Drink for the Thirst to Come (45 page)
Read Drink for the Thirst to Come Online
Authors: Lawrence Santoro
We bought a 14-foot sky blue jon boat, a shallow flat bottomed thing with blunt prow and stern. When fully loaded with outboard motor, fuel, camping supplies, clothing, food, and us, about three inches of freeboard remained.
Research begun and concluded the same drunken night the urge took us told us that the Ohio trucked along at a comfortable several miles an hour. We had visions. Huck and Jim would drift through sunny days and starry nights of the soul. Gentle water would lap our gunnels as froggies courted along the shore. Friendly tow-barges would wave to us as they slipped by. Our little putt-putt motor would be used only when a quick hurry was required to take us here or there along the way.
Currents are funny. Their substance is deep. After our put-in below the triangle, we found our expected downstream flow toward the Gulf of Mexico was more of a generalized upstream drift toward Pittsburgh. Even near-swamped, our little flat-bottomed boat reached barely 11 inches below the surface. The consequence was, we skimmed the river, skewing, sliding here and there more at the whim of breeze than current. Heavy rowing or the engine was necessary simply to keep us heading west and south.
The first tow-boat scared the bejeezus out of us. Out of morning mist there came a quarter mile of diesel-pushed steel, bellowing, two barges wide. The blind monster threw an eight foot high bow wave that spread across the river like a green rolling mountain. Imagine the view from a blue aluminum hole a bare three inches above the surface.
Less than five miles from our put-in we went to shore, set up camp, reappraised this volitional adventure.
To say “shore” is to idealize the land along the Ohio west of Pittsburgh. Conjure a slurry of mud and cinders capped with a six-inch mat of oil and other industrial effluvia spread along a sumac-crowded railroad right-of-way. We camped, rethought, regrouped, slept, and to our credit (or disgrace) continued the adventure the next morning. It was a cold night. I didn’t mention: this was October, heading into November. We did not dare build a fire the night before for fear of igniting the river or the land or both.
We never got to New Orleans, nor to the Mississippi. We did make Kentucky. We had many adventures and were jailed only once and that in Bellaire, Ohio for attempting to enter a VFW Post while wet. That’s a long story. We did not join a drinking companion we met in West Virginia as he headed out to find his girl, who had started dating a biker gang while he was in the Nam. He had a loaded .45 in his belt and dynamite in his truck and invited us along to watch. That also is a long story, which I will someday tell.
The spiders are real. They happened damn-near as written.
A TALE FROM THE RED LION:
CORDWELL’S BOOK
There is so much true and accurate in this story that I almost need not tell you any more. John Cordwell is gone now but he lived and his story as written here is mostly as it was lived. He was among those who made a habit of escaping from the Germans during that Second unpleasantness with the Hun. John was a character in the film
The Great Escape
. There are documentary films about him and the other POWs who made that audacious escape. Escapes, actually. The reality is more remarkable and more improbable than that shown in the theatrical film.
“Cordwell’s Book” came about because a bunch of us were drinking in the upstairs room of the Red Lion Pub in Chicago one night. Eventually the talk came around to the idea of doing an anthology of stories centered on the Lion and written by writers who hung out there. “Like us,” someone said. “
Tales from the Red Lion
,” someone suggested, “like Spider Robinson’s
Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon
but different, see?”
Seemed like a good idea.
As mentioned, I’d fallen into the place during my first week in Chicago. I was a theater guy from the east and the Lion was a place where theater folk hung. John Cordwell was a bigger-than-us-all presence in the bar and I was shy around him. I liked him and the place and was learning to like that time of my life.
One summer evening, I saw a remarkable production of one of Shakespeare’s plays on the roof garden—it was not
The Tempest
—and met a swath of good people as a result. There was great talent there and then.
That’s the core of the story.
I learned of John’s wartime experiences from John and, after John’s death, heard more from his son, Colin, who
is
a great barman and who told the stories almost as well as had his father. I kept the facts and mixed them with a bit of implausible froth and fairy tale-telling and published
Cordwell’s Book
in
Tales from the Red Lion.
I revised it for a second edition of
Tales…
and I fussed with it for this effort.
Those who know about such things say the Red Lion Pub is one of the most haunted spots in Chicago. I know people who have had experiences. I have not, not preternatural ones anyway.
At this writing, the Lion is a sheer hulk. Unavoidable decay and expensive repair estimates forced Colin to close the building. The notion was to raze it and build a new Red Lion on the spot. Then came the crash.
