The Complete Drive-In Read online

  “You did this, cowboy,” Sam yelled at Bob’s back.

  Bob pulled the door lever and went outside. I went after him. He was leaning against the bus, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He was watching the movie. It was The Toolbox Murders.

  I went up and leaned beside him. “You saved my life. I’m sorry you had to shoot the woman, but thanks for saving my life.”

  “I never said I was sorry for shooting her,” Bob said, but he didn’t look at me.

  We leaned that way for a time. “Movie any good?” I asked.

  “It’s all right,” Bob said, “but I’ve seen it.”

  I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got things to do.”

  We went back inside the bus.

  Sam looked at me and snarled. “Damn you, if you’d just gone on and cooperated, we’d have eaten you and things would have gone on like they were . . . least for a while.”

  “I have days when I’m obstreperous,” I said.

  “To hell with this talk,” Bob said. “We’re going on with it, Sam, with or without you even if I have to teach myself how to use that torch by trial and error and let Jack drive the bus. So how’s it going to be? You in or out?”

  Sam turned to look at Mable. He closed her eyes with his fingertips, then looked at us. “I’m in,” he said.

  Bob nodded. “Now . . . what would you like to do with her body?”

  There was no way to bury her, and options were few. We could toss her into the acidic blackness or we could leave her on the bus to burn when it exploded. (If it exploded. Just because we had a plan didn’t mean I had a lot of faith in it.)

  Sam preferred to leave her on the bus. He got some cans of sardines out of her overcoat pockets (he wasn’t so sentimental as to leave those), and put some old clothes on top of her to help her catch fire. He took some plastic plumbing pipe, couplings and pipe glue, used a hacksaw to make her an artificial hand. Or that’s what it was supposed to be. It looked like a dull garden rake to me. He tied it to the stump of her arm with some rounds of twine and a twisted coat hanger.

  Finished, he put a blanket over her and tied it and Mable to the bed with some strips of old sheet, changed out of his festive-tie shirt and put back on the one with a black tie. He said some words over her, then changed back to the shirt with the red tie painted on. I presumed that was also his welding shirt.

  “Sam,” I said, “I’m not one to meddle, but I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you paint those ties on your shirts?”

  “Can’t tie the knots,” he said.

  Made sense.

  We ate some sardines, talked the plan over one more time, then Sam and I lowered the dolly with the welding equipment on it out the back of the bus.

  “Go for it,” Bob said. We shook hands and he gave me the flare pistol. I slipped it into my belt next to the revolver.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Sam said. “I ain’t gonna shake hands with nobody.”

  I took hold of the dolly, cocked it back and started pushing it across the lot at a dog trot. Sam ran alongside me, wheezing like a tire going flat.

  3

  We weren’t too worried about the Popcorn King noticing us. We were a good distance away, and hey, it wasn’t like there wasn’t something strange going on all the time anyway.

  But the closer we got to the little fence that led out to the stretch of concrete where the Orbit symbol was, the more nervous I became. My courage began to falter, and I wanted to go back to the truck and get into the sardines and eat those, and just hope for the best.

  Still, I kept running, and Sam was staying up with me. We saw the Christians here and there, standing around, watching, wondering, I suppose. None of them waved. Stuck up.

  I looked toward the concession. It glowed beautifully against the blackness, like some exotic gem on black velvet. One of those little winds that kicked up out of nowhere from time to time started going and it carried the stink of the no-longerused toilets to me, and the smell was as hard and mean as a head-on collision.

  In the window of the concession I could see the bodies hanging, like big fish in a market. Some of them were little more than skeletons.

  We came to the wooden fence and Sam got up there and straddled it, and I pushed the dolly up where he could get hold of it and twist it over, lower it to the other side.

