He managed to extract the bottle without waking his wife, using her slack form as a counterweight as he leaned forward, and now he was unscrewing the cap and rinsing his mouth before taking a single long swallow. It seemed as if he was always thirsty lately, thirsty back at home, thirsty on the ship, thirsty under this sun, and he wondered vaguely if it was age-related, the first sign of some as yet undiagnosed syndrome — the dreaded acronym — that would bring him down in a dark bloom of imploding cells. The tires screeched. There was a bump. Another bump. Carolee jolted awake on a ragged intake of breath. “What?” she gasped, her eyes straining to focus.
“You were dozing.”
He gave her a minute to come back to the world, the bus, the rank invasive odor of the overheated sea and the sodden jungle. She’d been into the rum at lunch too, rum black as oil, in a smudged glass two-thirds filled with Diet Coke, no ice. Neither of them was used to drinking this early in the day, but then why not, they were on vacation, weren’t they? And he was retired — or pre-dead, as he preferred to call it. Party on. Everybody else was.
“I was dreaming,” she said.
“Me too, but I was awake. You got any gum?”
She shook her head. “Water?” she said, making a question of it, and she bent to reach for her bag before she saw the bottle clamped there in his sweating hand. “Which I see you already found.”
He handed her the bottle and she unscrewed the cap and took a sip herself. “Ugh,” she said, making a face, “it tastes awful.”
“Hot enough to put a tea bag in. And I’ll give you even money they fill it from a tap someplace, like in that movie, what was the name of it, in India?”
“No,” she said, “no. This came from the ship.”
He glanced out the window. More children, more school uniforms, a tienda with a wide-open door and maybe drinks inside, Coca-Cola, Naranja Croosh. He saw tethered goats, palms, bananas, clothes on a line, a squadron of white-haired men playing cards at a table set up in the courtyard between whitewashed houses, the whole business flitting by so fast it was like a movie in the wrong speed. And then, without warning, the bus veered left at a fork in the road and they shot down a narrow tunnel of vegetation, branches snatching at the roof, dogs and chickens scattering before them. Carolee slammed into his shoulder, loose as a puppet, and there went the water, the bottle hitting the floor with a soft liquid thump before vanishing under the seat and then reappearing an instant later as if it were some magic trick. “Jesus,” he said, “what’s this guy trying to do, kill us?”
In the next moment he was on his feet, making his way up the aisle toward the front of the bus, bracing himself against the seatbacks. He was a big man, six-three and two hundred twenty pounds, most of it still in the right places, and he filled the aisle. People turned to look at him — the ones who weren’t lost in a rum haze, that is — but he focused on the back of the driver’s head and tried to keep his balance. There were eighteen or twenty passengers, couples mostly and mostly around his age, and he knew the majority of them by sight, if not by name. The cruise had originated in San Diego and they’d already made stops at Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Puerto Quetzal, Puntarenas, the Panama Canal and Colón, and while there were nearly two thousand passengers aboard, you got to know — or at least recognize — the ones who tended to go on expeditions like this one.
“Excuse me,” he said, leaning over the driver, “but I wonder if you couldn’t slow down a bit?” The windshield held an image and then snatched it away, dodging like a Brahma bull. The engine labored. The driver shifted down, shot an impatient glance over one shoulder and then turned his back on him. “Excuse me?” he repeated. “People are getting upset back there—I’m getting upset.”
The driver didn’t seem to hear him. And why? Sten noticed now that the man was wearing one of those iPod hookups, the buds fixed inside his ears like decorations, like the black wooden plugs his son’s friend Cody wore in his stretched-out earlobes. The bus kept moving, but time slowed. Sten studied the man from above, the shining mahogany crown of his head, the ears like knobs you could take hold of and twist, the sparse bloom of stringy hairs snaking out of his chin. The music was so loud you could hear it even over the noise of the engine. Reggae. The eternal reggae they played everywhere on this side of the country as if it were vital to body function. He hated reggae. Hated this jerk who wouldn’t slow down or think to stop someplace so people could relieve themselves. And he hated to be ignored. So what he did, as tenderly as he could, was jerk the cord so the buds popped out of the man’s ears, and now the bus slowed, and now the driver — what was he, thirty, thirty-five? — was paying attention to him, all right.
“Go sit,” the man said, glaring over his shoulder. He made a motion with one hand, as if shooing a fly, then dug a pair of opaque black sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and clamped them over his eyes.
“I said, could you slow down, is all. You got old people on this bus. What’s the hurry?”
The driver ignored him, fixing his gaze back on the road. The buds dangled at his throat, the music released now to a metallic thump and roll and the thin nasal complaint of a voice lost in the mix. The bus accelerated. “You sit,” he said without turning his head. “No person is permitted up front.” And he pointed to a sign, faded and sun-blasted, that read Stay Behind Line.
Sten didn’t move. He just stood there, looming over the driver like a statue, one hand gripping the overhead rack, the other braced against the seatback. “And how about a pit stop? Any restrooms out here?” Even as he posed the question he realized how foolish he sounded. He could only imagine what the driver must have thought of him, of all of them, privileged white people demanding this and that, here today, gone tomorrow. What did this guy care? There’d be another boat tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Finally, the tension tightening like a cord between them, the driver whipped his head round, his eyes visible as two indistinct drifting spheres behind the black plastic lenses. “Five minutes,” he said, the reggae pulsing at his throat, radiating up from the neck of his bright print shirt. Reggae. Thump-thump, boom. Thump-thump, boom. “Five minutes and we are there. You sit. Now.”
Five minutes? It was more like fifteen — and you can bet he was checking his watch all the way, his stomach doing backflips and his bladder sending urgent messages up his nervous system to his brain, which by now had burned itself clear of any lingering aftereffects of the rum so he could focus on what was important. Like escaping this sweatbox. Like pissing. Wetting his throat. Getting all this over with so he could go back to the boat, take a shower and stretch out on the bed, shut his eyes and dream of absolutely nothing.
The driver finally slowed down, but only because the road was barely passable here, so trenched and riddled it looked as if it had been shelled. As it was, they were jolted from side to side as the bus dipped tentatively into one hole after another, the wheels grabbing for purchase, the chassis shuddering and the transmission crying out with a grating whine that had Sten wondering if they were going to wind up walking back. “All we need,” he rasped at Carolee as she rocked into him. “You think triple A makes calls out here?”