“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
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.
The fish we caught were mostly small, but now and again we’d catch something a little bigger. We found that a way to prepare our catch for food was to gut them and cut them in strips and lay them on top of the bus for a day and a night, then turn them over and do it to the other side. We tied them up there with string, running cord from one window, across the top of the bus to the other window, tying the cords off on seats inside.
The sun didn’t exactly cook them, but it dried them some, and that was good enough. Trust me, when you’re really hungry, you get a whole lot less persnickety.
Slowly, we started making not only a home of that bus, but a pint-sized community.
The only thing that was really terrible was when we wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to climb out a window-which made the bus lean heavy to one side-and work our way to the roof and hang the old moon over the side.
This however, in the number two department, didn’t work so well, as there were dark streaks on the windows, as our loads didn’t go smooth into the water.
Finally, it was determined the best thing to do was to climb down on the hood of the bus, near the front, and let it fly. This way, you didn’t quite hit the water, stains on the front weren’t so noticeable, and the way the bus nodded itself forward into the waves, as it was wont to do, it washed off the old dookie, became a perpetual self-cleaning machine.
Compared to how things had been, it seemed downright hygienic.
When I could, I got out my little possessions, which were all in a backpack I’d found in one of the cars-you wouldn’t believe the stuff we found in cars-and inside I had paper and composition writing books I’d taken from different places, and in those I tried to keep a running diary of everything that had happened. I also had a Louis L’Amour book, Hellfire Trail, that I read from time to time, even if it was missing a few pages, and I had a copy of an old Ace Double science-fiction book. It had a cover on back and front and half of the book was a novel called Masters the Lamp, and the other half-you had to turn it over and open it from the other side-were short stories under the title A Harvest of Hoodwinks. The writer was some guy named Robert Lory, and it was pretty good, though a little less interesting when you had read it about twenty times. I liked the story “Rolling Robert” best, and I could tell it pretty good, and I did that for Reba quite a few times, and though she had read it from the book its ownself, she liked me telling it best, because I added what she liked to refer to as embellishments. I put fucking in it. She liked that. And if you’ve read “Rolling Robert,” dear nonexistent reader, you know what a goddamn accomplishment that is, putting in the fucking, I mean.
So our biggest battle was not food, or drinking water, though we did call a moratorium on pulling up water in our buckets any time close to when one of our esteemed crew did their number one or two.
So, all things considered, life was tolerable. But there was all that water.
Water. Water. Every goddamn where you looked.
Water.
And more water.
Did I mention the water?
Alas, our greatest opponent was…
Boredom.
Boredom set in with a vengeance. We made up games. I Spy was out. That was easy. Uh, I spy… Water.
Me and Reba, we spent more time together. I shared my two books with her. We talked about this, we talked about that, did some serious drilling and heaving anytime it was night, and sometimes when it was day, and it got so, after awhile, the other guys, the ones not getting any, started to eye Reba in a way that made me nervous.