At this writing, the shell remains. And the memories. The memories, bless them. Bless them all, they’re alive.
DYING’S EASY. HORROR’S HARD:
THE LAST SCOOT AT SKIDOO’S TAP
This is more about me as a writer than about where
The Last Scoot…
came from. Where the story came from is simple. My wife suggested it.
“Look at this!” A well-known book dangled from her fingertips. “Write a vampire book,” said as though asking me for the last time to take out the trash.
Now, I have friends who have written vampire stories and were very happy with their lives.
I said, “Sure,” then, perversely, I wrote this.
Here’s a life-rule: Nothing will be what you expect. Nothing real, neither will vampire, zombie, man-wolf, or any creature of the night be a thing you’ll recognize. They will come from the literal dark, blindside you, and do things you cannot imagine.
I believe that a writer of the strange has a responsibility to that truth and to the creatures that support him.
The vampires of Skidoo’s Tap inhabit a grubby part of creation. They drink not blood but life itself. They take not what we hold dear, but that which we are happy to forget. They take pain, the drear of life. In return, they offer paradise, a heaven of non-being.
The trap of course is that pain and tedium are the artists of the beautiful. The dreary slog through life provides the contrast that allows us to see, touch, feel, smell the wonders of it all.
From where did Skidoo’s Tap come?
When Tycelia made her suggestion I was working on a novel. Not horror, not exactly fantasy, the story is set in small-town pre-JFK America and deals with a band of kids who set out to grab death by the tail and toss him.
The vampire story began in the same town. My town. Railroads did run through it. There is—was—a Skidoo’s taproom there. It wasn’t called Skidoo’s but it was as described. When I was 12, my genteel gang of non-Ender hooligans did weekly scoots into the joint. We ran screaming in, around the electric eye pole and out the OUT door. Doing so we caught whiffs of beery, smoky, sex-charged conditioned air then hooted all the way to our theater on the far side of our yards. There was a subway viaduct. We also had a gathering place in the cemetery.
That’s it.
I started there. I’d gotten about 16 thousand words into the thing before I realized what I was writing. Inefficient way to work, I know, but I do love to hang out in those grubby places of the mind. When I found where I was heading, I went back and fussed. The story went from 16 thousand to just over 9 thousand.
This is one of those stories that I wrote and never tried to sell. Sorry, Tycelia. I know vampire stories can make big money right now but that’s dependent on people actually liking the damn vamps, finding them cute, sexy!
So there. The stories are yours and you now know, more or less, where they came from.
A final word. I don’t plan for the most part. I begin, typically, with a notion and a person, an image, a face. When I have at least a person in my head, I begin writing. Most of the time I’ve no idea where the path is or through what country we’ll travel. For example: I was walking in the neighborhood today. I saw a sign in a store I’ve passed many times. “WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ROBOTS?” I was returning from a visit to my doctor. I wondered, what if a robot stopped in because…
Well, because.
See, my process might be summarized best by the 13
th
-century Persian poet Rumi: “Respond to every call that excites your spirit.”
I hope you’ve been excited. Now excuse me, I have the call.
The shop was in a dark part of town on a narrow, unclean street…
About the Author
Award-winning writer and narrator Lawrence Santoro began writing and reading dark tales at age five.
In 2001 his novella “God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. In 2002, his adaptation and audio production of Gene Wolfe’s “The Tree Is My Hat,” was also Stoker nominated. In 2003, his Stoker-recommended “Catching” received Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s 17
th
Annual “Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” anthology. In 2004, “So Many Tiny Mouths” was cited in the anthology’s 18
th
edition. In the 20
th
, his novella “At Angels Sixteen,” from the anthology A DARK AND DEADLY VALLEY, was similarly honored. Larry’s first novel, “Just North of Nowhere,” was published in 2007.
He lives in Chicago and is working on two new novels, “Griffon and the Sky Warriors,” and “Mississippi Traveler, or Sam Clemens Tries the Water.”
Stop by Larry’s blog, At Home in Bluffton, at: http://blufftoninthedriftless.blogspot.com/
and his audio website, Santoro Reads, at: http://www.santororeads.com
and you can find him on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/lawrence.santoro.
Table of Contents
SOME STAGES ON THE ROAD TOWARD OUR FAILURE TO REACH THE MOON
JEREMY TAKES HIS TEXT FROM THE LIVES OF THE SPIDERS
