“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 reinforcements. 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.
