The Complete Drive-In (40 page)
Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
(Hot damn. Glad to see it. Hands are visible there in the dark, shadows coiling between the gaps in the fingers when you hold your hand before your face, where before, you couldn’t see your hand before your face.)
What if (that age-old question) the fuse does go and the light doesn’t come back, and, well, here we are, nothing left but the sound of each other breathing, the touch of each other’s hands, the sharing of lice, the sharing of fleas.
I think bad things would happen.
And, hey. What if the fuse kills the climate altogether and there’s nothing but void?
V-O-I-D.
My take on that is it wouldn’t be good.
But, as it stands now, you can start a fire and cook a meal, and the sun could rise and set and rise and set again before you finish your ration of dinosaur egg on some kind of gooey weed, or your fistful of grubs with a dirty root.
And next time you cook, the day or night seems to go on forever.
When it’s night, there are the movies.
Films, as we intellectuals call them.
They show from the moment the darkness falls to the time it goes away. Throbbing light displaying horrible deeds, chainsaws, and power tools. Once I found it entertaining. I see too much real life in it now, even if it has become as familiar as the flat brown mole on the top of my dick. Well, maybe that mole is on the left side of the old cable. But, you know what I mean, Mr. Journal. Old Bitch Diary. Whatever you are, made up of composition notebooks and pages here and there and backs of envelopes and such, written in pencil and ink and crayon and charcoal and mascara, all wrapped up tight and stuffed in a knapsack found in the back seat of a car, next to the remains of a dead body.
Skeleton actually. Small. Some idiot took a child to see an all-night horror show. That skeleton wasn’t entirely a skeleton. It was a body of rags, and the rags were flesh, the bulk of it having been ripped from the bones and eaten. The bones had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out, and it was no longer a horror to see that, and I knew, just a slight push, a slight change of the emotional weather inside my head, and I too would be snatching flesh and cracking bones, chewing up meat, sucking up marrow like chocolate sauce through a straw.
But the movies. There’s no way to turn them off. We’ve thought about tearing down the screen, but frankly, we find this a scary idea. If the screen is gone and there are no movies, then, at night, there is very little light, depending on if the moon comes up (when it comes up some nights, we can hear what sounds like a crank, like someone is jacking it up from the horizon on chains and pulleys), and if it should cease to come up, if the machinery, which I think must be getting old up there behind that curtain of sky, should cease to work, then we will have no light at night, and in this place, no light, that’s scary, baby.
I mean, what if the light never comes again? And here we sit. In darkness. The occasional fire, but mostly, darkness.
Not good.
And there are the sounds.
Wouldn’t want to lose them.
I have become accustomed to the screams and yells and stupid dialogue from all the films.
They are like a mama’s lullaby at night.
If they cease to play and cease to light and cease to sound, there is only emptiness. And ourselves. And all that we have done, nestled in the backs of our minds, moving around to the front. Most of those memories are bad. Being completely inside yourself without outside sounds and interference, that is very hard for the very weak, and that be us, baby. The very weak.
Did I mention the dark?
I did, didn’t I?
It’s on my mind. The darkness.
Now that I think about it, except for that part about not knowing how long I’ve slept, I don’t feel that much like David Innes at all. I’m not only weak, I’m always scared shitless.
But let’s talk about the bus.
If I can focus on the bus, get something to eat soon, maybe I’ll be all right. As is, I’m rambling, I’m free associating, I’m all over the place, and if I’m not careful, I’ll once again talk about the dark.
I need to pee. And shall, out by the drive-in fence, in that special spot where the aroma of a zillion pees rises up and overwhelms and bullies and makes one hasten the act. But, hey, it ain’t nothing compared to a little farther down at what we call the Shittin’ Section. Now there’s some smelly business ...
The bus.
The bus.
Focus, Jack.
The bus.
Will it run?
It starts. It runs. But will it run great distances?
Must pee.
4I’ve peed. I’ve eaten. Had some boiled fruit. I had to go outside the drive-in, in the jungle, to pick it, and I was scared, doing it by moonlight, but I was more hungry than I was scared. I brought back a stick with the fruit. I wrapped the fruit in my ragged shirt and tied it to the stick and toted it back that way. Later I put the stick in the community fire and got it ablaze, came back to my bus, and using wood I had carried from the jungle and stored in the bus, I boiled water in a hubcap—the water taken from the community water—put the fruit in the hubcap and cooked it down and made a kind of goo, ate it with my fingers, which I burned. It gave me strength (fruit power, baby), and now I feel better. Less hypoglycemic. More organized.
But my fingers hurt.
Now, here are my plans. I write this feeling better, less loopy. I can write now without feeling like the script itself will come off of the page and dance.
This is what I am going to do:
There is a trail that leads into the woods. An animal trail. It’s fairly wide. It has to be to accommodate dinosaurs.
Once, while hunting down the trail, looking for something weak, looking for eggs or edible roots, me and Steve and a couple of the boys, as we call the “Popcorn Kids,” came across—now get this—
—a school bus.
That’s right.
Just off the trail, parked between two great trees, out there in the weeds. Vines had grown around the tires and twisted up under it and through cracks and under the hood. The vines held it tight to the ground like they owned it.
