The Complete Drive-In Read online

  When Sam knew she was gone he went to preaching. Said something about Jesus and the thieves on either side of him.

  “Ain’t stole nothing in my life,” Bob said. “Cept maybe your bus and sardines, and I don’t think that counts.”

  Sam went on with his story, said those suckers on either side of Jesus had repented and Jesus had saved their lives and they went on to Paradise. Being as I was in the thieves’ position, I could sympathize with their line of thinking, but just having had a rather uninspiring religious experience, I declined to join Sam in Paradise.

  But Sam kept at it. I couldn’t figure where he was getting the wind. I could hardly breathe at all. I reckon he felt like a big wheel because he was in the middle. He preached for quite some time before his mouth went dry and he couldn’t say anything else, which I was grateful for.

  I blacked out off and on, and once I had what might have been a dream. In the dream the lightning overhead ceased and out of the blackness came a face, an indescribable face, but a face that had the look of someone, or something, with a mission. He opened his toothy mouth and roared, “Over budget, you fools. Over budget. Cut. Wrap.” Then the face withdrew into the black and there was light. The dream ended.

  I opened my eyes and saw below that the patrons were piling more wood around me, and that one of them had a piece of board wrapped in a shirt and it was on fire. He was about to put it to my pile of lumber. I hoped fire was quick. I had read somewhere that it was a tough way to go, and that smoke inhalation killed you first. I decided I would breathe a lot of smoke quickly, get it over with.

  And then there was a change. I looked up. The lightning was still there and so was the blackness, but there was something bright moving behind it, a red glow that was expanding.

  I looked down at my captors, at the faces of those close to the fire and at the shadowy shapes of those beyond; the more clearly outlined, if distant, shapes over in Lot B, where the movies still rolled. They all seemed to be looking up.

  I lifted my head again. It wasn’t just delirium. It was lighter up there and growing lighter still. Then it looked as if a great apple broke through the chocolate pudding, but it was the comet tearing through the poison sky. Down it came, dragging daylight behind it, white clouds, the sun.

  The drive-in went red and the comet smiled.

  Up it whipped again, this time pulling the blackness with it. Up, up, up and away, until it was not even a speck against the bright blue sky, and there was nothing left but a fine warm day with the smell of trees in the air and the touch of hot sun on our faces.

  It was nice, but I didn’t feel like a picnic or nothing.

  The patrons just sort of stood there for a while, marveling at the world beyond the tin fence. There were lots of trees visible. Big trees. The guy with the burning board dropped it—not on the wood pile, fortunately. People began wandering off, some began to run. Cars were cranked. Engines seemed to be working fine. Like a line of insects the cars and trucks rolled out of the drive-in. Some people whose cars had been totaled walked. Some hot-wired and took other cars. Everyone was in a hurry to get out of there. They didn’t mention getting us down. No one waved or shot us the finger as they went by.

  A tall, skinny man with long hair and a hoe handle for a cane came up. He looked up at Bob. “How’s it going?”

  “Hanging around,” Bob said, not missing a beat.

  “Maybe you’d like down?” Crier said.

  “That would be right nice,” Bob said.

  Crier got down on his hands and knees and started pulling the junk out of the piling holes and pretty soon the crosses were wobbling and then Crier pushed us down. When I hit the ground I thought my arms and legs would come off.

  Crier went away for a while and when he came back he had a hammer. He used the claw end to free us. It hurt like hell. He got Mable free last, since she wasn’t in any hurry.

  “I broke into your camper to get this hammer,” Crier said to Bob, “I figured you’d have one. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Nah,” Bob said, “it’s insured.”

  My hands and feet hurt so bad I couldn’t move them and I couldn’t walk, least not without help. My legs seemed to have died. Sam looked walleyed and had gone to singing “The Old Rugged Cross” in a whispery kind of voice, and that wasn’t helping my nerves.

  “What you driving?” Bob said.

  “Well,” Crier said, “this is kind of odd, but I can’t remember what car I came in. Can’t remember who I came with.”

  “Don’t matter,” Bob said. “We’ll take the camper. You can drive, can’t you?”

  “Is it an automatic?”

  “I thought you said you were a truck driver,” Bob said. “I figured you could drive anything.”

  “Well, I may have exaggerated. A whole lot. I drove an ice cream truck, actually.”

  “An ice cream truck!” Bob said.

  “Yeah. But sometimes I drove it real fast. And it was an automatic. Which brings me back to the question. Is your truck an automatic?”

  “Yep.” Bob said.

  “Then I can drive the hell out of that. It’s been awhile, but I reckon I remember that much. But you don’t look like you got a key on you.”

  “There’s one underneath the dash in a magnetic box. Doors aren’t locked.”

  “Okay,” Crier said. “I’ll drive it over here and pick you up.”

  “You wouldn’t just drive off and leave us, would you?” Bob said.

  “Gone this far for you, might as well go the whole hog.”

  When Crier came back with the truck, Bob said, “There’s some blankets in the back. There’s a knife back there too. We can cut a hole in the blankets and slip them over our heads.”

