The Complete Drive-In

by Joe R. Lansdale

  It all seemed very real.

  Then it was like someone was calling me, my dad yelling at me to come eat breakfast, but the voice didn’t sound quite right. It sounded far away, filtered. And when I woke up and ran my hand through my hair I was in the bedroll in the camper, and the voice was coming from the outside, and it was Bob’s.

  I got out of the bedroll and came out of the back of the camper, still groggy.

  “I was about to come in there and drag your ass out,” Bob said. “Breakfast, such as it is, is being served.”

  I sat on the tailgate of the truck and looked at a line forming at the concession. People were talking in a friendly, if not happy, way, but you could feel the tension in the air, like some sort of invisible mesh. Seeing all those folks, thinking about what the line must be like over at Lot B, I realized that big as the Orbit was, it wasn’t that large, and there were a lot of hungry people here, and when it came to living here awhile, it could get pretty crowded. And fast.

  But at this point, things were still not bad. This was the time between hot dogs and horrors. When people were still trying to pull together, stiff upper lip, like all those old science-fiction movies where an alien menace makes them cooperate to thwart it, and in the end Earth overcomes and learns to live as one, and Moscow opens some McDonald’s and Disneyland puts in a branch over there.

  We got in a breakfast line and went through. There were three people operating the concession stand, plus the manager. I noticed the girl giving out the candy right off, and in time I would come to think of her as the Candy Girl. She was blonde and very pretty. She had cheekbones so sharp you could have picked your teeth with them. It looked fine on her. If she hadn’t been so short she would have looked like a model instead of a doll.

  “There’s plenty of food here,” the manager said loudly, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. “Everything’s going to be all right. It might take a little time, but it’ll all work out in the wash ...”

  I felt sorry for the manager. He was really trying. But Bob didn’t give a damn.

  “National Guard show up yet?” Bob asked.

  The manager gritted his teeth. “Not yet.”

  I got my hot dog, drink and candy, and up close the Candy Girl was no disappointment. The dark brown uniform dress she wore set her skin and hair off nicely. She had dark brown eyes, pale, clear skin. Her legs looked nice. I wouldn’t have minded being strangled between them. She was as delicious as the sweets she was passing out.

  I said hi to her and she gave me a quizzical look and said it back.

  So our ritual started. We would eat our meals, go back and watch the movies, visit with folks who came by and wanted to talk, mostly speculating on what was happening. Nobody had an idea any better than Willard’s and Randy’s about it all being a B movie, and nothing as loony as Elvis Presley’s ghost, which made all the other ideas a little less loony in comparison.

  One guy from Lot B came by regularly. He was tall and lean and probably thirty. He carried all the information from one lot to the other, sort of a town crier. Because of that, we got so we simply called him Crier, and he liked it and adopted the name.

  “I used to drive a beer truck for Budweiser,” Crier said. “Only Friday, whenever the hell that was, I got in the samples, if you know what I mean, and turned me a corner a little quick and I didn’t have the door closed tight, and I slung Bud all over the highway. Bunch of cars behind me had blowouts on the glass, and some other folks grabbed up the crates that weren’t broken before I could get the truck braked and run the hell off with them. Budweiser frowned on this and canned me. I got good and drunk and come to the drive-in. I wish now I’d stayed home and watched the Friday-night movie on television. It looked like it was gonna be a good one. One of them Godzilla-versus-another-guy-in-a-monster-suit movies. Before my wife left me for a Miller Lite driver, me and her and our dog Boscoe, he’s dead now on account of I backed the beer truck over him, used to sit up on the couch and watch them Jap movies every chance we got. There ain’t a comedy good as a Jap monster movie.”

  “How are things all about?” Willard asked.

  “I guess it’s better than heart disease at the moment, but it’s about to turn real nasty. There are signs. I always had a knack for signs. I could watch the news or read in People magazine about something, and I could always project, you know. Meaning I could look at a thing and see where it was really going. It’s a gift.”

  “Well, where’s it going then?” Willard asked, shaking us all out a cigarette.

  “As I was saying,” Crier said, taking a smoke and putting it in his mouth and producing his own lighter, “there are signs. Over in Lot B a man and a woman pulled their car up close to the tin fence, got on the roof of the car and climbed over the fence into that black crap. So long, sweeties. Suckers went out like June bugs on a hot griddle. It was quick, though. I seen a fella fall under one of them rollers they use to flatten out tar on the highway once, now that was tough. And it didn’t kill him right away. Can you believe that?”

