Burnaby, June, 1999
On the way home from work today the bus got stalled in traffic. Dead stop. Marine Drive. Not Marine Way, the newer highway closer to the river, but the older Marine Drive that winds through the woods and past houses. One lane each way. A police car with lights flashing ahead and a fire truck to the side of the road. Yellow tape. We’re stopped for so long that the bus driver opens the front door and steps out. A woman in front of me stands up and heads for the door and I follow her because I start to feel claustrophobic.
The air outside the bus smells like it does right before it rains and the sky is low and gray. The driver talks to a police officer. A bunch of firemen stand on the far sidewalk. One of them looks at me and I point to where he’s standing and raise my eyebrows. OK? I ask. He nods his head, so I start walking. Might as well walk the rest of the way home.
Something’s burning. Rubber maybe. Something metallic. When I reach the firemen I ask him if it’s OK to walk on the sidewalk, and he says, Sure, just keep to this side. So I walk past the houses and the fire truck and then I see the car in the ditch to the right, its trunk angled up. A burgundy sedan. The driver door is open, but no one’s inside. The front dash is burnt plastic. The front of the car is smoking slightly. A broken traffic pole leans over the hood of the car and the road, and a guy in orange overalls is standing high on a gurney, fixing the electrical line.
I keep walking and end up at the intersection. I look up at the hill at the cross street and see a dog trotting down the road towards me. More like a Husky. Like a wolf, white and gray with blue eyes. Trotting down the middle of the road, right towards me. I kneel down and say, Here boy, good boy, and it slows down and it’s just about to sniff my outstretched hand when a woman behind me says, What was it?
I stand up and the wolf shies away and crosses the road. What? I say and look back at the woman. It’s the woman who got off the bus before me.
What was it back there? she says, and I say, I don’t know. An accident. I look across the street but the wolf is trotting away on the edge of the other side of the road between the shoulder and the ditch.
The woman and I keep on walking and walking. There’s no traffic at all and no bus stop in sight. The houses have changed to warehouses and farms. I notice a pay phone up ahead in the parking lot of some kind of church and turn to the woman walking behind me and ask, Want to split a taxi? And she says, Sure. So I go to the pay phone and dial 411 to get the number of a taxi company in Burnaby, and just as it’s ringing the woman says, Hey, look. And coming down the road heading towards us is our bus, and the driver stops and lets us on even though there’s no bus stop and the woman and I sit down in the same seats we sat in before the traffic stopped, and it’s as though we never got off the bus at all.