  Sam followed after it and I took his place, straddling the fence. I looked out at the great tin fence surrounding the drive-in (except this area that led out to the Orbit symbol), and saw the cruel blackness beyond. I saw some of the screens and their movies and wondered how they had gone on so long without being destroyed. But then I knew. They were light. They were holy shrines to a mad god. I wondered how it would be if we managed to destroy the concession here in Lot A and the three movies went out. Once in darkness, would it all end, like bad dreams tumbling down the throat of sleep?

  Nope. Lot B would be the center then, for however long that lasted. Lot B with its empty concession and its manned film room, carrying on with or without the King until there was mass murder and/or starvation and finally over there the lights went out as well.

  I could see people moving around the drive-in, a number of them moving toward the concession. Probably time for the next meal of popcorn vomit. I figured some of the patrons could see me up there, but it most likely wouldn’t excite them much. Many had gone over the fences and out into the blackness, and in their eyes I’d just be one more quitter.

  “You gonna lay an egg up there, or what?” Sam said.

  I went on over and took hold of the dolly and started pushing it out on the spur toward the symbol. It was brighter out there because of the lightning, and the ozone was so thick it smelled like a wound being cauterized.

  The spur narrowed as we went and the ebony pudding was close on either side of us, and I thought about how easy it would be to end it all. I mean it was right there taunting me, inviting me to freedom. But I kept pushing.

  When finally we made the tall, tapering pole that held the symbol, I looked up at the tentacles (liked to think I could see suckers on one side of them, like on an octopus) and the lightning coming out of them, watched the bolts strike the symbol, spin off and engulf the concession. Looking up at that great light, those tentacles, made me feel small and weak and hated.

  Sam tried to arc a spark on the torch, but wasn’t having much luck. He talked to it. “Come on, now, be good. Come on. Hot A’mighty, that’s the way.”

  A spark jumped to the torch and he turned it up and the flame licked out and he put it to the pole, began to cut through. “Might as well get comfy,” he said. “This is going to take a while.”

  I remembered it was not wise to look at a torch without goggles because a spark could jump to your eyes, and I didn’t want to watch Sam work without goggles. The way he was squinting at the flame made me ache. I turned and looked at the blackness, but that was too dreary and it had a siren’s call, so I turned and looked at the fence and the back and top of the concession. I could see the upper half of one of the screens beyond that and I tried to watch the movie, Night of the Living Dead, but it seemed too much like reality and I knew all the lines by heart. I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing, but there was just too much in my head for that. I wondered what Bob was doing and how he felt sitting there in the bus, waiting for our signal. I wondered if he really would jump. I figured he might have already turned the bus toward the concession, and he would be watching the symbol, waiting for our flare. God, I hoped the bus would start.

  Then I didn’t think about that anymore. I thought of Randy and Willard and I felt pity, something I was afraid I might have lost, then there were tears in my eyes and they might have been for Randy and Willard.

  “Getting there,” Sam said.

  I thought, no, the tears are not for Randy and Willard, they are for all the good dreams I’ve dreamed, for all the good gods, who do not exist, for all the good in man that is only social conditioning
to keep the bigger man from breaking his head. Yes, that was what I was weeping for: mankind. The fact that man is not kind at all. But then I knew that was malarkey and that I was weeping for myself, all my loneliness, disappointment, the awareness of my mortality, the realization that the universe was a dark, empty place and life was nothing more than a carnival ride and that when the bell sounded to end the ride and you got off, you stepped out into nothing. It was all over then, all there was was ended, flesh and soul might as well have never been.

  Even the B-movie gods could not be proved except in my dreams. Maybe they were not gods at all but some sort of life-form that was far enough advanced that they served the purpose of god counterfeit deities. Alien filmmakers. Youthful aliens who have had an interesting accident with their chemistry set. Or nothing more than my need for there to be reason and design where there was none; I so desperately wanted there to be gods and magic, even if they were bad.

  “Timber,” yelled Sam.

  I turned and looked up and the pole was starting to go, dragging its lightning after it.

  “The flare,” Sam said.

