Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (27 page)
I got out of the car and looked at him. He was about thirty with long, stringy, grayish hair and he was lying on his stomach with his head turned to one side, his eyes open. But he wasn’t seeing much. He had been correct. It wasn’t heartburn. He was as dead as a dodo’s agenda.
Sue Ellen and Timothy got out of the car and came around and looked at him, then looked at each other, and finally me.
We didn’t say a word. We got hold of him and put him in the backseat and Sue Ellen got back there with him, and Timothy and I got in the front.
Of course, I knew what we were doing. We were saving him for food. I hadn’t been willing to eat popcorn with eyeballs on it, but somehow this was different. It would have been a shame to let him go to waste when we were starving. And if we didn’t eat him, someone else was going to come along and drag him off for just that purpose.
Hell, it wasn’t like we’d killed him.
I remember sitting there thinking about this, turning from time to time to look at the body on the backseat, and finding that each time I looked, Sue Ellen had removed yet another article of his clothing. When he was completely stripped, she called for Timothy’s knife, and he gave it to her.
My next memory is of holding the corpse’s still-warm liver in my hands and rubbing it into my face, then eating it. Strength flowed back into me immediately, and for some reason my legs began to jerk spasmodically and my knees hit the bottom of the dash and caused the glove box to knock open.
Timothy kept a little mirror in there, and it was at an angle, and by the light of the pulsating Orbit symbol, I could see myself. My face was stained a rust color from forehead to chin, and my eyes were little pits.
I looked at Timothy and Sue Ellen.
Timothy was chewing on a bone with a few chunks of meat on it. He had his eyes closed, and when he chewed he made little orgasmic noises deep in his throat.
Sue Ellen was on her hands and knees straddling the body, and she had half her head buried in an opening she had cut in the man’s stomach. She was rooting around in there like a pig.
I opened the door and fell on the ground and threw up.
I don’t think Timothy or Sue Ellen noticed. They were too busy with lunch.
I crawled under the Galaxy and tried to wipe the blood off my face with my forearms, then lay on my side with my knees pulled into my chest, and shook.
A young man so thin his pants flapped around his legs like flags on poles, came by, dropped to the ground, and made a meal of what I’d thrown up. His face was turned toward me as he lapped. When he saw me, he lapped faster. Maybe he thought I wanted it.
He finally staggered off. Where my vomit had been was a damp spot.
I rolled on my back and looked at the underside of the car and tried to think about nothing, but all I could see was that man gutted from throat to crotch and Sue Ellen with her head dipped into him. And lastly, my own face in that mirror, smeared with blood from hair to chin.
Bones were dropped out of the Galaxy’s windows on the left side, and I turned my head and looked at them and tried to determine if they were rib, forearm, or leg bones. I couldn’t make a decision.
As I watched, people came along and snatched up the bones and ran off with them.
I lay there for the longest time, feeling very sick to my stomach and my soul.
When I heard Timothy and Sue Ellen getting out of the Galaxy, I refused to watch their legs go by. I knew they were going to the concession to get their vomit corn from the King. I had decided I would starve to death before I did that.
I don’t know how long this went on, my lying under the car hoping to starve. It could have been thirty minutes or it could have been days. But Timothy and Sue Ellen came and went several times and I always felt dizzy, as if I were in the middle of some huge platter that was being spun.
But my starvation plans weren’t working out. The hunger had a mind of its own, and finally I crawled out from under the car and tried to stand up. But couldn’t. I was too weak. I got hold of a door handle and pulled myself up and looked in the window at the body on the backseat.
There was hardly anything left of the man. Even his eyes and genitals had been eaten. Only his pelvis, ankles and feet had flesh on them, and it was turning black.
I felt hungry enough to bite the toes off his feet, one at a time, and would have tried, but about the time I started to go after him, the concession stand blew up.
4That was us that did it, of course, and no use going into that again. Anyway, we smashed the concession, killed the King, and for our fine work, the crowd got hold of us and crucified us. But I told you all about that too.
Summing up this part of Grace’s story, she didn’t see what happened to the concession, but when she turned around it was in shambles and on fire. Of course the movies from the concession were snuffed too, though the projector over in B section of the lot was still pumping. But the thing is, we killed the King.
Grace’s dizziness subsided and she managed to walk toward the flames. She saw what was happening to us, but later when she met us, she didn’t remember our faces. The crowd was about to put fires under the crosses and cook us, and the comet came back. The black goo went away, and the drive-in folks were out of there.
Grace wanted to help get us down. Her dizziness had passed, and she tried to talk Timothy and Sue Ellen into helping, but they had come back to the car and they were ready to leave.
Anyway, Grace said—
I got the keys from Timothy and pulled the body out of the backseat. Doing that made me dizzy again, but I put a hand on the side of the car and stood that way until it passed.
I went around back to the trunk and opened it. I wanted to find something I could use as a tool to get those people down off those crosses, but there wasn’t much there. A tire tool, a spare, and a bag full of golf clubs. I leaned down deeper, seeing if maybe there was something way in the back, and when I did, my head felt as if it were flying apart.
And as they say in the old detective movies, I fell into a deep, dark pit and it closed around me.
“I didn’t mean to hit you that hard,” Timothy said.
“Someone meant to,” I said. “What did you use?”
“A golf club.”
It was bright daylight and I was stretched out on the ground beside the Galaxy, which was parked on the grass next to the highway. I felt a little too warm.
Timothy helped me to a sitting position and gave me a piece of fruit. After what we’d been eating, it tasted like heaven. I began feeling better immediately. Which is not to say the golf-ball-size lump (which was appropriate) had gone away.
“I panicked,” Timothy said. “I was afraid it would go back to how it was. I’m thinking better now that I’ve had some food.”
I looked for Sue Ellen and spotted her sitting in the shade of a big tree, eating fruit. She was rocking a little and humming to herself.
“She’s not doing so good,” Timothy said.
He got an arm under me and helped me to my feet. I looked down the highway and saw nothing but more highway bordered by jungle and topped by blue sky.
“I’ve got to go back to the Orbit,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” Timothy said. “Neither can Sue Ellen.”
“Just take me back. You don’t have to go in.”
“We’ve come a long ways since I hit you.”
“You owe me, Timothy.”
He drove me back and waited while I went inside the drive-in. I thought maybe I could find something in a car there to use as a tool to get those fel las down, if they were still alive. But when I got inside, the crosses were down and they were gone.
I didn’t stick around to look at the empty cars or the bones. I went outside to where the Galaxy was waiting, and we started on down the highway.
Okay, gang, I’ll interrupt here to say that we stopped Grace’s story and told her that Bob and me were two of the folks on the cross, and Crier was the one that got us down. And when we finished that, she picked up with her adventures.
But before we get to those, why don’t we take a brief intermission. My tongue is getting tired.
THIRD REEL
Grace Tells of Tremendous Gas Mileage,
Shit Town, and Popalong Cassidy
Shit Town, and Popalong Cassidy
So we went on down the highway, traveling only a few miles a day, stopping to look around, relieve ourselves and search for fruit and berries.
I was amazed at the way the gas held out. It was like when we were in the drive-in and the electricity worked for no logical reason, and now here was the gas gauge showing us to be getting incredible mileage. It was going down all right, but slowly compared to the miles we were racking up.
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.
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