Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (29 page)
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.
It was warm under the tarp, and the warmth came from fires built in the husks of a dozen television sets. Rain pounded the tarp and scratched at it like harpy claws. Some of it came through the holes in the tarp and hissed in the fire and hit my face and ran down it like tears. The televisions gave off greasy smoke and it fouled the air and made me woozy.
The side of my head hurt. It should. I had been knocked on it enough. But considering all that, I was lucky. My dad always said I had a hard head. On the other hand, I have dizzy spells from time to time even now. My vision gets screwy.
But as I was saying. My head hurt. Where the film touched me stung.
To the rear of the tarp, squatting in a semicircle, facing me, were four men. They were all dressed in ragged clothes and jeans. They were close-shaved and had bushy flattops that looked as if they had been cut with dull knives. They looked strong and well fed, or maybe just fed. Two of them were the men who had taken Timothy and me out of the jungle.
Behind them on the tarp were their shadows, The shadows were moving in defiance of the motionless posture of the men and the flickerings of the firelight.
I looked to the right of me and saw Timothy. He was tied to the wrecker by blue and red electrical wire. I assumed the same thing held me. Where the man had hit him with the scissors his skull had cracked open and a coil of his brain was leaking out like congealed oatmeal escaping from a crack in a bowl. Suddenly it was very hot. I thought I was going to faint. The wire was the only thing holding me up; there were no usable muscles left in me.
I took a deep breath and pulled some strength back into me from somewhere and looked to my left and saw Sue Ellen. She was tied to the wrecker by wire too. She had her clothes on now. Both her eyes had been blacked and her bottom lip was puffed. The front of her pants was dark with blood. She had her eyes open and she was looking straight ahead, but she wasn’t seeing what was there. She was tuned in to something else. Maybe a flashback of one of the movies she liked. I hoped so. This little scenario was certainly a stinker.
Then the four in the back rose and their shadows went still and rigid. They were staring at me, or so I thought at first, but realized that they were in fact staring at something behind me. I could sense the presence of that something, and I heard movement on the wrecker and I could hear a sound like breathing through a bad drive-in speaker, puff and crackle, puff and crackle.
Goose bumps rose along my arms and ripped up my back and down my spine, felt as big as blackberries. They were even on the backs of my calves. Then the sensation passed and the wrecker creaked and I knew that whatever had been behind me had moved.
I watched the heads of the men in back turn; watched the heads of their shadows turn. The fires flickered and popped when the cold rain came through the holes in the tarp and went into them and was turned to steam.
There was movement on the wrecker again, then whatever it was jumped to the ground between Sue Ellen and myself, and I got my first look at the thing I would come to know as Popalong Cassidy.
6Leave It to Beaver
was playing on his face and his face was a sixteen-inch screen with one of those old-fashioned glow lights trimmed around it, and this was all encased in a cheap brown wooden case. The character on the screen, Ward Cleaver, closed a door and said, “Honey, I’m home,” and this was all faint, this dialogue, because there was lots of static right then. And behind all this, in the depths of that tube-face, I could see two red glows that might have been little tubes or eyes.
was playing on his face and his face was a sixteen-inch screen with one of those old-fashioned glow lights trimmed around it, and this was all encased in a cheap brown wooden case. The character on the screen, Ward Cleaver, closed a door and said, “Honey, I’m home,” and this was all faint, this dialogue, because there was lots of static right then. And behind all this, in the depths of that tube-face, I could see two red glows that might have been little tubes or eyes.
The television set was wearing a tall, black hat. There was a white scarf around a very human neck, and the rest of the figure was human too, and it was dressed all in black, drugstore-cowboy attire. The pants were stuffed into some tall, black boots and there was a black glove on either hand. He wore a black gun belt with some metal studs on it and there was a holster on each hip and in the holsters were pearl-handled, silver-tooled revolvers.
Television Face came and stood in front of me, and I saw below his screen, on the cheap wooden frame, two rows of knobs and dials. They divided suddenly so that they looked like top and bottom teeth, which in a way they were.
The thing was smiling. The wood was not wood.
A tongue made of tangled blue and red wires licked from left to right and disappeared. In its place came a voice full of static and high of tone. “Hi. My name is Popalong Cassidy, and I bet you think we are mean.”
The hat lifted and I saw a set of rabbit ear antennas were responsible. They wiggled out cautiously, as if testing the air for radiation. The hat tipped way back but didn’t fall off; it fit there like a flap of skin.
A blue arc jumped from the tip of one ear to the other and the arc rode down the middle space between the ears, then back up.
Leave It to Beaver
went away and on the screen there was a dumpy, ugly man down on one knee next to a Highway Patrol car. The car door was open and the man reached inside and took a microphone from off the dash and pulled it out until the wire was stretched. He said something into the microphone I didn’t catch, ended it with “Ten-four.” I realized then that he was down like that because on the other side of his car, way off the highway, hid out there in the brush-covered hills, there was supposed to be a bad guy with a gun.
