The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Here is the rest area, coming up fast. Brenda sees only one car in the parking lot. It looks like a fancy one, a Lincoln or maybe a Cadillac. I could have rented one of those, she thinks. I had enough money but too many kids. Couldn’t fit them all in. Story of her life, really.

She looks away from the road. She looks at her old friend from high school, who ended up living just one town away. Jaz is looking back at her. The van, now doing almost a hundred miles an hour, begins to drift.

Jasmine gives a small nod and then lifts Dee, cradling the baby against her big breasts. Dee’s still got her comfort finger in her mouth.

Brenda nods back. Then she pushes down harder with her foot, trying to find the van’s carpeted floor. It’s there, and she lays the accelerator pedal softly against it.

VI.

‘STOP, PAULIE, STOP.’

He reaches out and grabs her shoulder with his bony hand, startling her. She looks up from his poem (it is quite a bit longer than hers, but she’s reached the last dozen lines or so) and sees him staring at the turnpike. His mouth is open and behind his glasses his eyes appear to be bulging out almost far enough to touch the lenses. She follows his gaze in time to see a red van slide smoothly from the travel lane into the breakdown lane and from the breakdown lane across the rest area entrance ramp. It doesn’t turn in. It’s going far too fast to turn in. It crosses the ramp, doing at least ninety, and plows onto the slope just below them, where it hits a tree. He hears a loud, toneless bang and the sound of breaking glass. The windshield disintegrates; glass pebbles sparkle for a moment in the sun and she thinks – blasphemously – beautiful.

The tree shears the van into two ragged pieces. Something – Phil Henreid can’t bear to believe it’s a child – is flung high into the air and comes down in the grass. Then the van’s gas tank begins to burn, and Pauline screams.

He gets to his feet and runs down the slope, vaulting over the shakepole fence like the young man he once was. These days his failing heart is usually never far from his mind, but as he runs down to the burning pieces of the van, he never even thinks of it.

Cloud-shadows roll across the field, printing shadow-kisses on the hay and timothy. Wildflowers nod their heads.

Phil stops twenty yards from the burning remains, the heat baking his face. He sees what he knew he would see – no survivors – but he never imagined so many non-survivors. He sees blood on timothy and clover. He sees a shatter of taillight glass like a patch of strawberries. He sees a severed arm caught in a bush. In the flames he sees a melting baby seat. He sees shoes.

Pauline comes up beside him. She’s gasping for breath. The only thing wilder than her eyes is her hair.

‘Don’t look,’ he says.

‘What’s that smell? Phil, what’s that smell?’

‘Burning gas and rubber,’ he says, although that’s probably not the smell she’s talking about. ‘Don’t look. Go back to the car and … do you have a cell phone?’

‘Yes, of course I have a—’

‘Go back and call 911. Don’t look at this. You don’t want to see this.’

He doesn’t want to see it either, but cannot look away. How many? He can see the bodies of at least three children and one adult – probably a woman, but he can’t be sure. Yet so many shoes … and he can see a DVD package with cartoon characters on it …

‘What if I can’t get through?’ she asks.

He points to the smoke. Then to the three or four cars that are already pulling over. ‘Getting through won’t matter,’ he says, ‘but try.’

She starts to go, then turns back. She’s crying. ‘Phil … how many?’

‘I don’t know. A lot. Maybe half a dozen. Go on, Paulie. Some of them might still be alive.’

‘You know better,’ she says through her sobs. ‘Damn thing was going six licks to the minute.’

She begins trudging back up the hill. Halfway to the rest area parking lot (more cars are pulling in now), a terrible idea crosses her mind and she looks back, sure she will see her old friend and lover lying in the grass himself. Perhaps unconscious, perhaps dead of a final thunderclap heart attack. But he’s on his feet, cautiously circling the blazing left half of the van. As she watches, he takes off his natty sport jacket with the patches on the elbows. He kneels and covers something with it. Either a small person or a part of a big person. Then he continues his circle.

Climbing the hill, she thinks that their lifelong efforts to make beauty out of words are an illusion. Either that or a joke played on children who have selfishly refused to grow up. Yes, probably that. Stupid selfish children like that, she thinks, deserve to be pranked.