“We’ve all seen shit like that, or sort of like that,” Steve said. “Though, the butt-fucking and head-eating simultaneously is high on the Holy Shit meter, but I mean something else. I’ve started having me some visions.”
“None of them have come true, by the way,” Grace said.
“Maybe they just haven’t had time, dear,” Steve said.
“Or maybe,” Grace said, “you’re full of shit.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Steve said. “I always have been pretty full of it. But, I tell you, I’ve got me a feeling, and it’s not a feeling I like.”
“Is it a feeling or a vision?” James said. “If you just feel it, it could be the flu.”
“It’s a feeling,” Steve said, “but it isn’t any kind of flu.”
“It’s probably this meat,” Homer said, pulling a piece on a stick from the fire. “It’s just two degrees short of having gone full south. The ants on it are fresher than the meat.”
“You don’t have to eat it,” Steve said.
“Actually,” Homer said, “I do. There ain’t that much we got to eat, and this has to go first. Then it’s the dried stuff.”
“Maybe we’ll come across a grocery store,” Reba said. “Seems like this place has got everything else. School buses. Pontoon boats and an airplane.”
We ate, and finally Cory came back from the woods.
He said, “Hope I didn’t wipe on nothing that might give my ass a rash. I picked me some big leaves, and one of them started crawling off. I was glad I wasn’t wiping with it when it started to crawl.”
“We’re all glad your ass is clean,” Steve said, “now, much as I hate to mention it, we got food, but you don’t touch the meat outright. I’ll put it on a stick for you, and you cook your own.”
“I could tear it off with my right hand,” Cory said. “I wiped with my left.”
“Use the stick,” we all said.
3
When eating was done, and everyone else’s bathroom needs were attended to, we all packed in the bus and set out, the Big Boys blasting on the tape deck. We hadn’t gone far when it grew dark as an oil slick inside of a coal mine at midnight.
What I’m trying to tell you, dear hearts, is it was dark.
Steve, who was driving, turned off the music, turned on the lights, and we eased on slowly. I saw several things—I know no other way to describe them other than to say they were things—rush out of the jungle and cross the road.
I didn’t know how safe we really were, but it made me feel better to be in that big bus, and not out there on foot. Maybe, most likely, there were plenty of beasts who could peel us out of the bus like sardines from a can, but it gave me a greater feeling of security to be inside something big and metal that could move.
To top things off, it began to rain.
It came down in little drops at first, seemed it would pass. But then the wind picked up, and so did the rain.
It was a strong wind, and it rocked the bus. Soon water was flowing across the trail in dark rivers. The trail went down, dipped into the jungle, water rode up about halfway over the tires.
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea to go farther,” Steve said, leaning forward over the steering wheel, trying to peer into the darkness, attempting to see what was before us in the light of the two pale head beams.
All that was visible was stygian water flowing through the jungle, washing hard against the bus.
“Turn it around,” Homer said.
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “We done got kind of committed here. The trail’s small for that, and it being so wet and all, we try, we might get stuck. “
“Then what’s the alternative?” Grace asked. “If we keep going forward, we could get washed off the road.”
“I guess I could try and back it out, but them tail lights ain’t much in this rain and dark. Inflamed hemorrhoids would give more light.”
“I’ll go to the back window and look out, be your guide—”
“Hey, what about the pontoons?” Reba said.
“Damn,” Steve said. “I forgot they were on the bus.”
“And it was your idea,” Grace said.
“I’m lucky these days,” Steve said, “if I can remember to shit out of my asshole and piss out of my dick. Sometimes I get kind of confused on which hole is which.”
“That doesn’t happen much in the middle of the night when you’re sortin’ my holes out,” Grace said.
“You can say that again, baby.”
Steve jerked the bus in gear, and we sat. “Look here,” he said, “the water picks us up, and we can’t control things, it could wash us into the trees. I think backing is still the best thing.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll do it that way.”
I went to the back of the bus, and Steve put it in reverse, started gassing the vehicle into retreat mode. We had gone about a dozen feet, slipping a bit on the mud, when suddenly there was a sound like someone had stuck a water hose in my ear and turned it on. Out of the jungle came a dark rush of wet, and I do mean wet, baby. It hit the right side of the bus and knocked it into the trees on the other side, and kept washing against us. The bus hung up in the trees, limbs wrapped around it like arms.
The water spurted in through the closed windows, finding every weak spot imaginable. Pretty soon it was all over the bus.
I could feel water vibrating under us, lifting us, and pretty soon it toted us up and out of the tree where we had gotten hung up, and shoved us down the trail in a rush.
“This ain’t good,” Steve said.
The bus floated down the trail, banging against trees. I feared the pontoons would get knocked off. But just when I thought it was all over but the drowning, we were lifted up, and we began to flow fast downhill.
