backhoe back. One of them – had
he been the culprit who speared us in the first place? --
climbed into the machine and started it up. Our car bounced
up and down as he worked the levers on his dashboard and
pulled the bucket out through our back window. The men cleaned
up the broken glass while the man with the clipboard took
information from my mother and tried to converse calmly
with her. My mother stopped crying, but now she wore a beady-eyed
tight lipped scowl that, despite her cheery red lipstick,
spoke of her contempt. She hated these men who plunged recklessly
ahead, oblivious to the destruction they left in their wake.
We waited for a lull in the traffic, and then we climbed
back into the car through the driver-side door, unsure if
we had sustained structural damage or merely a surface blow.
“They said the car is fine, nothing to worry about,”
my mother said “They could care less. Just another
day on the job for them.” She started the car up as
though she expected it to explode; then she accelerated
gently, and soon the wind began to whistle through the back
window and the bent rear door as we made our way into town.
I was sitting in the middle again, squeezed in tight between
mother and brother. “Your father will have to take
care of this, as soon as he gets back,” my mother said,
and my brother and I nodded silently in agreement. I gazed
out the window at the tall apartment buildings and the aging
three-decker houses lined up in long rows on both sides
of the road, and I braced myself for another day of school.
_____
Thomas
Mott has a Master's
degree in English from Columbia University (1982). He lives
and writes in Richmond, Virginia.