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 the 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.
“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