All of us were now seated, hanging onto the seat in front of us, and through the windshield, in those weak head beams, we could see the dark flow of water. The bus dipped down, and it looked as if we would be lost, down there at the bottom of the rush, somewhere deep in the jungle, waiting for the water to subside so crawdads or some such could eat on us. Then, suddenly, we rode up on a wave and were floating evenly on top of the gushing darkness, sailing down the corridor between the trees at about the rate of a goddamn speeding bullet.
“I think I saw a big bird in the water,” said Cory.
“No,” Steve said, “that there is a big stick. A goddamn log, if you want to get technical. I figure it’ll hang up under the bus, and maybe fuck something up under there.”
“Quit thinking negative waves,” Grace said. “We’re in a flash flood, and I don’t know about you, but it’s my first, and I’m trying to enjoy it.”
“Yeah,” Cory said, “and it’s wet outside and dark, and we might drown. And the fun just keeps on coming.”
4
We were carried along in the dark like that for a good piece. It went on so long, I finally drifted off, first leaning forward on the seat in front of me, and finally lying down in the seat.
You wouldn’t think with something like that going on, you could sleep, but the truth was, you could. Or at least I could, and I was doing me a good piece of that when I was yelled awake by Grace.
“Water’s rushing harder,” she said.
“What?”
She repeated herself, and I sat up.
“Do what now?”
“We got to put out the rudder, we need some guidance, we’re gonna smash up. We’re trying to turn sideways.”
I hurried to the back, slipped out the rigged window, and got the rudder. I had James take hold of it with me, and we stuck it out.
When it hit the water, it was like hitting cement. The rudder rode up, and the end we were holding hit James under the chin. He was knocked unconscious, and crumpled to the floor.
I screamed for help. Cory, Reba, and Homer all leaped forward, grabbed at the rudder. We tussled with it, and it fought us. But we held on and went along like that for a bit, then the water got r
einforcements. Probably some high place got overrun and gave up its water, ‘cause it came down through the jungle in a blast of dark bully wetness, and that rudder, it snapped like a toothpick.
When it did, we were all knocked loose and thrown to the floor or into bus seats.
I think I yelled something about Mama, and the next think I knew the bus dipped down, and we plunged into the rushing wet; it pounded over the windshield, and there was water on either side of us, up to the side windows. Some of it (too goddamn much of it) spurted inside. Then, as if some kind of a miracle took hold, the bus was pushed upward by an undercurrent. It shot up into the night like a goddamn porpoise, came down on its pontoons, and was shoved along down the trail, which now, to complicate matters, had begun to wind about like it had been laid out by a cross-eyed drunk with inefficient tools.
But things started turning for the good. The water slowed, and we were flowing along comfortably now, dead center of the trail, winding around those dark jungle curves like we were driving.
And Steve was pretending to drive. He had long cut the motor and lights, but he held to the wheel, which, due to the force of the water on the tires, he couldn’t turn anyway. I reckon it made him feel as if he were in control, clutching like that, leaning forward like he could drive on this watery highway, when, actually, all he could do was do what any two-year-old in a car seat with a plastic steering wheel and a horn could do.
Pretend.
And honk the horn.
Actually, with the engine turned off, he couldn’t do that, but he managed to make some very convincing honky noises.
Several times.
And then an amazing thing happened. The trees on either side of us grew short. In time they disappeared. Were covered by water. The rain was gone, and there were no clouds, just this great, strange moon above us, and this other moon—the reflection of the one in the sky lying on the water like a big old silver serving platter, minus meat, minus taters, just lying there, waiting for Mom to pile it up.
Before us, or at least as far as our eyes could see in the moonlight, was water.
Water ... water ... water.
Sail on, sail on, sail on.
5
One of the tapes we had was a classical one. Steve started up the engine, and we played that, listened to Moonlight Sonata and such, and finally I fell asleep.
As a defense against reality I have learned to snooze under pretty dire circumstances. Had to learn how. Or, considering the events of my life, I would have never slept. I have learned to sleep very deep. Down there in the bowl, with dreams, of course, but not so many as before. Least not that I remember, unless it is a good one (usually a lie or something good long past). The bad dreams I try to forget.
That doesn’t always work.
So it was that I awoke, there in the darkness, fearing it would be one of those times when the night went on forever, or when maybe my dream-shit filter was on the goof, and might in fact be clinging to the nasty remnants of an unforgiving dream, or a truth tied up in a dream, a bad memory wrapped in the sack of a nightmare.
But no. Nothing clung to me.
It was quiet in the bus. The music had long been turned off, and so had the engine, and Steve was asleep against the steering wheel. Grace had stretched out on a seat, and everyone else was asleep as well. The bus bobbed up and down on the water, but the pontoons held, and I could hear and feel the water wash up against the side of the bus.
The moonlight had turned very bright, and it glistened on the water and made it shiny as a poor man’s suit. There in the moonlight, I got a good look at Reba’s face. I couldn’t see the dirt so much in that light, and she looked pretty good.
