Rosie herded the kids into the front rows, three and four to a seat. Too rough; Rosie was always too rough with other kids, but it didn’t matter now.
“We’re playing a game,” Bea sang out in her best sunny voice and smiled into the rearview mirror. “Let’s see how fast La Vitesse can stop. I’ll honk my horn ten times. You all count with me. On the tenth honk, I’ll hit the brakes. Everyone hang on tight. Brace yourselves, okay?”
In the rearview, hoods and toques framed twenty pairs of big, scared eyes. They knew something was wrong. Kids always did.
“It’ll be fun,” she said, smiling wider. “Ready?”
The kids counted along as she honked. She hoped the horn might drive the dragon off, but she’d already tried that and it hadn’t worked.
On the tenth honk, they were on a good flat straightaway. Decent gravel, no potholes or washboard. Shallow ditches on either side, lined with slender young spruce. If La Vitesse skidded off the road, they’d be okay. The bus would stick, though; Bea had faith.
When she slammed on the brakes, one kid screamed. Several whimpered. The dragon hit the back of the bus with a hollow thunk. La Vitesse skidded but stayed square in the middle of the road. Bea shifted to first gear and slammed the gas. La Vitesse’s engine roared, then screamed. Bea let the revs build and shifted to second, her foot flat on the floor.
In the side-view, the dragon lay crumpled on the gravel, wings canted like a broken tent.
Bea held her breath, flicking her gaze from road to mirror to road. Dead, she hoped. Let it be dead.
The dragon lifted its head and yawned. A tongue of blue flame licked from between its fangs. It clawed the gravel with the hinges of its wings and staggered to its feet. In the early morning light, its eyes sparked a keen and murderous ice-white.
Bea had seen the first dragon in 1981, two years back, when she was bringing home a bus full of soccer players after a tournament in Jasper.
She’d been cruising east along the Athabasca River, heading toward the Jasper park gates. The sunset light turned the mountains mellow orange, and the trees threw long, spear-shaped shadows across the highway. La Vitesse’s speedometer was two fingers below the speed limit. The wheels hummed on the gently curving highway. Bea was thinking about making barbeque ribs for Sunday supper when she spotted the dragon perched on the massive cliff-edge of Roche Miette.
On the mountain high above the highway, the dragon’s red scales gleamed bloody in the sun. It stretched its wings and beat them once, then pointed its narrow head at the highway below. It dropped off the cliff, kited low, and disappeared behind the trees.
When La Vitesse rounded the curve, the red dragon hunched spread-winged atop the dynamite-blasted rock face where mountain met highway, a bighorn sheep clamped in its jaws.
“Look,” Bea squeaked. But the kids were making too much noise to hear. She floored the gas and watched the dragon recede in the rearview mirror. If she busted the speed limit all the way home, nobody noticed.
Twenty kids, and Rosie made twenty-one. The youngest not yet six, and Rosie the oldest at nearly sixteen. More than half of them were crying.
“Brake check all done!” Bea’s voice was high with tension. She hunched in her seat and twisted from side to side, scanning the sky through the side-view mirrors. “The brakes are fine! La Vitesse is a good bus.”
She patted the dashboard like it was a horse.
“Mom. They heard it hit us,” Rosie growled. “Fucking tell them.”
“A moose ran up the ditch,” Bea said. “Gave us a little knock on the bum but we’re fine.”
The kids wailed louder. Tony Lalonde yanked his toque down over his eyes and howled.
“The moose is fine, too,” Bea insisted. “Everything’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. The dragon wasn’t hurt. It flew a dozen car lengths behind, wings beating hard, mouth gaping. On every downstroke, that blue flame licked the road. Was it hot enough to melt her tires? Probably. She couldn’t afford to find out.
Behind her, Rosie stood in the aisle, surfing the bumps. When the dragon tore the emergency exit off its hinges and lunged up the aisle, Rosie would be its first victim. It would rip her daughter’s head off and slaughter the kids one by one while Bea sat behind the wheel. She had to think of something.
“Rosie, honey,” she said in the sweetest voice she could muster. “Come and drive the bus.”
When Bea reported the red dragon to the Hinton RCMP, the Mountie at the front desk had just smiled.
“Imagination goes wild in the mountains,” he said. “I had a coal miner in here the other day saying a giant black cat was lurking around his dragline.”
“Yeah, okay, but have you been to Jasper lately?” Bea asked. “You know the bighorn sheep along the highway? The ones that graze under Roche Miette? They’re gone. All of them.”
The Mountie smirked. “Last summer a bunch of campers said they saw a Bigfoot at Jarvis Lake.”
Bea gave up. He was from Toronto. What did he know? Nothing.
Bea and her family weren’t coal miners and they sure weren’t campers. The mountains weren’t terra incognita to her. She’d been born in the bush, like her parents and their parents and so on back all the generations. Her ancestors lived in Jasper before it was a park, until they were kicked out and resettled in Cadomin. Those Rocky Mountain ranges were her true home, so when Bea said she saw a dragon, she saw it. No matter what some Mountie said.
“You want me to drive La Vitesse?” Rosie said. “Are you fucking kidding?”
From the back of the bus came a high-pitched rasping sound, like metal on metal, and if Bea had been unsure, she wasn’t any longer.
“I’m not kidding. Take the wheel, please.”
They exchanged positions awkwardly. Bea’s ample hips didn’t leave much room, but Rosie slid in behind her. What mattered most—after staying on the road—was keeping pressure on the gas pedal. Bea hung from the grab rail and stretched to keep her toe on the pedal, like a swimmer testing the water.
“Let go, let go, I got it.” Rosie dug her shoulder into her mother’s hip, hard.
“Okay, honey. Keep it above fifty, even on the curves. Floor it on the straightaways. And if you see anyone coming, lean on the horn and don’t let up.” Bea grabbed the fire extinguisher from the stepwell. When she stood, Joan Cardinal glared at her from under her glossy black bangs.
“I’m going to tell on you,” Joan said, fully thirteen and fierce.
“That’s okay, honey. You do that.” Bea cradled the fire extinguisher like a baby. “Let’s play another game. Here are the rules. Everybody stay in your seat. Don’t get up. Hold tight to your seat buddies, stay quiet, and do everything I say. If you do, we’ll stop at Dairy Queen on the last day before Easter break. My treat.”
Every kid’s mouth dropped open. Ice cream was the bus driver’s secret weapon.
“Sundaes or cones?” said Sylvana Lachance, ten years old and already a master of negotiation.
“That depends on how good you are.” Bea gave them a big motherly smile. “Now take off your snowsuits.”
Rosie only had her learner’s license but she’d been driving since she was ten. Out in the bush, all kids drove early. She’s learned on Bea’s rusty Chevy Blazer, a four-speed with a sticky clutch, and had been driving it with confidence for years. Maybe the Blazer was nothing like La Vitesse, but Bea had no choice. She couldn’t do anything about the dragon while stuck in the driver’s seat.