“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Homer said.
“I wonder how far away it is?” Cory asked.
“Hard to say,” I said. “Out here, on this big piece of water, it could be close, or it could be way far away. You can’t really judge how big this water is, so that bridge—ladder—it could be close and small, or far away and huge.”
“I can tell you one thing,” Grace said. “It ain’t real close. It’s big. I get the impression that it’s goddamn big.”
“How can you tell?” Reba said.
“Well, I guess I can’t. But I’ll bet you. If I had something to bet.”
“You got something to bet all right,” Homer said.
“So do you. You bet against me, I’ll kick your goddamn nuts off,” Grace said.
“Let me think on it,” Homer said, “and I’ll get back to you.”
“But what is it?” James asked. “Where does it lead?”
“Heaven,” Homer said. “That bridge leads to heaven. It has to, ‘cause everything down here has got to be hell. And look how shiny and pretty it is. God would want a shiny bridge.”
“There isn’t any god,” Grace said. “It’s just us and whatever is behind all this.”
“Well, that’s god-like enough,” Cory said. “‘Cause something is sure strange, and I don’t think it’s government work. Not all this.”
“Aliens,” I said. “I know that’s what it is.”
“Well, whatever it is,” Homer said, “there it is, shiny as a metal tooth.”
“We seem to be drifting in that direction,” Grace said. “Very slowly. Current stays with us, we’ll know soon enough how close or how far away it is.”
“It’s some kind of place we can want to be,” Reba said. “I don’t know it will be good if we get there, but I like a goal, some kind of place to go. I haven’t had a goal since I tried to get Phil Senate to fuck me, and he turned out to be queer. That wasn’t a goal I made, getting a mercy fuck from a queer, so I had to let it go. So I’m going to make a pretty modest goal now. I hope we wash up at the bottom of the bridge, and that we get to climb it, and that it leads somewhere where someone would want to be. There’s got to be some place here that’s some place someone would want to be. There’s just got to be.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
Grace was right. We weren’t even close to the bridge.
We drifted for a long time. Nights and days, half nights and half days and fragment days went by, and though we flowed with a current that carried us in the direction of the bridge, it was a slow current, and I noted little if any progress.
No land appeared either. There was just that great shimmering water all about.
But one evening, the day fell, and the moon came up, cool on the horizon, like a blonde-headed giant poking its head out of the water. And shortly after its rise came a mist.
There was something odd about it, and as it came to rest behind the bus and float there, we saw (for everyone had moved to the back of the bus) that it was not a mist at all.
It was a specter.
It took us a bit of time to really see what we were seeing, as it was so large. It was a ghostly outline of the drive-in lots, and we could see gray versions of the screens, the shapes of cars, and there were spectral folks moving about. I recognized them as the drive-in people. They were going from car to car, and the specters looked happy. Slowly but surely I realized why.
The mist was a specter of the drive-in all right, but it was as the drive-in had been before the comet, the great red comet that had come burning out of the sky, hung over the drive-in, and smiled.
Showed teeth, baby, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.
And this was as the drive-in was, just before the comet swerved away, changed the drive-in and all of us inside forever. This was the drive-in when it was a fun place, a gathering place, a ritual shrine to the youthful. There were women in bikinis, and there were folks in monster suits, barbecue grills cooking away. Everyone looked so happy in the misty drive-in world, you could almost hear them laugh.
We all watched carefully, not a one of us speaking. Just stood there and looked out the back bus window, glared into our past.
I saw the lot where my friends and I had parked, and there we were, poking one another, laughing.
Oh, Jesus. All my friends.
Gone now.
Just me left.
“Ain’t that some shit,” Homer said. “It’s a haunting.”
8
I don’t know how long we stood at the back of the bus, watching, but I know it was a long time. I felt sad. Tears kept running out of my eyes, and when I looked around, I wasn’t the only one. Only Grace still had it together, centered inside somehow, and maybe, just maybe (because it had occurred to me more than once) she was in her element now. Strong and needed, lusted after and feared. A kind of shiny queen bee in a hive of colorless drones.
But I didn’t think on that long. I turned away from Grace and kept on looking at that ghostly drive-in.
In that spectral world we all looked so happy, and healthy. And though we had not aged in any classical way, here in the present drive-in world, we had, to put it mildly, gone to seed. It was obvious looking at our ghostly shapes. Even in their transparent grayness, they looked so much better than we looked now.
Again ... except for Grace. Still strong and clean of limb, with hair like a shampoo commercial.
So there we were, looking grimly back into our past. And as we watched, a gray version of the great red comet appeared at the top of the misty ghost of the drive-in, smiled, and things went bad.
I realized I could stand there forever, watching our past lives unfold.
I said, “You know what, gang. I don’t think this is healthy. The past is the past.”
“Besides,” Steve said. “This story seems to have gotten to the bad part. We’ve seen all the good we’re going to see.”
“I can see myself,” Reba said, pointing.
“We all can,” James said.