  “Why the trouble?” Crier asked. “You boys got dates?”

  “Just a thing I prefer, if you’ll do it,” Bob said.

  Crier found the blankets and the sardines and the knife. He brought the sardines out and we ate all we could stand, Crier feeding them to us, as our hands didn’t work so good.

  He cut the blankets and pulled them over our heads. Sam didn’t even notice. He was trying to sing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”

  “What about her?” I asked, nodding at Mable.

  “Dead, ain’t she?” Crier said.

  “Maybe you could pile some boards on her or something, set her on fire if you had a mind to. She ought to have some kind of burial.”

  “Ain’t you something,” Crier said.

  “And the Popcorn King,” I said. “He ought not just be left.”

  “You’re kind of tight with everybody, ain’t you?” Crier said,

  “Before he was that, he was two friends of ours,” Bob said. “I know it’s a bother, but could you?”

  “Hell,” Crier said. “Good thing you boys are paying by the hour.” He piled some boards on Mable and set fire to her and she caught poorly at first, but after a time was blazing away. It didn’t take so much to get the Popcorn King burning. He caught quick and flared like a torch, the blanket whipping to flame immediately. Black smoke churned up from the corpses and floated up into the clear sky and faded.

  “Now,” Crier said. “Any little ole chores you boys want performed? Just anything would be all right. Maybe you’d like to see if I can make a few laps around the lots.”

  “Would you?” Bob said.

  “You know what you can do,” Crier said.

  Crier helped Bob and Sam into the back of the truck and led me around to the cab. It seemed to take forever and my feet felt like raw stumps. I had Crier on one side holding me up, and the truck on the other. I touched the truck with my elbow because my hand wouldn’t take it. I still couldn’t open or close either one of them. They looked like talons.

  Inside the cab, Crier started the truck again, leaned on the wheel and looked around. “Strange, I feel funny leaving.”

  “Maybe you can get over it,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “One thing, Crier,” I
said. “You saw what that crowd was about to do to us. I know you couldn’t have stopped them, but would you have helped eat us? Could you have done that?”

  “Been the first in line if I could have. No sense missing a free meal, even if it is made up of a couple of guys I kind of like.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s one way of looking at things.”

  EPILOGUE

  I leaned against the door and kept my sore hands in my lap. As we started rolling, I looked around at all the vacant cars, many of them wrecked. There were also lots of bones. You could see that clearly now. We drove by one car with its roof decorated with human skulls wearing popcorn sacks, and there was another car with a baby seat sitting on top of it with a little skeleton in the seat holding a rattle.

  I glanced through the gun rack and the back glass, saw Bob and Sam stretched on the floor of the camper. Bob was up on one elbow, gingerly managing sardines from a can Crier had opened and left for him. Sam wasn’t moving. Later Bob told me he died before we got out of the lot.

  We went through the exit, and though the highway was there, the yellow line had faded and the concrete had buckled and grass grew up through it in spots. Nothing else was remotely familiar. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. I remembered what Sam had said: “It ain’t over yet. It ain’t never over.” No, it wasn’t over. It was time for the second feature. A lost world movie. As we drove, a massive shape stepped out of the jungle foliage at the right of the highway and Crier eased on the brake and we watched. It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.

  The dinosaur looked at us in a disinterested way, crossed the highway and was swallowed by the jungle.

  “I don’t think this leads home anymore,” Crier said, and eased forward again, started picking up speed. I looked in the truck’s wing mirror and I could see the drive-in in it, one of the screens in Lot B. The projector might still be running back there, but if it was, I couldn’t make out a picture. The screen looked like nothing more than an enormous slice of Wonder Bread.

  CUT/FADE-OUT

  BOOK TWO

  THE DRIVE-IN

  Not Just One of Them Sequels

  INTRODUCTION

  The Drive-in 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, wasn’t a book I expected to write. I didn’t have plans. I had a few ideas left over from the first book, and I from time to time thought about what to do with them, but nothing came to mind. And then, my editor, Pat LoBrutto called.

  He wanted a sequel.

  I’ve always balanced my career between art and pragmatism. If I want to write something, I generally write it, no matter what. Sometimes, I’m asked to do a project I didn’t originate, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a project I wouldn’t like to do. Often I pass on things I’m offered. But when Pat LoBrutto asked me to do another novel about the Drive-in world, needing to keep my career going, needing money to pay bills, and liking the challenge. I went for it. The first time had been a tough experience that turned out well, so I thought, been there before, so this one will be more fun to write.

  It wasn’t. It too was hard. There was something about telling these kind of stories, making them seem simple, and sliding in the ideas I wanted to portray at the same time. But, I had a sense this one was good, even though it was tough. I chose to let it end in what for some might be an anticlimactic manner, but was for me, the perfect ending. As always, I go my own way.

  It was received with a little less enthusiasm, but over the years the fans for it have grown, especially those who have read the first book.

  I like it quite a bit. I think it has some of my best satirical work. It’s also weird with a side of weird. The first novel had a character called the Popcorn King, who I believe to be as unusual an invention as I’ve ever come up with—or at least I thought so until I wrote The Drive-in 2 with Popalong Cassidy.

