reminded me too that I could fail and that the teen-age bomb could kill the queen or the queen the bomb. The beginnings of a hot and hungry night.
But I must have lain there musing and grumbling for hours, for several hours at least, before the tire exploded.
“Oh!” came Cassandra’s whispered shriek, her call for help, and I pinioned Pixie’s rump, I sank down, my knees were heaved into flight, Cassandra was floating, reaching out helplessly for her child. In the next instant the rear half of the bus was off the road and sailing out, I could feel, in a seventy-eight-mile-an-hour dive into the thick of the night. Air brakes in full emergency operation. Accidental blow to the horn followed by ghastly and idiotic trill on the trumpet. Diving rear end of the bus beginning to describe an enormous arc—fluid blind path of greatest destruction—and forward portion lurching, hammering, banging driver’s black head against invisible wall. Now, O Christopher… and then the crash.
Then: “Be calm, Cassandra,” I said, and kept my hold on the agitated Pixie but uncovered my face.
And she, whispering, breathing deeply: “What is it, Skipper? What is it?”
“Blowout,” I said, and opened my eyes. We were standing still. We were upright. Somehow we had failed to overturn though I saw her naked legs with the knees caught up to her chin and though everywhere I looked I saw the duffel bags lying like the bodies of white clowns prostrate after a spree of tumbling. And in this abrupt cessation of our sentimental journey, becoming aware of moonlight in the window and of thethin black line of the empty highway stretching away out there, and feeling a heavy deadness in my shoulder—twisted muscles? severed nerves?—I was able to glance at my free hand, to study it, to order flexing of my numerous and isolated fingers. I watched them. One by one they wiggled. Bones OK.
“Are you all right, Cassandra? Can you move your toes?”
“Yes, Skipper. But give Pixie to her mother, please.”
So we disembarked. We joined the slow white procession of hatless sailors. In the dark and among the angular seventeen-year-olds with ties askew and tops askew, among all the boys red-eyed and damp from cat-napping and too baffled, too bruised to talk, we felt our way up the canted aisle until we reached the listing door, the puckered aluminum steps, the open night. I took her in my arms and swung her down, and out there we stood together, close together, frock and uniform both body-tight in the wind, ankles twisting and shoes filling with sand. The bus was a dark blue dusty shadow, deceptive wreck; our skid-marks were long black treacherous curves in the desert; the highway was a dead snake in the distance; the wind was strong. We stood there with the unfamiliar desert beneath our feet, stood with our heads thrown back to the open night sky which was filled with the tiny brief threads of performing meteors.
The wind. The hot wind. Out there it warmed the skin but chilled the flesh, left the body cold, and though we lifted our faces like startled sun-tanned travelers, we were shivering in that endless night and in the wind that set the long dry cactus needles scraping and made a rasping noise of all the debris of the desert: tiny cellular spines, dead beetles, the discarded translucent tissue of wandering snakes, the offal of embryonic lizards and fields of dead dry locusts. All this rasping and humming; all the night listening; and underfoot all the smooth pebbles knocking together in the hot-cold night. And she, Cassandra, stood there swaying and clasping Pixie awkwardly against her breast, swaying and trying to catch her breath behind Pixie’s head; and the pale little fissure of Cassandra’s mouth, the pale wind-chapped tissue of the tiny lips made me think of cold kisses and of gooseflesh and of a thin dust of salt and of lipstick smeared helplessly on the white cheek. I took her elbow; I put a hand on her back and steadied her; I was
But I must have lain there musing and grumbling for hours, for several hours at least, before the tire exploded.
“Oh!” came Cassandra’s whispered shriek, her call for help, and I pinioned Pixie’s rump, I sank down, my knees were heaved into flight, Cassandra was floating, reaching out helplessly for her child. In the next instant the rear half of the bus was off the road and sailing out, I could feel, in a seventy-eight-mile-an-hour dive into the thick of the night. Air brakes in full emergency operation. Accidental blow to the horn followed by ghastly and idiotic trill on the trumpet. Diving rear end of the bus beginning to describe an enormous arc—fluid blind path of greatest destruction—and forward portion lurching, hammering, banging driver’s black head against invisible wall. Now, O Christopher… and then the crash.
Then: “Be calm, Cassandra,” I said, and kept my hold on the agitated Pixie but uncovered my face.
And she, whispering, breathing deeply: “What is it, Skipper? What is it?”
“Blowout,” I said, and opened my eyes. We were standing still. We were upright. Somehow we had failed to overturn though I saw her naked legs with the knees caught up to her chin and though everywhere I looked I saw the duffel bags lying like the bodies of white clowns prostrate after a spree of tumbling. And in this abrupt cessation of our sentimental journey, becoming aware of moonlight in the window and of thethin black line of the empty highway stretching away out there, and feeling a heavy deadness in my shoulder—twisted muscles? severed nerves?—I was able to glance at my free hand, to study it, to order flexing of my numerous and isolated fingers. I watched them. One by one they wiggled. Bones OK.
“Are you all right, Cassandra? Can you move your toes?”
“Yes, Skipper. But give Pixie to her mother, please.”
So we disembarked. We joined the slow white procession of hatless sailors. In the dark and among the angular seventeen-year-olds with ties askew and tops askew, among all the boys red-eyed and damp from cat-napping and too baffled, too bruised to talk, we felt our way up the canted aisle until we reached the listing door, the puckered aluminum steps, the open night. I took her in my arms and swung her down, and out there we stood together, close together, frock and uniform both body-tight in the wind, ankles twisting and shoes filling with sand. The bus was a dark blue dusty shadow, deceptive wreck; our skid-marks were long black treacherous curves in the desert; the highway was a dead snake in the distance; the wind was strong. We stood there with the unfamiliar desert beneath our feet, stood with our heads thrown back to the open night sky which was filled with the tiny brief threads of performing meteors.
The wind. The hot wind. Out there it warmed the skin but chilled the flesh, left the body cold, and though we lifted our faces like startled sun-tanned travelers, we were shivering in that endless night and in the wind that set the long dry cactus needles scraping and made a rasping noise of all the debris of the desert: tiny cellular spines, dead beetles, the discarded translucent tissue of wandering snakes, the offal of embryonic lizards and fields of dead dry locusts. All this rasping and humming; all the night listening; and underfoot all the smooth pebbles knocking together in the hot-cold night. And she, Cassandra, stood there swaying and clasping Pixie awkwardly against her breast, swaying and trying to catch her breath behind Pixie’s head; and the pale little fissure of Cassandra’s mouth, the pale wind-chapped tissue of the tiny lips made me think of cold kisses and of gooseflesh and of a thin dust of salt and of lipstick smeared helplessly on the white cheek. I took her elbow; I put a hand on her back and steadied her; I was
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