And this was true. The spectral shape twisted and misted and reformed, and showed different parts of the drive-in, like cuts in a movie. Faces. Close-ups. Medium shots. Long-distance shots. Dissolves. Fade-ins. Fade-outs.
“Something is fucking with us,” I said. “Something has always been fucking with us.”
We all made a deal to stop looking at the misty drive-in.
As much as we could stop looking, that is.
We still looked. Just not as much. I just looked now and then when I didn’t have anything else to occupy my mind.
Which, of course, was all the time.
It was a little easier to stop looking when the misty events moved forward in time and showed me the horrible things that had gone on, back when the food first ran out and there was nowhere to go and everyone was so hungry. I knew the Popcorn King and his horrid activities, the blood corn events, were coming up, and that helped me not look. I didn’t want to see that. I had lived that, and I hadn’t liked it much.
So, I quit looking.
As often.
As the night passed and we dozed and the sun came up and the light that was our day wore on and became really hot, the mist evaporated, and we had a break. There was just the ocean now, and it was flat and smooth, as boring as watching your mama peel potatoes.
We ate and climbed on the roof and swam around the bus, hung to the pontoons, did this and that. Made up games, sang songs.
It was like a real bus trip.
You know, like when you’re a kid and you go to camp, and you got songs to sing and things to talk about. Only thing missing is we didn’t know where we were going or when we would arrive.
Actually, a lot of things were missing, but for that short time, we found some happiness, and we concentrated on it.
When we wore out on the songs, Steve started up the engine from time to time and we listened to tapes. What we had to talk about would always turn grim. Tales of the drive-in. So doing things like s
ongs and swimming was better.
The swimming was really pretty nifty, because all of us stripped naked to do it. Grace was dynamite. I loved that triangle between her legs, how it looked when she climbed out of the water, stretched out on the pontoon, knowing full well we were all looking, perched atop the bus, hanging over the sides, drooling. She shook out her long golden hair and arched her back, showed us what lay inside the taco, all pink and inviting. A smorgasbord of goddess.
And let me tell you, Reba looked good too. Tiny, ribs showing from lack of food, well built, and more modest. She stripped and stood on the pontoon too, but she wasn’t trying to give us an aerial view of the canyon, so to speak.
She just did what she had to do, shook out her shorter, darker hair, pulled back on her clothes, climbed on top of the bus, lay in the sun, and dried herself and the damp clothes she wore.
Steve lay with us, hanging over the roof looking down at Grace, and he said, “Grace is such a tease.”
Homer said, “You know, I wouldn’t ask this in the real world, and you may hit me, but you got to understand, what I’m seeing there, and not having had any in awhile, ‘cept this fella’s butt hole (pointing toward Cory, who raised his hand in admission), but it wasn’t the same, you know, so can you tell me, for entertainment’s sake. Is she good?”
Steve pursed his lips, made a kind of smacking sound, looked at Homer, smiled, said, “Now, let me ask you this, Homer, my man. Looking down on that young woman, all ripe and spread out and brown, and being all uninhibited like, and you having had, at best of recent, some shitty ass off Cory, what the fuck do you think?”
“Oh, yeah,” Homer said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
“Male chauvinists,” Reba said.
We had sort of forgot she was there.
“Well,” James said, “this here is a new world, and it’s got new rules, and, shit, we don’t mean nothing by it. Besides, how much of a chauvinist is Homer. He fucked Cory in the butt.”
“I don’t like him though,” Cory said. “It was just one of those things. Me and him, we wouldn’t even hang anymore if he hadn’t gotten on this bus.”
“Maybe you ain’t chauvinist,” Reba said, “but I wanted to mention, I’ve seen you all swimming, and each and every one of you have what can only be described in euphemistic terms as having real small dicks.”
“Hey, now,” James said, “that ain’t right.”
“It certainly isn’t all that euphemistic,” I said.
“You don’t mean me,” Steve said. “You couldn’t mean me. They used to call me Horse in P.E.”
“I think they were just calling you by your first name,” Reba said.
“What’s that mean?” Steve said.
“You know,” she said, “Horse Ass.”
9
Night came, and we all climbed back inside the bus, and the misty world of the drive-in floated up out of the ocean, first in a cotton candy twirl, then the twirl spread, and figures began to form, coiling and uncoiling, eventually taking shape.
The drive-in ghost floated behind us for a time, then it moved forward, melted right through the walls of the bus and was part of us, our own ghostly wraiths moving past us and through us and around us; all of the events of the drive-in unfolding silently and overlapping and passing one through the other.
For awhile we watched in awe, but in time, some of us anyway (I was one) had had enough. I coiled up on one of the seats and covered my face with my arms and tried to sleep; my trained ability to do so kicked in, and I drifted off. I dreamed I was on a great rocking horse, and it was bucking, baby. I mean up and down, even side to side, and finally my head banged against something, and I found myself lying on the floor of the bus, and the bus was churning about. I climbed onto a seat and looked out the window.
