For six months a biker parked his motorcycle in the bus lane outside my son’s school every morning. So one wet Thursday I marched over in my orange volunteer vest, rapped my clipboard on his gas tank and said, “Men like you don’t sit outside an elementary school for no reason.” He didn’t argue. He looked down the highway.
My son Idris was ten, in fourth grade behind that fence, and I’d signed up for drop-off duty so I could watch the gate myself.
The bike was a black bagger with hard saddlebags, backed into the yellow hatch marks where the buses swing wide.
He rode in at 7:30.
He was gone by 8:05.
In between he sat on it with a sleeve of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells into his fist and pocketing them.
Early sixties, I guessed.
Short silver beard, a gray horseshoe mustache, old ink gone soft and green down both arms.
He never got off the bike. He never came near the fence.
He never once looked at the kids.
That should have helped. It didn’t.
By April the mothers in the drop-off line had a name for him.
“Creeper’s back,” Antonia said every morning from her minivan window, like she was reading the weather.
Somebody put his picture on the parents’ page. Forty-one comments.
Nobody called anybody.
So I did it myself.
It was September, warm and drizzling.
I cut between two minivans and brought the clipboard down on his tank hard enough to make it ring.
“You’ve got two minutes to tell me why you’re parked at an ELEMENTARY school every day,” I said. “Or I call the sheriff.”
He looked at the clipboard.
Then past me, at the highway, where it bends out of sight behind the feed store.
“Are you deaf?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Then move your bike.”
His eyes went to his left mirror. The one tipped down the road.
I already had my phone out. I told the dispatcher a man on a motorcycle had been watching children since spring, loud enough for him to hear it.
He didn’t even turn his head.
At 7:46 he thumbed the starter.
He rolled out of the hatch marks, and I stood there with the phone on my ear thinking that was the end of it.
He didn’t turn toward town.
He rode straight to the shoulder, swung the bike sideways across the near lane and stopped. Hazards blinking. Left boot down.
His right arm went straight out, palm flat, toward the curve.
A log truck came around the bend.
I heard the brakes before I saw it.
It stopped maybe sixty feet off his front tire.
And out of the ditch on the far side, where the path comes down from the trailer court, a little girl in a purple coat two sizes too big crossed the highway behind his back wheel.
She didn’t run.
She didn’t look at the truck.
She tapped his saddlebag twice going by, the way you’d tap a doorframe on your way out of the house.
Then she came through the side gate, right past me, with the dispatcher still saying “Ma’am?” in my ear.
He rolled back into the hatch marks and killed the engine.
The truck pulled through. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel at him.
I hung up.
I bent down to the girl. “Honey, do you know that man?”
“He’s my crossing,” she said.
And she went inside.
Her name was Chloe. She was eight.
She lived in Pine Hollow, on the other side of the highway, which sits just inside the mile-and-a-half line.
That means NO BUS.
There’s NO CROSSWALK and NO LIGHT. There’s a curve, a 55 sign and a steady line of log trucks coming down out of the hills outside Mena.
Her mother, Valentina, clocks in at the truck stop at six. She’d asked the county for a crosswalk four times.
I walked back to the bike. My knees felt wrong.
“Why didn’t you just SAY something?”
He shook the seeds in the sleeve.
“You didn’t ask me anything,” he said. “You told me.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Since spring break. Hung had it through summer school.” He nodded at the gas station across the highway. “There’s seven of us. I take Monday through Thursday.”
“But why?”
He looked at that curve a long time.
“I owe that bend one,” he said.
The cruiser pulled in at 7:58.
Deputy Luke Vanderhoof was maybe thirty, citation book open before his door shut.
“I called too fast, he’s helping a little girl cross, I was wrong,” I said.
“Ma’am, you reported a man watching children,” he said. “That’s on the record now. I have to address it.”
He wrote him up for stopping in a school bus zone.
Then he wrote him up again for obstructing a state highway. $185 and $240.
“One more call that you blocked that lane and you’re riding in the back of my car. Understand?”
Reynaldo Juarez folded both tickets in half and slid them into his vest.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The principal, Margaret Caldwell, stood behind the glass doors the whole time with her arms crossed.
She’d watched that girl cross since March.
She didn’t come out.
That night I found his picture on the parents’ page. Mine was the eleventh comment.
