I came awake.
I was surprised at that.
I was still alive. I could still breathe.
But I was surrounded by wetness. Not the thick mess that I had felt before, but wetness. I was bobbing about in the water, and I could see the water rippling, and there was great white foam, and sticking out of the foam was the nose of the bus, the windshield gone, the roof crushed in, the front right tire blown.
I had been shoved through the windshield, and the bus had shot to the surface, if ever so briefly. Perhaps the pontoons (which had come loose of the bus) had done it, or as we went into the fish’s ass sphincter and he let us fly, the force of it had driven us out and up. Trapped air in the bus, maybe. I didn’t know. In that moment, nothing made sense.
Reba was clinging to the front of the bus. I could see her pretty well lying in a pool of what I realized was moonlight, silver as mercury. I could see a dark patch on her face where blood had bloomed like a flower, the moonlight made it appear to be a large black rose.
She clung to the bumper, lay across the hood in what could only be described as a dazed state. She looked in my direction, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. She lifted her head a little, like a turtle sunning itself on a rock, then lowered her head against the bus, continuing to cling.
The bus started down, quickly. I tried to yell Reba’s name, beg her to let go, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. The water foamed around the bus, churned the fish turds that had come up with it, then the bus dove. Water lapped over Reba and rushed into where the windshield had been, then it was gone, taking Reba with it, leaving only a wide band of chrome-colored ripples that pushed me up and down in the water like a fisherman’s cork.
I dove after the bus, but I was too weak. My lungs wouldn’t hold the air I had swallowed. It was so dark I couldn’t see a thing below. Huge turds bounced against me.
There was nothing I could do.
I fought my way to the surface, screamed as I broke the roof of the water and saw the moon above me. I began to cry. I felt something touch me. A vast patch of water disappeared, and in its place was a great gray wall.
The wall rose higher.
And higher.
It was Ed swimming by.
He dove. The dive pulled me under. I fought with everything I had to make the surface, even ended up putting my foot on Ed’s back and shoving off.
I broke the surface and looked in the direction Ed had gone. All that could be seen was a great fin knifing through the dark water. As I watched, something struck me hard in the head, almost knocked me unconscious.
I grabbed at it.
It was one of the pontoons. It had snapped in half, but it still floated. I grabbed hold of it and clung, tried to climb on top of it. It rolled with me, and I lost it a couple of times, but finally I had a solid grip on it, straddled it, latched my legs around it tight.
Across the water I saw a white mist. And then I saw it was not a mist at all, but the ghost of the drive-in. It slowly floated toward me. Floated until it was over and around me. And inside the drive-in I could see everything that had happened while I was there. I could see me and my friends, all dead now, in the camper, tooling along the highway, heading for what we thought would be a great weekend.
There were dinosaurs and such, and all the events that had happened after we escaped the drive-in theater-or so we thought. All that and more. Overlapping, running together, seen simultaneously like a bad TV connection, one program blending into another.
The mist stuttered. Was followed by a sound like electricity shorting out. A snap of light and shadow, a crackle like cellophane being chewed by a goat, and the mist was back.
The Popcorn King.
Those dinosaurs.
Poplalong Cassidy and his carnivorous film.
Grace. Shit Town.
The bus. All gray and ghostly and us inside. Outside the bus. Inside the bus. Every view you could imagine. All that had taken place. Reba and I making love. Grace kicking Cory to death. All of us, looking like some kind of ride at Disneyland, a bus full of escaped specters from the Haunted Mansion.
The past and the present rolled in and out. Everything was caught up in that white mess of memory.
I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but my voice was still too hoarse.
I dropped my head against the pontoon, stretched out on it as best I could. And clinging like I was riding a rocket to that silver moon above me, to escape the mists and all it contained, I fell into a stupor as the water rode me up and rode me down.
2
“It’s okay,” I heard Reba say, and I could feel her stroke my hair.
I awoke to find she wasn’t there. There was only me and the pontoon, and it was a breeze moving my hair, not Reba’s soft fingers. The moon was gone, and the sun was warm but not too warm, and the water was a bright sheening blue. Beyond, there was a great cloud bank, and in little patches, like glimpses of car metal as seen through clouds of white dust in a dirt-track race, I could see the great silver bridge.
I thought of Reba again, bright eyes, fine face, skin made hard from life, her navel like the end twist on a gut-stuffed sausage, the tangle of hair between her legs.
I thought: That’s about right. Here I am floating on what is essentially a goddamn log. I’ve lost all my friends, and my lover, and what I’m thinking about is not her sweetness, and kindness, but the fine wet thing between her thighs.
Men. They ain’t worth killing.
And I be one of them.
As I clung to the pontoon, I was thinking: This might be my chance. Just to let go. Just to drift down, the way poor Reba had. Drift down into the great deeps and fill my lungs with water, and end it all.
Wasn’t drowning supposed to be pleasant?
Or did I read it was actually very unpleasant, and the idea that it was pleasant was a myth? Which was it?
Just the thought of unpleasantness was enough to make me dismiss the idea. It was never anything I was in love with anyway.
“Jack,” a voice called.
I thought: Here I go again.
But this wasn’t Reba calling.
It was a man’s voice. Sounded like Steve.
Then came Grace’s voice calling my name.
I rolled my head to the other side, and out there on the water, floating up and down, were two heads and a body. The body was between the two heads, and they were hanging onto it. It was not floating very well, and I slowly deduced it was Homer, face down. On one side of him was Grace, on the other, Steve.
I tried to yell at them, but my voice came out in a bark. I realized then that the rushing water had gone into my throat and filled my belly and caused me to throw it up at some point, scalding my throat with stomach acid.
“We’ll come to you,” Grace said, and they let go of Homer and swam to the pontoon. Homer’s body floated lower in the water, so there was really little to nothing left of him to see.
They gripped the pontoon at the front and back. I continued to straddle and clutch the pontoon like a spider on a stick; I began to cry.
“You’re okay,” I said.
“More or less,” Grace said.
She was at the end where my head was, and I lifted my eyes and looked at her. It was really the first time I had ever seen her look the worse for wear.
There was fish shit in her matted hair. Her face looked haggard. Her flesh was waterlogged, her lips were purple. There were patches on her face where the fish’s stomach acid had burned her; red spots like flung paint. The look in her eye, for the first time, appeared distant, that hundred-yard stare. She too had finally felt the bite of fear.
But, it was still a beautiful face to me.
She said, “Reba?”
I shook my head.
Steve reached out and patted me on the foot, said, “Can we all share this thing a little better?”