The Complete Drive-In

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.

“I might also add, that the meat we cut out to make the caves, oh, my goodness, it was sweet as pussy fresh with the pubescent bloom, salted down with excitement sweat and the juices that cause it to make smacking sounds in the deeps of the nights.

“But that was one of the few good things, that meat. ‘Cause, down here, it wasn’t grand. The water the fish gulped was drinkable, if not exactly Evian, and the food the fish swallowed kept us with bellies full. And we, of course, could borrow from the fish itself from time to time. And we had the light, and because we did, well, we couldn’t sleep good at night.

“So, early on, we lived at the farther end of the fish, not down in the dark part of the tail, but farther than here. This was before the caves, I should say. You see, there were the cars and such down there, stuff the fish had scooped up somehow. We would go down there and sleep in the wrecked cars to get away from the light. But the lights started to die out down there, and that’s when we began to appreciate them. Unlike stars that wink out, their light did not travel long and far while dead or dying. Just being lights, they winked the fuck out and left that part of the fish as dark as the inside of a wolf’s ass.

“This darkness, it produced another problem.

“I mean, it was there before. Way down in the tail where there were never lights and it stayed dark. Way down there bad things moved, my little dirties. We didn’t know what they were, though some folk went that way to explore (and let me point out I was happily not among them), and they didn’t come back. We couldn’t yell them up, and the parties that went to search, carrying fire from car metal sparked against dried seaweed and such, didn’t come back either.

“We could see their little lights, all Prometheus and such, and then, gentlemen and two ladies, they were gone.

“Here a moment. Gone the next.

“No one else went down there. We yelled a lot, whistled some, but no folks come up.

“Let me add this, though. Just before one of those weak-ass torches went out, I thought I saw something shaped like… well, something shapeless, you know. Like shadows that got no shape, like that. Figured I saw it under hot lights it would have shape all right, but not a pretty one.

“Then what light there was got stolen and there wasn’t even a flutter of shadow, just this snatching sound like a bullwhip cracking and wrapping itself around something there in the pitch-ass darkness, and that was enough to tell me, don’t worry about staying away from the light like those I’m-going-to-God sonsabitches. No sir. Go the other way. The way you’ve known since you were small. Since cavemen first lit torches and poked them in caves. Stay the fuck away from the dark. Dark bad. Dark final. Stay away from the dark. In the dark, it’s dark, gentlemen and two ladies. Dark. Just plain ol’ dark.

“Anyway, I think it-whatever the fuck it was-nabbed the torch guy. Hell, I know it did. ‘Cause there was a grunt, then the light went out. We scampered quick as frightened mice back toward the hottest and brightest part of the light, all us sonsabitches who had been watching at the edge of light and shadow. And when we arrived beneath the bestest lights and their warmy, not quite toasty yellow, we was goddamn proud to be there.

“Now, that wasn’t bad enough, there being something down there in the dark, and it not being good, another concernful-type thing happened.

“The goddamn lights back there started going out a bit more regular.

“That was bound to have made the things, the shadow guys, the Scuts, happy. Unless they are fifty feet tall, they can’t reach the lights. Like here, there must be ladders back there. And that may be why it’s all dark to the rear of our fishy boat, them beasties, the Scuts, having climbed up there and done those lights in. But their sliding ladders, they don’t come this far. Their ladder rails play out about where all them cars are piled, so they can’t just keep taking them out, not unless they’re willing to come into the bright lights for any time at all. Find their way to the ladders.”

“What are they?” Reba asked.

“Not sure. But I think they are built-in disease. You know, the robots were maintenance, and these guys, these shadow motherfuckers, they are dis-maintenance. Just like us, gentlemen and two ladies. We are built in such a way that cells repair, and all manner of such shit, but, we are also built to age and go obsolete-o, baby.

“These Scuts. They are the Big Boy’s Obsolete-o team.

“Someday, they win.

“And the fish, he’s all done in.

“And so are we. And now we’re here. And we just might give them a fight.”

“Why did the lights last as long as they did?” I said. “I mean, why didn’t they put them out early on? And if they put out the ones they put out, why didn’t they venture into the light to get rid of these?”

“I can’t answer that. I don’t know. Maybe they were happy back there in the dark, eating fish shit, and then one day they find out we’re here, get a taste of long pig from our little torch-carrying adventurers. And being so delicious-and it is delicious-they decided shit wasn’t quite the delicacy they once thought.

“And it’s different coming up on a light from the dark, reaching out quick-like and banging it. But to get these, they got to come seriously into the light for some time before they can even get to a ladder. That gap between us and them is enough to hold them, I think. Unless all the lights go out. You know. Just play out without help. It could happen. I’ve seen a couple die, no Scuts needed.”

“Is there anything in those cars that’s useable?” Grace said, always the utilitarian.

“In those cars, in one of them, I found a lady. A beautiful lady. She washed in one day while I’m up here watching the water flush, and her car washed in with it. Washed along the grid and flowed to the back and banged up against them other cars. I went down to investigate, ‘cause I could see someone was behind the wheel.

“She was all drowned, her blonde hair pushed tight against her head, her lips purple. But God, did she look good.

“And the water, well, it had tenderized her.

“So, of course, we ate her.

“Rest of the cars yielded skeletons, tires, and greasy jacks. Nothing special. I figure they were folks drove off from the drive-in, tried auxiliary trails, same as us, but it hadn’t worked out. Flash floods may have got them. Or they could have died in their cars, and in time, rain would slippy-slipslip them down muddy paths twixt great trees and hungry critters toward the great body of water under which we are now, doing the Nautilus shuffle, only to be swallowed by our larger-than-average-and-then-some fish. Who, by the way, we affectionately call Big Boy or Ed. Let me tell you something about Ed. Sometimes the plumbing backs up, and what can only be described as about a whale’s ass-load of fish shit, flows back this way on a real serious schedule. You can smell it before you see it. It usually gets to just this side of all them cars and such. It ain’t pretty, and whatever it is that lives down in there must be tougher than a Christian lie, because when it washes back, now and again, you still see those creepy-shadow-shapes moving amongst the cars, all shitshined, I guess.

“Nasty as we are here, back there, man, we got to be talking nastier than you want to be times ten. Know what I’m saying? And when that fish fart smell comes sailing back this way, it’s so solid, you had a club, you could beat it back.

“Oh, Lord. What kind of life is this? Here we are. Jonahs all, with electric lights and bad fish plumbing.

“I need drink. I need love. And figure what I’ll get is a drink from yonder skull.

“Let me stop for a drink.”