The Complete Drive-In (5 page)

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Authors: Joe R. Lansdale

BOOK: The Complete Drive-In
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I figured as long as I was punishing myself, I might as well sit up in bed and get so I could see all the spines and really feel rotten. There were also books on Eastern religions that mainly had to do with holding your thumb next to your forefinger, wrapping a leg around your neck and making with some damn-fool chants. There was even one of those hip modern books that told me I just thought I was a schmuck, but wasn’t really. It was everyone else, and I was a pretty neat fella. I liked this one best until I realized that anyone with the price of a paperback was a pretty neat fella. That sort of let the air out of my tires.
Only book I didn’t have up there on my shelf was one on divining the future through chicken guts, and I’d have had it had it been for sale.
I couldn’t figure why I was such a sucker for that stuff. I wasn’t unhappy, but the idea of everything just being random didn’t suit me, and didn’t seem right. And I didn’t like the Big Bang theory. It was kind of disappointing, came across like a lab experiment that had gone wrong and made something. I wanted things to be by design, for there to be some great controlling force with a sense of order. Someone or something up there keeping files and notes.
I figured I just hadn’t found the right book.
I got out of bed, got a trash sack out of my closet and took all those little dudes off the shelf and put them in the sack. I went downstairs and threw them in the main garbage in the washroom, then went into the kitchen.
Mom was in there running that crap she has for breakfast through a blender. It smelled like wet dog hair and mildewed newspapers to me.
“Want some eggs and bacon?” she asked, and smiled.
She was standing there in her tennis outfit, her long blonde hair pulled back and bound with a rubber band. I’m sure some backyard psychiatrist will make an Oedipal thing out of this, but to heck with it. My mom is damn fine-looking.
She started pouring the smelly mess from the blender into a glass.
“Well, I don’t want that,” I said. “And if I were you, I’d see if a nest of roaches, or maybe a rat died in that blender overnight.”
She grimaced. “Does smell bad, doesn’t it?”
“Oh yeah. How’s it taste?”
“Like shit.”
I got some cinnamon rolls out of the fridge. “Let’s have these.”
She patted her flat stomach. “Nah. Got to keep my girlish figure. Otherwise, I’ll die while I’m out playing tennis. Bad form to die on the court.”
“You couldn’t gain a pound if you were wearing galoshes.”
“For that, you may have two bone-building, nutritious cinnamon rolls. And though I wouldn’t normally eat that garbage, pollute my body with those foul chemicals and sugars, I will, on this occasion, knowing how you hate to eat alone, make an exception.”
“If you ever finish your speech, that is.”
“Precisely.”
She sat down and ate four rolls and drank three cups of coffee. When she was through she smacked her lips. “God, but I hated every horrible minute of that. Each bite was agony, acid to my lips. The sacrifices mothers make for their children.”
Dad came down. He was wearing an old brown bathrobe that Mom hated. She had tried to throw it away once, but he’d found it in the garbage, rescued it and slinked upstairs with it under his arm. Mom had laughed after him and he had looked down at her, hurt.
She had also given it to Goodwill, thinking they’d turn it into rags, but they’d washed it, put it on the racks. And Dad, looking for used paperbacks, saw it, bought it and came home mad. He told Mom never to say his robe had come apart in the washing again.
That robe
is
an ugly thing, tattered and threadbare. He had at least three good ones in a drawer upstairs, but as far as I knew, he had never so much as tried them on. Wearing that old brown one, his feet in house sandals and his hair thinning on top, he always reminded me of Friar Tuck.
He wobbled in sleepily, weaved over to the counter and came suddenly awake when he got a whiff of what was in the blender.
“Goddamn, woman,” he said. “There’s something dead in that blender.”
“That’s what I said, Dad.”
“Funny,” Mom said. “It’s just that old robe you guys smell.”
“Ah,” Dad said. “The melodious voice of the serving wench. Make me some ham and eggs.”
“Poof.” Mom said. “You are some ham and eggs. Any more requests?”
“None I can think of,” Dad said. He got a bowl, spoon, milk and cereal, arranged them at the table and pulled up a chair.
“What happened to the ham and eggs, Your Majesty?” Mom asked.
“Too lazy to fix them myself.”
“And I won’t feel sorry for you, will I, snookums?”
“Looks that way,” Dad said. He looked at me and grinned. “Up early, aren’t you?”
“Friday,” I said.
“Ah. No school and tonight is the big night. A trip to the Orbit with the boys. You should try going out with girls, son. They’re a lot more fun.”
“I go with girls,” I said. “It’s just that the Orbit is special ... something I prefer to do with the guys.”
“I always liked drive-ins with girls.” He looked at Mom. “A purely puritan adventure, of course.”
“That’s not the way I remember you,” Mom said. “Aren’t you running late this morning, Mr. Big Shot?”
“I own the company, my dear. I can do damn well as I please. Outside of this house anyway.”
“Ha,” Mom said. She got up and started for the cabinet. Dad slapped her on the butt. She whirled. “Harold ... could you do that again?”
I laughed. Dad stood up, grabbed her, bent her back like they do in those old movies. “Woman, my little dove. You are the love of my life. Patting your ass is a pleasure unmatched by gold and video ... And remember, serving wench, no TV dinners tonight or I sell you to the Arab traders.”
He kissed her.
“Thank you, Harold. Now will you lift me up. My back hurts.”
“When the going gets rough, when it looks like we’re not going to make it, I’ll save the last two bullets for us.”
“Harold, you’re crazy. Now pull me up, will you? My back hurts.”
He pulled her up. “That’s what happens when you get old. Back trouble. And no sense of romance.”
“Go shower and shave ... and for heaven’s sake brush that hair off your teeth,” Mom said.
“My breath is sweet. I go to bed with sugar breath, and I awake with it even sweeter. I—”
“Go!”
“Yessuh, Massuh,” he said, and shuffled off.
When he was gone Mom gave me an exasperated look. “He’s crazy, you know?”
“I know,” I said.
A little later on, Mom went to play tennis and Dad went to work and I never saw them again.
4
 
