Behind the Wheel

Luck and Burdens: Consecutive Substack Story 1178

Eddie Pilzer carries Bandaids like some guys carry smokes.

Murphy from The Black Kat calls him just to say hi.

Jeanine is still pissed about the pudding.

Eddie’s left arm rubs raw from the loose rivets on the trim of Bus 24, Tagle Community Schools.

He knows putting his arm there costs him layers of flesh.

He doesn’t love it, but he kind of likes it.

That’s where his arm was on September 29, just shy of one year earlier, when a semi crossed the median just before Swaajen Nursery and Landscaping.

Instinct and common sense would have told ya that you whip the bus over the shoulder and into the large Swaajen parking lot.

Eddie Pilzer decided in the half second the fates gave him to decide, that the geometry wasn’t gonna work in his favor, the physics, the dynamics. He yanked the bus left, across the two lane and very roughly onto the dust of Michaelsen’s fallow farm.

The semi came to rest about halfway through one of Swaajen’s storage buildings, the driver dead from a stroke.

With the exception of Elijah Maki biting his lip pretty good, all the kids in the bus were unharmed.

Eddie Pilzer needed three stitches on his left arm where one of the loose rivets ripped him open.

Eddie was given a week off-policy-because the truck driver died, told he could take more if he wanted, even though the semi didn’t make contact with the bus.

The State Police Accident Investigator told Arlene Wyman, the school transportation captain that if Eddie would have veered right there would have been at least twenty funerals and the Whitcomb Red Cross would have been dry.

“Stamp it, “ he told Arlene. “Hero. Tell the world Edward Pilzer is a hero.”

But Arlene told Eddie first, and Eddie wasn’t having it.

Eddie closed The Black Kat the night before the accident.

He brushed his teeth good in the morning, but goddamn.

If he had gone right…

He didn’t tell Arlene about the Kat, of course.

He did tell her this: “I ain’t no hero. My job to get kids back and forth safe. And I did. End of story.”

But it’s hard to close the curtain on a play when you’re in the audience.

Eddie Pilzer as hero was just an accepted fact in Tagle, Whitcomb, and even 490 miles away at Lieder Trucking, where they were relieved to the point of ecstasy that Joe Matzin’s rig didn’t wipe out forty middle schoolers.

Eddie can’t go to the Kat anymore, because the famous hero bus driver can’t be drunk in public like he was that September 28th.

He gets home from his route, pours himself a Maker’s Mark almost to the rim of his Green Bay Packers glass he’s had since he was a kid, downs his medicine, and goes to bed.

Jeanine Pilzer is happy Eddie isn’t at the Kat all the time, even though the expensive Italian pool cue she got him for his birthday sits idle in the monogrammed case.

Jeanine’s mad that on the second day of school, a transfer kid from Bovoda County who didn’t know the Eddie Pilzer story dumped chocolate pudding on his bald head while he drove, and when she saw Tommy Harris at FrostyWhirl she bought him a slush for beating the kid up.

Eddie broke up the fight of course, and the kids said “Mr P, your arm is bleeding,” but it was bleeding already, because he rubs that left arm against the loose rivets while he drives, trying to remind himself he might have to yank the wheel at any time.

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If you like this and wanna give me more than a punch on the arm attaboy, you can buymeacoffee.com/JimmyDoom