Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (48 page)
“We cheered.
“I distinctly remember cheering.
“Yeehaw. I’m a dumb ass. I’m going to leave a nice home on the banks of a beautiful body of water, surrounded by great trees, with plenty of food, and a lazy lifestyle, to climb onto a boat and sail off to ... Nowhere.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Anyway, we swarmed aboard. The boat was already packed with food and stuffs, and there were, in fact, a dozen long lifeboats on that sucker. It stood high out of the water like it was proud of itself. We were ready and eager to set sail.
“The sails went up. Made from animal hides and vines, they were, but they were solid and they caught the wind, and we set out. And the wind was good that day, strong and blowing harder than a whore at Mardi Gras.
“About one day out something that should have occurred to us before, suddenly became prominent. Noah may have known how to build a boat, and we knew how to hoist sails, but frankly, none of us, Noah included, knew how to actually sail.
“And the good wind went away.
“Another problem. The boat was so big, that the only way it moved was s-l-o-w-l-y. Out there far from land, we became becalmed.
“This was okay for a day or two, you know, benefit of the doubt and all that, but within a few days we were pissed. All of us.
“We went to Noah, and in polite words, told him to turn that motherfucker around and take us back to Fort Drive-in, and from now on he could live in the fucking boat.
“No, someone said, the boat would become a second fort, up a ways from the first, and those with children, they could live there, make it a giant nursery.
“But, the bottom line, thing that counted, was this. We wanted to take our asses back to Fort Drive-in.
“‘No,’ said Noah. This was just the sort of thing that ruined a good adventure. Sailors always grumbled. The becalming would pass, and with it would come a good wind, and we would sail on into adventure.
“Besides, he made a very good point.
“Without any wind, becalmed as we were, we weren’t sailing anywhere. Home or otherwise.
“Did I tell you this Noah was a good speaker? He could talk the pork off a pig. He was that kind of guy, had that kind of voice. Held himself firm and high, had a beard. Reminded me of Charlton Heston in that Biblical movie,
The Ten Commandments
. So, to make it short as my hopes, I’ll just say we were famboozled again and hung in there.
The Ten Commandments
. So, to make it short as my hopes, I’ll just say we were famboozled again and hung in there.
“He had even given us a little fire in our bellies, made us think it was a good idea.
“So, finally we did catch a wind, and it was a good one, and it carried us far, far out, and land was no longer a distant line of brown. It was lost to us. There was only the sea and the sky, and once again, guess what? No fucking wind.
“Died like a politician’s promises.
“Let me tell you. I just thought that I was bored at Fort Drive-in. That big boat soon seemed like a fucking canoe. I paced it daily, as did a lot of others. Noah, he stayed away in his cabin. Sight of him made us angry, and he knew it.
“It was also obvious to us by this time that if we wanted to go home, we wouldn’t know how to do it. We had been turned and moved by that last good wind, and in fact, felt as if we were doing little more than spinning about like a top in pretty much the same place, so no matter which direction we decided to go, it would be a crapshoot.
“You know how it is here on this world, this place, this dimension, whatever it is. The sun might come up in one spot one day, in another the next. Same with the moon. And the stars. They move about like fireflies.
“These, of course, are things we should have thought of. But, like a lot of fools, we had put our fate into the hands of one person. Someone who KNEW THE ANSWERS. It wasn’t until we were on the ocean, becalmed, going a little crazy, starting to go short on supplies, and catching no fish, that we determined Noah didn’t know his dick from a grub worm.
“So, and I’m a little ashamed to tell you this part—but not real ashamed—there came a time when we had had enough, and we pulled him from his cabin and cut off both his ears, his nose, his dick and balls, tied him to the rigging and hoisted him up.
“He lasted a long time, hanging up there, bleeding to death, screaming and cussing, wiggling with his hands tied behind his back, his feettied together, as big white birds pecked out his eyes and took off chunks of his flesh. He was plagued by insects too. Big mothers. They tore at him as well.
“It was horrible to see.
“All that meat going to waste.
“So after a time, on a dark night, we brought him down and beat his head in and cooked him up and he was good. And might I add, we ate him by his own light, having used some of his fat which was not much at that moment in time, him having lost weight up there on the ropes—to stick in bowls to light as lamps. So there’s an irony, or at least if it isn’t irony, it’s a strangeness, to make a light of him to eat him by.
“When we were finished, we beat in his meatless jaw with clubs, knocked out his teeth, gathered them up, and in a kind of ceremony, tossed them into the dark waters, one by one. And for a long time, I kept a toothpick made of a snapped and fragmented bone from his skull, stuck it in what were then the remains of pants and/or now just so much fiber dust somewhere inside this fish.
“But, shit, I lost the pants, I lost the toothpick.”
2“Well, there we were. Out there on the vastness of the wetness, having eaten our captain, who was about as seaworthy as Captain Crunch, in a boat that looked like a giant Noah’s ark with a rudimentary sail, and we weren’t sail ing so good.
“We cursed the drive-in world, and we cursed the lack of wind. We cursed Noah, and we cursed the ship. We even got around to cursing ourselves. I missed the college classroom, teaching, which is what I did for a living, gentlemen and two ladies. Liked teaching fine. Spreading knowledge. Meeting young women. Truth be told, I fucked a lot of my students. I know that isn’t ethical but, as you can see, I’m sort of dick oriented, and I, like my students, am young, in my twenties. I just couldn’t help myself. Hear what I’m saying?
“So, I liked to do what they did. Go to the drive-in being one of those things. I took one of my students as a date. She was fine. I mean fine. But when things got bad, shit, had to eat her. And, not the usual way that word is used. I mean, you know, I did that too. Before I got hungry. And then, I actually ate her. Cooked her. Had matches in the glove box and a lighter on my person.
