The Complete Drive-In Read online

  Still, gas was going to be a problem eventually. But it was a problem that was solved when we came to a place with lots of cars pulled off the highway and parked along its edges and out in an area that had been partially cleaned by nature and partially by human beings.

  A crude sign had been painted on a big, split limb and stuck up in the ground beside the road. It read:

  People were living in their cars and crude huts. There was a river nearby and they were getting fish out of it. And, of course, there was abundant fruit.

  You wouldn’t call it a harmonious little town, but it seemed to be doing well enough, considering a canopy of doom hung over it; a canopy knitted stitch by stitch by dark experience.

  We stayed on a while, living out of our car, watching the place try and become a real town.

  One night this guy about my age got a rope from somewhere and went out to the edge of town and picked this big oak and threw the rope over a limb and fashioned a noose and hung himself.

  Next morning he was dangling there, purple-faced, looking like some oddshaped, overripe fruit about to drop from the vine. The log he had stood on and kicked away at the last moment was about six feet from where his feet dangled. I wondered if in his last painful moments he had looked down at the log with regret.

  Timothy and I helped get him down and some others got rid of the body, and the next night a girl of about twelve went out there and climbed up on the limb and put the rope around her neck and hung herself.

  In the morning she was discovered. Sue Ellen went over to look at her. Neither Timothy nor I tried to stop her from seeing the body. She had seen much worse than that, and keeping her from it was akin to shutting the barn door after the stock have run off. Still, the way she looked at the dead girl’s face made me shiver. You’d have thought she was gazing on the countenance of the Madonna.

  No one cut the rope down. I think it was a way out everyone liked knowing was there, even if they never actually planned to use it.

  New people joined the community regularly. They had all been down the road a piece and they had given up and turned back, coming rolling into Shit Town in cars propelled by little more than fumes. Or they walked in, weary and defeated.

  I was still thinking about the end of the highway, so I talked to as many newcomers as I could. No one I spoke with had made it to the end. They said it got rougher and stranger as you went, and some of them felt certain the highway never ended.

  The town grew and the rope became more popular. Sue Ellen spent a lot of time looking at it. I decided it was time to move on.

  Timothy agreed. He spent his days gathering stones and taking them out to the middle of the highway and putting them on the fading yellow line and swatting them with a golf club. His strength, like mine, had come back, and he could knock them real far. He did that day in and day out until it was too dark to do it. He didn’t talk much.

  I talked to people in the town that had cars, asked if I could have their gas. A lot of them said they had gone all they intended to go, and they gave it to me. I managed to get a can and a hose. I siphoned gas from the cars into the can and transferred it to the Galaxy.

  While I did this, Timothy golfed and Sue Ellen looked at the rope.

  I put a can of gas in the trunk and some fruit too, then I got Timothy and Sue Ellen and drove us out of there. Timothy wasn’t shit for driving anymore. He couldn’t keep his mind on it, and the King’s popcorn had done something to the both of them. They had flashbacks of a sort. Recited lines from the movies back at the Orbit. Sue Ellen could even do the nail gun noise from The Toolbox Murders.

  Anyway, we drove on out of there, and I put the pedal to the metal and kept my eyes ever forward, searching for the end of the highway.

  2

  We went along quickly, stopping only to sleep and get fruit from the trunk of the car, but after a few days, things began to change.

  It was getting along night when I first noticed it. As it grew darker the jungle grew thicker and great roots cracked the concrete and coiled onto the highway along with vines that twisted and knotted like threads in a complex tapestry.

  When the Galaxy’s tires went over the big roots, the shocks throbbed, and when they went over the larger vines, the vines exploded like garden hoses full of black water.

  The sun, like a head full of fire, nodded out below the pinprick of the highway’s horizon, and the moon rose up in the same spot like a mean little kid giving us a bent-over view of a pockmarked ass.

  I turned on the lights and the trees on either side of the highway leaned forward and touched overhead making a tunnel of foliage down which the Galaxy was shooting like a bullet out of a gun barrel.

  The wind picked up and leaves churned across the road and popcorn bags and soft drink cups and candy wrappers joined them and made a little twister that fell over the windshield of the Galaxy like an avalanche. I beat the refuse away with the wipers and went though another twister of the stuff, and yet another, each gaining strength and causing the car to shake violently.

  I thought I could see drive-in screens, or fragments of old drive-ins, on either side of the road, but I couldn’t be sure because of the shadows.

  Something came blowing toward me and plastered to the windshield and there was no way I could make out for sure what it was before it blew away, but it looked like a movie poster, one of those garish ones you see in the horror movies.

  I glanced at Timothy, but he had passed out some time back and was leaning against the door, snoring softly. Sue Ellen was stretched out on the back seat asleep.

  Goose bumps went up my back, but I didn’t slow down and I didn’t pull over. I didn’t know what I’d find out there if I pulled over, and the idea of slowing down bothered me, especially now that the shadows were growing thicker and looking funny, and I use the word funny in the loosest sense, because I wasn’t laughing about anything. I wasn’t even cracking a smile.

