Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (49 page)
“Except for one. We cut him up and ate him.
“I might also mention, that the ones we put over the side that morning we didn’t let drift and we didn’t bust them with boat paddles. We drowned them, pulled their bodies close to the side of the boat, and tied them off with rope. They were our larder. We had come to that, and thank God we were wise enough to do just that. I only regretted that we had thrown so much fine meat over the side the night before. I remembered one of those women quite well, seeing her ass in the wet moonlight, bobbing up and down like a round-ended barrel. She would have provided us with rump roast for days. She had been a volunteer. Someone who just couldn’t take it anymore. She bobbed about for awhile, that ass up in the air, and then she dove in and went down with hardly a splash, and didn’t come up. My guess is she swam down till her breath played out and the water filled her.
“The other boats floated nearby, and they too had gone through a thinning. I suppose with our experiences in the drive-in, this kind of ruthlessness was to be expected. Sentimentality had long passed us by, and though for a time, there in Fort Drive-in, I thought we might be gaining our humanity, I learned quick-like we had not, and thank goodness for that, or I, and the bulk of us, would not be here today.
“Considering we’re all inside a giant fish, that might not be such a good thing in the long run, but I suppose the best any of us can hope for these days is extension of life, and not quality. In the past I often thought, quality, not quantity, is what’s important. Until I was faced with the big sign-off. The idea was unappealing to me. I didn’t have the courage of the fat-assed woman who went over the side and swam deep down.
“I am still ready to grab at whatever bit of life I can get, no matter how sour it might taste, how foul it might look. I still wish for better food and cleaner pussy and having my ass outside of this fish and back at my house in East Texas.
“Hell, I’d settle for being back at Fort Drive-in. It was a pretty good deal. You could bathe regular, fix meals that didn’t stink so bad you had to hold your nose, or worse, just get used to.
“But, I was telling you about the boats.
“Drifty, drifty, drifty, that’s me.
“We went a couple of nights and some days, and then one night, in the moonlight, all of the boats floating close together, the dark water rose up high and broadened. We thought it was a freak wave. But it was not.
“The darkness froze for a moment, then opened up into greater darkness, and the boats, even though we paddled hard to not let it happen, flowed into the big ole darkness of the black hump, and down we went.
“You know what’s next. You experienced it. We shot out of a gut or throat, or whatever, and landed here on the grid, splashing water behind us, shattering our boats and spilling us willy-nilly, this way and that, breaking some of us up. As a side note, I should add that those poor unfortunates got eaten. That was their unintentional contribution, but, I think, if their ghosts could be here to discuss it, they would tell you they were proud to share, considering they weren’t going to recover from their wounds.
“The lights that hang above us, went way back. Not to the tail. But way back. They are starting to play out now, but then, they were bright and far. Not like now, where there are almost less than half the lights there used to be.
“And, so here we were, where you are now. In the fish’s belly, lit up and stinky, all of us lost causes.”
That was the first part of Bjoe’s story. And we’re going to pause there.
When he finished telling us all that, Cory rose up, asked for more grog, fainted dead away again.
I thought, this guy, this Bjoe fella, decided he wanted to eat one of us, or all of us, because he always seemed to find some justification for long pig preparation, and that ladder was going to be hard to navigate with us running all over each other’s asses.
And, Cory, shit, way it looked to me, he was first on the menu. I wasn’t going to try and drag his big unconscious ass down that ladder. He was on his own. Pickled and ready to serve.
I said, “So the lights were here?”
Bjoe nodded.
I scooted back closer to the ladder, tugged on Reba’s sleeve a little. She looked at me and slid back too.
I looked at Grace and Steve. I could tell from the way they looked at me, they too were hip. Thinking: this guy could go snacky-whacky at any moment.
“Wow,” Grace said. “The lights were here, right?”
“Yes,” Bjoe said. “Yes, they were. Brighter than they are now, and they went way down the fish, and for awhile ... But I said that.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “Tell it all. Tell some of it over if you have to.”
