The Complete Drive-In Read online

  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.

  4

  I’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.

  1

  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.r />
  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.

  “Right you are, Homer,” Steve said, “but that stuff will run out. We’ll need new food.”

  “I knew that,” Homer said. “You think I didn’t know that?”

  “I know you do, but what I’m talking is strapping them goddamn pontoons on either side of the bus, and if we need to float across a river, we can do it. I think, if we work on the backdoor window, we can fix it so we can take it out when we want. And we can make a rudder, stick it out the window there, and though we can’t motor this baby across a river, maybe we could guide it some.”

  “It’s a thought,” I said.

  “Hell, it’s a good idea,” Steve said.

  We spent another day transferring the pontoons to the bus and making the rudder. We rigged the glass on the back door so we could take it in and out; rigged it so we could poke out the rudder and hook it on the window frame with some wire Steve found somewhere in the drive-in. Steve also rigged us up a tape player and we took tapes from all the cars we could find, except for Barry Manilow or similar shit, and then we were ready to go.

  We put the box of tools inside, and just before we were to leave, a young woman came up the trail. She was short and pretty nice looking, or would have been, had her clothes not been made of an animal hide with a hole cut in it, draped over her head and cinched up with an old belt. It might have helped too if her hair had been clean and she wasn’t so scratched up on the legs, and she hadn’t had a look in her eye that made you think maybe she could see something just to the left of her nose no one else could see.

  She was carrying a pack made of an animal skin. Wild dog. The head was still on the pack, and so was the tail, which she had turned into a kind of strap.

  She said, “I want to go, too. I brought some dried meat and some dried fruit. I dried them good on the roof of my car. They’re a little chewy, and the fruit has got some bugs in it, but they make it a little tastier.”

  “Protein is good,” Grace said.

  Grace, who today was wearing clothes (more of a bikini, really) made of animal hides, looked marvelous. Considering the rest of us all looked like scarecrows, I don’t know how she did it. But she wore those skins great, like Raquel Welch in that movie, One Million Years B.C. Her hair was as shiny as the chrome on a brand new motorcycle, and that came from the fact she wasn’t afraid to go down to the river out back of the drive-in and bathe and wash her hair, and use some kind of weed that if rubbed together made a pretty good excuse for soap. Her hair was all combed out too, was real long, and when she moved, it moved, flowed around her, and was the color of scorched honey.

  Looking at her, dressed like that, I thought about the time me and her hooked up, and right then I was thinking on how I’d like to do the trailer hitch thing again, and damn if she didn’t look at me and catch my eye, and give me a kind of grin, like, you know, you done had yours, and I pitied you, and it’s probably the best pussy, if not the only pussy you ever had, so you best think back on it a lot, ‘cause it’s not a repeater, if you know what I mean.

  I got all that out of that little smile.

  I smiled back, kind of a thank you, ma’am. Ain’t nothing else I’d rather have had, and in fact, it is my favorite present to date, and in memory sense, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Then she turned away, and the old bad world came back, and there was Reba, looking at me like a dog confused by language.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her, my mind still on Grace, fearing my thoughts would show on my forehead, or that she might notice my pecker had moved to the left of my worn pants, as if in search of prey.

  “Reba.”

  There were also James and Cory. They were buddies. Good ole boys meet Heavy Metal types. Cory was bulky. James was wiry. Cory said he wished we had some Black Sabbath cassettes.

  Steve said it was a shame we didn’t. But he didn’t mean it.

  When we were ready, I, as tour guide, I suppose, said to everyone: “Well, climb on in, and let’s shag ass on out of here.”

  2

  The trail was as bumpy as a teenager’s face, and there were places where there didn’t seem to be any trail at all.

  The woods, or jungle to be more accurate, grew thick on both sides, and the vines wound in amongst the trees, and things moved out there. Sometimes we saw them, sometimes they watched us, and sometimes it was just shadows, falling between the trees, but fostered by nothing we could see.

  There were lots of sounds. Cries and strangles, barks and growls, grunts and groans, and once, I thought I heard a fart.

  I read a story once, a funny story, and I don’t remember who wrote it or what it was, but it had a line in it that I remember. It went: Somewhere, a toad farted ominously.

  Out here, bumping along the trail, that kind of thing didn’t seem so funny anymore.

  That fart from the bushes—larger than a toad, I might add—did seem ominous.

  Hell, the wind, which had picked up our first day out (I call it a day because the sun went down and came up again), picked up even more, and it whistled through the jungle and shook the limbs and leaves and vines like dry peanut husks.

  We drove and drove, and finally stopped so that we might take a bathroom break.

  The seven of us hadn’t spoken much, had just bumped along, trying to figure on what the hell we were doing, but now, we began to talk.

  There was me and Grace and Steve and Homer and Reba and the two rednecks, James and Cory. James talked about beer a lot, about how he’d like to have some, and about how he had brewed some from fruit, but it had just tasted like nasty fruit, and what he’d give for a Budweiser, that sort of thing. Cory was quiet, didn’t say much, except, “I got to go take a shit,” and wandered off into the jungle to do just that.

  Grace and Steve seemed to have handled this whole lost in another world thing better than anyone else.

  I think that’s because they had each other.

  I don’t know if they loved one another, but they had each other, and it seemed to be working. It kept some bloom on the rose, especially on Grace’s rose, ‘cause like I said, she was the only one amongst us who looked fresh. Steve looked okay, though he had recently lost a tooth on the left side of his mouth, and if he grinned real big, you could see the gap.

  “I get the creepy feeling,” Steve said, as we sat around, coo
king up some of the dead animal he and Grace had brought, listening to the ants pop in the fire that we had stoked with flint and steel and bits of tinder, “that somethin’ is followin’ us.”

  “Something always is,” I said. “You can count on it. If it isn’t following us, it’s running ahead. There’s things in the jungle. Both sides. I can feel eyes all over me.”

  “I don’t mean like that,” Steve said. “Something weird even for here.”

  “Considering the Popcorn King,” Reba said, “I don’t know how weird it could get. I ate some of his popcorn, and shit eyeballs, I did. I had a kid too. He was stolen from me and eaten. He was eaten raw. The savages. I guess it was for the best. I really didn’t want a kid covered in eyeballs.”

  The maternal instinct is a lovely thing.

  “Well,” Homer said, “long as we’re talking weird, how’s about them dinosaurs and such?”

  “And Popalong Cassidy,” I said.

  “I ain’t saying this ain’t the warehouse for weird,” Steve said, “just saying I been having this feeling something is following us that I don’t want to have catch up with us.”

  “That could still be most anything,” I said.

  “I was out with this fella that came to the drive-in with me,” Cory said. “Out with him looking for food, and no shit, he bent over and a little dinosaur rammed a dick through his cloth pants and got him some ass, and while he was gettin’ it, he bit my buddy’s head off. Blood went everywhere, and if that wasn’t bad enough, the dinosaur jerked, sprang around in happy circles, shooting his jism all over the place. I got some in my hair. I figured I was next to get butt-fucked and ate up, so I hooked ass to a tree and climbed it. And damn if that critter didn’t scuttle up after me. He was small enough for that. So, I kept climbing, and finally I got to the damn near top of that tree, where it was thin and starting to bend, and I was thinking, well, it’s either jump and get it over with, or get eaten while up in a goddamn tree, and maybe butt-fucked—though I couldn’t see that critter doing that while balancing on a limb—and damned if that critter didn’t miss his footing. Fell. Killed his ownself. When I got down he was lying in a puddle of blood and shit. I cut a big portion of meat out of him and took it home. I would have took my buddy home, but something had already dragged him off. Now, tell me that isn’t weird.”