Great sprays of water and splashes of white foam were striking the windows, and the bus was washing precariously to one side, then the other. Out there in the frothy splash of foam, I thought I saw large dark creatures move. Then the water slashed the bus, and anything I might’ve seen was gone.
The others were up and watching as well. There was nothing else to do. A bit of water came through the cracks in the windows, washed under the bus door, and foamed in the driver’s section like soapsuds.
But still we floated.
Someone vomited. I didn’t even look, but I could smell it. All I could think was, when this stops, that will have to be cleaned up. I visualized us at the bottom of this ... ocean? Monster lake? Whatever it was. Just settling down to the bottom, the pressure of the water squeezing the bus, shattering the glass, the water rushing in. And then I thought, what if it’s not as deep as it seems, and we go down? We could hit the bottom and there wouldn’t be the pressure to crush us, the quick rush of water to drown us. It would be a slow seep. Just sitting there on the bottom with water leaking in through the windows, slowly filling the bus.
I knew if this body of water were that shallow, I would just open a window and let it all rush in.
It seemed to me you should be able to open a sliding window. Underwater pressure wouldn’t keep that from being done, would it?
And if it did, maybe I could break it.
There were ways.
All this went through my mind as the bus washed about.
One good thing, though, the misty past adventures of the drive-in were nowhere to be seen.
As I sat there in my seat, Reba slid in beside me. She took my hand. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No.”
“I thought, we went down, you know, we could go down together. Someone with someone.”
“Someone with someone,” I said. “
“We don’t have to like one another,” she said.
“I know ... We don’t have to dislike one another either.”
“That’s true,” she said, and squeezed my hand hard. “I thought I wanted to die a few times, but I’ve lived so long now, been through so much, I don’t want to die anymore. I just want to find my place. Isn’t that a strange thing to think? That I just want to find my place.”
“No. Not at all. I know exactly what you mean.”
The storm tossed on, and once the bus lay almost on its side, but the pontoon rig Steve had made held. The water waved us back, and the bus settled and turned, and soon the rush of the storm was no longer pushing the side of the bus, but the back of it, and that little twist of fate may have been what saved us. We washed forward, the storm propelling us like a motor.
Why the bus didn’t spin and take it on the side again, I can’t say. It was as if the storm were the hand of great child, and we were its toy, and the child was motoring us forward, on down a wet highway to who knew where.
10
The storm subsided.
We didn’t sink.
The day came up quick and hot, and there was no mist and no ghostly drive-in.
Reba and I lay down in the seat together. It was a narrow seat, so she had to lie on top of me. She rubbed against me. She put her mouth close to my ear.
“I didn’t think I could get juiced again,” she said. “I thought that sort of thing had all dried out. But I’m wet as outside the bus. And hot, and I hurt, you know, in a good way. Down there.”
“I feel like I have a crowbar in my pants,” I said.
Not exactly romantic, I admit, but we were not living in romantic times.
She pulled up the rag of a dress she wore and rolled to the side and undid my near worn-out pants, and out I came, popping up like a jack-in-the-box.
“We shouldn’t,” she said, holding my dick in her hand.
“No?” I said.
“I don’t want to get pregnant.”
“I’ll pull.”
“What if you don’t?”
“I will.”
“Famous last words.”
“Really. I will.”
She slid over me and spread her legs, and in I went, and she said, “You lie still.
”
“Everyone knows what we’re doing.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “and even if they do, let’s try and keep it private as we can. Let’s have this between us ... Oh, God, that feels good.”
And so we went at it. She made a little noise even though I was silent like she asked, and very quickly she opened her mouth and showed her fine white teeth, then made a squeak like a mouse that had just gone to Cheese Heaven, leaned over, and touched her forehead to mine. After a moment, she sat up and went at me again, and when I was close, not so close that I knew it would happen, but close enough I knew it wasn’t far off, I pulled and shot on her pubic hair. She made with a little purring sound, spat on her fingers, rubbed the sperm into her dark triangle of hair and over her lower belly.
She licked her fingers.
She looked down at me and smiled.
She said, “I needed that.”
“It didn’t hurt my feelings any either,” I said.
She climbed off of me, patted my balls, and said, “See you later,” as if she were about to drive off to work.
She pulled her ragged dress down and moved to the back of the bus.
I pulled my pants up and lay there both satisfied and confused, felt just a little cheap and used and maybe not all that well respected, and wondered if everyone had been watching.
PART TWO
In which the great bridge is nearer, a catfish appears,
and the gang takes up new quarters.
1
The days went by slow, and we got good at fishing. Using a piece of cloth cut off one of our rags for bait, dipped in blood from an open wound Cory got from snagging his elbow on the side of the bus while out swimming, we attached that strip of cloth to a long length of twine (it had come with a kite found in the trunk of a car). Actually, we had a roll of it, the twine, and we cut several strips and made a strong cord by braiding them. We made a hook carved out of a bone from the meat Steve and Grace had provided, a sinker made out of a bolt we worked out of one of the seats with a screwdriver. With our rig we sat on top of the bus, taking turns, catching fish.