The Driver Delano Mills Refused To Lose

Marisol told me later that Emmett had stood on his chair in the back of that board room and clapped until his hands hurt when the vote passed, and that he had asked her on the drive home whether Sergeant Combs was going to be there every Friday again. She told him yes, and he had gone quiet for a minute before saying that was the best part of the whole week, better than the game itself. I keep that particular sentence somewhere I do not let myself forget it.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since Vietnam, about what it means to come home from something that changes you and try to build a life ordinary enough to hold the pieces together. I never got a parade in 1970. None of us did. But I got twenty eight years of teenagers falling asleep against bus windows trusting me to get them home safe, and I got a town that showed up three deep along a back wall the one time somebody tried to tell them my word was not good enough anymore.

I turned the key on that bus the following Monday morning same as I have for twenty eight years, checked my mirrors, waited for the kids to settle, and pulled out onto the county highway with the sun just coming up over the water tower. Somewhere behind me, a freshman I did not recognize yet asked the kid next to him why there was a brass plaque over the driver’s seat, and I heard the answer come back before I could say a word myself.

“That’s Sergeant Combs. He’s the reason we get home.”

I drove the rest of that route with my hands steady on the wheel and my eyes on the road, the way I have every single morning since the Army first taught me what it means to be the one other people depend on to bring them home.