The Wanderer

“You’re telling me?” he retorted, looking around at her incredulously and flashing some yellowed, stumpy incisors and scattered, black, amalgam-roofed molars. “He told me,” he went on, jerking a thumb at Doc just outside the door, “about this five-hundred-and-sixty-foot tide that would drown me if I didn’t get up in the hills fast. He made it mighty vivid. And then he told me I needn’t strain myself making up my mind whether to take you folks too, because he had a guy with a gun. Good o’ me? I just had no choice. Besides,” he added, “there was a big slide blocking off my regular route south. Might as well throw in with you crazy folks.”

Margo laughed self-consciously. “You’ll get used to us,” she said. At that moment the Ramrod came shouldering into the bus, calling back to Doc: “Very well, Wanda and I will ride in this conveyance, but I categorically refuse to drink milk with fallout rays and rat poison in it!”

The driver looked at Margo. “Maybe,” he said sourly.

The rest came crowding aboard. Hunter had sat down beside Margo while the driver was talking to her. She ostentatiously made extra room, but he didn’t look at her. Doc stood in the door and counted noses. “All here,” he announced. He leaned out and shouted to the truck, “O.K., off we go! Reverse course and follow in line astern!”

The school bus turned around on the bridge, and the truck behind it. Margo noticed that the water in the wash was now a yard higher. A tiny roller came up it, foaming along the sides. The beach onto which she’d shot the boulder was under water, too. Last night the road here had been over half a mile from the ocean, but now only a hundred yards separated it from the surf.

Doc settled down in the strategic spot he’d reserved for himself, opposite Hunter and behind the door. He sprawled a leg over the extra seat beside him.

“On to Monica Mountainway,” he told the driver. “Keep her at an easy thirty and watch for rocks. We’ve hardly four miles to go along the highway — ample time to dodge Mrs. Pacific as she fattens up. Remember, everybody, the Pacific Coast tides are the mixed kind. Fortunately for us, this morning’s the low high. — McHeath,” he called over his shoulder, “you’re our liaison officer. Keep an eye on the truck. Rest of you, don’t crowd the sea-side. I want this bus balanced when we start uphill. We’re well ahead of the tide — there’s no danger.”

“Unless we get some more—” Margo began, but checked herself. She’d been going to say “earthquake waves” or “tsunami.”

Hunter flashed her a smile. “That’s right; don’t say it,” he whispered to her. Then, in a not much louder voice, across to Doc: “Where did you pick up that five-sixty figure, Rudy?”

“Eighty times the L.A. tidal range of seven feet,” Doc replied. “Much too big, I devoutly hope, but we have to make some kind of estimate. Oh, a life on the ocean wave, a home on the rolling deep, da-da-da-da-da-da-da…”

Margo winced at the raucous voice “singing for morale” — how well consideredly was an open question — and wished it were Paul’s. Then she clasped her hands together and studied the back of the driver’s seat. It looked recently scrubbed, but she could make out, “Ozzie is a stinker,” “Jo-Ann wears falsies,” and “Pop has 13 teeth.”

Despite Doc’s reassurances, there was considerable excited watching of the creeping waters and scanning of the misty horizon, and a mounting feeling of tension as the bus chugged south. Margo felt the tension slacken the moment they turned up the sharply mounting, two-lane black ribbon of the moun-tainway — and then, almost immediately, gather again as people scanned the road ahead for slides or buddings. There instantly sprang out of Margo’s own memory Mrs. Hixon’s vivid phrase: “Those mountains have stirred like stew.” But the first stretch, at least, straight up a low-domed hill, looked clear and smooth.

“Truck turning inland after us, Mr. Brecht,” came a soldierly voice from the rear.

“Thank you, McHeath,” Doc called back. Then, to Hunter and Margo with grinning enthusiasm, and loudly enough for all to hear, “I’m banking on Monica Mountainway. There hasn’t been much about it in the general press, but actually it’s a revolutionary advance in roadbuilding.”

“Hey, Doc,” Wojtowicz called, “if this road’s clear to the Valley, there’d be traffic coming through.”

“You’re sharp this morning, Wojtowicz,” Doc agreed, “but we only need the mountainway clear the first three miles — that’ll put us over six hundred feet up. We don’t have to worry about the other twenty-two miles. In fact, it’s probably better for us if it’s blocked somewhere beyond that”

“I get you, Doc: we’d be fighting fifty million cars.”

“The sky looks blacker ahead, Mommy,” Ann piped up. She and Rama Joan were in the seat behind Doc. “A big smoke plume.”

“We’re between water and fire,” the Ramrod announced, some of the dreamy note coming back into his voice. “But be of good cheer; Ispan will return.”