The Driver Delano Mills Refused To Lose

The letter was taped to the steering wheel of the activity bus, folded once, my name typed on the outside like I was a stranger who needed to be told where to stand. I found it at five thirty in the morning, same as I found everything on that bus, because I got there early enough to run the heater and scrape the windshield before the team ever climbed on for the away game in Cassville.

It was from the new superintendent, a woman named Vanessa Kirsch who had been in Delano Mills for eleven weeks. It said my volunteer driver authorization was suspended effective immediately, pending review of an expired medical certification, and that the district would be securing alternate transportation for all activity trips until further notice.

I have driven that bus, or one just like it, for twenty eight years. Twenty two of them on the payroll, six of them for nothing but the privilege of doing it, and in all that time nobody had ever taped a letter to my wheel instead of walking up and saying it to my face.

My name is Delroy Combs. I am seventy six years old, and before I was anything else in this town, a feed store clerk, a deacon, a widower, a bus driver, I was a staff sergeant in the United States Army, First Cavalry Division, and I spent thirteen months in Vietnam that never fully let go of me, not once, not for a single year since. I came home in the spring of 1970 with a Purple Heart I never talk about and a hitch in my left knee that tells the weather better than the radio does, and I have spent every year since trying to be the kind of steady that country never let me be a boy long enough to learn on my own.