Crash

Last week a man got hit by a car in front of my bus stop. It was 16 degrees below zero with windchill. The first person to stop used his truck to shield the man from traffic. He called 911 and took off his coat, draping it over the man's legs. This is how long it took for me to understand what had happened.

More people stopped to help, bringing blankets from their cars to drape over the injured man until he was lying beneath a large mound. The woman next to me was smoking a cigarette and crying. "He just ran across," she said again and again to no one in particular. A suitcase lay on the ground beside him. I imagined that he was headed to the airport and saw the bus coming, dashed across the street to catch it because who knows when the next one will be by. Maybe he was running late. I could see the bottoms of his shoes. One of them was pointing the wrong way.

An old woman navigated her Caddy into the gas station parking lot and fished a rainbow-striped blanket from her trunk. She added it to the growing pile on top of the man, and painstakingly knelt down beside him in the street. I could hear her reassuring him. She might have been stroking his hair.

When my bus huffed up 10 minutes later the police were still absent. I climbed aboard, but the crying woman stayed behind. Maybe she was waiting to see how it would turn out.