“He’s not here for any good reason, trust me.”
I deleted it. It didn’t fix anything.
Friday I got to the gate at 7:20.
The deputy’s cruiser was parked in the hatch marks. Engine running. Vanderhoof inside with a gas station coffee.
No bike.
7:40. 7:43. 7:45.
Across the highway Chloe came down through the weeds in that purple coat and stopped at the lip of the ditch, where she always stopped.
She looked at the empty hatch marks.
Then she looked at me.
Behind the curve a truck geared down.
And from the gas station on the far side I heard engines turn over. Not one. SEVEN.
Vanderhoof set his coffee on the dash and opened his door.
7:45 on Friday
He didn’t walk toward Chloe.
He walked to the shoulder and faced the gas station with one hand up, palm out, the way you tell a dog to stay.
Seven bikes rolled out to where the gas station’s gravel meets the road and stopped there in a line. Engines running. Nobody put a tire on the highway.
Reynaldo was on the end, helmet off.
The truck came around the bend loaded with pine and never touched its brakes. The wind off it pushed my vest flat against me.
Chloe didn’t move from the lip of the ditch. Somebody had taught her that much.
The deputy still had his back to her.
My paddle was hooked on the fence where I always hung it, the red STOP side facing the parking lot. I’d never once carried it past the curb.
I took it down.
I walked out past the hatch marks and the cruiser’s bumper, into the near lane, and held it up toward the curve with both hands.
The next one was a pickup pulling a stock trailer. It slowed. It stopped.
Chloe came down out of the ditch and across, behind me.
She didn’t tap anything. She went straight past me to the gate.
“Ma’am,” Vanderhoof said. “Out of the road.”
I got out of the road.
Across the highway the seven of them shut their engines off one at a time, and Reynaldo put his helmet back on and rode toward town. The other six stayed where they were.
Behind the glass, Margaret Caldwell uncrossed her arms and pushed one of the doors open.
“Dena,” she said. “My office. Leave the vest on for now.”
The walker column
I got the vest in August, the week before school started.
Caldwell ran the volunteer meeting in the cafeteria herself. Twelve of us at the long tables, the floor still sticky from whatever summer camp had been in there. She handed out the vests from a cardboard box, then the paddles, then the clipboards.
Then a laminated card with eight rules on it.
Rule four said volunteers do not enter the roadway under any circumstance.
She read that one out loud. “The highway is the state’s,” she said. “The curb is ours. Please don’t make me say it twice.”
She said it twice anyway, at the end.
I’d signed up because of a Tuesday two years before. Idris was in second grade. He came home and told me a man in a pickup had pulled up to the fence at recess and asked him what time it was.
That was all. The man asked the time and drove off.
Nobody ever found out who he was. Nobody looked very hard. I asked at the office and the secretary said, “Oh, that was probably somebody’s granddad.”
Probably.
So I put on the vest. Every morning I stood at the side gate and looked at every grown man who came within a hundred feet of that fence, and I was proud of it.
The clipboard came with a roster the office printed every Monday. Car riders on the left. Bus riders by bus number in the middle. Walkers on the right.
I checked the car riders off. I counted the bus kids as they came through. That was the job.
The walker column had one name in it every single week.
Chloe M., gr. 3, Pine Hollow.
I’d read it maybe sixty times. I never once asked myself which way Pine Hollow was.
Caldwell’s office was down the hall from the front doors, with a window onto the side lot. She sat. I didn’t.
Behind her desk, on the corkboard, was the same Monday roster, pinned up with a red tack.
From where I stood I could read the walker column.
Margaret Caldwell’s office
“Sit down, Dena.”
I sat down.
“Thursday you made a report to the sheriff’s office,” she said. “The deputy came and dealt with it. Today you walked into a state highway wearing a vest with this school’s name on the back. Do you know what our insurance carrier says about that?”
“She was standing in the ditch.”
“I’m aware of where she stands.”
“She crosses every day. You’ve seen her do it.”
“Students who live inside the line are their family’s responsibility until 7:50,” she said. “That’s the district’s policy, not mine. What happens on that road before the bell is an arrangement between a parent and whoever she’s made it with. I’m not part of it. I can’t be part of it.”
“It’s seven men on motorcycles.”