  The shadows fluttered and rolled across the road like tumbleweeds and hit the car with a sound like wet blankets. They were very odd shadows indeed. Shadows of trees and leaves and men and women and giant apes and dinosaurs and flying things bigger than a double-decker bus.

  I couldn’t see the source of any of the shadows, but I had a feeling if they had a source, they lived lives contrary to the movements of their origins.

  I thought I saw movements in my mirror, faces, reflections of things in windows, thought I heard whispers, laughs and sighs.

  Then it started to get really bad out there. The wind picked up and gathered all the shadows, the popcorn bags, candy wrappers, cups, and posters (I was sure now), all this stuff, and it began to hit the Galaxy and whirl about it and the wind sucked at the car and lifted it up and dropped it down, lifted it up and dropped it down, and once when it went down, the back right tire went with a noise like a six-gun shot.

  The car swerved and I tried to turn in the direction of the skid like the handbook says, but the skid said “Fuck You,” and the shadows sacked up the car and took away the light.

  Round and round the Galaxy went, over and over. Timothy flew into me and we banged heads and the darkness outside became the darkness in me.

  3

  I woke up and found that the car had righted itself and that I was lying on the front seat alone. The door on the passenger side was open.

  I sat up and clung to the back of the seat until I felt focused. I could see Sue Ellen’s shape in the back, draped partially on the floorboard and partially on the seat. I reached back and touched her and she moaned and sat up slowly and held the side of her jaw.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “The movie over yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. I took her hand gently from her face and saw a thin cut running from the corner of her mouth to her chin, a scratch really. She didn’t seem to be in any real pain.

  “Wait here, okay?”

  “You going to the concession stand?”

  “I’ll be right back.”
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  “Where’s Timmy?”

  “I’m going to get him.”

  “Have him bring me a large popcorn, will you?”

  I couldn’t tell if the wreck had banged her around and thrown off her timeframe, or if she was having another of those pop-backs. Maybe she was seeing a movie through the windshield of the car.

  The wind was still high when I got out of the car, but not as bad as before. I held on to the door handle for a moment, edged my way to the rear of the car. The trunk was open and the keys were in the trunk lid. Timothy had gotten the keys and gotten back here. Maybe he wanted some of the fruit.

  I got the keys and put them in my pants pocket and saw that his golf bag had been pulled from under all the fruit. It was sticking out of the back of the car by a foot. I knew then that he had gotten one of his golf clubs. If Sue Ellen was still at the drive-in watching movies, maybe Timothy thought he was participating in the Bob Hope Open, or whatever that golf thing is called.

  There was mashed fruit all over the place and the gas can was hanged up, but not open. I set it up and got a piece of fruit and ate a few bites out of it, and started looking for Timothy.

  The wind passed on by, and the last of it let popcorn bags and debris flutter onto the car and ground. Plastered across the rear of the windshield was a poster. The moon was brighter, now that the shadows had fled, and I could read the printing on the poster. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The words looked as if they had been written in blood.

  Out in the trees I could see big hunks of whiteness. I decided they were fragments of drive-in screens—chunks of white painted wood.

  Draped between the trees like Christmas decorations were lengths of film, the moonlight sticking through the sprocket holes like long, bright needles, and a sort of mist swirl ing about the film itself.

  I didn’t see any videotapes, and I didn’t see Timothy.

  I went around the car a couple of times, examining it. Except for a lot of bumps and a hairline crack in the windshield, it looked all right. It was no more than ten feet from the highway, and the ground between it and the highway looked firm enough to drive on.

  I wanted to look for Timothy, but I didn’t know if we might need the car in a hurry, and I wanted to be ready. I dug around under the fruit and the golf bag and got out the tire iron and the spare.

  The jacking up and the tire changing went pretty quick, and I rolled the old tire off beside the road, tossed the tire tool in the back and closed the trunk.

  I started looking for Timothy.

  Out to the right there was a trail. Maybe dinosaurs had made it. Maybe cars had made it. There was no rhyme or reason to this place.

  I went down the trail calling for Timothy. As I went the wind picked up again and it started to rain and lightning began to crackle in the heavens. Still, the moon held bright.

  Something moved in the jungle, and I found a good-sized stick and carried it with me. Martial arts or not, another equalizer never hurts. Course, if it was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, something like that, it would eat me and pick its teeth with my stick.

  As I went along, the trail widened. I went over a little rise and down into a clearing. There was a lot of grass there were posts for drive-in speakers, and a few of them still had speakers on them. There were rusted cars dotted about.

  At the back, almost integrated into the jungle, was a drive-in screen. It was split open in spots and limbs poked through the splits and twisted upwards and spread out in leaf-covered branches that looked like bony fingers from which dangled tufts of dark flesh.

  About ten yards in front of the screen, golf club in hand, on the tail end of a classic swing, was Timothy.

  I stood and watched a while. He was golfing up dirt and leaves.

  I called to him. He looked up, went back to golfing. I walked over and waited until he finished a swing, then I stepped in and took hold of his elbow.

