There were a hundred and fifty people on the bridge, maybe more. The front of the crowd had turned and was beginning to step backward, uncertain about what was happening, as Letty continued to shout at them. The school bus was now backing up, a foot at a time, slow, too slow, with people stacked up behind it, some of them banging with their fists on the fenders to stop it. The crowd on the far side of the bus had continued to move forward or had stopped, confused.
Boom! Boom!
Kaiser fired two more shots and the crowd began to move back, a few tried to run, stumbling along the edges of the bridge. Some of the caravan members, who hadn’t heard what was happening, continued to press forward from the Mexican side, blocking the escape of people trying to get off the bridge, but then, like a turning tide, people began to get off, picking up Letty’s voice, shouting at the people behind them:“Hay bombas abajo del puente!”
The school bus was missing its front door and a woman jumped out of the bus, followed by another, both carrying and dragging kids, and Letty realized that the bus was full of women with small children who couldn’t keep up with the caravan on foot.
Kaiser screamed, “One minute,” and Letty ran to the rear door of the bus and began banging on it, but a woman’s face appeared in the window and she made a windshield-wiper motion with one finger, telling her that the door didn’t work. Two more women, each with a child, jumped off the bus at the front door as the bus continued to slowly back up.
Kaiser shouted “Thirty seconds.”
They were twenty yards from the end of the bridge and some of the crowd was still standing on the last slab, and Letty yelled at Kaiser, “We gotta get the kids off,” and Kaiser shouted back, “Can’t,” and he shouted,“Ten seconds,”and Letty started back to the bus’s forward door and Kaiser picked her up as though she were a heavy coil of water hose, holding her under one arm, ignoring her as she beat on his legs with her fists, and ran for the Mexican end of the bridge, smashing through the crowd like a linebacker.
Dropped her on her feet when they got off the bridge and he said, “Should have blown...”
WHOMP!
The first bomb went and a handful of people who were still on the bridge managed to leap off, as the slab nearest them tilted crazily to one side, and then,WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP!
The charges began going off, not quite simultaneously, and spans began to drop into the river and onto the riverbanks on both sides, and Letty put her hands over her ears andWHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP!
The explosions stopped; Letty took her hands away from her ears, to the screams of injured and dying people who’d gone down with the bridge.
The nearest slab had fallen fifteen or twenty feet onto the riverbank and the bus and thirty or forty walkers had gone with it. The bus was nose-down, the slab canted sideways, and the bus began totilt to the side, as though in slow motion, and then toppled over as the slab beneath it wrenched free of its moorings and fell another five feet.
Letty looked at Kaiser and shouted, “We gotta get the kids out of there...”
Kaiser shouted back, “This way,” and they went to the side of the bridge, where a railing still stuck up, and they went around the railing, and now Mexican border patrolmen and members of the crowd began to follow them down where the slab was lying on the ground under the bridge.
The people who’d been on the slab when the bombs went off were all hurt; some of them badly, broken bones, broken backs, skull fractures, people screaming for help and crying. Mexican border patrolmen were swarming down the slab, trying to give aid, one man with a tiny kit of small bandages, Band-Aids, and disinfectant ointment.
The bus door was underneath the chassis and they couldn’t get to it, but the back door had popped open a few inches and one of the Mexican border patrolman unloaded his rifle and used the barrel as a crowbar, and with somebody inside kicking at it, they managed to wedge the door open eight or ten inches, but the patrolman was too thick to squeeze through.
Letty said, “Let me! Let me!” and with Kaiser and two border patrolmen prying at the door with their hands, she managed to squeeze through.
Looking down, the seats of the bus were like a sloping ladder to a stygian hell, dark, stinking of blood and sweat and desperation. Lights began to flicker inside, as people outside began shining flashlights through the windows on what was now the top of the wrecked bus. A woman was climbing the seats toward Letty, holding a small child with blood all over the kid’s head; the mother wasshouting at her and Letty took the kid and pushed her upward to the back door, and a man on the other side of the door took her through the narrow opening, still screaming, and then the mother climbed past, trying to get out.
Letty went the other way, down and sideways. Forty people were piled up at the bottom of the bus, half of them children, all of them hurt, some trying to push out of the pile and pull others up. Letty shouted in Spanish, “Take the children up... Take them up.”
Women began climbing the seats, carrying children. Some were getting out, but in the pile at the bottom, many more were hurt too badly to move, and others had to be dead, Letty thought, twisted into impossible shapes; and some of them were small bundles of flesh and clothing.
She began to cry; cry and carry and climb, her body shaking, tears pouring down her face, handing injured children upward. Cry and carry and climb. A woman below her handed her a baby, and Letty began climbing toward the top again, and when she got to the door, three women were there. Two went through and the other started back down to bring more people up, and Letty handed the baby up to one of the Mexican border patrolmen, and as she did that, she realized something was terribly wrong with the baby’s neck and head; the baby was dead.
That nearly broke her. She slumped against a crazily tilted seat and pressed her hands to the sides of her head, weeping, and dimly heard Kaiser, “Bring the pole, bring the pole.”
The sound of his voice brought her back and she wiped the tears off her face and went back down. More women were climbing the seats, the backs of the seats functioning as narrow platforms. Children were being handed up, placed on the seats, then passed upward, and uninjured women kept trying to lift children and injured women out of the nose of the bus and pull them up to platforms...
As Letty was climbing upward with a little girl, a thick, rusty steel pole that might have held a stop sign pushed through the narrow opening of the back door and people outside began yelling, and the pole pried the door open to a point, and then with a sudden crack it was wrenched fully open and women began to climb out. Letty passed the little girl upward, and a woman below handed her a bloody toddler and she climbed up the seats and passed the child up and then border patrolmen began climbing down past her.
The bus was becoming jammed with rescuers and Letty crawled out, wet with blood and saliva and snot and urine, one sleeve nearly ripped off her blouse. She climbed out and found Kaiser there, who took her by the arm and pulled her up.
“They got it; we can’t help much more,” Letty said. She began to cry again, looking at a line of bloody, injured women, children, and a few dead bodies, now laid out on a tarp on the road, the Mexican border patrolmen working over them with towels, sheets, anything they could find to help.
Kaiser was still holding her arm, supporting her. “Wegottahelp,” he said.
“Thenyouhelp,” Letty snapped. “I’m gonna cross the fuckin’ river and kill some people.”
TWENTY-SIX