  I pulled the flare gun, lifted it and fired at an angle, not knowing the height of our sky. The flare went bright red and pretty against the dark and the strands of blue lightning. I dropped the gun and started running for the fence, Sam behind me, wheezing. Before we made it there, the symbol came down, and it lost its lightning; it was like the lightning was bubble gum and it had been stretched too far and had popped free. The symbol came down on the concession with a crunch, and there was a momentary crackling and sizzling that hurt my ears and made my flesh feel warm, then debris flew and the lights of the projectors went out.

  I got hold of the fence and pulled myself up, straddled it. There was still plenty of light from the lightning overhead, and I could see that Bob had gotten a late start, but was coming. The old bus whined like an unpleasant child, the lights shone like miniature suns. The bus hit the concession with a screech and a blast, and a rush of flame went through it, blew the windows out and wrapped around the roof, kicked the back door open. All manner of crap propelled out the open door and went sailing, including the bed Mable was strapped to. It skidded across the asphalt, twisted sideways and struck a Volkswagen, ricocheted back toward the burning bus, stopped spinning halfway there, sat smoldering like a cheap cigar. The blanket had been torn partially free, and Mable’s arm with the plumbing-pipe hand came out from under it and struck the ground, lay there like a stiff white spider unable to run. The recipe cards had also escaped from beneath the blanket and they were fluttering down. Some had been flame-kissed and were nothing now but blackened wisps.

  I saw Bob. He had jumped. He was on his feet and limping toward me. He had the shotgun and he was still wearing his hat. I felt like cheering but before I could celebrate, the debris shifted, boards lifted and dropped as the Popcorn King stood up out of the rubble. He was charred from head to foot. That part of his head that was the popcorn cup had a lick of flame fluttering out of it like a feather in a fez. A board had gone through his top chest. Glass poked out of his flesh. He looked very unhappy, and he was looking directly at me.

  He reached up with his top right hand and pulled the board out of his chest and tossed it aside. He started walking out of the debris, toward me.

  “Get away from there,” Bob yelled. “Run.”

  But I was frozen, watching the King. He was moving slowly, staggering. He no longer had the blue glow. He looked more like a bad acrobat act, a little guy on a big guy’s shoulders.

  The King opened his mouth and coughed out smoke. He fell to his knees and the tattoos dripped off him like melting licorice and formed a dark pool on the ground. The King lay face down and quit moving.

  I got down off the fence and went over there. I could hear Sam calling to me to help him over, asking what was happening. I could hear Bob telling me to run, but I didn’t pay either of them any mind.

  I bent down to the King and whispered, “Randy?”

  The head lifted slightly. The single eye looked at me. I couldn’t tell if there was recognition there or not. Maybe it was just confusion. A tooth fell out of his mouth and clinked on the asphalt, was followed by a little lake of vomit in which one of the cyclopean popcorns floated; the eye was dead and filmed over.

  “Eat and be fed, brother,” the King’s upper mouth said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Turning down a sick man,” the King said, and it was the lower mouth this time. “That’s a hell of a note.”

  He laid his head down gently, his face in the vomit. His head was turned so I could still see the single eye. He opened his top left hand and there was a crumpled paper skull in it. “Second-rate materials. Second-rate effects,” Randy’s voice said. “I could have done better with household supplies.”

  The one eye closed. The Popcorn King was dead.

  But Mable wasn’t. About that time she screamed.

  4

  When I turned, I saw that at Mable’s scream Sam had made it over the fence and sprinted over to her. Bob was ahead of him, tearing off the smoldering blanket. Sam and Bob got arms around her and lifted her up and Sam said, “Oh, honey bugs, I thought you were croaked. Done gone to be with Jesus.”

  Mable was clutching one of the recipe cards in her good hand. She looked at it there in the light of the burning concession and the lightning overhead. “Polk salad,” she said. “Now that’s a good one, if you get it when the shoots are young. Don’t, you might as well cook you up a mess of Johnson grass.”

