Lifted
Wilderstory 03
Dot followed the scrubby desert bushes along the roadside as they sped through her field of vision. The closest ones were almost a blur. But she found if she blinked quick enough, she could capture them in focus for a split second. Like flickering still photographs.
“Strobes,” she thought. She sensed her lips moving, articulating the shape of that word as it formed in her mind.
It wasn’t a big bus. Maybe six rows deep. Most of the other girls were sitting in groups of two or three, sometimes leaning over between the seats to talk. Dot was alone in the back. Minding the gear, as Florence would say.
Florence was the music teacher. She also drove the bus. Dot could see her face reflected in the long rear-view mirror that ran across the top of the windshield. Her eyes bulged from behind her plastic rimmed glasses.
“She sees everything,” Dot mused, looking down to her lap. In one hand, she held the two Rooster Stix that Florence had given her money to buy. She rolled them against each other, listening to their plastic wrappers crinkle.
Her other hand was closed. Secret.
Dot opened it. The red oblong mass inside clung to her fingers. It wasn’t really the shape of a fish anymore. It had molded itself around the contours of Dot’s hand. But she could still make out the surface details; an eye, a gill and a stamped pattern of tiny scales along one side.
A single Swedish Fish, plucked from a clump of other Swedish Fish. Lifted, as they would say on TV. But Dot didn’t consider it stealing, because she didn’t plan on eating it. Not now, anyway. And besides, the box was already half open when she found it on the shelf.
She slid her hand down the side of her leg until she felt the top of her boot. Just inside the rubber lip was a slender built-in pocket. It was designed to hold a house key. Or some spare change. Or in Dot’s case, a single Swedish Fish.
The bus rattled continuously. Dot could feel the vibrations from her bench seat all the way up to the edges of her nostrils. And the seats around her squeaked and groaned with all the gear. Instruments in cases. Overnight bags. And the big black amp across the aisle, with its textured side panels and clunky round knobs. Florence always complained about having to bring it along whenever they traveled to the Gallup lodge. “Because their sound system sucks,” she would say.
One of the girls toward the front of the bus stood up in the aisle and moved toward Florence.
“Ellen says she has to pee,” the girl said.
Florence’s face flashed in the mirror. “Mother of God,” she exhaled. Ellen was sitting in the third row, shoulders slumped.
“Marta. Go sit down. And Ellen,” Florence turned in her seat, “for crying out loud — we just stopped at a gas station.”
There was a fly buzzing around Florence’s head. Dot could easily make it out in the mirror. It was large and black, like a horsefly. Now it was in Florence’s hair. Now on her neck.
She chased after it with her free hand. The bus lurched as her other hand pulled at the wheel. And the heads and shoulders of all the girls swayed in unison.
Florence looked up into the mirror, surveying the faces of the girls behind her. She composed herself, blinking, “I’m not turning this bus around. So you’ll have to hold it until we get to the lodge.”
Through the mirror, Dot watched as Florence looked rigidly down the road. In her face and in her hair and in how she dressed, she saw Florence the music teacher. Florence the bus driver.
But in her eyes, Dot felt like she could finally see Florence the woman. And she wondered what Florence was like when she wasn’t driving a busload of girls to the Gallup lodge.
That’s when the fly reappeared, landing on Florence’s upper lip. Big and black and round, like an old Hollywood beauty mark. Dot could feel her own mouth open in disbelief as Florence sat calmly at the wheel. Oblivious.
The fly lingered for a moment. And then, without warning, it clambered straight up her nostril.
Florence’s eyes bulged as she groped and pawed at her nose. She dug with her nails to pluck it out. But the fly was burrowing deeper.
Florence began to gag. She fell forward into the steering wheel as the bus swung across the opposite lane.
The sound of the road beneath the tires was replaced by the sound of shifting gravel. Florence yanked at the wheel, and the world outside tilted, as if on an axis that was the bus itself. And there was a creaking of metal that Dot guessed was like nothing she had ever heard before.
The girls in front of her floated; their hair lifting and swaying. Weightless. Their screams were far away. And everything seemed to be leaning.
Dot looked across the aisle to see the gear, gliding and bumping up out of the seats and tumbling toward her. The instruments in their cases. The overnight bags. And the big black amp with its textured side panels and clunky round knobs.
There was a singular moment of peace before everything went dark. A comforting void that may have lasted less than a second. The light through the windows flickered before Dot’s eyes as she blinked.
“Strobes,” she thought.
