The Bus Camera Told the Whole Truth
Nate looked up. His eyes were red around the rims, the way a boy’s get when he has not cried but has been close enough to count the tears. I saw him decide, again, not to say it. Whatever it was.
“Yes sir,” he said.
Doyle had the truck running, and he had been watching the pole light across the lot the whole time, because a lineman cannot look at a pole without checking it. I buckled Nate into the middle of the bench seat, which he had not allowed since he was eight, and Doyle did not remark on it.
“I could go in there,” Doyle said, with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, “and have a talk with that young man.”
“And you’d be a grandfather who yelled at a principal, and that would become the story. Give me one week. If I haven’t gotten anywhere, you can be as loud as you like, and I’ll hold your hat.”
He breathed out through his nose. “One week.”
He drove the four miles home at thirty-eight miles an hour, slower than he has ever driven that road.
Nate had lived with us on school days since the summer, because the hours his parents kept left a boy nowhere to be at three in the afternoon. Our daughter Roberta is an aide at the Maple Grove Care Center and had pulled a double that week. Her husband, Darren, hauls cattle, and he was somewhere south of Joplin with a load of calves bound for a sale in Oklahoma.
I fixed Nate a grilled cheese. He ate half.
“Nate, I’m going to ask you one thing. You can say no. Did you hit that boy?”
“No ma’am. I held his wrist.” He turned a crust over with one finger. “He swung at me, and I just held it. Then he yanked back and hit his mouth on the seat, and I let go right away. I swear, Grandma.”
“I believe you.”
“Mr. Dornan doesn’t.”
“Mr. Dornan hasn’t seen it yet.”
Something crossed his face that I took at first for relief. It was fear. “You can’t,” he said. “If somebody says, they’ll go after Keith.” His voice cracked on the name. “I told him on the bus I’d never say it was him.”
“Who is Keith?”
He shook his head. I did not press. I put a hand on the back of his neck and let him go out to the fence with Doyle.
I sat at that table a long time. My grandson was willing to sit out three days of school rather than hand over a boy’s name. I thought: I will not make him tell. I will find out another way.
At ten past twelve, at the library desk, my phone rang.
“Mrs. Voss? This is Dorothea Lambert, from the front office at the middle school.” A low, careful voice, as if she stood in a closet. “I’m calling on my lunch. I’m not supposed to. Your paper, the one you left. I took it out of Mr. Dornan’s tray and walked it over to the transportation office myself. I asked them to hold Bus 14 for Tuesday and keep anyone from touching it.”