Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (58 page)
Grace reached out, took hold of a rancid, blackened arm, said, “This one has been here awhile. Look at it. Look close.”
The arm had rotted, and the crows had been at it, and though the arm was clearly meaty, inside it I could see a flexi-metal rod that served for bone, and twisted around this “bone” were wires—red, blue, white, and yellow.
“Part human,” Grace said. “Part machine.”
“Holy shit,” Steve said.
“Question now,” Grace said, “is do we still want to go up there?”
She pointed up at the wall of metal, the jungle of wires.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Reba said. “The world is caving in on itself. Whoever runs this crazed-ass shithole must be up there. I think it’s time to confront him. Beard God in his own goddamn cheap-ass Naugahyde, cheetahskin-decorated den, and kick his ass.”
“Hear, hear,” Steve said, and stuck out a hand.
We piled our hands on top of his.
“Up, up, and away,” Grace said.
“By the way,” I asked, “how do you know if there’s a God he’s got Naugahyde shit up there?”
“It fits his toss-out-the-window, white trash image,” Reba said.
“Ah,” I said.
PART FIVE
Complexities are contemplated. A bridge is climbed.
Toy soldiers get funky. Experiences with rubber, wood,
and flesh. Aliens are found. Bad things happen to good people.
The world is folded, and our remaining heroes
travel through a glass darkly.
Toy soldiers get funky. Experiences with rubber, wood,
and flesh. Aliens are found. Bad things happen to good people.
The world is folded, and our remaining heroes
travel through a glass darkly.
Let me tell you how we did it, took that climb.
We decided, as we always knew we would, to go up that great beam, which was slanted slightly and had those multitudes of cables to cling to. From a distance those twists of wires had looked like one big dark cable on either beam of the bridge. Now, I could see it was not a bridge at all, but what it was, I was uncertain. The metal beam and its skin of tangled wires ascended into the red sky, disappearing, not into the waste hole, but advancing to the top to be wrapped in clouds like a precious possession in fluffy balls of cotton.
It was not a short trip, dear hearts.
It might not have been Everest, but it wasn’t a hill back home either. It was WAY THE FUCK up there.
So, we took the dried fruit from my pack, laid it out, determined it was not enough. We went about picking more fruit and drying it. It was a scary decision. Every moment we wasted meant the sky could fall, doing us in. But, if we were to take the climb unprepared, and if it was as high up and difficult to travel as we suspected, then we could die of thirst and starvation. Not to mention we might fall off and smash our asses.
Maybe that’s where the bodies and shapes of humans had come from. They had fallen, not been pushed.
But, shit, man. Did those wooden critters walk?
Or were they just prototypes?
And how were those great potato chips made so thin and vacuum-packed in a can without crushing all of them?
I wished I were home with a can of them, sitting in front of the television set watching a rerun of
The Lone Ranger
. Guns snapping, bad guys falling. But no blood, man. No blood. No real terror.
The Lone Ranger
. Guns snapping, bad guys falling. But no blood, man. No blood. No real terror.
Of course, when we got to the top, we could find ourselves in worse shape. But again, it was that goal business, dear hearts.
The goal.
The reason to strive.
It’s what made us want to climb, and it beat standing around with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for the world to fall apart and the sun to blow down on our heads and cook us.
Steve found some gourds and we labored at hollowing those out by twisting off the narrow, blackened, umbilical-cord tops and working a sharp stick down into them. We wormed the stick about until we liquefied the gourd’s guts, then we poured the goo out. There were numerous pools of water about, and we dipped the gourds in those and rinsed them, filled them with sand and let them dry while the fruit dried.
We even went back to the beach and found some of the boiled fish. We ate some, and found that they were pretty good, considering we had been living off dog-urine fruit, which made for a very real and very regular bowel movement, dear hearts. I figured, way we had been eating and shitting, the woods were full of scat.
We cut the boiled fish open with scoops made of sharp sticks, wrapped them in leaves, and stuffed them in my pack. We made spears by twisting off limbs in such a way that a sharp piece was left on the end. It wasn’t a great weapon, but it was all we had.
On the day when fruit and gourds were dry, we packed my pack full of the withered dog-urine produce, filled the gourds with water, corked them with pieces of wood, made slings of vines to carry the gourds, made similar straps with vines so we could fasten them to and carry our spears on our backs, then we started out.
Our plan was to take turns with the pack. We all carried our own water gourds and spears. As for the pack, I carried it first. We took a hike around the pile of busted toys and rotting bodies, made our way to the shiny beam that rose up to heaven.
And with the red-stained sky dripping down frighteningly low, we did the pile-on hands thing again, made with a little one-for-all grunt, and started up.
It went well enough at first. The wires were thick, and they gave you something to cling to. The beam slanted enough you weren’t just hanging out in space, but it didn’t slant enough for you to be comfortable. It didn’t take long before I was tired. I thought it was just because it was my turn to tote the pack, but when Grace took it over, I found I was even worse off, as if the weight of all that food had given me what strength I had.
Finally we came to a great bolt in the beam, and the wires were nestled about it in a wad. We found we could crawl up in that wad, and the wires were bundled tight enough, very little light got in. We crawled in there and pressed up together, mostly in a sitting position, opened the pack, ate and drank sparingly, then rested.
Resting turned out to be a full-bore doze.
When I awoke, stars were in the sky, and I watched two of them drip off and fall. I could see way out there, dear hearts, and I watched as the stars hit the sea and the water rose up big-time, came crashing down on the island, washing trees away like matchsticks with a garden hose.
The drive-in mist, which was cruising the water below, was hit by the waves and disrupted. It curled and coiled and broke apart.
