THE BUS DRIVER

Years ago, I decided to help out by becoming a school bus driver and went to get my license. On the appointed day, my learner’s permit in hand and accompanied by my friend Tiny, a fully licensed driver, I drove the school bus to a Windsor public works depot for my driving test. The man in charge there of conducting school bus driver road tests, couldn’t have been a greater disappointment. Clearly tenured in some way, his world, the one where he was in charge, was this DOT maintenance lot, circumscribed by piles of road sand and a cyclone fence that contained his similarly forbidding attitude. This attitude and his disregard for those hapless individuals who came to him seeking approval were  breathtakingly offensive. He wore some kind of uniform [GD1] and assumed a wildly proprietary attitude. The contempt he had for me and for my prospects was undisguised. Because Tiny was a licensed bus driver, an equal of sorts, this fellow assumed some sort of kinship with him, as if they’d seen combat together. He began talking immediately, speaking not to me but only about me, and directing his comments to Tiny. He spoke disparagingly, of me, of my intentions that day, of my diminished capabilities, of my probable flawed character and of my likely failure. He used only the crudest language, all the while making truly awful comparisons between various of the bus’s components and body parts.

Eventually, his soliloquy ran its course, by which time I had pretty much resigned myself to this trip having been pretty much a waste of time. Still, I was here and Tiny had sacrificed a day to accompany me. I would do my best to do as I was told and be civil. At the instructor’s command—for that’s certainly what it was—I did my walk around the bus, inspecting its condition, proclaiming my satisfaction that it was safe to drive. He disagreed, stretching several oblique sexual metaphors to the breaking point in the process.

          By now, I was even more fully resigned to this sad encounter ending in failure, and my earlier resolve to make the best of it had waned. Thus it was that when he told me to get in the bus, pretend he was a student, drive down Route 17 a mile or so, lawfully discharge him at a designated stop, proceed on to a turn- around, lawfully pick him up on the return leg, and deliver him to the point of beginning, I found myself in a less than compliant frame of mind. When I reached the designated stop, I engaged my flashers, did all the other things correctly, and let him off. Waiting till he had safely removed himself to the shoulder behind the bus, and resisting the urge then to back over him, I drove off, turned around up the road apiece, and drove back. There he was, hands on hips, disapproving, belly sticking out, a mighty disappointing imitation of a little kid waiting to get on the bus. His eye’s met mine, from a hundred feet away, and I watched his face as it became apparent to him that I was not going to stop. Keeping an eye on the road with my peripheral vision, I maintained eye contact till abreast of him, long enough to memorialize his expression. Tiny who’d ridden along in one of the kids’ seats in the back, as chuckling, but did so with less enthusiasm as we got farther from the instructor. When we got back to the lot, I got out and let Tiny into the driver’s seat, suggesting that if he thought we ought to retrieve him, he could drive.

 [GD1]Revised to avoid using of sorts twice in two sentences.