The man beside me, Derek, wouldn’t stop talking. He spent the first forty minutes on his phone telling somebody he was about to land a “mid-seven-figure contract.” He shoved past the driver when he boarded. He stepped on my foot getting settled and didn’t look up. I just kept my crossword in my lap. I’m 77, I’ve got no interest in that kind of trouble.
Then the bus gave a hard lurch. A real stomach-dropping jolt. Derek yelped. “What the hell was that?” he said. A few minutes later the driver’s voice came through the intercom, tight and strange. “Folks, we’ve lost pressure in the rear brakes. I’m going to try and…” The speaker cut out with a burst of static.
People started to cry. Derek had gone the color of old chalk. He grabbed the transit attendant’s sleeve. “You need to fix this right now! My father owns half this city!”
That’s when the emergency partition swung open. The assistant driver stood there soaked through his shirt. He had a folded piece of paper in his hand. His eyes moved across the seats, wide and desperate. He called out over the noise, “Is there a Ms. Patton on board? A passenger named Carol Patton?”
Derek looked sideways at me and laughed. “Perfect. Hope some old relic can save us.”
I didn’t say anything back. I just set down my crossword and stood up. The assistant driver’s mouth went slack. He looked from the paper to my face and back again. “Ma’am? You’re… you’re the NTSB engineer who wrote the certification report on this vehicle’s…
The Paper in His Hand
The full sentence was: “…brake pressure system, Series 7 transit configuration, 2019 revision.”
Yes. That was mine.
I wrote that report in the fall of 2018. Fourteen months of field testing, three rounds of peer review, one very ugly Tuesday in a conference room in Washington where a man named Gerald Fitch told me my tolerances were too conservative and I told him he could sign his name to the report if he felt that way. He didn’t. I retired the following year. The report stood.
The assistant driver, whose name tag said Kenny, was maybe twenty-six years old and he looked like he’d been running on nothing but adrenaline and bad luck for the past ten minutes. He held the paper out to me. It was a laminated emergency protocol card, the kind bolted inside the partition door. Someone had written across the top in red marker: Call NTSB, Series 7 brake fault, see certification contact.
The contact listed was my old office number. Which I hadn’t had in five years. But here I was anyway.
“Walk me to the front,” I said.
Kenny walked fast. I walked faster. Derek said something behind me. I didn’t catch it and I didn’t try.
What the Driver Was Dealing With
His name was Marcus. Mid-forties, big shoulders, the kind of steady hands you want on a steering wheel. He had the bus in the right lane doing about thirty-two, holding it there, working the engine compression to bleed speed. He knew what he was doing. He just didn’t know how much runway he had left.
“How long since you felt the rear go?” I asked him.
“Six, seven minutes. She’s still got front pressure but it’s soft. I don’t know how soft.”
The route was a long downhill grade into the Claremont interchange. I knew this road. I’d driven it myself a hundred times when I was still commuting to the regional office on Teller Street. Three miles of gentle drop, then a hard left at the bottom where the road flattened out near the rail crossing. If you went into that turn too fast, you went into a concrete barrier. The barrier would stop the bus. It would also do considerable damage to everyone sitting in it.
“What’s your next turnoff?”
“Hartwell Avenue. Half a mile.”
Hartwell was an uphill residential street. Steep enough to kill the speed naturally. Narrow, but not so narrow you couldn’t thread a bus through it if you were careful.
“Take Hartwell,” I said.
Marcus glanced at me. “It’s residential.”
“It’s also a thirty-foot grade and there’s a cul-de-sac at the top. You’ll stop in three hundred feet.”
He didn’t ask me how I knew. He just nodded and got on the radio to dispatch.
What I Was Not Thinking About
I was not thinking about Derek.
I was not thinking about the crossword, which I’d left on my seat with four clues still blank. Thirty-two across had been bothering me since Millfield Station. Former Yugoslav republic, five letters. I still hadn’t got it.
I was not thinking about whether I remembered the specs correctly, though some part of my brain was running the numbers without being asked. Series 7 rear brake assembly. Hydraulic pressure nominal at 1,850 PSI. Fault threshold at 600. Bleed rate under compression braking, roughly 40 PSI per minute under normal load. We’d been losing pressure for seven minutes. That put us somewhere around 1,570 PSI if the fault was a slow leak. Enough for the fronts to hold on a gentle grade. Not enough for a hard stop.