“It’s seven men nobody in this building has run a background check on,” she said. “Including the one you called about. You were right to call. I’d have called myself.”
She held out her hand.
I looked at it.
“The vest,” she said. “And the paddle. You can come back on drop-off in January if you want. We’ll talk about it then.”
I took the vest off and folded it and put it on her desk. The paddle was still out in the hall where I’d leaned it against the trophy case. She said she’d have Sheri pick it up.
I kept the clipboard. Nobody asked for it. It was mine, a cheap brown one from the dollar store, and the roster was still under the clip from Monday.
In the car I called the sheriff’s office and asked to take back my report.
The woman who answered was nice about it.
“You can’t really take back a call, hon,” she said. “It’s logged. If you want to add a statement, you can do that. The tickets go before the judge now. That’s out of the deputy’s hands.”
“Can I see what got written down?”
“You can request the incident report. Five dollars, at the front window. Ten business days.”
I drove over at lunch and filled out the form standing up at the counter.
When I came back for pickup at three, Antonia was two cars ahead of me in the line.
She leaned out her minivan window and gave me a thumbs-up.
Hung
The gas station across the highway sells diesel, ice, night crawlers and pie by the slice. Saturday morning I walked in and asked the girl at the register if she knew anybody called Hung.
She pointed out the window.
He was at pump two with a big touring bike, wiping the windshield with a paper towel. Older than Reynaldo. Reading glasses on a cord.
“You’re the clipboard,” he said.
“Yes.”
He kept wiping.
I told him I wanted to pay the tickets. I had an envelope in my purse with $425 in it, twenties from the ATM by the feed store. I held it out.
“He won’t take that,” Hung said.
“Could you give it to him?”
“I could. He’d give it back to you. Then he’d be mad at me.” He threw the paper towel in the can. “Put it away.”
“Why does he do it? He said he owes the bend.”
Hung looked at me over his glasses for a while. I think he was deciding whether I’d earned it.
“He drove log trucks for twenty-two years,” he said. “Came around that curve loaded one morning in ’98 and there was a boy on a bicycle in his lane. Paper route. He stood on everything he had. His bumper touched the back tire.”
“The boy was okay?”
“The boy was fine. The bike was bent.” He put his glasses up on his head. “He says that bend let him have one. So he owes it one back. That’s all I know and all he’s going to tell you.”
“What happens Monday?”
“Monday Nam takes it, from this side. We don’t go in the road. We just stand where the trucks can see us.” He shrugged. “They slow down for a row of bikes. Not all of them.”
Then he told me where Valentina worked.
The truck stop is four miles south. She was on till two. I sat at the counter and ordered coffee I didn’t drink, and when she brought it she knew who I was before I said a word.
“You’re the one who called,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Chloe said a lady with a stop sign walked her yesterday.”
“That was me too.”
She wiped the counter in front of me even though it was clean.
“I asked the county four times,” she said. “Three times they said a crosswalk on a state highway is the state’s business. The fourth time the chairman of the road committee called me back. Mr. Pawlowski. He said there’s something called a hazard route. If the walk’s dangerous, the district can bus a kid inside the line.”
“So why didn’t they?”
“He said they need the school to say a child actually walks it.”
“And?”
“They told me the school wrote back. Nobody ever showed me the letter.”
The August minutes
The county puts its committee minutes online as scanned PDFs. Crooked pages, a coffee ring on one of them.
I sat at the kitchen table Sunday night after Idris went to bed and started with June.
June was culverts. July was a gravel contract and a complaint about a neighbor’s goats.
August 19 had a line for Pine Hollow.
Item 6. Ms. V. requests hazard route designation for students walking from Pine Hollow across the state highway to the elementary school. Fourth request.
Under it, one more paragraph.
Committee notes correspondence received from M. Caldwell, principal, stating that the school has no enrolled students who cross the highway at this location. Request not advanced.
I read it a few times.
Then I got the clipboard out of my purse.
The roster was still under the clip, curled at the corner where my thumb had held it in the rain. Car riders. Bus riders. Walkers.
Chloe M., gr. 3, Pine Hollow.
I flipped back through the old ones I’d never thrown away, the stack I kept under the newest sheet so the clip had something to bite. I found the week of August 18 and pulled it out and put it on the table next to the laptop.
The office printed it on the Monday. The committee read her letter on the Tuesday.
