Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (34 page)
I took the Elvis fan and fanned myself, then put it back and went outside. The others had wandered down the street, not having felt the pull of the arts.
The guy with the one tooth said, “Find anything?”
“I fanned myself a little.”
“It’s checked out right now, but there’s a pretty good Max Brand novel we got, ‘cept the last couple of pages are torn out. Some fella wrote an ending for it, though. He wrote on the inside back cover, ‘He rode off into the West and everything was okay.’ Seems a good enough ending to most anything, don’t it?”
“Does at that. I take it you’re also the librarian?”
“Yeah, but people want fruit juices more than they want books. Only thing is they don’t always have something good to trade. Tell you, I’ve had all the dry pussy I want. It’s making the head of my dick raw. In the long run I get the bad end of the trade. I’d really rather have some kind of meat, fish, maybe some roots that are good to boil.”
“Commerce can be a bitch,” I said.
4When I caught up with the others, they were standing beside the street looking out between a couple of shacks made of mud and sticks, staring at a man hanging from the limb of a big oak tree. He was spinning around, kicking his feet and working his elbows as if in a square dance. The elbows were all he could work of his arms, since his hands were tied behind his back.
On a bench near the oak sat two men and a woman. They looked like benched baseball players waiting for their turn at an inning.
“Suicide tree I told you about,” Grace said. “Come on.”
“I don’t want to see that,” I said.
“Me neither,” Bob said.
“I’ll pass too,” Crier said.
“Do what you want,” Grace said to me, “but they’re going to hang themselves anyway and you fellas need pants.”
“Pants?” I said.
“You think those folks are gonna need them later?”
“I got pants,” Crier said. “They’re ragged, but they’re pants. I’ll just hang out.”
Grace led Bob and me over to the tree. I looked up at the guy. His face was purple as a plum and his neck was swollen out in such a way it was starting to spread over the rope. His tongue was flopping against his chin and he was biting through it. His eyes were crossed and the lid of one was drooped halfway down and the other eye looked like a table tennis ball being pushed out of the hole from behind.
We went over to the bench. The woman was sitting on the end near us and the men were sitting next to each other. She looked at us. The hair on one side of her head had been burned off, and the hair on the other side wasn’t anything to be proud of. It was dirty-brown and kinky as wire. I’ve seen Brillo pads with more class. She had on a filthy T-shirt and her nipples were punching through it. The jeans she had on were thin enough to shit through. Her face wasn’t any kind of special. It was covered with pimples and red welts. She was barefoot.
The two guys weren’t fashion models either. They had beards full of dirt, bugs and fruit seeds. Their dark coloring wasn’t the result of the sun’s rays. You could have packed lunches on the pores of their skin.
I hated to think what I looked like.
“Bench is full,” the woman said. “Come back tomorrow. Three’s about it for a day. Them’s the rules.”
“We’re not here to hang ourselves,” Grace said.
“If you’re going to watch,” she said, “stay back out of the way. This bastard won’t never choke. I bet he’s been up there an hour.”
“He looks about gone to me,” I said.
The man beside her, the skinnier of the two, said, “Who can tell how long he’s been up there. Time isn’t worth a duck fart here. But you should have seen him just a little while ago. He looked worse than this. I think he’s gotten him a second wind.”
“Maybe he’s changed his mind,” I said.
At that the hanging man began to kick his legs vigorously. “No, don’t think so,” the woman said.
“Look at him,” I said.
“You can’t pay that any mind. It doesn’t mean a thing. He wanted to go worse than the rest of us. He bit Clarence there to get first in line.”
Clarence was the skinny fella. He held up a sticklike arm and pushed his short sleeve back. There was a crescent of teeth wounds.
“He called me some things I’ve never heard,” said Clarence, “then he pushed me on the ground and bit me. I told him to go ahead. Hell, I wasn’t even next in line. Fran was. But look who he bit. That’s the way it’s always been for me. I tied his hands for him and boosted him into the rope. More than he deserved, I’ll tell you. Which reminds me, you folks around when Gene here goes, maybe you could tie his hands for him. It works better that way, otherwise you claw at the rope, no matter how bad you want to go.”
“I’ll make do,” Gene said. He got up and went over to the hanging man and jumped on him and swung back and forth like a kid on a tire swing. The hanging man’s neck lengthened.
“We probably won’t be around long enough to help Gene,” Grace said, “but we wanted to try and talk you out of your pants, just you fellas. Jack and Bob here don’t have anything but these dresses.”
“Noticed that,” Clarence said, “and I’ll tell you boys, you haven’t got the legs for it.”
From the hanging man came a sound like a semi tire blowing out at high speed.
“Goddamn,” Clarence said, “there’s the signal.”
“Yeah,” Fran said. “It’s nature’s way of saying ‘
Sayonara
, motherfucker.’”
Sayonara
, motherfucker.’”
“It’s nature’s way of filling your pants with shit, is what it is,” Clarence said. “Get off of him, Gene. Let’s get him down and get Fran up there. Come on, get off of him, goddamnit.”
“About those pants,” Grace said.
“Guess you want them before I hang myself,” Clarence said.
“Well,” Grace said, “you know how it is, nature’s sayonara and all.”
Clarence nodded and undressed. He didn’t have on any underwear. He tossed the clothes at me. “Take all of it. Shoes too, if they fit. Hell, if they don’t fit.”
