The Complete Drive-In

6

The day did not come off hot, but it came off warm, and we worked the windows down so we could catch a breeze.

We still couldn’t see land, not even a dark line of trees. Just all that water. And I thought: we could float here until all our food played out. Just float here until we were all dead in our floating bus coffin.

I have never liked great expanses of deep water, and at that moment in time, I liked them even less, and this particular section of water I hated even more.

We ate some of the meat and some of the fruit. The raw meat that Steve and Grace had brought on board we had cooked up completely at last stop, and now we ate that and some of the fruit. We decided we should eat all the meat, because it was going to turn bad soon, and we best have our bellies full of it, lest we get hungry and decide to eat it when we shouldn’t.

Though, I figured if we were starving, it didn’t really matter much. It might be better to die of a belly full of rank meat than have your belly chew on itself until you were dead.

Course, neither were appealing alternatives.

Some water splashed up at the bottom edge of the door and came inside, but the pontoons held us up pretty good, so it was no biggie. I figured if this body of water, this great lake, this sea, this whatever it was, ever grew stormy, we would be up shit ocean without a paddle. Enough water could wash in to sink us like a stone.

I wondered what all was down there, in the deeps. Other dead folks from the drive-in. That great fish and all his companions, down there in the deep dark wetness.

It gave me the goddamn willies just thinking about it.

Steve managed to slip his body out of one of the windows, and by rocking the bus only a little, he climbed on top and looked around.

He lay over the edge of the bus and yelled back through a window.

“Nothing but water.”

“Well, I didn’t think a few feet up was gonna cause him to see land,” Homer said.

“No,” Cory said, “but it would have been nice.”

We had a stick with us, and we tied a pan on that and stuck it in the water and pulled some of it in. I tasted it. It wasn’t salty.

“Well, I don’t know how clean it is,” I said. “I mean, it don’t taste bad, and it isn’t salty. We can drink.”

“Parasites could be all in it,” Reba said.

“We could boil it,” Grace said.

“We got to make a fire,” Reba said.

“We could build a small one right there on the floor. Maybe tear out some seat cushions and burn them. Open the windows and they’ll work like a chimney.”

“When we’re all out of seat cushions?” Reba asked.

“Then we drink it straight,” Grace said.

“Hell, I think I’d take my chances drinking it straight right off,” James said, “rather that than build a fire in the bus. Besides, them seats are pretty comfortable. Comfort might be a thing. We could drink the water out there when we run out, shit out the window after we drink. Maybe get some kind of rig to catch some fish. Back home, in the Sabine, I used to catch little fish with a line and a hook and a sinker and a colored piece of cloth. You got to be good, and you got to know how to pull that hook just right when they grab the cloth, but it could be done.”

“We could be like that Flying Dutchman,” Reba said. “I read about him in school. We could eat and sleep and drink and shit and just be here on this bus until we died of some kind of disease or old age.”

“Damn,” James said. “That’s a creepy thing to think about. Think I’d rather slip off in that water and drown than sail on forever, or until I just naturally died.”

“A natural death don’t seem likely,” Reba said.

We heard Steve calling.

“Look,” he was saying. “Look over there.”

When he made clear where over there was, we looked.

It was an amazing sight.