Darren in the Van

Darren and I made friends right away. On the first day I picked him up in the school bus I drove, he called out to me from the back.

“Hey bus driver!” he said.

“Yeah Darren?”

“Yes means no and no means yes!”

“Is that what they taught you in kindergarten today?”

“No, I figured that out myself.”

Sometimes we’d talk, or sometimes we’d just sit silently together in our pointless trajectory across the suburbs.

It wasn’t a real school bus, it was a van. Darren was 5, and for some reason his kindergarten program ended more than an hour earlier than the ones at other schools. Once he’d climbed aboard, we headed off across the valley to pick up Josh at 12:30. We’d sit in the van for about 20 minutes to wait there. Then we went back to the private school where I worked. This struck me as kind of insane for poor Darren in the van with me, driving back and forth across the valley for no reason. I talked to the director of the school about it.

“Cindy, can’t I just take Darren back here at 11 instead of keeping him in the van with me for almost two hours?”

“No. His parents won’t pay the extra for him to have the last part of his kindergarten day here, so this is how I’ve solved that problem.”

It didn’t surprise me. Her husband was a lawyer and they’d set up this school as kind of a large-scale baby-sitting program for their other lawyer friends and some people like Darren’s parents, I suppose, who had the misfortune of happening upon it.

So Darren and I made the best of it. I taught him songs I remembered from elementary school, like “The Cherry Tree.”

White in the sunshine, green in the rain
Leaning out from a hill at the top of the plain
The cherry tree watches the people who go
Down the hill fast, up the hill slow

He’d sing with me, but he wasn’t all that into it. But I was saving for a trip across Europe and I knew a little French, so I figured I’d practice with him – and that, he loved. “Un! Deux! Trois!” he’d shout, repeating after me. I taught him some colors, too. “Rouge! Noir!” When Josh got in the van, they’d show each other their drawings and talk about their families and their pets and what they saw on TV and what they did over the weekend. Sometimes we even practiced a little French together. The three of us were having a pretty good time.

One day, though, we drove to Josh’s school and waited as usual, but when kindergarten got out – no Josh. I walked into the office to ask about him and the woman there told me she was sorry, she was supposed to have gone out to the van to tell me that he would be off school for two weeks. His parents had taken him on a trip.

OK, I said to myself. Cindy doesn’t know or she would’ve told me, probably. This means I’ve got two hours to kill every day. If I tell Cindy, she’ll make an issue about Darren’s parents not paying and she’ll find some other scheme to deal with him, maybe even crazier than having him spend two hours in the van. And she’d find something for me to do, too, like wash windows or help serve lunch. I decided hanging out with Darren would be more fun.

So the next day, when I picked him up at his school I said:

“We don’t have to pick up Josh. Whaddya wanna do?”

“I dunno. Shouldn’t we go to school?”

“Well, we could if you want to. But I asked them and they said you weren’t in the program until the afternoon. Tell you what, I’m going to the bank and then I’m going to go say hi to a friend. Wanna come?”

“Sure.”

So I took him to the bank. I didn’t think the tellers would notice I had a 5-year-old with me, but they knew I was another 19-year-old Valley stoner like them, so they did.

“Is that your little brother?” one of them asked.

I explained I was a school bus driver and I had a little extra time so I was running some errands. Then I went up to Mike’s house. He didn’t think there was anything unusual about me dropping by before noon with a 5-year-old. He knew I was driving the van and I’d told him about some of the kids. I introduced them once we got inside.

Mike had just woken up and was about to have cereal. He poured a bowl for Darren, too. Then he found a channel still showing cartoons that late in the morning. They watched cartoons and ate together. I browsed through Mike’s parents’ copy of Newsweek on the family room table.

“Do you guys like alligators?” Darren asked us.

“They’re OK,” Mike said.

“I guess I like ’em,” I said to Darren. “Do you?”

“I love alligators.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re the closest things we’ve got to dinosaurs!”

We killed half an hour or so that way – we talked about helicopters, too, and we all agreed they were pretty great, along with trumpets, pianos and guitars – then I took Darren back for day care with kids his own age and headed out for my afternoon pickups.