Leave It to Beaver
went away and on the screen there was a dumpy, ugly man down on one knee next to a Highway Patrol car. The car door was open and the man reached inside and took a microphone from off the dash and pulled it out until the wire was stretched. He said something into the microphone I didn’t catch, ended it with “Ten-four.” I realized then that he was down like that because on the other side of his car, way off the highway, hid out there in the brush-covered hills, there was supposed to be a bad guy with a gun.
I recognized the television series. It was an old black-and-white one I had watched on occasion. It was called
Highway Patrol
and starred Broderick Crawford.
Highway Patrol
and starred Broderick Crawford.
I didn’t get to find out if Crawford went after the culprit in the brush or not, because Popalong darkened his face except for a little yellow dot in the center, and that grew rapidly smaller until it too was gone. The rabbit ears slid back into the set and the hat fell back into place.
“It’s okay if you think we’re mean, you know. I don’t mind.” And with that Popalong backed away from me until he was up against the big antenna that punched up the middle of the tarp. There was a bar that ran through the bottom of the antenna, about four inches off the ground, and Popalong back-stepped onto that and reached his arms up and draped them through the antenna rods, hung his head to the side and let his body droop. Presto, a media Christ.
The rain plummeted the tarp and slipped through the holes and sizzled in the popping fires. Nobody said a thing or moved a muscle.
After a while, one of the men got up and raced to the wrecker and climbed on it. When he jumped off he had a big load of magazines under each arm. He went from TV to TV and put magazines into their blazes. I saw the covers of some of the magazines before the flames devoured them. TV Guide, People, Tiger Beat, Screen Gems, all of them decorated with the faces of movie stars and fading celebrities. I thought: Where in hell did that stuff come from?
When the fires were really popping and the air was tinged with smoke, the man darted back to his place with the others, and Popalong lifted his head and looked at me and turned his face on. A test pattern filled it. The dials below the screen split apart again and the tongue of tangled wire presented itself briefly and disappeared. “Don’t think there’s any hatred in my heart for you or anyone,” Popalong said. “My heart has no room for that. It’s full of electromagnetic waves and they jump about like frogs.”
He got down off the antenna and came over and bent forward and looked at me, as if hoping to find something reflected in my eyes. The rabbit ears poked out from under the hat and touched my hair and I felt a faint electric sizzle ride the circumference of my skull. “You have no shadow, you know. It’s because you haven’t learned to belong. That’s what I think. I think when you belong here you have a shadow. I think you earn it. You haven’t earned anything. When you’re like us you’ll have a shadow, a familiar made up of the absence of light.
“Pay attention. Keep sharp. I jump around a lot. It’s the sign of a good mind. I’m trying to tell you there’s a confusion about good and evil. We worry about which is which way too much. Let me just say that good is too easy. It requires nothing. No real commitment. You can’t get the real good out of goodness until you know darkness. Death. Pain. These are instructive tools. Or as Dr. Frankenstein said in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, ‘To know death, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.’
“I know this now, but all my life I have been looking for this truth and it’s been under my nose all the time. The images taught me where it was at. There are good images and there are bad images, but the bad images make the best show, so I’ve opted for the bad images. I praise the Orbit for leading me to the truth. I praise the night I went. The Popcorn King was right. Movies are reality and everything else is fraud. But the King was not the Messiah, as I thought. He was John the Baptist. I’m the Messiah. I was given powers and position by the Producer and the Great Director, and they wanted a sci-fi horror picture. We’re number two of a double feature.
“Why me, you ask? Because I have seen more hours of television than anyone. I can quote commercials by heart. I know the name of the Green Hornet’s secret identity, the name of the sleek, black car he drives. I know the name of Sky King’s niece and what Batman eats for breakfast. Everything that is important is in this square head.
“Let me tell you too, I was made for it. I’m a preacher’s son. I grew up with fire and brimstone and channel nine, the only channel we could get at that time.
“My father spoke savagely to us from the pulpit and every Sunday afternoon after church he beat my mother with his thick belt, then came downstairs and beat me too. I never ran. I took it. He would beat me until his arm got tired, then he would switch arms and wear down. He left welts on my ass.
“When he was finished, he would become remorseful and read the Bible to me and pray. Then he would tell me to turn on my television set and watch it. That I was redeemed. That the sin was cast out of me by pain.
“My mother went away when I was eleven. I thought about her a few days after she was gone, but I never missed her. She had been nothing more than someone around the house, going this way and that in a plaid housecoat and slippers with the backs broken down. She ate a lot of sweets and drank lots of coffee and sipped Nervine that she poured from a bottle into a great big spoon. She seldom spoke to me and never fixed meals. I took care of myself. I grew up on Cokes and Twinkies. The characters on TV spoke to me in her place.
“When I graduated, passed more out of courtesy than from any other reason, my father took his belt to me and beat me until I couldn’t get off my knees. He gave me a new Sylvania set and told me to be gone by morning and to never come back. He had taken care of my raising until I was a man, and now I was a man, and to go.
“I went. I couldn’t get a good job. The people out there were cruel. Unlike TV, they expected things of you. They wanted college educations. I wanted a satellite dish and more channels. The chance to see time and again Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Andy Griffith Show. It really didn’t matter. Just images. My images. Part of my holy communion. Kurtz and Opie, Leatherface and Lassie, side by side.
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