  “Yeah?” Willard said.

  “Yeah,” Crier said, and he gave details, then went away.

  Without clocks, the sun and the moon to measure time by, it was up to the projectionists to mark the hours. They did this by counting the number of movies they changed. They kept them running constantly. Six of them. Three from our concession stand and film house, another three from the concession in Lot B. When one film was finished, they would measure by its reel time. Usually about an hour and a half per flick. That way, when enough films had been changed, they could compute time for meals. The manager would then announce over the speaker: “Snack bar will be serving breakfast now.” Or whatever meal was on the roster. Not that it mattered, since it was the same stuff every time.

  “Hot damn,” Bob would say, “popcorn. They make a mean bag here, don’t they? Regular four-star restaurant.” And he would always ask the manager about the National Guard.

  That Bob. What a kidder.

  For a while I tried using one of Bob’s old history composition notebooks and a Bic pen to keep time by the number of movies seen, like the projectionists. But I could never remember if the mark on paper was for the previous movie or the one I had just seen. Things ran together kind of rapid like.

  I don’t think I was the only one having trouble with time. I think the projectionists were missing it now and then too. Certainly, I was pretty hungry a few times, and I think they missed calling us for meals. But mistakes were expected. I could attest to the fact that keeping time by the number of movies shown wasn’t an exact science. And I was sick of the movies. I knew them by heart. You could hear people across the drive-in chanting the dialogue ahead of the actors. Sometimes I dozed when the zombies were eating guts, or when Mitchell was using the industrial nailer on the pretty woman from the shower.

  People continued to be patient. Or most. There were a few fights. I saw a guy slug a guy in front of us once, but I don’t know what started it. It was fast and explosive. But mostly, people were doing pretty good. It was still like what I was talking about earlier, about those old science-fiction movies where we all pull together against the menace. Only our menace was silent and surrounded us, and we didn’t have any bombs to throw at it, and the damned old National Guard didn’t seem likely to show up.

  When we were tired, we slept in the camper using the bedrolls, giving Willard spare blankets and an old backpack for a pillow. Sometimes one of us would sleep in the cab, or lie down on our bedroll under the truck. We didn’t always sleep at the same time. Bob especially seemed to have a different body clock. He would usually climb into the camper for a nap when we were waking up. There seemed to be something furtive about this, but I couldn’t figure what it was, unless he wanted to masturbate.

  We used the bathroom at the concession, but I could see that wasn’t going to last. It didn’t work well. It was getting so bad I longed for the toilet at Buddy’s Fill-up.

  My highlights were saying hi t
o the Candy Girl and eating. It got so I was getting kind of fat. I took up exercising, but I couldn’t stay with it. Just too damn tired. Nothing seemed real or important. The idea of being trapped in the drive-in, though depressing, began to seem normal, as if we had always been there. I wondered why ants in ant farms didn’t commit suicide.

  The weather in the drive-in was fairly consistent. Not too warm, not too cold. Yet it did change occasionally. Wild winds would twist up out of nowhere and tear across the lots, blowing paper cups and popcorn bags before them like frightened coveys of quail. The paper would fly against the wind-rattled tin fences or over them and into the blackness to be consumed. Sometimes the wind was so strong it shook the truck like a mechanical pony ride.

  There was also a now-and-then movement in the blackness overhead. It bulged down, made lumps. Fuzzy blue lightning leaped out of it, produced crackling stick figures that danced across the strange sky to the rhythm of metallic thunder and ran together like idiots to explode in dazzling displays of fireworks.

  It never rained, however, and it got so the electrical storms were welcome. They were a break from the monotony. They gave more light. People would lie on the ground, or on top of their cars, hands behind heads, looking up, entranced.

  And when there wasn’t the lightning, there were the meals at the concession, and the movies. The movies, ever rolling: chainsaws and zombies, drills and screams, common as spit.

  With all of us so close together, it got so sex was super casual, damn near a spectator sport. There had always been this element at the Orbit, but it was more blatant than ever, and the romance had gone out of it. To the front of us a group formed that participated in orgies. We were hurt no one invited us over. We used to sit in lawn chairs and watch them wallow on the asphalt. Bob would cheer them on and call out points, and I would wonder where they got their energy. Watching them made me tired.

