UNIONS

Madeline Kramer''s kindergarten class was wired. The dinosaur room at the museum had been closed for renovations and so they had spent much of the time in a dark, carpeted, multi-leveled room with hundreds of different minerals lit up behind windows and some displayed out in the open that could be touched.  The children had run around the room knocking into one another and other visitors as well.  The boys played a game that involved hitting one another with their jackets and then pushing the victim to the floor.  They ate lunch in a big room on the first floor that sold souvenirs.

By one o''clock Ms. Kramer had her class arranged single file on Central Park West just about fifteen minutes ahead of schedule since she thought the air might calm her overexcited children. The bus would be picking them up soon.  Benjamin had been assigned the position of leader since he had behaved himself inside the museum unlike most of his friends.  Yet Ben was starting to act up too wiggling and dancing in order to make his classmates laugh.  Everyone could see him spastically flailing his arms and jumping on and off the curb. Ms. Kramer told him that if he continued she would take away his privilege as line leader.  She then turned around to do a final head count. With his teacher''s back turned, Ben resumed his antics jumping off the curb and into the street all the time writhing. The class began giggling and a few broke into the same dance step.  Ms. Kramer turned to the culprit and yelled,

"Benjamin, get back on the curb right now." Surprised to hear her voice and frightened by its tone Ben stopped and turned, but before his foot made the step back onto the curb a speeding taxi screeched to a halt first knocking Ben over and dragging him another ten feet where it hit a car in the oncoming traffic.  There was the universal sound of two cars colliding – an impact of metal and then the crash of glass. Madeline Kramer gasped and put her hands to her face.

"Oh my God. Oh my God. Someone help.  There''s a child stuck under there. One of my children. Please help."  People from both sides of Central Park West surrounded the accident.  Some took it upon themselves to push back the remaining children along with the mothers who had come along on the class trip.  The children were whimpering and huddled together in two great clumps clutching for a piece of one of the mothers, a purse, a jacket, a blue-jeaned leg.  The large crowd that formed was screaming at the cab driver.

"There''s a child."

"You hit a child you son of a bitch."

"Don''t let him get away." There were gasps and moans and lots of people filling in other voyeurs as to what had happened.  Meanwhile the two drivers h ad come out from their smashed cars and the cab driver was defending himself in broken English to a well dressed businessman with a bloody face in his fifties whose car had run into after running over Benjamin.  Both men were trembling and disoriented.  Once the businessman understood from others that a child had been run over he ignored the taxi driver and bent down with some members of the crowd to look for the little boy.  The taxi driver, a young and dark, perhaps Indian or Arab, turned to the crowd and with imploring eyes and tears running down his face he clasped his hands and begged them that he hadn''t seen this child.  Those who paid attention to his protestations only screamed at him.  The yellow school bus was caught a block away in the heavy traffic tie-up.  Through her hysteria Madeline Kramer directed the mothers to walk through the crowds with the children towards the bus.  At least on the bus the children could be shielded from the horror of all this and what was going to be worse once Ben was located and brought out from underneath the wreckage.  A guard from the museum had called for emergency help on his walkie-talkie.  Now sirens could be heard and beeping horns helped clear the way for several cop cars and finally the blip blip of an ambulance.  With the police there the crowd was thinned considerably and the emergency crew was joined by yet another ambulance. Three men and a woman paramedic jumped from their trucks and were on the ground.  They hooked up an intravenous bag even before they had removed Ben. They brought out a special stretcher with straps all over it and placed it near the front of the taxi cab which was half buried in the twisted mass of the businessman''s blue Ford Taurus.  Ben''s body was ever so slowly dragged out. The paramedics spoke in clipped, critical phrases to one another.

"Slow."  "Now slide." "Start the iv." "Any BP?" People cried in long deep moans as the tiny boy''s body was shifted onto a stretcher and his neck and head and legs tied down carefully with Velcro straps.  There was little left to Ben''s face. It was a bloody mess. Half of his head was caved in and his clothing was soaked in blood. One leg was twisted nearly all the way around. Madeline Kramer was hyperventilating and two police officers were trying to calm her and at the same time get the story.  Other bystanders were also being interviewed.  The teacher was helped into a patrol car as the stretcher carrying Ben was being put into one of the ambulances.  The businessman got into the other ambulance and the taxi driver was escorted into yet a different patrol car.  All that was left was the wreckage, small crowds, several enormous pools of blood and a flattened Garfield lunchbox.