Flaming Zeppelins

by Joe R. Lansdale

Twain lay back down, surprised himself by falling asleep again. And he slept well.

  There were flashes of light and waves of darkness in the crack in the sky. Shiny things. Dull things. Moving things. And then the crack narrowed.

  Eventually it would be nothing more than a fine blue line.

  Then that too would fade away.

  But, before it did, something sailed out of the crack, onto the dark blue ocean below.

  Black sails.

  The Jolly Roger.

  A large ship.

  Pirates.

  Part Two:

  Extracted from the Diary and Journals of Ned the Seal

  Eleven: The Mist, Ripped, the Terrifying Descent

  Once upon a time I was a normal seal. This was before I was captured by Captain Bemo and given a great brain in this tin hat beneath this fine fez by none other than the infamous Doctor Momo on his secret island. My memories of this time are hazy. Once my brain power was increased, and I was given thumbs attached to my flippers, I became ravenous to learn, and read all the books that Captain Bemo had in the library aboard the Naughty Lass, and most of those on the island owned by Doctor Momo.

  I did skip a number of his more graphic erotica books, as these tended to arouse me, and there were no female seals in my vicinity. You see, with the increase in my brain power, my sexual desires had increased as well. This waiting around for a female to be in heat, that was a bore. Sex for recreation. I want to state here and now that I’m for it. Long as the partners are willing, then why not.

  But I have veered.

  The books I loved the most were the ones the sailors owned and shared, the dime novels of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley. Books about people I eventually met. I might also add that I read a book called Frankenstein, and I met the monster of that book, as well. He was really nice. The book only gave one side of the story, and it is certainly not well known that Doctor Frankenstein died in a skating accident. This is how the monster told it, and I believe it. He seemed like a genuine sort of chap, and personally, I have no reason to doubt him.

  The book, the biography of Frankenstein and his creation, takes quite a different slant, and gives the good doctor a different sort of demise, but as I said, I’m sticking with the monster’s version. I got it straight from his dead lips, and he seemed as sincere as a hard-on.

  Pardon my language, but I have been amongst a rough crowd.

  Before the operation to make me smart, mostly what I remember is eating fish, mating with female seals (of course), and avoiding sharks.

  I do not like sharks. Not in the least bit. I have my reasons. One of which is that they ate a friend of mine. Or what was left of him. A talking head in a jar. He was the aforementioned famous Buffalo Bill and my hero, and they ate him. They tried to eat me too.1

  They did bite me a lot, but I survived and I washed up on the shore that is called Spain and was rescued by none other than the famous writer, Mark Twain.

  He is known primarily as a humorist, but since I have known him, he has not been that funny. He seems profoundly sad. I am sad too. I miss Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, and there was also Cat. She was beautiful, like Annie, only she had once been a cat of some kind before Doctor Momo operated on her. He operated on himself as well. He gave himself a horse-size penis. Actually, he literally gave himself a horse penis. I assisted in the operation. He conducted it while awake, under a mild anesthesia. I think he liked a bit of pain. That was Doctor Momo’s way.

  Then again, that is all part of another story, contained in my diaries, and perhaps someday I will write of them, perhaps as fiction, perhaps as autobiography, perhaps as both.

  But this time I’m telling you about, I was way up high in a balloon, and the day grew hot. Along we sailed, like a great orange moth, gliding with the wind, willy-nilly, with no particular place to go. We had escaped being killed by what Mr. Verne believed to be Martian invaders, and what were certainly large octopus-looking things with two assholes. I saw the assholes when we came upon a dead one lying on the beach.

  Anyway, we escaped from those eight-armed sonsabitches by boat, then by balloon.

  At first I found the whole thing quite the adventure. But after going through a horrible storm that made me think we would crash into the sea, and then to hope we would, I began to feel otherwise. Even when the storm passed, I grew anxious and felt restricted by the constructs of the balloon. Its interior was covered quite briskly and there was little to see on a second tour. You also had to shit over the side, and this is a precarious feat at best. And for me, a very heavy seal (which is not to say I am not trim, but I am a seal after all) with my ass dangling over the edge of a balloon while my companions moved to the far side to balance my weight, held my flippers so that my ass would not overload my body and send me dropping, it was, to say the least, an embarrassing situation.