The next day, though, I really didn’t know what Darren and I could do to waste time, so we took a drive around the Valley. I drove to the top of a hill that looked out on a huge expanse of chapparel, an undulating plain covered with brush that would turn into tumbleweeds when summer came. They were going to build a freeway there. It had been a foggy morning, and there was still some mist clinging to the barren landscape.

Darren and I climbed from the van to stand on the ridge and take in the view. We were out of our usual element of storefront-lined avenues and suburban tract homes in the neighborhoods behind them. It looked otherwordly up there.

“You know where we are?” I asked him.

“No.”

“This is where people go when they die.”

He looked up at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. A cool breeze blew over us, tousling his hair slightly.

“Is my dog here?”

I felt bad immediately.

“No – ” I was about to tell him I was just messing with him. I didn’t want him climbing out of his window at three in the morning and trying to find his way up there to look for his dog. But before I could, he asked:

“Is my grandma here?” He was getting intense. I knew I had to calm him down.

“Darren, Darren, I was just teasing. Man. Don’t take me so seriously. It’s just a field. I was just kidding. They’re gonna build a freeway here. That’s why there’s nothing up here. It’s just a field.”

He was still looking at me.

We got back in the van. He was silent.

“You know I was just kidding, right?” I asked him as we drove away.

“No.”

He didn’t believe me when I said I was kidding. He thought I’d showed him where people – and dogs – go when they die. He figured I was trying to cover it up.

I pulled over and stopped the van and turned around to look at him.

“Darren, you gotta believe me. Nobody knows what happens when you die. Nobody knows. Some people believe in heaven. Some people don’t. But nobody knows. It’s a mystery. But one thing you gotta know, guy: That field I just showed you has nothing to do with it. I was just kidding.”

I had forgotten what it was like to be 5. And I’ll never know what it was like to be Darren, Mr. Yes-Means-No.

“You believe me, now, right?” I asked him when we got back to the school. He just stared at me. I could tell what he was thinking: “You let me in on a secret and now you’re trying to tell me it’s not the truth.”

Cindy saw us and asked me where Josh was. I gave Darren a signal to go ahead to his classroom and explained that the woman at Josh’s school told me he went on a trip with his parents.

“Yeah, I just got the note on that. So where were you?” I had underestimated her attention to detail. One kid, two kids, one hour, two hours – I really didn’t think she’d notice.

“I took Darren with me to gas up the van.”

“All this time?”

“I talked to the guy at the gas station for a while. I had him check the van over. Then we went for a drive. You told me you didn’t want Darren here too early, so I was taking as long as possible.”

I could see the gears working in her lawyer-wife head: “Should I challenge him? What’s the upside? What’s the downside?” She decided to walk away.

A couple of days later, though, she called me into her office.

“I’ve had some complaints.”

“About …?”

“Well, some of the parents said you take their kids to the doughnut shop.”

“That’s Joan. She used to work at Winchell’s. They give her free doughnuts. It’s a treat for the kids. She told me she does it sometimes. I wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t give me free doughnuts.”

“And Darren said you took him to a restaurant.”

“Nope. Never happened.” Where’d he get that?

“And to the bank.”

“I stopped at the bank for a minute that day I didn’t have to pick up Josh. I was killing some time. Remember, you told me you didn’t want Darren here too early. Speaking of which, what are you doing with Darren now that I bring him at 11?” She didn’t answer, though.

“He said you brought him to your friend’s house.”

“No. I would never do that.”

I was waiting for the next part. What was I going to say? I was waiting in dread. But it didn’t come.

“OK,” Cindy said. That was the end of our meeting.

I wonder why Darren didn’t tell her I took him to the place where people go when they die. Maybe he thought she’d just deny it, too, like I did. Just another liar in a world full of them, huh Mr. Yes-Means-No? They built that freeway up there. You can’t see that field anymore, so dreamlike in the morning mist. It’s gone. I know. I’ve looked for it.