The Complete Drive-In

4

We were carried along in the dark like that for a good piece. It went on so long, I finally drifted off, first leaning forward on the seat in front of me, and finally lying down in the seat.

You wouldn’t think with something like that going on, you could sleep, but the truth was, you could. Or at least I could, and I was doing me a good piece of that when I was yelled awake by Grace.

“Water’s rushing harder,” she said.

“What?”

She repeated herself, and I sat up.

“Do what now?”

“We got to put out the rudder, we need some guidance, we’re gonna smash up. We’re trying to turn sideways.”

I hurried to the back, slipped out the rigged window, and got the rudder. I had James take hold of it with me, and we stuck it out.

When it hit the water, it was like hitting cement. The rudder rode up, and the end we were holding hit James under the chin. He was knocked unconscious, and crumpled to the floor.

I screamed for help. Cory, Reba, and Homer all leaped forward, grabbed at the rudder. We tussled with it, and it fought us. But we held on and went along like that for a bit, then the water got reinforcements. Probably some high place got overrun and gave up its water, ‘cause it came down through the jungle in a blast of dark bully wetness, and that rudder, it snapped like a toothpick.

When it did, we were all knocked loose and thrown to the floor or into bus seats.

I think I yelled something about Mama, and the next think I knew the bus dipped down, and we plunged into the rushing wet; it pounded over the windshield, and there was water on either side of us, up to the side windows. Some of it (too goddamn much of it) spurted inside. Then, as if some kind of a miracle took hold, the bus was pushed upward by an undercurrent. It shot up into the night like a goddamn porpoise, came down on its pontoons, and was shoved along down the trail, which now, to complicate matters, had begun to wind about like it had been laid out by a cross-eyed drunk with inefficient tools.

But things started turning for the good. The water slowed, and we were flowing along comfortably now, dead center of the trail, winding around those dark jungle curves like we were driving.

And Steve was pretending to drive. He had long cut the motor and lights, but he held to the wheel, which, due to the force of the water on the tires, he couldn’t turn anyway. I reckon it made him feel as if he were in control, clutching like that, leaning forward like he could drive on this watery highway, when, actually, all he could do was do what any two-year-old in a car seat with a plastic steering wheel and a horn could do.

Pretend.

And honk the horn.

Actually, with the engine turned off, he couldn’t do that, but he managed to make some very convincing honky noises.

Several times.

And then an amazing thing happened. The trees on either side of us grew short. In time they disappeared. Were covered by water. The rain was gone, and there were no clouds, just this great, strange moon above us, and this other moon-the reflection of the one in the sky lying on the water like a big old silver serving platter, minus meat, minus taters, just lying there, waiting for Mom to pile it up.

Before us, or at least as far as our eyes could see in the moonlight, was water.

Water… water… water.

Sail on, sail on, sail on.