  I held it a lot. Which, I don’t have to tell you, is not healthy.

  With me in the balloon was Mr. Twain, the great writer, and Mr. Verne, also a great writer and an inventor. With him was his servant, friend, and fellow inventor, Passepartout. They were all real nice guys. It saddens me… Well, I will not go there. Not yet.

  There was also limited food and water, and though, since the alteration of my brain, I can eat things like bread and honey with a certain delight, it is still not the same as fish, and beyond thinking about fish, which I must confess I am frequent to do, I was concerned about the state of our water. Already we had consumed half of the bottle Passepartout had produced from under a cushion, which was the lid to our food container.

  And though he assured us that there was yet another container of the same, as well as slightly different foods in tins, stuffed beneath another couch cushion, I was still nervous about our odds. I confess it also passed through my mind, without any true warranty, I should hasten to add, that for three hungry men, a plump seal might began to look quite tasty after a few days with one’s belly gnawing at itself.

  This, of course, was most likely a silly consideration, though I did think that once I caught Passepartout giving me the once over, the way a butcher might eye a prize hog at a stock show (or so I’ve read in dime novels). But the heat, the boredom, the fear of death makes one think and consider all sorts of strange things, and even if I were to know for sure this passed through his mind, I forgive him. I forgive him, too, because I sometimes saw the three of them as long white fish. And I thought about how those fish might taste. All I had to do was get them out of those clothes… Well, you see how it was.

  Anyway, I thought about food a lot. I wondered if one of the tins inside the food container under the cushion had fish in it. If it did, I wondered if I could work the can opener, or cut into it with a pocket knife. I have thumbs, and I can do some things you wouldn’t imagine a seal might do, but the use of really fine motor skills in the area of grabbing and such is not a specialty. I can pull my dick. I do that well. But I’ve discovered that this isn’t an area of conversation that my companions wish to visit. They have, in fact, asked me not to do it while around them. Somewhere, in all my studies, perhaps due to my being around the foul and perverted Doctor Momo, I never learned that this whole yanking the tow line was a private matter.

  Frankly, I still don’t see the big deal.

  I’m a seal. I don’t wear britches. So, well, it’s out there when I get ready for it to be. I get the urge, it pokes out.

  I suppose, if I wore britches, I might not think about it as much.

  But the bottom line is, up there in the air, hot, bored, frightened, I would have given my left nut for a big wet mackerel to slake my urges.

  Or a sardine.

  Or a tuna.

  Or a salmon.

  Most any kind of fish.

  I looked over the edge of the balloon, down at all that water, begin to think about how much I would like to be there, all wet and sleek and diving down deep, hunting fish.

  It even occurred to me to l
eap from the balloon, but I knew better. My brain had not been enhanced by Doctor Momo for no reason. It worked well, and I had studied much. I knew that from that height, were I to dive and hit the water, it would be the same as diving into a brick wall. I would be one splattered seal.

  The wind died down, and the balloon slowed, and the day grew hotter and more miserable. For a seal without water it was murder.

  Mr. Twain awoke, and seeing my distress, poured some of the remaining water on his hand and gave me a rubdown with it. It felt good, but its pleasurable sensations were brief. The sun dried me out quicker than a female seal’s ass on a hot rock.

  We drank a bit more of the water, ate some crackers from the second storage bin — just the wrong thing for such a hot, dry trip — but it’s what we had, and tried to make the best of it.

  Mr. Twain looked over the side of the craft, said, “Look, Ned, could that be land?”

  A gray mist floated above the water and the mist was wide and thick, like a wool patch on the ocean, but at the edges of the mist we could see patches of what looked like shoreline.

  “There must be land beneath that,” Mr. Twain said. “I would stake my royalties from Tom Sawyer on it. If I had royalties.”