  “This is a tough course,” he said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “I don’t think I’m doing too well.”

  “You’re doing fine. That was the last hole.”

  “Yeah. How’d I do?”

  “You beat the competition hands down. Come along, Sue Ellen is waiting for us.”

  I led him along and the wind picked up and the trash twisters coiled at our feet.

  4

  Serious rain.

  Serious wind.

  Serious lightning.

  Serious lost.

  “Where the hell are we?” Timothy asked.

  “Well, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  “Kansas? We’ve been in Kansas? Who’s Toto?”

  “Just close your little mouth and walk.”

  Sometimes it doesn’t pay to read or watch old movies. No one knows what you’re talking about.

  “Goddamn,” Timothy said. “This is a weird course. What’s that?”

  It was shadows. They had collected in our path. On either side of us the trees whipped their heads up and down like drunk women with the dry heaves.

  I threw my stick at the shadows and the stick went into them and was not seen again. The shadows flowed over us with a howl of the wind and they felt like wet felt where they touched us. But there was nothing more to them. They went through us, and I turned to watch them blow on down the trail like ink-stained ghosts.

  The trail disappeared. It was as if the trees had pulled up by the roots and repositioned themselves. Nothing was familiar. Strips of film dropped down from the branches and clung to us, and when I tore them off they ripped my flesh.

  Timothy swatted at them with his golf club. The film wound itself around the club and jerked it away from him. Last sight of it was a silver wink in the moonlight as it disappeared into the rustling leaves of a dark, gnarled tree.

  I grabbed hold of his wrist and tugged him. We went between trees and shrubs, wherever there was a space. Film ran along the ground and dropped out of the trees and tried to grab us.

  Lightning flashed. I got a glimpse of the highway through the trees. Not much farther.

  Timothy was pulled from me. I turned. The film had him by the feet and more of it had dropped down from the trees and coiled around his arms and pulled them up. A thin strip of it was twisting around his leg and working up his body. By the time I reached him, the end of it was tight around his neck.

  I tried to pull it off of him, but more of it came up from the forest floor and snapped around me like the business end of a whip. Then my feet were held and my arms went up and more of it wrapped around my body. Where it touched my bare skin I could feel a sensation like dozens of tiny needles.

  From where I stood, immobile, I could see a clear spot in the trees, and when the lightning flashed. I saw the highway, and out there on the highway was a black wrecker with its light on. A man was standing by the wrecker looking at the jungle and the wrecker door was open and I could see a naked butt rising and falling, and there was something between the butt and the seat, white-legged and thrashing, and I knew instantly that it was poor Sue Ellen.

  And I knew too that the same lightning that had flashed and allowed me to see the man by the wrecker had allowed him to see me.

  5

  A flashlight bounced like a great firefly toward us. When the light reached the edge of the jungle I could see the outline of a big, broad-shouldered man and the outline of another behind him. Their shadows leaned together behind them like two happy thugs. When the men moved, the shadows moved of their own accord.

  As they entered into the jungle the film crept out and grabbed at them and the biggest of the two men yelled, “Edit,” and produced some large scissors and snipped at the film. The man behind him did the same with a smaller pair.

  They cl ipped their way through, and one came up to me, the other to Timothy.

  The one with the big scissors and the flashlight was the one in front of me. He put the light in my face and said, “How would you like to be cast in the part of prime pussy?”

 
; Film crawled on his legs and he bent casually and clipped it. “Damn stuff,” he said.

  “This one looks like a dumb asshole,” said the other.

  Some of the old Timothy came back, and it couldn’t have been a worse time. Timothy said. “Fuck you.”

  The man hit Timothy in the side of the head with the little scissors. Timothy nodded forward, made no further sounds.

  The little scissors went to work on the film that held Timothy, and when it was snipped, Timothy fell down. The man picked him up and tossed him over his shoulder and headed toward the highway, kicking at the film as he went. Once he squatted with Timothy balanced on his shoulder, and used the scissors on a swathe of film.

  “Snip, snip, snip, you little motherfuckers,” he said. Then he and Timothy were out of the jungle, being pursued by both men’s shadows; they moved out into the brighter moonlight which had replaced the dark and the lightning. Out on the highway the wind made little plumes of trash jig all around the wrecker.

  The man in front of me cut a coil of film from around my neck and snipped an even smaller piece from that, held it three feet from me. It dripped blood.

  “They’re like leeches. They show best when they’ve eaten.” He put the flashlight against the strip from behind and two hands holding a chainsaw came out on my side and ballooned to full size and the chainsaw buzzed and the hands shoved it at my face.

  He turned out the light just in time. The buzz of the saw died, and where the hands and saw had been, were drops of falling blood. I felt them bite my shoe.

  The man cocked the flashlight and said, “Good night, moon,” and he hit me.

  I was still bound when I awoke, but I was no longer in the jungle. I was tied to the wrecker, facing out. The wrecker was off the highway and a tarp had been stretched over it and the end visible to me was stretched down tight with stakes, and the center of it was poked up high with an antenna stalk that bloomed into a clutch of silver quills at the top.