I turned. It was Reba. She had her mouth wide open. She was clutching my sleeve with one hand and pointing at the water with the other.
The fish had surfaced.
And, to put it simply and honestly, it was a big motherfucker.
“It’s a catfish,” Homer said. “It’s like a blue cat, only a whole hell of a lot bigger.”
“It’s big as a Great White,” Grace said.
“It’s coming right for the bus,” Homer said, as if this might not be obvious to the rest of us.
The great head split, and the mouth was wide, maybe six feet, no teeth, but there were whiskery growths sticking out from its broad face, and its eyes were black and bottomless.
It dove, showing only its fin, which split the water like a razor slicing paper.
Then the fish hit the side of the pontoon.
The bus shook and I heard Cory and James cuss again. I was knocked back into the seat behind me. I scrambled to my feet, made it across the bus, to the window, called out, “Get back inside. Now.”
But the catfish hit again, and I heard a splash on the opposite side of the bus.
I turned for a look just as Reba said, “It’s Cory. In the water.”
And it was.
He yelled out for help a couple of times, and I was about to work myself through the window to go for him, when Grace said, “Oh, my God.”
I turned.
The catfish that had rammed the bus rose up out of the water. Its tail flashed, and it seemed to heave like it was being pumped with a bellows. It sat there on the surface, looking at us, giving us the evil eye.
But he wasn’t nothing.
He wasn’t nothing at all.
Not anymore.
There was something new.
Something that made our concern about the ramming catfish seem like a silly notion.
In fact, the idea of leaping into the water and wrestling with it seemed less scary than what was about to happen.
4
The water, as far as the eye could see, foamed. Then it lifted in a sheet of sun-shimmering silver, and beneath the splashes and lapping of the water was a darkness. At first it was a line, like a black storm on the horizon, stretching way wide.
The line widened, became a maw, and the maw became a great black cave. Slowly, the cave condensed, and there was just the fine line again. Then the line dropped below the water, and there was a dark hump rising, making a brief waterfall to either side. This was followed by a faraway flick of a finny tail. I don’t know how far away that tail was, as it was impossible to tell distances, but if I were a betting man, I’d say, and no shit on this, it was a half a mile away, and even that far away it was considerably bigger in appearance than any fishtail I had ever seen, no matter how close to my eye and how large the fish.
The body rose up higher in the water, and there was a massive head, about the size of six city blocks, and there was a glimpse of one eye the size of a spotlight, and a whisker, big as bridge cable. The whisker flexed.
I looked and saw, down a distance and to my left, the other eye (way down there it was, dear hearts) and another whisker (also way down there), and it was then that our finny friend opened its mouth and showed us the cave again.
In that moment, of course, I knew what it was. A catfish. And not the sort you’d catch and toss in the back of your truck to be weighed at Wal-Mart for a fishing contest.
This watery denizen would have made Moby Dick look like a fucking anemic minnow on a runway model diet.
The mouth stayed open, and the fish dropped slightly in the water. A whisker whipped the wind like a black snake whip, and the other catfish, the one we had thought was big, turned and swam slowly toward the greater one, a willing sacrifice.
It swam right into that cavernous mouth, splashed on in and out of sight. The maw continued to widen and expand and the water rolled and foamed as the monster swam toward us.
We just sat there, our thumbs up our asses.
Wasn’t any place we could go.
Nothing we could do.
No one said a word. Not even a Holy Shit, look at that size of that motherfucker.
Nothing.
We didn’t even notice that Cory had worked his way back up on a pontoon and had climbed dripping wet through a window. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had noticed, but it hadn’t registered deeply. How could it. Not with that Leviathan out there.
Water ran into the fish’s mouth like being poured into a funnel, and way to the left, and way to the right, I saw a shiny spurt of spray, and knew water was rushing through the great fish’s gills, shooting out against the clear blue sky like geysers.
The bus began to move. Rapidly. Flowing behind the formerly large, now less impressive catfish, into the darkness of the maw that must have swallowed Old Jonah.
Finally, someone spoke.
It was Grace. She said, “This sucks.”
Steve said, “I just want to say goodbye to my dick. It’s been good to me.”
The water moved fast and went into the fish and we went with it; there was a rush into the great mouth as the bus straightened itself, fled down the throat of the beast, and behind us the light faded.
I turned to look.
The dark line was lowering, and the bright blue of the outside was going away as if a blind were being slowly pulled closed. Water lapped in and with it came a total blackness like the end of all things.
There was a thud and a jerk as the water the behemoth gulped slammed up against the back of our craft. The bus began to flee along at breakneck speed, like a roller-coaster ride, on down, dropping our stomachs out. Water spurted in through the bus’s cracks, and someone, James I think, yelled, “We’re gonna drown like rats,” and from the back window came a confirmation, a blast of black wetness (should have closed that fucking window up), and away we went, water gushing to our knees, causing us to climb into the seats, only to instantly feel the water rise up to touch us.
Away we went, faster and faster, propelled into the pitch dark moist nowhere toward the nucleus of the Lord of the Fishes.
5
One thing you don’t expect inside a fish is light.
Soon there would be other things unexpected. But, for the moment, let’s just consider the light.
Lights actually.
A row of them.
But let’s not jump too far ahead.
Let’s roll back and talk back and go up the throat of the fish, and let me tell you how we came down.
We came down in a stink, baby. The water nearly filled the bus. We bumped our heads on the ceiling, and the water smelled bad, and there were things in the water, and the bus went fast, and then it slowed. There was a feeling like being a mole in a water hose. And somehow I knew we were in some piece of gut, making our way to