  Mr. Twain stirred Mr. Verne and Passepartout from their slumber, took a look. It was generally agreed that it might be land.

  As we floated nearer, it became more evident that it was indeed land. Misty and wet-looking, but inviting, considering how hot we were up there. Outside of the mist, we could see for certain a sandy shoreline, a glimpse of trees. Still, it was quite contained in the mist, like a rock hidden in cotton candy, Mr. Twain said.

  “Jules,” Mr. Twain said. “How do we go down? We must go down.”

  Mr. Verne took in the situation immediately, looked up at the balloon and made a face.

  “We seem to have made an error,” he said. “There is in fact a release valve, but we unfortunately forgot to prepare a way to make it work from within the basket here, monsieur.”

  “What?” Mr. Twain said.

  I wrote on my pad. WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK? THAT’S DUMB.

  “I’m with Ned on this one,” Mr. Twain said. “That was just plain old shit stupid.”

  “Actually,” Mr. Verne said, “so am I. Not the shit stupid. But in agreement with Ned. I would like to remind everyone, though I provided the money for this device, I was not the one who designed the blueprints.”

  Passepartout cleared his throat. “You examined them.”

  “I am not an expert of the blueprints. I am not the builder.”

  “It is a prototype, my good monsieur.”

  “So it is,” Mr. Verne said. “But now, what do we do, my good sir?”

  Passepartout looked up, said, “Well, I fear there is but one thing to do.”

  “And that is?” Mr. Twain asked.

  With a sigh, Passepartout said, “I’ll need to climb up there and work the release valve. The problem is, when I climb up, it will distribute the weight in a not so good manner. Like when Ned takes the shit. You must arrange yourselves evenly about the basket.”

  I wrote:

  ONE GOOD THING. I DON’T NEED TO GO RIGHT NOW.

  “That is good, Ned,” Mr. Twain said.

  Everyone else agreed that was good.

  “I can tell you this,” Passepartout said, “don’t let this device tip, or you will fall very far. I am going up now.”

  Passepartout took hold of one of the cables and said, “I’m going to put my foot on the edge here, so I can take hold of one of the cables to climb. Perhaps you should all move to the opposite side when I put my weight down and start to climb. But you will have to adjust as my weight is redistributed. You will need to do that instantly. And I advise strongly that you do not make with the fuck up.”

  Passepartout put his foot on the edge of the couch, or the basket as he referred to it, and indeed, the basket leaned in that direction, even with Twain, Verne, and myself on the opposite side. For a moment, I thought we were making with the fuck up.

  Passepartout scooted up a cable, pulling with his hands, locking his feet around it for support. As the cable tapered to the center, and his position changed, the basket wobbled. We did our best to maintain proper distribution. Moving this way and that.

  After what seemed like enough time for me to have eaten quite a lot of fish, he made it to the release valve, or just below it, where there dangled a hose and a clamp and a lever. He said, “I’m going to let out a bit of the helium. Be prepared for a sudden drop.”

  He pulled the lever and the hose opened. The hose whipped, and the helium gushed. The hose struck Passepartout so hard in the face, he let go of the cable.

  And fell.

  He fell to the center of the basket, and the basket slung back and forth, but remained centered. The balloon began to descend.

  A little too quickly.

  “Too much,” Passepartout said. “I must fix it.”

  Passepartout, pushed upright, put a foot on the side of the basket, grabbed a cable, went up swift and nimble as a monkey this time. The basket shook like dice in an eager gambler’s hand. (Note these similes. I read a lot and am quite proud of it. I am, after all, a seal.)

  Passepartout fought to get hold of the flapping hose, and finally, after being struck on hands and face by the thing, which was popping about like an electrified eel, he nabbed it. (I like eel by the way. I have had it smoked and it is very good. I like it raw. They can shock you, some of them. You have to be careful. A little fishing tip.)