There were other things around as well, all of them just as inexplicable. A large pontoon boat. A World War II plane, not to mention a Confederate flag on a flagpole, just stuck up in the dirt, and lying about, a bunch of beer cans, a pack of rubbers, and some cigarette butts.
Above, in the sky where a break in the trees let us see it, was a great funnel.
No shit.
The small end of it dipped down out of the sky, and the rest of it flared wide and gray and up into the heavens, and all we could figure was the bus and all the other stuff had come down that great funnel, come to rest here in the jungle.
I’ve thought on it a lot, but I’ve never come up with any explanation that satisfies, but then again, this world is full of unsatisfactory questions and few if any revelations.
But, anyway, we found this bus, and we came across the bus many times after that on our treks, and finally we managed the door open, and began using it for storage. It was a pretty good place to hide from critters chasing us, as well. A kind of halfway station. We got the front door to work and the back door to work, and one day, just for fun, I turned the key, which was in the engine, and—
—it started.
No shit.
Fired right up.
The gas gauge rocked forward. A near full tank.
Like everything here, it didn’t make sense.
Where did it come from?
Had it come another time?
Who had been in it?
Kids on their way to school?
A band trip?
Football team on its way to or back from a game?
We didn’t know.
Over the next few ... days? weeks? months? years? ... Steve and I, and a couple of others, have been working to free it of the vines. The tires are all flat, blown out and ripped up to be exact, and the bus looks to have run on the rims, driving like crazy, pursued by ... who knows what?
That comet that sucked it in?
Giant aliens with tweezers, ready to grab hold of it and fling it down the funnel?
Who knows?
But there were a few tires on a few vehicles in the drive-in lot that fit, so we jacked it up and loaded it down with rubber, and, with handmade bellows and the remains of a bicycle pump, we inflated the tires.
One day, I drove it back to the drive-in, and they opened the great barrier we had made at the fore of the place, and I steered it inside. I closed it off, began living in it.
So when I determine tomorrow has come (keeping in mind I say this often), I am going to drive out of here in my sacred little home.
Not down the highway, but down the trail where the bus was discovered, just drive off into a new mystery.
And perhaps a short existence.
It has to beat this.
THE THIRD FEATURE BEGINS
“On the road again. I’m so happy to be on the road again ...”
—Willie Nelson
PART ONE
TRUCKIN‘, BABY
In which Jack and friends venture out into the great world which
turns wet, and they see strange beasts in the shadows, an
odd ghost, and, in the distance, shiny
in the sunlight, the stairway to heaven. Maybe.
turns wet, and they see strange beasts in the shadows, an
odd ghost, and, in the distance, shiny
in the sunlight, the stairway to heaven. Maybe.
And so the sun came up, and I called it tomorrow. I hitched up my mind and my resolve, and I said to myself, Self, I’m driving out of here.
Today, baby, is the day.
So I went to Grace and Steve, and I said, “I’m leaving.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Hunting. Foraging?”
“Leaving,” I said.
Grace, long and lean and beautiful, and quite naked, stood up and stretched (I could smell that they had been sexin’ it up), and said, “You asking us to go?”
“I’m telling you I’m going, and you want to go you can. It’s up to you. There’s a couple others I’m gonna ask, and then I’m gonna go, without folks or with folks.”
“We have been here a long time,” Grace said. “I think. I really don’t know. But it seems like we have. Shit, I say we go, Steve.”
Steve nodded. “Beats nailing your dick to a two-by-four.”
The day was as bright as a rich man’s day, and I had all the world before me.
Such as it was.
Stuffed with dinosaurs and monsters and strangeness.
But, I didn’t want to think about that.
The sun was bright. The trail was clear.
So, what we did was this: We found a few others who wanted to go. Most were afraid to go. Afraid if they got away from the drive-in with its relative protection, they would surely be on their own.
It was amazing. Once they had all been mostly young partygoers out for a weekend night at a four-screened drive-in, and now they called it home. And didn’t want to leave. Did not want to go out into the world with a New Big Bad Wolf, but wanted to stay with the Wolf They Knew.
I guess it was best to have only a few with us. Less to worry about. Fewer personalities to mess with.
Me, I wanted to go to my real home.
Didn’t know how.
Didn’t know if I could.
But I had to find out.
We managed to take a gas tank out of a car with tools found in the trunk of another car, and we put that tank in the bus, filled it with gas we siphoned from vehicles, and we corked the spare tank with a wooden plug, as the exterior screw-on cap had been long lost, and we put it in the back of the bus for reserve. We put some fruit back there, as well. Steve and Grace had some meat that wasn’t too rancid (dead critter found in the forest the day before, ants part of the treat), some water in gourd containers, a few odds and ends, and then we gave each other our best wishes and were off.
Or we would have been, but Steve came up with an idea.
“If we’re gonna be traveling about, and we don’t even know where we’re going, I think we ought to be prepared.”
“We got fruit and a dead thing we can eat. If we don’t wait a long time.”
This was from a guy named, and I shit thee not, Homer.
He was one of our volunteers. He looked like what you thought a Homer ought to look like. Kind of tall and lean and goofy with hair the color of watered-down shit that fled over his head in good patches, but showed through in spots and was as shiny there as a dog-licked dinner plate.
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