Of course, it might have been like they say, they all look better at closing time, or in my case, near-dying time. But she did look good to me, and I watched her sleep for a long time, and I had some fantasies, all of them nasty, and I liked how her chest rose up and down, and the way she lay there, her legs drawn up, her hands tucked between her thighs, smiling. Maybe she too was thinking of something good, though most likely it wasn’t me.
Perhaps she had just finished practicing the maiden and widows dance of fingers, and it had thrown her free of bad associations, knocked her out of the dark and into soft light where she could sleep and savor some good emotions and feel all right.
I hoped so. We all deserved to feel all right.
When I looked up and out at the water, it was still calm out there, and daylight was starting to seep into things, covering up the pearly edge of the sky, turning it rosy, and though it was still a bit chilly, I felt that the air had warmed.
Not too far out on the waxy-looking surface of the water with its little waves, I saw a dark fin break the surface. It was huge. It cruised for a bit, then dove out of sight, and there were wide ripples for a long time before the water went smooth again, and when it went smooth it was completely smooth, like a fresh-buffed floor.
No ripples. No waves. Just the morning sun on water, making it pink and proud as the nipple of a fine girl’s tittie.
6
The day did not come off hot, but it came off warm, and we worked the windows down so we could catch a breeze.
We still couldn’t see land, not even a dark line of trees. Just all that water. And I thought: we could float here until all our food played out. Just float here until we were all dead in our floating bus coffin.
I have never liked great expanses of deep water, and at that moment in time, I liked them even less, and this particular section of water I hated even more.
We ate some of the meat and some of the fruit. The raw meat that Steve and Grace had brought on board we had cooked up completely at last stop, and now we ate that and some of the fruit. We decided we should eat all the meat, because it was going to turn bad soon, and we best have our bellies full of it, lest we get hungry and decide to eat it when we shouldn’t.
Though, I figured if we were starving, it didn’t really matter much. It might be better to die of a belly full of rank meat than have your belly chew on itself until you were dead.
Course, neither were appealing alternatives.
Some water splashed up at the bottom edge of the door and came inside, but the pontoons held us up pretty good, so it was no biggie. I figured if this body of water, this great lake, this sea, this whatever it was, ever grew stormy, we would be up shit ocean without a paddle. Enough water could wash in to sink us like a stone.
I wondered what all was down there, in the deeps. Other dead folks from the drive-in. That great fish and all his companions, down there in the deep dark wetness.
It gave me the goddamn willies just thinking about it.
Steve managed to slip his body out of one of the windows, and by rocking the bus only a little, he climbed on top and looked around.
He lay over the edge of the bus and yelled back through a window.
“Nothing but water.”
“Well, I didn’t think a few feet up was gonna cause him to see land,” Homer said.
“No,” Cory said, “but it would have been nice.”
We had a stick with us, and we tied a pan on that and stuck it in the water and pulled some of it in. I tasted it. It wasn’t salty.
“Well, I don’t know how clean it is,” I said. “I mean, it don’t taste bad, and it isn’t salty. We can drink.”
“Parasites could be all in it,” Reba said.
“We could boil it,” Grace said.
“We got to make a fire,” Reba said.
“We could build a small one right there on the floor. Maybe tear out some seat cushions and burn them. Open the windows and they’ll work like a chimney.”
“When we’re all out of seat cushions?” Reba asked.
“Then we drink it straight,” Grace said.
“Hell, I think I’d take my chances drinking it straight right off,” James said, “rather that than build a fire in the bus. Besides, them seats are pretty comfortable. Comfort might be a thing. We could drink t
he water out there when we run out, shit out the window after we drink. Maybe get some kind of rig to catch some fish. Back home, in the Sabine, I used to catch little fish with a line and a hook and a sinker and a colored piece of cloth. You got to be good, and you got to know how to pull that hook just right when they grab the cloth, but it could be done.”
“We could be like that Flying Dutchman,” Reba said. “I read about him in school. We could eat and sleep and drink and shit and just be here on this bus until we died of some kind of disease or old age.”
“Damn,” James said. “That’s a creepy thing to think about. Think I’d rather slip off in that water and drown than sail on forever, or until I just naturally died.”
“A natural death don’t seem likely,” Reba said.
We heard Steve calling.
“Look,” he was saying. “Look over there.”
When he made clear where over there was, we looked.
It was an amazing sight.
7
Way in the distance was a great ladder, or rather a bridge. I mean it was huge, like the goddamn Golden Gate Bridge. It was silver, and at its bottom there was a cloud of mist, so you couldn’t see to what it was attached, but it rose up high and shiny and chromey, rose up and went up into the sky and into the thick white clouds that surrounded it at the top like shaving cream.
You couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended, but it was wide, and though similar to the Golden Gate, instead of stretching across something, it was rising from somewhere at a slant, going up, disappearing into some place unseen.