Before we started going to the drive-in, come summer mornings you couldn’t get me up if you fired a bazooka under the covers. But now Friday meant the Orbit, and I was usually up early. And there was also The Early Morning Monster Show that I had acquired a taste for. It showed on Channel 6 at eight and Randy came over every Friday to watch. Bob would have, but he worked half a day at his dad’s feed store. As I said, none of us had to work, but Bob was more willing, and he liked having plenty of pocket change.
So Randy came over and the movie was
The Crawling Eye
, and it wasn’t bad until the monsters showed up. The wind kind of went out of its sails after that. It was hard to feel threatened by things that looked like large rubber mops. Still, I enjoyed it, and it gave Randy a chance to make fun of the special effects.
He got what I thought was a sort of strange, even perverse, pleasure out of that, considering most of those movies had been made on a rubber-band budget. But I think it was important for him to have something to look down on, considering he felt pretty much low man on life’s totem pole. He had brains and he was nice, but there was some invisible thing about him that led others to direct their hatred toward him, the incident with Bear being a case in point. In fact, I sometimes felt that behind that mousy, quiet exterior was a tyrant without courage, someone looking for his edge on humanity.
He was good in school, but he didn’t take any particular pride in that because no one gave a damn. He was knowledgeable about film, makeup and special effects particularly, but again, no competition. Bob and I loved that stuff too, but we weren’t wrapped up in it like Randy. So the only thing he could measure his knowledge and skills against were low-budget films, mentally playing out in his mind that he could do better if given a chance.
But the thing I remember best about that morning was Randy turning to me while all hell was breaking loose in the movie (admittedly the hell in the movie wasn’t as intense as it ought to have been), and saying, “Do you think Willard has a steady girl?”
“Hell, Randy, I don’t know. I’m sure he has girls, but I don’t think he’s the wearmy-ring kind. I think the tattoo on his arm, EAT PUSSY, is sort of a statement on romance, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Randy said. “I suppose so.”
After that he just watched the movie, but I could tell his mind wasn’t on it. He had a sort of dreamy look in his eyes, like he was thinking about something that lived way down deep in his brain.
About noon we ate some ham sandwiches and drove over to Safeway and bought some supplies for the night: Cracker Jacks, chocolate-covered almonds, potato chips, some Cokes and a few bags of cookies. Bob was supposed to get a case of beer; he had connections. Connections that bought it cheap and sold it dear, and didn’t give a damn if you were a minor or a warthog. In spite of that, Bob could deal with them better than we could. He dressed the way they did, could talk their line of talk, and the bottom line was he was so damn tight, when he blinked the skin on his dick rolled back. Just the man for hard money dealings.
He had also promised Randy and me that he would bring us some jerky from his dad, who had made it himself from last season’s deer. He’d given us some of it before, and it was fine. In fact, last time he’d given us enough to feed an army. Well, mine mostly fed my dad, even if it did give his teeth a workout. He loved the stuff, tried to convince everyone who came by the house they should too. My dad and Bob’s dad should have gone into business together. Bob’s dad could make it and my dad could hawk it.
I remember passing the kitchen once, and Dad was sitting in there at the table with one of his business partners, and he had pushed a strip of the meat off on him, and I heard the guy say, “I’m not so hot on this stuff, Harold. It’s kind of like chewing on a dead woman’s tit.”
From then on when I ate the stuff, I had to chew it in an absentminded sort of way, not thinking too much about the texture so I could enjoy it.
We took the goodies home, read some
Fangoria
magazines Randy had brought over, and Bob arrived an hour later than usual for our ventures.
Two things were noticeable right off. One was that the fool was fresh from the shower and hadn’t bothered to dry off; his shirt was stuck to his back and the hair that hung out from beneath his hat was wet and shaggy. The second thing was that he had been in a fight; he had a black doughnut around his left eye.
“You know that girlfriend I used to have?” he said.
“Used to have?” Randy asked.
“Yep, used to have. Caught her with Wendle Benbaker.”
Wendle was about the size of a small camper trailer. He had played tackle for Mud Creek High until graduation, and his hobby, when he wasn’t drinking beer and talking about girls, was talking about girls and drinking beer. He was the only guy I knew who moved his lips over the
Playboy
foldout as well as the magazine’s text. I think it was the staples that confused him.
And to be honest, Bob’s girlfriend, Leona of the Big Tits, didn’t strike me as any great loss. Her nickname was how she was known by the staunchest anti-male chauvinist, both male and female. She invited being called that, even liked it, thought it was an honor; she wore those monstrous boobs like war medals on a proud general’s chest.
“Reckon this discovery,” I said, “caused you and Wendle to fight.”
Bob rubbed his sore eye. “Good, Sherlock. You’re right. Jake was supposed to meet me out back of the Dairy Queen with the beer, and he did. But after I loaded it up, I saw Leona and Wendle sitting in his car around front. She was sitting so close she might as well have been wearing his pants with him. Burned my ass up. She told me she didn’t do nothing on Fridays but watch TV. Told me I could go with the guys, no sweat. Now I know the hell why. She’s been letting Wendle check her oil.”
“What did you do?” Randy asked.
“Went over there, yanked the door open and called him a sonofabitch, I think. I was a bit under stress right then and don’t remember so good.”
I nodded at the black eye. “And I take it he wasn’t scared none?”
“Not that I could see. And he can move fast for a big guy. Sucker popped out of that Dodge like a ripe zit and hit me in the eye before I could shag it.”

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