That was when the engine died. That was when, fighting her for the gun, Pan realized that the bear's big humped ottoman head had a mouth full of teeth in it and that the bear wasn't heading for shore anymore. No, the bear was coming for _them__ now, plowing through the weave of the current like a torpedo in one of those grainy old _Victory at Sea__ reruns his father couldn't get enough of. He snatched a look at Verbie and saw that she'd reconsidered her position-_Verbie,__ the den mother, the Buddha, the hack-haired chick who was never wrong. Who never faltered. Who knew it all and was ready to tell you about it twenty-four hours a day. That was her thing, that was her trip, that was why she'd been christened _Verbie__ in the first place. But now a look came over her face that fomented as much real terror in him as he'd ever known, a look that said she'd miscalculated, she'd interfered, she'd opened her big downer mouth at the wrong time and was going to pay for it with her life. And his.
Ronnie shoved her down, hard. The big head was surging across the water, no more than twenty yards away. This was a crisis. The first real crisis of his life. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, nothing, and his heart clenched and unclenched even as he tugged at the starter cord and heard the engine cough and die, cough and die. He never even thought of the gun. It was lying in the bottom of the boat where he'd dropped it, lying there inert in three inches of water. Nor did he think of the.44 strapped to his right thigh or the bowie knife strapped to his left. _The oars,__ that's what he thought. And in a pure rocketing frenzy of panic he snatched them up, jammed them into the oarlocks and began digging for all he was worth. Which, admittedly, wasn't much, because he hadn't actually had a pair of oars in his hands-hadn't actually _rowed__ a boat-since he was twelve or thirteen. The oars slipped and missed, chopping at the water. Back they came, and missed again. But then they caught and held and the boat swung its nose into the current and the seething monumental toothy head of the bear-which had been so close, ten feet away, ten feet or less-began to fall back, inch by inch, foot by foot, till he couldn't hear the roar of its breathing anymore, till he couldn't hear anything but the creak of the oarlocks and the deep punishing hiss of the river.
Boynton wasn't much-a collection of unpainted shacks and log cabins the color of dirt, explosions of weed, clots of trash, stumps, rusted-out pickups, eight or ten powerboats pulled up on the gravel bar or drifting back from their painters like streamers on a kid's bike-and it would have been easy to miss if it wasn't for the bus. The bus was right there, fifty feet from the gliding dark surface of the river, planted amidst the debris outside Sess Harder's shack-or his pied-à-terre, as Skid Denton liked to call it. Pan focused on the bus as he swung the skiff round the final bend east of town-and yes, the engine was working just fine, thank you, after he'd got done performing fellatio on the fuel line and pulling the starter cord so many times it felt as if his arm was coming out of the socket-but the bus wasn't yellow anymore, or not strictly yellow. He saw that Lydia and the other truants had been at it with their paints, an exercise in boredom at base camp, playtime, free time-_recess,__ for Christ's sake-while everybody else had been humping logs and eating mush out of the ten-gallon pot. But how could he complain? This was _art,__ the fruit and expression of civilization, and the strictly functional schoolbus yellow had given way to fluorescent purple and cherry-apple red, to doppelgänger green, Day-Glo orange and shattered pink. Freaks should be freaky, shouldn't they?
“Wow,” Verbie said, and it was the first syllable out of her mouth since the bear incident, “wow, do you dig that?”
“What?”
“The bus. It's all done up in faces, in what do you call them-caricatures. Cartoons, I mean. Look, that's Norm, right there by the door? And Reba. And look, it's you, _Pan,__ down there by the tailpipe, with a fish in your hand-”
He skated the boat in, watching for obstructions, but when it was safe, when he'd tipped the propeller up out of the water and let the thing ride, he took a closer look, and there he was, at the far end of the bus, with a head like a lightbulb and a tiny dwindling little anemic body and two fish-two _minnows__-dangling from the stringer in his hand.
“Pan,” she said, “the mighty hunter.”
“Verbie the yapper,” he said.
He was climbing out of the boat now and he'd just about had it with her shit-they'd almost died out there, didn't she realize that? “I don't see _you__ up there,” he added, just to stick it to her.
Her face was clenched like a fist. She stepped out into six inches of water, and she was devastated, he could see that-imagine Verbie excluded from the Drop City pantheon-but then she recovered herself and shot him a look of pure and vibrant hatred. “I'm on the other side,” she said, “you want to bet on it? Or the back, look on the back.”
He wasn't looking anywhere. He really didn't give a rat's ass whether her portrait was plastered all over the bus inside and out or whether they'd raised a statue in honor of her or burned her in effigy-this was childish, that's what it was-and he crossed the yard to the bus and stuck his head in the open door.
It was deserted-you could see that at a glance. But he stepped up on the milk crate somebody had set there in the dirt to ease the transition to that first elevated step and gave a look down the aisle. Sun leaked through the curtains in thin regular bands and illuminated the dust motes hanging in the stagnant air. There was the usual clutter of clothes, books, record jackets and dirty plates, the odd smear of crushed flies and mosquitoes rubbed into the cracked vinyl seats, and a smell he couldn't quite place, something promiscuous, something _communal.__ “Anybody here?” he called.
No answer. And that was odd: Where could they all be in the middle of the day? In the shack? Up the bank of the river tossing daisies in the water? Tooling around in the Studebaker? But no, he could see the car out the window, sitting idle on the verge of the dirt road, and Harmony's Beetle humped there beside it under half a ton of dust. Verbie's voice came to him then, a little whoop of triumph from the far side of the bus: “Here I am! Look, I told you-I'm right here next to Angela and, and-this must be Jiminy!”
Pan backed out of the bus, his head as clear as it was ever going to be, since he hadn't had so much as a beer or a toke since he'd rolled out this morning, and no food either (breakfast, in its entirety, consisted of the honey-sweetened tea at Sess Harder's place and the handful of stale crackers Pamela had fanned out on the table like a deck of cards). Clear-headed? Light-headed was more like it. He was starving, that's what it was, wasting away like a mystic in the desert, and if he didn't get a burger and a couple beers in him pretty soon he was going to start speaking in tongues and spouting fire from his ears. For a long moment he stood there puzzling over the deserted bus, contemplating the pattern of footprints in the dust at his feet-the impress of bootheels, the elaborate punctuation of bare soles and the little necklaces of toeprints strung across the path that ran through the trampled weed to the road-and then he knew: they were at the bar, the saloon, the roadhouse, whatever they called it. The Three Pup. They were at the Three Pup, tipping back beers and maybe the odd shot of Everclear, getting a buzz on, salting fries, listening to the sizzle of burgers on the grill and the rattle of the jukebox as the record dropped and the stylus maneuvered into place. Pan was already making it up the road when Verbie came out from behind the bus. “Hey,” she said, her voice trailing away till it became no more noteworthy or troublesome than the routine buzz of the mosquitoes in his ears, “where is everybody?”