The Complete Drive-In (26 page)

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Authors: Joe R. Lansdale

BOOK: The Complete Drive-In
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Two of them sat on the curb and started crying and the other one rolled around on the lawn and whimpered like a dog with glass in his belly. A fireman came over and yelled at him and kicked him in the butt. The guy crawled off and joined his comrades at the curb and they cried in trio.
I hoped like hell there wasn’t anyone inside that house. If so, they wouldn’t be graduating.
I was about to leave when I was touched lightly on the elbow and a voice said, “You start this one, baby?”
“Nope. I’m all out of matches.”
“Then you got nothing to worry about.”
I turned and looked at Timothy. I had known him all my life, had been over to his house to play when we were kids, and he had been over to mine. There had never been anything romantic between us, though when I was twelve I talked him into playing doctor and discovered what I’d heard about boys was true: They were fixed up different from girls.
“Good to see you,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
One of the firemen came coughing out to the curb across from us and sat down next to one of the frat boys. The one who had been rolling on the ground sobbed and said, “They gonna save it?”
The fireman took off his smoke-stained hat, coughed, and looked at the frat the way some people look at retarded children. “Son, we’ll be lucky if we save the mineral rights on that sonofabitch.”
The three frats really started to cry.
The roof collapsed then and the sparks from it rose up to heaven and turned clear like the souls of fireflies gone off to meet their just rewards.
“Last time I heard,” Timothy said, “you were digging holes in the ground or something. Had some night classes too.”
“A lab,” I said. “Archaeology in the daytime, labs at night. I had to let it go.”
Then I told him the whole story.
“I quit too,” he said.
“I never knew you started.”
“It was the math fixed me. Never could understand how X could be some other number. It always looked like X to me. I couldn’t make sense of it. If X was ten one time, how could it be fifteen the next? Who the hell could keep up with what X was if it could be anything?
“What I should have taken was all P. E. courses and majored in golf. I can’t make X and Y add up, but by God, I can knock those little white balls to Dallas.”
And he could. I had played golf with him before. My golfing style was akin to a frightened matron trying to beat a rat to death with a curtain rod, but I had played enough to know the good stuff when I saw it, and Timothy had the good stuff. A number of pro golfers had made the same observation, and Timothy had mentioned more than once that he was thinking about taking his clubs on the road and seeing what he could do.
“We’re on our way to the Orbit,” Timothy said. “Want to go?”
“We?”
“Sue Ellen. She loves that horror stuff.”
Sue Ellen was Timothy’s little sister. She was twelve. Last time I’d seen her was two years back, and she wanted me to explain why Barbie and Ken were smooth allover. I didn’t remember having any answers.
“I doubt she even remembers me,” I said. “She might feel uncomfortable.”
“She remembers you quite well.”
“She’s sort of young for blood and guts, isn’t she?”
“Tell me about it. Mom and Dad think I’m taking her over to see
Bambi
,
Cinderella
,
The Fox and the Hound
and assorted cartoons in a Disney dusk-todawn extravaganza.”
“Wonder how they got that idea,” I said.
I took my car home, told my parents where I was going, not mentioning that Sue Ellen was waiting in the car with Timothy, and we went over there in the Galaxy.
When we got there, the line was as long as the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and, of course, we got a place near the end of it. The flashing blue-and-white Saturn symbol of the Orbit was far enough away to look like a Ping-Pong ball with an oversized washer around it.
It was warm and the air was full of mosquitoes. Rolling up the windows made you hotter, and rolling them down fed you to the mosquitoes. Timothy talked about giving it up and going home, and I was for it. But not Sue Ellen.
“You promised me, Timmy. You said you’d take me. You know I want to see
The Toolbox Murders.
”
I turned and looked at Sue Ellen perched in the middle of the backseat. She was blonde and fair and had moist blue eyes and a freckled pug nose and a red bow mouth. Course, it was dark enough you couldn’t see all this, but you knew it was there, and telling her no was a lot like kicking a puppy for licking your hand.
“We’ll be miserable,” Timothy said. “Besides,
The Toolbox Murders
? How’d I let you talk me into that?”
“You promised, Bubba. And if any of it bothers me, you can explain it to me.”
“That’s choice. I might need you to explain it to me.”
“See, I’m old enough.”
“One word about mosquitoes, one complaint, and we’re out of here.”
“Deal.”
Had the weather been hotter, the mosquitoes thicker, or if Sue Ellen had had all the charm of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, we might have cut for home right then. Sue Ellen would have grown up to break hearts, Timothy would have gone on to hit little white balls across great expanses of greenery for unreasonable amounts of money, and I might have ended up with my own karate studio.
3
 
