Sten didn’t move. He just stood there, looming over the driver like a statue, one hand gripping the overhead rack, the other braced against the seatback. “And how about a pit stop? Any restrooms out here?” Even as he posed the question he realized how foolish he sounded. He could only imagine what the driver must have thought of him, of all of them, privileged white people demanding this and that, here today, gone tomorrow. What did this guy care? There’d be another boat tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Finally, the tension tightening like a cord between them, the driver whipped his head round, his eyes visible as two indistinct drifting spheres behind the black plastic lenses. “Five minutes,” he said, the reggae pulsing at his throat, radiating up from the neck of his bright print shirt. Reggae. Thump-thump, boom. Thump-thump, boom. “Five minutes and we are there. You sit. Now.”
Five minutes? It was more like fifteen—and you can bet he was checking his watch all the way, his stomach doing backflips and his bladder sending urgent messages up his nervous system to his brain, which by now had burned itself clear of any lingering aftereffects of the rum so he could focus on what was important. Like escaping this sweatbox. Like pissing. Wetting his throat. Getting all this over with so he could go back to the boat, take a shower and stretch out on the bed, shut his eyes and dream of absolutely nothing.
The driver finally slowed down, but only because the road was barely passable here, so trenched and riddled it looked as if it had been shelled. As it was, they were jolted from side to side as the bus dipped tentatively into one hole after another, the wheels grabbing for purchase, the chassis shuddering and the transmission crying out with a grating whine that had Sten wondering if they were going to wind up walking back. “All we need,” he rasped at Carolee as she rocked into him. “You think triple A makes calls out here?”
The nature walk wasn’t sponsored by the cruise line, but the concierge or fun director or whatever you wanted to call her—a short grinning wide-faced woman in clopping heels and skirts that rode up her thighs—had pushed the brochure on them, along with brochures for a dozen other activities, ranging from kayaking in the harbor to visiting working potters and silversmiths to a self-guided tour of the local rum distilleries, map included. The brochure had featured a sleek two-tone modern van, silver above, blue below, and a light-skinned Tico driver with a conventional haircut, a welcoming smile and a chauffeur’s cap, not that Sten cared whether the man behind the wheel was a Swede or a Mandingo, but the reality was something else. Here you had this surly thug for a driver and a shabby decommissioned school bus that had been painted over so many times it looked as if it had grown a hide. Nobody had been particularly happy about it (“No air-conditioning? You kidding me?”), but they all climbed aboard and squeezed into the seats designed for children in some other place altogether, Lubbock or Yuma or King City, and told themselves At least it’s cheap.
He was staring gloomily out the window, getting more irritated by the minute, when they came to a shallow stream that seemed to be incorporated into the road along with the blistered rocks and scum-filled potholes, except that it was flowing, fanning out in front of them in a broad rippling pan. The tires eased into the water with a soft shush, spray leapt up and fell back again, and all at once he was thinking of the fish that must have lived there in the deep pools, tropical fish, the characins and Jack Dempseys and brick-red platys he’d introduced to his aquarium as a boy. Suddenly he was lost in reverie, picturing the glowing wall of tanks in the pet shop he’d haunted after school each day, remembering the pleasure of selecting the fish and paying for them with his own money, of setting up his first aquarium, arranging the rocks, digging in the gravel to plant the—what was it?—elodea. Yes, elodea. And the Amazon sword plant that looked like a miniature avocado tree. And what else? The little dwarf catfish, the albino ones, and what were they called?