I am not scared of pie. I laugh in the face of pie. Ha!
I used to not be afraid either. Until it happened. Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into my ship, Chief. Happended just after midnight. We was coming back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first Pie for about a half-hour. Gooseberry. 12-incher. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by looking from the crust to the crust. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, Pies come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in that old calendar over there like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the Pie come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that Pie he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that Pie looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about Pie is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be living... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... oh then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' all those Pies come in and... they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many Pies there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On thursday morning, the third day Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water in his lifejacket, he was like a kinda top. Upended him into a nearby raft... well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waiting for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men came out, the Pies took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.
Let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a Pie... And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.
SnakePlissken
Corvallis, OR
December 2002
JUN 18, 2006 02:36 PM