Same name. Same week.
At the top of the roster, in the small gray print the school’s system puts on everything it spits out, it said Generated by: M. Caldwell.
The road committee
The incident report came on Wednesday, two days early. Two pages, five dollars.
Most of it was me. What I said to the dispatcher, word for word, with the time. Caller states male on motorcycle has been watching children since spring.
Under that was Vanderhoof’s part from Thursday, and then a line from Friday. 0745. Observed female minor approx. 8 yrs cross state highway from west ditch, unescorted. Volunteer entered roadway with stop paddle. Advised volunteer.
And at the bottom, a box called Prior calls, this address.
There was one.
08/14. Request for added a.m. patrol, school zone, re: motorcycle parked in bus lane. Caller: M. Caldwell.
Five days before her letter went to the county.
I took the report to the sheriff’s office front window and asked whether Deputy Vanderhoof could be at the road committee meeting Tuesday night. The woman said she’d pass it along.
He was in the back row when I came in. Valentina was in the second row in her truck stop shirt. Caldwell was at the front, because I’d asked the chairman, Mr. Pawlowski, to put Pine Hollow on the agenda again and he’d invited the school.
I’d signed up for public comment. They gave me three minutes.
I read my own call out loud. The whole thing, off the report. Male on motorcycle has been watching children since spring. Then I read the Friday line. Then I said Chloe had been on the school’s walker roster every week since August, and I put the August 18 roster and the minutes on the table in front of Mr. Pawlowski.
Then I sat down.
Caldwell didn’t wait to be asked.
“I want to be very clear about what that letter says,” she said. “No enrolled students cross. Assigned to cross. The district does not assign any student to walk across a state highway, and I’m not going to sign something that says we do, because the moment I put my name to that, every child in that trailer court is my liability before the bell. I have four hundred and twelve students. I have one secretary. I have no crossing guard, because the county won’t fund one and the district won’t either. And I’m supposed to certify a route?”
“You printed her name,” Valentina said.
“I printed a roster.” Caldwell turned around in her chair. “I didn’t put your daughter in that ditch, Valentina. I’m sorry. I didn’t. I’m not the one who rented inside the line.”
Mr. Pawlowski had the incident report in his hand.
“Mrs. Caldwell, you called the sheriff on the man who was crossing her.”
“I called about a motorcycle parked in a bus lane at an elementary school. Any principal in this county would have.”
“Five days before you wrote us.”
“Those two things have nothing to do with each other.”
“Then why’d you want him gone?”
“Because I can’t have that,” she said. “I can’t have seven men standing in for a crossing guard I don’t have. Because when one of them misses a morning, and one of them will, it’s my school on the news.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
The deputy stood up in the back.
“I timed it Friday, sir,” Vanderhoof said. “Eleven seconds from her foot leaving that ditch to the first truck. That was with nobody in the road.”
He sat back down.
Mr. Pawlowski wrote something on the minutes in pen.
“We’ll send it to the state with the designation tonight,” he said. “District can have a bus stop at Pine Hollow by the first.”
Caldwell picked up her bag and left before the next item.
In the hallway Vanderhoof held the door for me.
“The tickets stand, ma’am,” he said. “That’s the judge now.”
Bus 14
The bus came on a Monday, the first of the month, at 7:32.
It swung wide into the yellow hatch marks, the way the paint says to, and folded its door open at the side gate.
Chloe got off in the purple coat. It still didn’t fit her.
I was in the drop-off line in my car, four back, no vest. Sheri has the paddle now. Antonia was right in front of me and didn’t look in her mirror once.
The tickets were paid, both of them, in cash. I went to the clerk’s window with my envelope the week after the meeting and she said a man had come in the Monday before. She wouldn’t tell me what he looked like. She didn’t have to.
Across the highway, seven bikes were backed in at the gas station.
Reynaldo was on the end with his sleeve of seeds.
The car in front of me moved up. I moved up.
I lifted two fingers off the wheel.
If somebody you know has already written off the man who sits in the same place every single morning, pass this along to them before they ask him nothing.
For more unexpected encounters with riders and kids, read about the photograph tucked in her ladybug pocket and the blue helmet that cost $19.99. And for a school fundraiser that took a messy turn, there’s the biker and seven coolers of lemonade.