  No doubt all of these books seem to have at their core a love–hate relationship with the entertainment media, TV, movies, etc., as well as a love for false profits and a strange desire to identify with pretty horrible people.

  The novel, like the first, was written quickly, though perhaps a little less quickly. Like the first, I was uncertain what I had wrought. Upon reading it in galley form (I don’t think the term galley is used so much these days), I found myself pleased with it. The first is somehow more powerful, if for no other reason than it’s the first, but this one is highly inventive and as a writer, I got to explore the Drive-in world some more and find out what was out there.

  What was out there was pretty weird.

  Here, let me invite you on the journey. Keep your hands and feet inside the car, and if you think you see something weird, it is weird.

  Enjoy.

  —Joe R. Lansdale, 2009

  “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”

  —Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

  FADE-IN PROLOGUE

  Pay attention. When I’m through there will be a test.

  One day suddenly you’re out of high school, happy as a grub in shit, waking up with a hard-on and spending your days sitting around in your pee-stained underwear with your feet propped up next to the air conditioner vent with cool air blowing on your nuts, and the next goddamn thing you know, you’re crucified.

  And I don’t mean symbolically. I’m talking nails in the paws and wood splinters in the ass, sore hands and feet and screams and a wavering attitude about the human race. It’s the sort of thing that when it happens to you, you have a hard time believing ol’ Jesus could have been all that forgiving about it.

  It hurts.

  Had I been J.C., I’d have come back from the dead madder than a badger with turpentined balls, and there wouldn’t have been any of this peace-andlove shit, and I would have forgotten how to do trivial crap like turn water to wine and multiply bread and fishes. I’d have made myself big as the universe and made me two bricks just the right size, and I’d have gotten the world between the bricks, and whammo, shit jelly.

  It wouldn’t do to make me a messiah. I’ve got a bad attitude.

  I do now, anyway.

  It isn’t that I expected life to be so sweet and fine that I’d grow up sweating pearls and farting peach blossoms, nor was I expecting to live to be three million and have endless fan mail from long-legged, sex-starved Hollywood starlets telling me how they’d like to ravish my body and bronze my pecker. But on the other hand, I was expecting a little better than this.

  Me and my friends went to the drive-in to see movies, not to become part of them.

  The evening we drove into the Orbit things started going to hell in a fiery handbasket. We had just gotten settled in, and this big, red comet came hurtling from the sky like a tomato thrown by God, and then the comet split apart and smiled rows of saw-bladed teeth at us.

  And when I thought the comet would hit us and splatter us into little sparklers of light, it veered upwards and moved out of sight. What it left in its wake was some bad business.

  The drive-in still had light, but the light came from the projectors and the projectors didn’t seem to have any source of electricity. We were surrounded by a blackness so complete it was like being in a bag with a handful of penlights. The blackness beyond the drive-in was acidic. I’ll never forget what it did to that carload of fat people that drove off into it (or what I assumed it did), or the cowboy who put his arm into it and got his entire self dissolved.

  Anyway, we were trapped.

  Things got nasty.

  There was nothing to eat in the drive-in besides the concession food, which was bad enough, but when that got low, people started eating one another, cooked and uncooked.

  Then two of my friends, whacked out from lack of food, got hit by this strange blue lightning; (Randy was riding on Willard’s back at the time) and it fused them together and made them uglier than a shopping ma
ll parking lot and gave them strange powers and they became known as the Popcorn King. They weren’t friends of mine and Bob’s anymore. They weren’t anyone’s friends. They were now one creature. A bad creature.

  Hello, permanent blue Monday.

  The Popcorn King used his weird powers and unlimited popcorn to control the hungry crowd, and Bob and I might have joined them if it hadn’t been for the jerky stash Bob had in his camper truck. The meat kept us from having to eat the King’s popcorn, which had grown kind of funky, and from having to eat other folks, which was a thing the King encouraged.

  But me and Bob were realistic enough to figure eating other folks and each other was just on the horizon, so to speak, so we decided, live or die, we were going to destroy the Popcorn King, and we did, with the help of this evangelist named Sam and his wife, Mable, who we thought was dead at the time. But that’s another story and I’ve already told it. Let me just say that Sam and Mable together probably had a lower IQ than the foreskin on my dick.

  To shorten this all up, we killed the Popcorn King, smashed him with a bus and blew his ass up, and for our efforts, Samaritan as they were, the King’s followers stripped us naked, called us some real bad names, crucified us and started building bonfires at the bottom of our crosses so they could have us for lunch.

  Then the comet decided to come back.

  The big red bastard couldn’t come back before we were crucified. No sir. It had to wait until we were up on those crosses with nails in our hands and feet and our bare asses hanging out before it chose to make an appearance.

  But, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. The bonfire didn’t get built, and consequently, we didn’t get eaten.

  The comet did what it had done before, only this time when it went away the blackness around the drive-in went with it and folks got in their cars and trucks and drove off.