  Passepartout closed off the lever with some difficulty, but maintained his position. He found that by locking his feet against the slanted cable, leaning into it, hanging onto the hose and using the other hand to release the lever, he could maintain a position on the cable and control the release of helium. Still, we were dropping a bit fast, and finally he closed it off.

  Scootching down the cable to the basket, he said, “I think that we are low enough for the moment. It might be best that we acquire the lay of the land, and then plan our descent a bit more precisely. Otherwise, to put it bluntly, we might end up with the pointy top of a tree up our asses.”

  “That wouldn’t be good,” Twain said. “I like your suggestion.”

  I wrote:

  IT WOULD HAVE TO BE SEVERAL POINTY TOPS TO STICK IN ALL OUR ASSES.

  “You are right, of course,” Passepartout said.

  The descent had created a new problem. Down there was a humid mist, and it rose up and surrounded us. We couldn’t really see what was below us, only above us, and up there was the bright orange balloon and the hot blue sky, and as we dropped down into the mist, like drugged bug specimens in cotton, the sky and the sun began to disappear.

  It was while I was looking up that I saw something moving through the mist. A big, dark dot. And the dot was growing, descending from on high. And then I saw what it was. I grabbed my pad and wrote.

  LOOK UP! A BIG FUCKING BAT, I THINK.

  Twain looked up. “Oh, shit.”

  Mr. Verne said, “My God, a pterodactyl.”

  I JUST SEE THE BAT.

  The beast attacked the balloon.

  The creature, bat, pterodactyl, winged snake, whatever, was diving at a rapid rate. Its mouth was open and it had as many teeth as a barracuda.

  Perhaps the oddness of the balloon, its bright color (can birds see color? I can since the operation , but before, I saw in black and white) had annoyed the bird. I know bright orange annoys me. I am not overly fond of lavender, either. And there are some shades of green I find irritating.

  “Shoooo, shoooo!” Verne screamed at the beast, but we were, as they say, shit out of luck.

  The beast hit the balloon with its mouth open; its fangs tore at the balloon. There was a sound like a whale spouting water through his blowhole. The blast of helium hit the creature full in the face and knocked it back.

  It screeched, whirled and wheeled in midair, went up into the higher reaches of the mist, out of sight, a
nd at the same time we lurched and wheeled and the basket slung us all over the place.

  We were nearly thrown out. Our water and much of our supplies were tossed, and the water canister grazed my head and bounced into Mr. Twain, which made him cuss, and then I was hardly aware of anything.

  We clutched whatever we could grab as if it were life itself, and in a sense, it was. The basket dropped out from under us at times, then snapped back under our feet (in my case, I use that euphemistically), as we were jerked about by the wheezing, cable-tugging balloon.

  After what seemed like enough time to have had a great meal of fish and a squid, the balloon became less radical in its movements, but more determined in its descent. We would not be choosing our landing area now, and I thought about what Passepartout had said about a pine tree up the ass, found myself tightening my sphincter muscles.

  I chanced a look over the side of the basket, saw mist, and then poking up from the mist, what Passepartout had suggested might be there, and what I feared.

  The tip of a tree.

  Though, at that moment in time, I couldn’t tell if it was in fact a pine.

  1 See Zeppelins West by Joe R. Lansdale (taken and adapted from diaries and journals by Ned the Seal, plus speculation).

  Twelve: Ned’s Journal Continues with a Lost Land, Seal Nookie, Fresh Fish and Strange Circumstances

  And so we fell, and the tip of the pine (for so it proved to be) jammed through the bottom of the basket, poked right through the wooden floor of our craft until it seemed to rise in front of us like a decorative parlor plant. Then suddenly the pine expanded as the branches, momentarily trapped by the floor of our craft, sprang back into position. Our vessel burst apart, except for the leaking balloon, which still hovered above us, whistling helium out of itself like a slow fart from a fish-filled seal, unlike myself who was fishless and fartless.

  (We seals make a lot of fart references. It is not considered rude to fart when you are a seal. Though, I will say that what a walrus passes for gas can be considered very rude in most kinds of company, mixed or otherwise.)