Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (45 page)
It was kind of weird, really.
But it worked.
And when I finished that night, everyone seemed calmer. Happier. Not so much aware of the ghostly drive-in that pursued us and floated around us and tried to become one with us.
I felt I had taken some of the pressure off the teapot. And Reba, she was sweeter that night, and slower, and I felt respected, and when I came, I opened my eyes and saw over Reba’s shoulder the ghostly shades from the drive-in drift by. An old acquaintance, Crier, was looking my direction, not really seeing, just standing there ghost-like, looking at the spot where I lay on my back, Reba astride, and I felt a strange fondness for him. But in that moment of pleasure, I was quite fond of everyone and everything.
And when daylight came, it was a little better in there.
No one was singing tunes from The Sound of Music or giving me the high five, but it was better. Calmer.
Nights came, I told more of the short stories. And as the nights passed, I told the Lory novel. Then the Louis L’Amour novel. Then I began to make up things. I felt like Sheherazade from the Arabian Nights, and like her, I feared if I ever slowed down or bored them, I was dead meat.
Then, when I felt I was maybe out of tales or losing my energy to tell them, was hoping my ass could take a lot of loving and not be too unhappy with it, and, in fact good at it, so I would have something to barter besides being turned into jerked meat, a strange thing happened.
And considering our lives have been a list of strange things, this was a very strange thing indeed.
3The day had turned out hot, and the water was still, and it hardly seemed we were flowing with the current at all. We were mostly becalmed. There was, of course, nothing but water to see, and the great bridge, clouded at bottom and top, but visible. It seemed no closer than it had seemed many days before.
I climbed on top of the bus for a bit, took in the sun with my shirt off, lying face down. But there was so much of old Sol, and I didn’t have any way to protect my skin from the rays, and the idea of some terrific sunburn without so much as a bottle of calamine lotion didn’t appeal to me, so I decided to climb inside and take in some shade.
As I turned over to go back in the bus, I saw Grace climb out, stark naked and brown as a walnut. She didn’t fear the sun and spent much time in it. And though the sun’s rays might be rough on her in the near future, right then she looked like a brown jungle savage, a regular Sheena. I watched her dive from the hood of the bus and swim about for awhile, then I climbed back through the window with my shirt.
It was a good thing too, and it was a good thing that Grace became bored and came back inside, because Cory pointed out an open window, yelled out, “Look there.”
We looked out the window where he was pointing.
The great fin again.
“That is one big fucking fish,” Cory said.
“There’s enough meat there to dry and feed us till this big old waterhole goes dry,” Homer said.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Steve said, slipping an arm around Grace’s nude body, “but there’s a lot of meat there.”
“I’m gonna get my line and such,” Cory said, “get up there, see if I can catch it.”
“You’re gonna need more than a few twists of twine and a bone hook to hold that one,” I said.
“You can catch a big fish on small line if you know what you’re doing,” Cory said, snatching up his fishing gear. “And I got some fish guts for bait. They’ve been hitting good on that one.”
He climbed out the window with his gear, boosted up by James.
We could hear him on top of the bus, and we saw his line flash out in the direction of the fin.
The fin surfaced and the water rippled. Then everything was still again.
James said, “Shit, he’s done gone to the bottom.”
About that time we saw the string go taut, and Cory yelled, “Goddamn. String cut my hand.”
James stuck his head out the window. “Hold him, Cory.”
“Get up here and help, James.”
James climbed out the window, worked his way to the roof of the bus. He clumped around up there for awhile, then we heard them both cussing.
“Maybe they need more help,” Homer said.
“Damn,” Steve said, letting go of Grace, grabbing a seat back for balance. “That little cord and that fish are causing the whole damn bus to rock.”
“They need to forget that fish,” Grace said. “The thing could swamp us.”
About that time the twine snapped. James and Cory cussed and began to jump up and down on the roof.
“Stop that, you idiots,” Grace said.
I felt a tug at my sleeve.
I turned. It was Reba. She had her mouth wide open. She was clutching my sleeve with one hand and pointing at the water with the other.
The fish had surfaced.
And, to put it simply and honestly, it was a big motherfucker.
“It’s a catfish,” Homer said. “It’s like a blue cat, only a whole hell of a lot bigger.”
“It’s big as a Great White,” Grace said.
“It’s coming right for the bus,” Homer said, as if this might not be obvious to the rest of us.
The great head split, and the mouth was wide, maybe six feet, no teeth, but there were whiskery growths sticking out from its broad face, and its eyes were black and bottomless.
It dove, showing only its fin, which split the water like a razor slicing paper.
Then the fish hit the side of the pontoon.
The bus shook and I heard Cory and James cuss again. I was knocked back into the seat behind me. I scrambled to my feet, made it across the bus, to the window, called out, “Get back inside. Now.”
But the catfish hit again, and I heard a splash on the opposite side of the bus.
I turned for a look just as Reba said, “It’s Cory. In the water.”
And it was.
He yelled out for help a couple of times, and I was about to work myself through the window to go for him, when Grace said, “Oh, my God.”
I turned.
The catfish that had rammed the bus rose up out of the water. Its tail flashed, and it seemed to heave like it was being pumped with a bellows. It sat there on the surface, looking at us, giving us the evil eye.