“God, I miss my cigarettes.
“I miss her as well. She was pretty special. I think we might have gotten married when she graduated. One thing for sure, she was gonna make an A in my class, she did the work or not.
“Not that she couldn’t do it. She could. She was smart. Hell, she even cooked up good. Sometimes I think I can still taste her. You haven’t eaten until you’ve had human flesh ... Did I mention that? A tittie, it fries up good.
“Oh, yes. The boat. We were on the boat. And I’m thinking, where the hell are we, really? I’m sure we’ve all thought that. I know I have. Where are we?
“Another planet?
“Another universe?
“Up a duck’s ass?
“I sort of like that idea. Not the duck ass. The different universe idea. You know, all that stuff about multiverses. Expanding out beyond our own universe, and the laws of physics not applying in the same way, or at all, and the laws of physics here being nothing more than bylaws. You hear what I’m saying? Bylaws. What applied where we were, our world, does not apply here. Someone has laid out a whole new list of what does and what don’t.
“But, I think on that, and I think, shit, to believe that, I got to make a real leap of faith, and finally it’s just so much guess work.
“Yet, here I am. Some goddamn place. The inside of a fish, that much I know. But, this world, can it be? Why yes, I tell myself. It can be. For here I am. So I be, and you be, we all be.
“But still I wonder, and the wonder confuses my head.
“It also causes me to veer from my story. I’ll throw out a mental lifeline and tug it back. I should know how to tell a tale better than this, a tale that ends up with me inside a fish’s tail, which makes a hell of a tale indeed.
“So there we sat on our boat inside this branch of the multiverse, or wherever the fuck we are, and finally we got some wind.
“We had been becalmed for some time, and we had prayed for that wind, begged for that wind, longed for that wind. And when it came, we didn’t want it.
“It started out calm and cool and fine enough, but in short time it was less calm and turned cold. The water frothed like meringue on a pie, and then it was not so much frothing as foaming, then not so much foaming as white with fury, like a mad dog frothing.
“At first, before it went psycho-wind on us, it filled the sail in a single puff, and we decided to turn the boat, for no good reason than the bulk of us voted to do that, thinking we had come from that direction, but not really knowing, you see, just guessing.
“But we decided to turn it, gentlemen and two ladies.
“And the boat began to move. The wind picked up, and the boat moved faster, and then an interesting thing happened, and this was even before the wind turned savage.
“Parts of the boat began to fall off.
“The glue we had made to stick between the boards, after being damp for so long, was coming apart. Noah had designed the boat in such a way that not all of it was tightly pegged. Some of it, heaven forbid, was held together by no more than resin and hope. This sort of shit, my gathering of little dirties, is exactly why Noah should have been eaten.
“He had duped us.
“He didn’t know glue from cow shit. And hadn’t that motherfucker ever heard of a nail. A bunch of nails. Not just a peg or two, but real nails. Maybe we would have had to have made them from wood, but they should have been made. Some kind of way. Hear what I’m saying?
“Glue is okay for paper hats and homemade valentines, but it’s shit for holding together big-ass boats after they get good and wet and end up in a storm.
“The waves and wind lashed us and slammed us, and washed into that weak-ass glue and made it thin, made it come undone even faster. We rode the waves, this way and that, and our sail got wadded up like a snotty Kleenex. Folks were going crazy, they were so scared. They were fighting and yelling, fucking, leaping over the side of the boat. It was like someone had touched us with a crazy wand.
“Finally, I took control. I didn’t know I had it in me. I had to stab a couple folks, make them quit running around like assholes, make them shut up, but pretty soon, I’m yelling ideas, and then the ideas are orders, and folks are listening.
“Stabbing a motherfucker or two will bring another fella’s mind around quick-like.
“I yell out about the lifeboats, say let’s get those goddamn lifeboats filled.
“About the time we’re trying to do that, the whole goddamn great boat, or ship, or whatever the fuck it was, came apart. Just collapsed like a Republican tax cut. Looks good on the outside, and works fine up front on the short run, but boy do you pay for it in the back end. And, my little dirties, we were paying for it.
“Thing was, the lifeboats had been filled. About a hundred and ten of us in those boats. There were a few folks left over. We had to give them our best wishes and a couple of knife wounds to keep them out of the lifeboats. When the big boat came all the way apart it left us floating, and those unfortunates who hadn’t been fast enough to get their nasty asses in the boats, that hadn’t been stabbed, well, they were just out there, hanging to lumber or going under, or getting finished off by boat paddles to the head. It sounds cruel, but it was better than just leaving them there. Especially the little ones. The three- and four-year-olds who were struggling so hard. You can’t stand to see that, I will assure you, so we beat them down.
“The wind kept up, and we had to bail water out of the lifeboats, and there wasn’t much room to bail, so we put some of the mothers and children over the side and wished them luck. We had to stop hitting them with the paddles, due to the fact we had shattered one and cracked another. That wouldn’t do.
“I know that sounds cold, and I suppose it is. I got to come back to that, me saying how cold it was, but how necessary it was. You see, for the bulk of us to survive, we had to rid ourselves of the weak. And most of the mothers and children were weak. We hung onto the stronger women with the plumper babies (food should always be considered), and kept at it.
“The night came and that was bad, but at least the wind had stopped and the moon had come up. During the night, some of the folks in the boat disappeared. I don’t know what happened. I think someone must have cut their throats and drank the blood and put them over the side. It had to have been seen by just about everyone (not me, though), but no one was complaining. Not when the bailing buckets had warm blood in them to drink.
“When the sun came up, we checked our boat, took a head count, and determined how our survivors were doing. There were some who had been injured when the big boat came apart, you see, and now, in the daylight, we could see they weren’t doing so good, so we put them over the side.
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