All right, I’m going to stop with Grace’s story now. For all you dipshits in the back row who haven’t been listening—Leroy, quit playing in that pile of shit. Put that stick down. Yeah, well, screw you too, little buddy. I hope your balls get covered in ants.
Now, all you bozos keep interrupting my relating here and I’m tired of it. You all keep saying, “What about the comet? What about the comet?” Well, I’ve got no new news on the comet, okay? You’ve heard it all before. I’ve told you that story half a dozen times. I started this story with the comet. Remember?
No, I don’t change it as I go along Leroy. Look, I don’t make you come and listen, do I, huh?
Why did all this happen?
We’ve been over this part, Leroy, back when I read you the first half of this story, the one I call THE DRIVE-IN, A B-MOVIE WITH BLOOD AND POPCORN. Yes, the one written on the Big Chief tablets. But to answer your question why ... I don’t know. It’s like why do turds come in different shapes and colors. I can’t answer that. It’s one of life’s big mysteries, and the comet is an even bigger one.
Here, listen. Do you remember those sayings I taught you? The ones the Christians are fond of. Remember, we talked about Christians. Good? Now those sayings. Let’s use them to get things on the roll and because they’re all purpose. Repeat after me: THERE ARE SOME THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW, and I FEEL IT IN MY HEART. Later I’ll teach you about Faith, that way if you don’t know how to explain something, say, you’ve got faith. That covers a lot of bases and cuts down on argument.
What do you mean that doesn’t work for you? Is this going to be like yesterday’s conversation, Leroy? The one about Why Is There Air and Why Do Boys Have a Pecker and Girls Don’t? Good, because I’m not going to get into that. I’ve got a story written down here and it’s the story I’m going to read. It’s a good story and I’ve recorded it as best I can, and it’s almost the truth. If you want to hear it, fine, if not, I’ll read to myself. I do this for me, not you, so you want to hear the story you got to listen. What, Leroy?
Uh huh, that’s right. Why don’t you go ahead and find your stick again and stir the shit pile. At least you were quiet. I wish I hadn’t disturbed you.
Yeah. That’s okay, use your finger. Let me get back to Grace—
Okay. Maybe I don’t remember what Grace said word for word, but this is pretty close. Trust me.
 