But he wasn’t nothing.
He wasn’t nothing at all.
Not anymore.
There was something new.
Something that made our concern about the ramming catfish seem like a silly notion.
In fact, the idea of leaping into the water and wrestling with it seemed less scary than what was about to happen.
4The water, as far as the eye could see, foamed. Then it lifted in a sheet of sun-shimmering silver, and beneath the splashes and lapping of the water was a darkness. At first it was a line, like a black storm on the horizon, stretching way wide.
The line widened, became a maw, and the maw became a great black cave. Slowly, the cave condensed, and there was just the fine line again. Then the line dropped below the water, and there was a dark hump rising, making a brief waterfall to either side. This was followed by a faraway flick of a finny tail. I don’t know how far away that tail was, as it was impossible to tell distances, but if I were a betting man, I’d say, and no shit on this, it was a half a mile away, and even that far away it was considerably bigger in appearance than any fishtail I had ever seen, no matter how close to my eye and how large the fish.
The body rose up higher in the water, and there was a massive head, about the size of six city blocks, and there was a glimpse of one eye the size of a spotlight, and a whisker, big as bridge cable. The whisker flexed.
I looked and saw, down a distance and to my left, the other eye (way down there it was, dear hearts) and another whisker (also way down there), and it was then that our finny friend opened its mouth and showed us the cave again.
In that moment, of course, I knew what it was. A catfish. And not the sort you’d catch and toss in the back of your truck to be weighed at Wal-Mart for a fishing contest.
This watery denizen would have made Moby Dick look like a fucking anemic minnow on a runway model diet.
The mouth stayed open, and the fish dropped slightly in the water. A whisker whipped the wind like a black snake whip, and the other catfish, the one we had thought was big, turned and swam slowly toward the greater one, a willing sacrifice.
It swam right into that cavernous mouth, splashed on in and out of sight. The maw continued to widen and expand and the water rolled and foamed as the monster swam toward us.
We just sat there, our thumbs up our asses.
Wasn’t any place we could go.
Nothing we could do.
No one said a word. Not even a Holy Shit, look at that size of that motherfucker.
Nothing.
We didn’t even notice that Cory had worked his way back up on a pontoon and had climbed dripping wet through a window. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had noticed, but it hadn’t registered deeply. How could it. Not with that Leviathan out there.
Water ran into the fish’s mouth like being poured into a funnel, and way to the left, and way to the right, I saw a shiny spurt of spray, and knew water was rushing through the great fish’s gills, shooting out against the clear blue sky like geysers.
The bus began to move. Rapidly. Flowing behind the formerly large, now less impressive catfish, into the darkness of the maw that must have swallowed Old Jonah.
Finally, someone spoke.
It was Grace. She said, “This sucks.”
Steve said, “I just want to say goodbye to my dick. It’s been good to me.”
The water moved fast and went into the fish and we went with it; there was a rush into the great mouth as the bus straightened itself, fled down the throat of the beast, and behind us the light faded.
I turned to look.
The dark line was lowering, and the bright blue of the outside was going away as if a blind were being slowly pulled closed. Water lapped in and with it came a total blackness like the end of all things.
There was a thud and a jerk as the water the behemoth gulped slammed up against the back of our craft. The bus began to flee along at breakneck speed, like a roller-coaster ride, on down, dropping our stomachs out. Water spurted in through the bus’s cracks, and someone, James I think, yelled, “We’re gonna drown like rats,” and from the back window came a confirmation, a blast of black wetness (should have closed that fucking window up), and away we went, water gushing to our knees, causing us to climb into the seats, only to instantly feel the water rise up to touch us.
Away we went, faster and faster, propelled into the pitch dark moist nowhere toward the nucleus of the Lord of the Fishes.
5One thing you don’t expect inside a fish is light.
Soon there would be other things unexpected. But, for the moment, let’s just consider the light.
Lights actually.
A row of them.
But let’s not jump too far ahead.
Let’s roll back and talk back and go up the throat of the fish, and let me tell you how we came down.
We came down in a stink, baby. The water nearly filled the bus. We bumped our heads on the ceiling, and the water smelled bad, and there were things in the water, and the bus went fast, and then it slowed. There was a feeling like being a mole in a water hose. And somehow I knew we were in some piece of gut, making our way to the center, where, I figured, stomach acid, or whatever fish use to digest (is it rocks? no, I believe that’s chickens that get pebbles in their craw), would be our final destination.
Seven for the soup.
Dinner served.
A little later that day it would be out the ole sphincter, blown through the asshole into the deeps, an acid-pocked bus full of skeletons.
If that much was left.
Just so much fish shit.
But, I was saying about the lights, and now we come to them again. So, we’re jetting along through the guts and into the stomach, hanging onto the seats, drenched in water, not quite drowned, but in a position that we in the business of being swallowed by fish like to call, seriously wet, and then—
—SQUIRT—
—right out into—
The light.
A muddled light, I might mention, as if shown through thick wax paper, but it was light. The bus came down with a smack, right side up (thank goodness), and the water in the bus sloshed back and forth across us, and the light shining through the windows, piercing the water that was now almost to the ceiling, burned our eyes.
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