I wriggled. I blushed. I took the sandwich. I heard the catgut notes of the ukelele — vision of French letters floating downstream in the moonlight — I heard the black turbine roaring of our diesel engine, beyond this metal and glass heard the high wind filled with thistle and the flat shoe leather bodies of dead prairie rodents. And I was wedged into the night, wedged firmly in my cheerful embarrassment, and chewing, frowning, hoping to keep her feathery voice alive.
Our picnic, our predawn hours together on this speeding bus, our cramped but intricate positions together at the start of this our journey between two distant cemeteries, the nearly physical glow that begins to warm the darkest hour at the end of the night watch — when sleep is only a bright immensity put off as long as possible and a man is filled with a greedy slack desire to recall even his most painful memories — in all the seductive shabbiness of the moment I felt that I knew myself, heart and stomach, as peaceful father of my own beautiful and unpredictable child, and that the disheveled traveler was safe, that both of us were safe. We too would have our candy bars when the sun rose. Sonny had provided the sandwiches but I myself had thought of the candy bars, had slipped them secretly into the flight bag with Cassandra’s stockings and Pixie’s little fluffy pinafore. We too would have our arrival and departure, our radio broadcast of victory and defeat. In the darkness the driver sounded his horn — triple-toned trumpet, inane orchestrated warning to weak-kneed straying cows and sleeping towns — and my lips rolled into the loose shape of a thoughtless murmur: “Happy, Cassandra?”
“I’m sleepy, Skipper. I would like to go to sleep. Will you try?”
I chuckled. And she smoothed down her frock, brushed the empty paper bag to the floor, pressed her hands together, palms and fingers straight and touching as the child prays, and without glancing at me lay her cheek on her clasped hands and shut her eyes. As if she had toileted, donned her negligee, turned with her face averted and drawn the shade. Modest Cassandra. While I chuckled again, grimaced, rolled my head back to the window, grunted under the weight of Pixie — bad dreams, little pig sounds — then sighed and swung away and dropped to my army of desperate visions that leapt about in the darkness. But safe. Sleeping. Outward bound.
But wasn’t Cassandra still my teen-age bomb? Wasn’t she? Even though she was a war bride, a mother, a young responsible woman of twenty-five? At least I thought so when at last I awoke to the desert sunburst and a giant sea-green grandfather cactus stabbed to death by its own needles and to the sight of Cassandra begging Pixie to drink down a little more of the canned milk two daysold now and pellucid. And wasn’t this precisely what I loved? That the young-old figure of my Cassandra — sweet queenly head on an old coin, yet flesh and blood — did in fact conceal the rounded high-stepping baby fat and spangles and shoulder-length hair and dimples of the beautiful and wised-up drum majorette, that little bomb who is all hot dogs and Egyptian beads? Wasn’t this also my Cassandra? I thought so and for the rest of the day the emotions and problems of this intensive fantasy saved me from the oppressive desert with its raw and bleeding buttes and its panorama of pastel colors as outrageous and myriad as the colors that flashed in the suburban kitchen of some gold-star mother. Saved me too from our acrobatic Pixie who at lunchtime added smears, little doll-finger tracks and blunt smudges of Nestlé’s chocolate to my white naval breast already so crumpled and so badly stained. Smelling the chocolate, glancing at the unshapely humps and amputated spines, thorns, of miles of crippled cacti, I only smiled and told myself that the flesh of the cheerleader was still embedded in the flesh of Pixie’s mother and so soothed myself with various new visions of this double anatomy, this schizophrenic flesh. And toward sundown-more chocolate, more smearing, end of a hot and untalkative and disagreeable day — when I was squinting between my fingers at the last purple upheaval of the pastel riot, I struggled a moment — it was a sudden cold sickening speculation — with the question of which was the greater threat to her life, the recklessness of the teen-age bomb or the demure determination of the green-eyed and diamond-brained young matron who was silvery, small, lovable with bare legs and coronet? It was too soon for me to know. But I would love them both, scrutinize them both, then at the right moment fling myself in the way of the ascendant and destructive image. I was still scowling and loving her, suspecting her, when the desert fireworks suddenly ended and the second night came sweeping up like a dark velvet wind in our faces.
“And we don’t even have sandwiches tonight, Cassandra. Not one.”
I felt the child’s tiny knee in my groin — determined and unerring step — I felt her any hand return again and again to tantalize and wound itself against my unwashed cheek, absently I picked at the chocolate that had dried like blood on the old sailcloth or cotton or white drill of my uniform. And finding a plugged-up nipple secreted like a rubber talisman or ill omen in my pocket; watching Cassandra stuff a pair of Pixie’s underpants into the flight bag; discovering that between my two white shoes there was another, the foot and naked ankle and scuffed black shoe of some long-legged sailor who had stretched himself out at last — in orgasm? in extreme discomfort? — and seeing Cassandra’s face dead white and realizing that finally she had scraped the bottom of the cardboard face powder box which I had saved along with her stockings: all of it reminded me of the waxworks museum we had visited with Sonny, reminded me of a statue of Popeye the Sailor, naked except for his cap and pipe, which we had assumed to be molded of rubber until we read the caption and learned that it was made of eight pounds and five different brands of chewed-up chewing gum, and 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 the thin 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.