 
Food started running out at the concession, so we used Timothy’s pocket knife to cut strips from the leather seat covers. The leather must have been coated with something (a dirt-resistant spray?), because it made us sick at first, though after a while we got used to it. When we still had Coke from the concession, we’d soak it in that and chew on it, maybe finish off with a few chocolate almonds. But when everything was gone at the concession we had to eat the strips straight out.
All around us people were losing it, going nuts for food, killing one another and eating one another. Sue Ellen wasn’t doing so hot either. She seemed addled most of the time and kept insisting we take her home, that Mommy and Daddy would be worried. She said she didn’t like the movies anymore. She missed her dog. She said lots of things.
I had to use my martial arts a few times to keep from being hurt by nuts who wanted me for either sex or food. We never got the situation clear; I pounded their heads briskly and they went away. But in time I got too weak for the martial arts, and a lot of the folks around us were too weak to do much of anything either. I guess you could say it was a kind of trade-off. I didn’t feel so good, but the folks that might have done me, Timothy and Sue Ellen harm weren’t exactly up to the Boston marathon either.
Then along came the Popcorn King.
Now he was one weird sonofabitch, looking back on it, but I’ll tell you, when those two guys were fused together by the lightning and they had all those powers, tattoos coming to life and running around and the like, I wasn’t even surprised.
Weird was the status quo, right?
What did surprise me was when he used those powers of his to supply us with popcorn and Coke, and he started talking that stuff about how he was our savior and that the movies were reality and murder and mayhem were okey-dokey and our salvation, and by the way, got any dead bodies, bring them on over to me and I’ll eat them. You know the rap.
When he stopped giving out the popcorn and disappeared inside the concession stand for a time, like Jesus gone off into the wilderness, I’ll tell you true, I was some depressed. It was back to eating seat covers.
When he finally did reappear, he no longer had popcorn to give us. Least not the real stuff. Now it was that substitute crap he was vomiting up. And that had bloodshot eyeballs on it.
Weirdness suddenly re-identified and redefined itself. I wasn’t going to eat that junk, no way, no how. And neither was Timothy.
Sue Ellen ate it. There wasn’t any way we could stop her from it. We tried at first, but she got away and got to it anyhow. She said it was sweet as candy and ran around inside your head like a hot lizard; said looking out of her eyes was like looking through a projector, like becoming the light and sound that shot out of the projector and hit the screen; like being everything fast-moving and bright that ever existed. Stuff like that, not twelve-year-old talk. She said when she looked at us she saw little screens on our faces instead of eyes and on the screens she could see little picture shows of our past, and I guess maybe she could, because she told us some things we hadn’t told her about the two of us, like about the time we played doctor.
Mysterious stuff. Popcorn magic.
And in time the eyeball corn didn’t seem so odd. So what, big deal, the popcorn had eyeballs and it came from the King who vomited it up? So what?
The idea of crunching down on those eyeballs wasn’t so weird anymore. I thought maybe in texture it might be like damp Cracker Jack. Was it the vomit that made it sweet? Did lights and shadows and sounds run around in your head like a hot lizard, as Sue Ellen said? Was it really like that? Would I know new and wonderful things?
I looked around at the others. They were eating the corn, but they didn’t seem to be cruising through life any better than I was. They were weak and sick and malicious, always hungry. They were dying same as me except they were hiding behind the veneer of the King’s chemistry, mixing it with his jive religion, but they were going to die same as me.
Still, you can only hold out so long. Hunger is the biggest monkey ever made. It can make heroin addiction seem like a Coca-Cola habit.
Timothy caved in. He got tired of chewing seat covers and listening to his belly rumble. He went the way of Sue Ellen and ate the vomit corn. First time he had it he came back talking about the color of lies. His breath was sewerish and his eyes were dull; I wondered what movies were showing on the backs of them.
I used my martial arts to keep me away from the corn. I was too weak to practice it, but I did the movements in my head, tried to fill the hungry thoughts with visions of me nude and strong and practicing every technique I knew, fast and slow and medium.
It worked well, but not well enough. In time my belly started to win over, and I would have gone for the corn had the man not come along.
This is hard to talk about, but it seems to me, bad as this was, it was better than the corn. The corn would make me sing the King’s song; I wasn’t ready for the color of lies and movies on the backs of my eyes.
Okay, here goes. Straight plunge.
Timothy and Sue Ellen were just back from the concession, sitting in the car, eyes closed, seeing whatever it was the corn made them see, and I was sitting there thinking of stripping off another piece of seat cover to chew on. There wasn’t much left and it made me ill to think about chewing on that nasty stuff, but what else was there to do? So I’m thinking about this, trying to get the will to do it, when this man staggered by on my side, put his hand against the door frame, said, “Shit, this ain’t heartburn,” and fell over.

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