Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“Is it a feeling or a vision?” James said. “If you just feel it, it could be the flu.”

“It’s a feeling,” Steve said, “but it isn’t any kind of flu.”

“It’s probably this meat,” Homer said, pulling a piece on a stick from the fire. “It’s just two degrees short of having gone full south. The ants on it are fresher than the meat.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” Steve said.

“Actually,” Homer said, “I do. There ain’t that much we got to eat, and this has to go first. Then it’s the dried stuff.”

“Maybe we’ll come across a grocery store,” Reba said. “Seems like this place has got everything else. School buses. Pontoon boats and an airplane.”

We ate, and finally Cory came back from the woods.

He said, “Hope I didn’t wipe on nothing that might give my ass a rash. I picked me some big leaves, and one of them started crawling off. I was glad I wasn’t wiping with it when it started to crawl.”

“We’re all glad your ass is clean,” Steve said, “now, much as I hate to mention it, we got food, but you don’t touch the meat outright. I’ll put it on a stick for you, and you cook your own.”

“I could tear it off with my right hand,” Cory said. “I wiped with my left.”

“Use the stick,” we all said.

When eating was done, and everyone else’s bathroom needs were attended to, we all packed in the bus and set out, the Big Boys blasting on the tape deck. We hadn’t gone far when it grew dark as an oil slick inside of a coal mine at midnight.

What I’m trying to tell you, dear hearts, is it was dark.

Steve, who was driving, turned off the music, turned on the lights, and we eased on slowly. I saw several things-I know no other way to describe them other than to say they were things-rush out of the jungle and cross the road.

I didn’t know how safe we really were, but it made me feel better to be in that big bus, and not out there on foot. Maybe, most likely, there were plenty of beasts who could peel us out of the bus like sardines from a can, but it gave me a greater feeling of security to be inside something big and metal that could move.

To top things off, it began to rain.

It came down in little drops at first, seemed it would pass. But then the wind picked up, and so did the rain.

It was a strong wind, and it rocked the bus. Soon water was flowing across the trail in dark rivers. The trail went down, dipped into the jungle, water rode up about halfway over the tires.

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea to go farther,” Steve said, leaning forward over the steering wheel, trying to peer into the darkness, attempting to see what was before us in the light of the two pale head beams.

All that was visible was stygian water flowing through the jungle, washing hard against the bus.

“Turn it around,” Homer said.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “We done got kind of committed here. The trail’s small for that, and it being so wet and all, we try, we might get stuck. “

“Then what’s the alternative?” Grace asked. “If we keep going forward, we could get washed off the road.”

“I guess I could try and back it out, but them tail lights ain’t much in this rain and dark. Inflamed hemorrhoids would give more light.”

“I’ll go to the back window and look out, be your guide-”

“Hey, what about the pontoons?” Reba said.

“Damn,” Steve said. “I forgot they were on the bus.”

“And it was your idea,” Grace said.

“I’m lucky these days,” Steve said, “if I can remember to shit out of my asshole and piss out of my dick. Sometimes I get kind of confused on which hole is which.”

“That doesn’t happen much in the middle of the night when you’re sortin’ my holes out,” Grace said.

“You can say that again, baby.”

Steve jerked the bus in gear, and we sat. “Look here,” he said, “the water picks us up, and we can’t control things, it could wash us into the trees. I think backing is still the best thing.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll do it that way.”

I went to the back of the bus, and Steve put it in reverse, started gassing the vehicle into retreat mode. We had gone about a dozen feet, slipping a bit on the mud, when suddenly there was a sound like someone had stuck a water hose in my ear and turned it on. Out of the jungle came a dark rush of wet, and I do mean wet, baby. It hit the right side of the bus and knocked it into the trees on the other side, and kept washing against us. The bus hung up in the trees, limbs wrapped around it like arms.

The water spurted in through the closed windows, finding every weak spot imaginable. Pretty soon it was all over the bus.

I could feel water vibrating under us, lifting us, and pretty soon it toted us up and out of the tree where we had gotten hung up, and shoved us down the trail in a rush.

“This ain’t good,” Steve said.

The bus floated down the trail, banging against trees. I feared the pontoons would get knocked off. But just when I thought it was all over but the drowning, we were lifted up, and we began to flow fast downhill.

All of us were now seated, hanging onto the seat in front of us, and through the windshield, in those weak head beams, we could see the dark flow of water. The bus dipped down, and it looked as if we would be lost, down there at the bottom of the rush, somewhere deep in the jungle, waiting for the water to subside so crawdads or some such could eat on us. Then, suddenly, we rode up on a wave and were floating evenly on top of the gushing darkness, sailing down the corridor between the trees at about the rate of a goddamn speeding bullet.

“I think I saw a big bird in the water,” said Cory.

“No,” Steve said, “that there is a big stick. A goddamn log, if you want to get technical. I figure it’ll hang up under the bus, and maybe fuck something up under there.”

“Quit thinking negative waves,” Grace said. “We’re in a flash flood, and I don’t know about you, but it’s my first, and I’m trying to enjoy it.”

“Yeah,” Cory said, “and it’s wet outside and dark, and we might drown. And the fun just keeps on coming.”

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.