Hartwell would work. It had to work.
What I was actually thinking about, if I’m honest, was my daughter Ruthie. She’d called that morning to ask if I wanted her to drive me to my appointment and I’d said no, I’ll take the bus, I’m not an invalid. She would find this very funny later. I planned to let her.
Hartwell Avenue
Marcus hit the signal at the last possible second. The bus leaned hard into the turn.
Somebody screamed. A few somebodies. The back end swung wide and Marcus caught it, both hands working, and then we were climbing. The engine groaned. The speed dropped fast. Forty, thirty, twenty-two, fifteen.
The cul-de-sac at the top of Hartwell is a wide circle with a grass median in the middle and four ranch houses around the perimeter. Two of them have low decorative fences. One has a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. Marcus brought the bus around the circle slow and easy and rolled the front wheels up against the curb on the far side, and that was that.
We stopped.
Complete stop. Gentle, almost. Like parking.
Marcus put it in neutral and sat there for a second with both hands still on the wheel. Then he picked up the radio and called it in.
I went back to my seat. Someone was clapping. Then a few more people. Then most of the bus. Kenny was leaning against the partition door looking like he might actually cry. I picked up my crossword.
Former Yugoslav republic, five letters.
Bosnia? No, six. Kosovo? Five letters. K-O-S-O-V-O. Six again. I counted on my fingers.
What Derek Did
He didn’t say anything for a while. The bus was still running, heat on, while we waited for the transit authority vehicles. People were on their phones. A woman two rows up was talking to what sounded like her mother, voice still shaky. A teenage boy near the back had apparently slept through most of it and was confused about why we were parked in someone’s cul-de-sac.
Derek was looking at his hands.
After maybe five minutes he said, “I didn’t know.”
I didn’t look up from the crossword.
“I mean,” he said, “I didn’t know who you were.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said.
“That was rude. What I said.”
I put my pen down and looked at him. He was maybe thirty-five. Good suit, badly wrinkled now. The chalk color had faded but he still looked like a man who’d recently been frightened down to his foundations, which I understood. It’s not a comfortable feeling.
“Derek,” I said. “It was rude before you knew who I was too.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
“The driver. When you boarded. You shoved past him.”
He looked at the floor.
“That man just saved your life,” I said. “Him and Kenny both. I just told them which street to turn on. That’s all I did.”
I picked my pen back up.
Former Yugoslav republic. I tried it again. Five letters. Then I thought about the spelling and realized I’d been miscounting Kosovo this whole time. Five letters. K-O-S-O-V-O.
Wait. That’s six.
Oh, for goodness’ sake.
After
The transit authority sent three vehicles and a supervisor named Phil Garza who shook my hand for about fifteen seconds too long and kept saying “incredible” in a way that I found slightly exhausting. Marcus got a lot of handshakes. Kenny sat on the curb and drank a bottle of water someone gave him and stared at the middle distance. I sat with him for a few minutes while we waited for the replacement bus. He didn’t need me to say anything and I didn’t say anything. We just sat there.
Ruthie called at four-fifteen, which was when the story hit the local news. Her first words were “Mother, I saw the ticker on Channel 7, are you all right?” and her second words, after I told her I was fine, were “I told you I’d drive you.”
“You did,” I said. “You were right.”
“You’re going to let me say that again later, aren’t you.”
“Probably a few times.”
She laughed. She sounded like she’d been scared. I let her be right about the driving thing because it seemed like a fair trade.
The NTSB called two days later. They wanted a debrief, which I expected. They also asked if I’d be willing to consult on the Series 7 fault investigation, which I also expected. I said yes to the debrief and told them I’d think about the consulting. I’m retired. I like my crosswords. I like the bus, actually, brake failures notwithstanding.
I still haven’t gotten thirty-two across.
Former Yugoslav republic, five letters. I’ve tried every combination. I’m starting to think the puzzle has a misprint. That happens more than people realize.
—
If this one stuck with you, pass it along to someone who needs it today.
For more incredible tales of family drama, check out My Grandfather Handed Me a Check I Thought Was a Joke – Then My Father Called and Told Me to Bring the Money Home or discover what happened when My Son Brought a Manila Envelope and Told Me It Would “Simplify Everything”. You might also enjoy the story about how My Son Called Another Man “Father” in Front of the Whole Backyard.