Reba, who I didn’t know was awake, said, “We left just in time.”
“It’s not going to wash the whole thing,” I said, “not this time. But what if the moon falls?”
“It’s all over,” she said. “Davy Jones’ Locker, baby.”
The moon was out and it was bright, but that old lunar wad nodded from time to time, as if it might doze off and drop into the waters below. We watched for awhile, until the drive-in ghost had regrouped and began to float over the waters, then we decided to wake the others, keep climbing, making time while the moon was up and its light was high.
As we climbed, Grace and Steve in the lead, Reba (carrying the pack now) and I lagging slightly behind, Reba said, “What do you think about all those bodies down there, the toy soldiers, the mannequins, and such?”
“I don’t know. I’m having some thoughts, but they aren’t altogether formed, and what thoughts I’m thinking I can’t express, but, baby, somewhere back to the rear of the old bean, I’m not liking what I’m thinking at all.”
“Want to share?”
“I meant what I said. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s more a feeling than an expression. But it comes to me, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I think I do know what you mean. Something is nagging me, too. And it feels uncomfortable. Like a pretty bad thought is trying to burrow out, and I won’t let it.”
“I hear you,” I said.
Many days and nights passed, and sometimes there was no place for us to really rest, so we had to keep on cl imbing. And sometimes, when we found a bolt, where the wires were always clustered, we decided to stay for a day or two, if anyone could in any way decide on what a day was.
In time, more stars fell, and the water rose up way high, and soon there was no land or trees below us. Oh, for a few days it was there, in patches, and the water would roll back and show us at least the tops of trees, and now and again a patch of mud, but eventually that went away too. And then one night the thing we had feared happened.
The moon came up and went down fast and furious. Striking the sea so hard it sounded like an atomic bomb had gone off. The great beam vibrated and the metal sang with a sound like a scream from a robot’s lungs.
The ocean yawned, and the water went all about, then it gathered itself together with what sounded like a moan and rushed forward. All the waters of this drive-in earth appeared to have loosened their bounds, and they had gathered together in one great wet flood; it thundered below us with a gush, and it began to rise, like a plugged toilet, and in a time so short as to be somewhere between our taking a deep breath and cutting a fart of fear, the water charged up and around the beam, rose nearly to our feet.
Well. Okay. That’s an exaggeration. But it rose up as high as we had been two drive-in days before. Had we decided to hang out a little longer down there, we would have bathed the big bath, baby.
The flood brought with it a bullet-hard rain and a cloud of mist, and the mist collected itself and became the drive-in ghost. We looked down on it and I saw within it the island and us on the island, and then I saw us and the pile of corpses, false and neat, and I quit watching then. Feared it might show me our future. And, frankly, I didn’t want to know.
2“All these wires,” Steve said, “I think they run the drive-in world. They travel along these great beams, and the interconnecting parts that look like ladder rungs. They run through those. They go from the sky to the ground. They’re worked into this world’s fabric. They give it light. They make the sun, the moon and stars, night and day work. Or did. They’re starting to go bad. Shorting out maybe. No maintenance. The whole goddamn thing is breaking up. I don’t know, maybe it’s on purpose. But down there, it’s all over. I’m sure of it. From sea to shining sea, from one end of the jungle to the other, all the way down that single stretch of highway, the drive-in at either end. It’s done, companions. Done.”
We were resting in a mess of wires by one of the huge bolts, and Steve, he was running on, talking ninety miles an hour, as if he were on some kind of caffeine high, which he wasn’t, unless the dog-urine fruits were naturally rich in it.
And maybe they were, because we were all in one of those late-night type of conversational, philosophical moods that one usually associates with coffee houses or university lifers or chat-it-up smart guys trying to score pussy.
Only thing was, it wasn’t late night, it was day, but the day wasn’t much. The sun was down low, literally, and it was leaking its light over the water, making it the color of rich bourbon. There was a lot less water now. Much of it had been steamed away. But still that sun dripped into the sea, and our version of Sol had begun to lose its shape, like a rotting fruit going quick-fast to liquid. On the seabed all manner of creatures, giant squids, fish, and even our great catfish friend, Ed, squirmed in the mud.
From where we were, we could see the great fish clearly. The dark things, the ravenous cancers, or pissed-off shadows, whatever they were, those hungry things that had been inside of Ed, had exited the old boy’s ass. The shadows fluttered about the muddy seabed like crickets. There was too much light for them, fading or not, they hopped and twisted and fell about like dying locusts, came apart in little black pools that ran into the mud and were absorbed.
The people who had been inside Ed exited as well. They were very small from our position, the size of termites. But we knew they were people. They came out of the gaping mouth of the fish and disappeared into the mud. It probably went very deep, that mud. Maybe miles.
If anyone was still in the fish, they might stay on the surface for awhile, as Ed covered a lot of space and was sinking more slowly, spread out like that, but he was sinking. We could see that big buddy going down.
Goodbye, Bjoe, if you’re still there. Goodbye you man-eating, dick-jerking asshole.
The horizon had become a charcoal gray band, and it was broadening. Soon, all the world below would be dark.
Above us, the clouds were near touchable. Puffed up and white as a Jesus robe.
I said, “I think, tired as we are, we should start moving again, while we can see to climb. If the sun holds out just a while longer, I think we’ll reach the clouds.”
“And if we do,” Reba says, “who says that means anything? It can be just as dark inside a cloud as out. The sun goes, what the fuck does it matter where we are?”
“I’m thinking the beam leads somewhere,” I said. “Remember Popalong, he climbed up here, through that hole over the drive-in, and it was nearly as high as this. He saw things. He told us a little about them. This world has an attic.”
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