Bjoe nodded.
“We lived back down there as well, at the back, away from the big rushes of water, not up here on the scaffolding and in the caves. But that was before the Scuts.”
“The Scuts?” Grace asked.
Bjoe nodded. “Yep. The Scuts.”
3“Oh yeah. The lights were here. And that was a mystery to me, at first. Then I began to put some things together, draw what we like to call in mathematics some goddamn fucking conclusions.
“I’ll begin with the robots.
“Don’t look so goofy. Really. Robots. Fuckers made of metal with lumps for heads and a single light for an eye. Tentacles instead of hands. All cabled up and ready to go. Guess there were six cables, flapping this way and that. Reckon there were twenty or thirty of them metal, multitentacled doohickeys. Don’t know for a fact, didn’t count them, but it was in that range.
“Maintenance.
“Bless their little electric hearts.
“Place was a hell of a lot neater then.”
“So,” I said. “What you’re saying is, the grill was in place, all this was in place before you came.”
“Do I look like a fucking electrician? A carpenter? A metalworker? And where would I get the tools? Yeah. It was all here.”
“And you think you know why?” Grace asked.
“I do, you good-looking thing. And, hey, I’m really talking to all of you. You all look good to me. But, shit, you lady, you’re, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Begin with why all this stuff was here,” Grace said.
“All right, doll. You see, I think the robots were finishing up this baby. Making this fish ... Don’t look that way. Let me explain, let me go into what we in the mathematics business like to call one big ole fucking goddamn shit-eating hypothesis.
“This world is hand and machine made, gents and two ladies. I shit thee not and fuck with you not at all. That’s what I believe. You see, this fish, it was water workable, and the robots, they were here to finish up its insides. Do maintenance while it was operating, and at the same time being built. Maybe whoever was building this fish, having it made, forgot all about it and set it adrift before the robots were all done. They had a built-in wear-out time. Like those dissolving stitches you get in your head. They stay in so long, then they dissolve. That’s what happened with the robots. They were supposed to do maintenance for so long, then the fish was supposed to go obsolete, like a Ford, you know.
“Why, I don’t know. Maybe there’s no real reason. Maybe it’s just that these work-on-stuff robots can only last so long before they go nutty-bolty. That being the case, they—whoever they is—decided they’d build them with this go-tobutter clause in their wiring. Finish up a certain span of work, then goo-out.
“Ain’t that a possible?
“Sure it is. Don’t think on it long. Sure it is.
“So they got the grid to not get eat up by the stomach acid they made. And they have lights above, ‘cause they’re doing work inside a way-down-in-thedark structure, so therefore gentlemen and two ladies, you got to have some old-fashioned illumination, lest you think you’re sharpening your pencil and it’s someone’s dick.
“They didn’t even take note of us when we came, those robots. Not so much as a howdy-do, or, oh-shit, you done found out the fish is electric and we ain’t the Partridge Family. They were programmed, hot-wired and motivated, chip-headed and blueprint driven.”
“But, the fish has flesh,” Reba said.
“Oh, yeah. It’s got flesh and it’s got veins that pulse with blood. But, I’ll tell you another thing this big old finny motherfucker has got, and that’s wires, sweet baby cakes.
“I know you must have noted now and again that the dinosaurs seemed to crackle and pop, spark and sputter. Yet, they died or got killed, we ate them and didn’t find wires in our teeth, so, it was like what can only be called one big fucking mystery.
“My belief, and you can just quote the living dogshit out of me on this, is that the wires were too small. No shit. Too small even in dinosaurs. To understand the wires, how this alien-built world works (I know, I said aliens, and I’ll stand by that remark), is you got to understand the wires are minuscule, as in small little bastards. You can’t see them with the undressed eyeball, and, before you go where I know you’re gonna go, let me run ahead of you.