  I started over to join them, stopped. The patrons of both lots were coming out of the shadows, into the light of the great fire, coming toward us. A more unpleasant crowd I’d never seen. The patrons from Lot A no longer had their movies, and neither lot had their King and their popcorn.

  Sam and Bob saw me looking, and they swiveled Mable around so that they were all facing the crowd. I pulled the pistol from my belt and held it against my leg and walked over there.

  Bob and Sam gently lowered Mable to the ground. She sat there reading the pork salad recipe, nodding over it.

  “It ain’t over,” Sam said. “It ain’t never over.”

  “The King,” went the cry from the crowd. “The King.”

  Then they swarmed us. I heard Bob’s shotgun roar and I got off one shot—and missed. In a crowd, no less. Jack the deadly gunman. Sweaty, hot bodies piled on me and I struck the ground hard and someone said an obscenity in my face and some other smart aleck twisted the gun out of my hand and hit me with it, which is kind of humiliating, getting clubbed with your own gun, I mean. Next the crowd started dribbling me around the lot with fists and feet and I got beyond pain and entered into nice, dark, cozy unconsciousness.

  But that didn’t last long.

  Lot A built a bigger and better fire out of the smoldering lumber of the concession stand so they would have plenty of light to work by, but they managed to save enough of the lumber for cooking and building.

  What they built was crosses.

  They got some nails out of the wreckage and someone had a hammer, and they stripped us naked and held us down and crucified us. That hurt bad enough, but when they dropped our crosses into the holes the concession pilings had been in, that was real pain. It shook my entire body until I felt as if the tips of my teeth would bulb up and squirt blood.

  They packed the holes tight with junk from the concession, then piled lumber around the bottoms of the crosses and looked up at us like chefs contemplating the larder.

  The nails hurt something awful, but worse was the racking pain throughout the body and the pressure it put on the lungs. Now and then I had to make my legs work so I could force myself up on the nail through my feet and get some good breaths. I’d stay that way long as I could until the muscles in my feet cramped and I had to let go. Then I’d have trouble breathing again, and I’d get my strength back just enough before my lungs collapsed, and I’d push up once more. I had just thought Coach M
urphy’s calisthenics in PE were tough.

  They got the Popcorn King’s body, put it on a pole and stuck it upright in that part of the wreckage that wasn’t on fire. The King had gone seriously ugly. The tattoos had fallen off him and lay like ink pools on the ground where he had lain. That part of the body that had been Willard was pink again; he had even lost the tattoos he had come to the drive-in with.

  Members of the crowd took a blanket and put it over the King’s head so his face would show, and they took a nail and nailed through it into the top of his hat so it wouldn’t fall off. Then they stretched the blanket behind him so that he looked like he was standing there wearing a hooded robe. One young woman with spiky hair claimed she had been possessed by the King’s spirit, or some such thing (I wasn’t in the mood to take it all in, actually), and she wandered around and did a kind of Jezebel dance by the body, and after a while she let her voice go deep, though it cracked some, and she gave the impression the King was talking through her. The crowd liked that, and she got behind the body, under the stretched-out blanket, and patrons would come by and ask the King questions and she’d answer for him and everyone was pleased with this oracle. They did this until it got boring and they turned back to us and started piling more lumber. One of the pilers was especially annoying. He kept singing “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread,” and he couldn’t carry a tune in a safety-deposit box. It just wasn’t the way for a man to die. On a cross, about to be cooked, with some idiot singing “Short’nin’ Bread.”

  I could turn my head and see the others to my left. Sam, Bob and Mable. Mable, who had lost her plumbing-pipe hand, had gotten nailed through the wrist a couple of times and I think she was bleeding worse than the rest of us. She cashed in early, her last words being something about how to wrap tamale meat in corn shucks. I kept expecting her to come alive again and start on some other recipe, but this time she was dead for real. Her shapeless white body hung out from the cross like a swollen grub.