The Complete Drive-In

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.

“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.”