“You’re gonna say: Yeah, but Bjoe, we done ate the meat off these critters, and we didn’t eat the wires, and what I’m going to tell you, now grab hold of your balls—I already got mine, and those of you who are ball-less may clutch anything at will—I’m gonna tell you flat out, you did eat them too, my little hungry folks.
“They’re edible. They dissolve. I mean, shit, they can make women’s panties you can eat right off the snatch and have them taste like fruits and such, so you think some way-advanced alien motherfuckers can’t make some edible iddy-bitty goddamn wires?
“They can.
“And inside this fish, in which you could stuff several dinosaurs and our worn-out asses, except you baby blonde, goddamn you are fine and movie-star-like and not even partially worn out—”
“Tell it,” Grace said. “Just go on and tell it.”
“Yeah. Okay. Look at the wall of the cave. See the flesh of the fish pulsing. See those cables of veins. Well, when we cut this dude apart, just dug chunks out of it on the inside, touched bones in some cases (the scaffolding is what I call the skeleton), I found wrapped around them, running through the meat, veins, I could see were wires. Red and blue, green and white. You can cut through them and not get shocked. Remember what I said about physics here being bylaws. Things are different. Bring that little thought back to the fore.
“And now I’m gonna go all Serbian guy Nikola Tesla on you, and we’re gonna talk alternating-current power transmission, rotating magnetic field principle, and polyphase alternating-current system and induction motor all over the goddamn place, and let me quote B.A. Behrend, ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, let Tesla be, and all was light.’
“That’s from my schooling, gents and two ladies. In math and physics and such, I was just schooled all over the goddamn place, although I regret to say I’m all theory and no action, or not much action anyway. I once fell off a chair screwing in a light bulb. That’s my electrical work career right there, in the proverbial motherfucking nutshell.
“Now, you’re looking at me funny, like I’ve gone north and am waving at you from afar, shouting out stuff the wind is carrying away. Let me put this where you can fucking understand it. Get your mind jaws around this, gentlemen and two ladies.
“This electricity comes up from the ground, the water, out of the atmosphere, drawn in by ... Well, shit, I don’t know. Do I look like a fucking Einstein? I just quote people, I don’t really understand them. Except to say, There ain’t no plug-ins, Jack, there’s just the electricity, and it’s on its own, pulsing through the wires, the veins, the edible cables. And the fish, it lives off the electricity, just like we humans live off electricity. At birth, BAM, there’s a spark, jumpercable time, my little dirties. Our batteries are charged. We got that crackly stuff running through our veins. Call it chi if you will, and if you want to go Japanese, call it ki, and, if like me, you want to stay on the planet Earth (though we ain’t, I don’t think), call it elec-goddamn-tricity.
“Call it string cheese for all I care.
“You see, the robots, they were finishing up this little fucker, and whoever owned it set it a’sail and a’dive before it was done, and the robots, they were trapped here, and they just kept working while we were here. Not bothering us at all, but restoring lights and fixing stuff, shining the grid.
“So, like I said—and we’ve come back to it gentlemen and two ladies. Finally, those robot gentlemen just wore down and dissolved. Went to silver-metal goo, they did, and that goo just went right through the grid and into the goop, and sayonara robot fellas. No shit, pilgrims. That’s how it went down.
“Their work was done, their time was done.
“But I done told you all that. I tell you now, we got a new phase me and my pals are latching into.
“We used the robots’ ladders to climb up here, and there was no place to really rest, so we ventured to cut into the walls of the fish, just so deep, so we could make caves.
“And caves we made, and that’s when I found in the walls the veins, so big ’cause the fish is so big. All just one big train-and-fish set this motherfucking world is. Here we are, adrift out there in the hooty-hooty with nothing but our own goddamn selves, and maybe now and again a peek at what this real world offers: aliens seen in dreams—yeah, I see your face, you got them dreams—and wires seen in fish-meat caves.
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