I gathered up the clothes and held them. They smelled a little ripe.
“Hey Gene,” Clarence said. “Want to help the other fella out?”
Gene had finally got off the dead man, and he came over to the bench and sat down. He took off his clothes, except for some soiled, green boxer shorts, and gave them to Bob.
“Go on, enjoy them,” Clarence said. “You want to thank us later, well, we’ll be hanging around.”
Clarence loved that. He laughed like a drunk hyena.
He was tying Fran’s hands for her when we went away.
5We collected Crier and went out to the camper. He and Grace sat up front and talked, and Bob and I tried the clothes on. I ended up with some pants too tight in the waist, but I zipped them up high as they would go and left them unsnapped and used the belt I had made for my blanket outfit and ran it through the pants loops for extra support. The shirt fit fine and I wore it with the tails hanging out. The socks were thin but not holey. The shoes were an inch too long and they made me look a little like Bozo the Clown.
Bob’s pants fit him in the waist, but were too short. They were what my dad used to call high-water pants. The shirt he had was too narrow across the shoulders, and he got a knife out of the toolbox and slit it halfway down the back. He slit the sides of the shoes too because they were too narrow.
Grace and Crier laughed at our outfits, but just a little. I guess thinking about where the clothes came from took some of the humor out of it.
Crier and Bob stayed with the camper, and Grace and I took Bob’s gas can and went around begging for gas. The people who were living in cars that had huts attached to them were the quickest to give up their gas; they had made a stand and they were staying. Some wouldn’t even talk to us, and one guy told us he’d pour his goddamn gas on the ground and piss on it before he gave it to us. We took this as a no.
By the end of the day we had a full tank of gas, and we went into Shit Town one last time to see if we could talk someone into giving us enough to fill our can. It never hurt to have extra.
We got off Main Street and went down a little side street lined with huts and cars and we came on this tall, hatchet-faced fella wearing a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was as unusual in that he was clean-shaven.
He had the hood up on an old red-and-white Plymouth convertible, and he had a wrench and he was fiddling with something under there. He didn’t look like someone that wanted to get rid of his gas, but we asked anyway.
“I got plans for a big trip,” he said. “Need all the gas I can get. Y’all want a drink? It’s the local poison. Made out of fruit juice and piss. No kidding. It’ll put you higher than goddamn Skylab.”
We passed.
He took a swig and shivered. “Things a man’ll drink. Look here, name’s Steve.”
He stuck out his hand and we took turns shaking it and giving our names.
“Guess y’all are heading on down the highway too, huh?”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll see you then. Soon as I get this buddy tuned up, have me a damn good drunk, I’ll be ready to roll. I figure sometime tomorrow. Can’t say that I see much to keep me here.”
We wished him luck and went back to the camper without the gas. I didn’t look in the direction of the hanging tree.
It was dark by the time we got back there, and the four of us talked and ate some fruit and went to bed, Crier slept in the front seat as usual, and Bob, Grace and I slept in the back.
Grace was between me and Bob, but she didn’t try to molest me, and she didn’t try and molest Bob. Bob refrained from playing with himself.
Ilay there and thought about Grace and told myself I was too mature and philosophical and had been through too much to expect anything of our relationship other than friendship. Besides, hadn’t she said not to make too much of the other night?
Some things you just had to take like an adult. What she did was what she did and it didn’t matter to me. She was her own person. And a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, and look and see if you’re right then go ahead, and every dog has his day, and every cloud has a silver lining, and a penny saved is a penny earned, and everything works out for the best, and ... it was a long night.
It was later than we planned by the time we got up. We had fruit for breakfast because there wasn’t any ham and eggs and coffee on the menu, then we got out of there. Crier and Bob up front, me and Grace in the back.
Grace talked about some books I hadn’t read and necking didn’t come up.
That’s how it went for a few days, and finally I quit worrying about IT every second, and cut down to about once an hour.
So when I wasn’t thinking about IT, I was thinking about what in hell had possessed me to agree to go along on this little run. I wasn’t any hero. I had tried to be once and I had gotten nailed up for the trouble. What I did best was mind my own business, and here I was barreling down the highway so I could confront Popalong Cassidy, who did not sound like a nice guy. Worse yet, I was the reason Crier and Bob were going too. Or at least part of it. I guess when a fella gets bored he can do some stupid things. And maybe I thought I was being macho going with Grace to the end of the highway to help her out. I was wondering how I had ever arrived at that. Grace could probably beat up all three of us.
Damn, Bob had been right when he said a set of titties made me go all to pieces. And maybe Grace had known exactly what she was doing that night in the camper and down by the lake—sealing a deal.
And maybe I was being a horse’s ass. It really hurt to discover I had a bigger streak of male chauvinist pig in me than I thought. It hurt worse to realize that I was stupid and tittie blind and was probably going to get killed for it. I preferred happy endings.
But even this kind of thinking didn’t last. You can only focus on your own death and destruction so long before it gets boring. You begin to wonder about more important matters, like do people who wear suspenders wear them because they like the way they look, or because they hold their paints up? Do people who work on garbage trucks see their work as important? Did they grow up wanting to be garbage men? What kind of tools are used to scrape dead animals off the highway? Who was the idiot who invented those Happy Face symbols, or those signs that read BABY ON BOARD or SHIT HAPPENS? Should those folks be slow-tortured by parboiling, or killed outright? What was the true story on green M&M’s?
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