  I remember this little girl who used to walk her poodle between the fornicating bodies. She must have been about eleven. The bodies could have been hedges for all she and the mutt cared. The dog had a pink bow, the girl a red one. The dog was too small in its white fur, the girl too small in her dress. The red ribbon against her oily blonde hair looked like a wound.

  There were fights. People got mad over very little. Over to our right a fellow wearing a welder’s cap got into some kind of shindig with a hatless fella over the quality of the chainsaw Leatherface was using in yet another viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They did some excellent name-calling. Even Willard and Bob were impressed, and they were well versed in tongue-lashing. Willard had been raised on the streets, and Bob had a dad who thought most of humanity was a sonofabitch, and that the word “sonofabitch” itself was the period to a sentence. “I’ll be a sonofabitch. There goes that sonofabitch. You got to watch them sonofabitches. Remember now, boys, folks are just sonofabitches.”

  The guy with the hat was the sharper of the two, as he had a three-foot length of two-by-four, while the hatless fella had only a popcorn sack, and that mostly empty. Even as Leatherface chased an intended victim across the screen, Hat laid a lick on Hatless’s noggin that would have made a sadist wince. Hatless, wobbling a little from the blow, flapped his popcorn bag at Hat, and the bag burst open and sent popcorn bouncing into the night.

  It got better than championship wrestling. Folks nearby, maybe friends or relatives, or just interested parties, got in the act, chose up sides, started kicking and slugging. After a while, sides didn’t matter. It was getting the good blow in that counted. One guy got crazy, ripped a speaker off a post, went at everyone and anyone with it. He was good, too. Way he whipped that baby around on that wire made Bruce Lee and his nunchukkas look like a third-grade carnival act.

  He started coming our way, whirling the speaker fast as a propeller, yelling. He smashed the windshield out of the car next to us.

  From my lawn chair I could see him coming straight for me. Bob had already vacated his seat and beat a hasty retreat. He called for me to do the same, but I couldn’t move. I was excited and wanted to move, but couldn’t quite find the energy to get up. Lately everything was a major chore, even fleeing before a madman. I waited for my destiny. Death by drive-in speaker.

  Willard calmly got the baseball bat out of the truck and stepped smoothly over and swatted a home run with the guy’s head before he could reach me. The best part of me feared the fella was dead, the worst part of me hoped he was.

  “Thanks, Willard,” I said. I could have been thanking him for a cigarette the way it came out.

  “Hell,” he said. “I was going to do that anyway.”

  The fight was still going on, though it was now moving in the other direction. There was a guy in the car that had gotten its windshield knocked out, and he was sitting there behind the windshield with glass in his hair and on his shoulders. He looked as if he’d tried to ram his head through a block of ice and made it. “Who’s gonna pay for all this?” he said. “That’s what I want to know.”

  No one came forward with an answer.

  The fight was so far down the lot now, encased in shadow, the grapplers looked like frogs jumping together. After a while, you could just hear cussing, but it was losing some of its originality.

  I finally shifted my chair and started watching the next movie, Night of the Living Dead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the guy Willard had swatted wake up. The side of his head looked dark and pregnant. He had one eye open and he was moving it from left to right, scoping things out.

  He rolled smoothly and gently onto his stomach, started to crawl off, dragging the speaker behind him by the wire. He didn’t seem to notice it was clattering on the asphalt like a bad transmission. He crawled a great distance down the row of cars and disappeared under a Cadillac festooned with so many curb feelers it might be mistaken for a giant centipede. He stayed there through most of Night, and by the time of the next movie, he was brave enough to crawl out from under it, go on his hands and knees for a few yards, rise up to a squatting run and weave off into a maze of parked automobiles, the speaker following him like a tail.

  I looked around for Bob, Randy and Willard. They were not in sight. Perhaps they had gone to sleep, or gone off to look around the lots for girls, for action. Me, I didn’t want to get out of my chair. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and couldn’t seem to concern myself with it. I closed my eyes and thought again of B-string gods. In the dream these gods were made of big eyes and bladders and tentacles. They had a cobbled look, as if a good special-effects man was doing the best he could with leftover parts. They were the same creatures as in the dream before, but they were clearer this time, as if my brain had been focused.

  They were up there behind the blackness, and when they writhed across it, it made those bumps we saw from time to time. They had great machines with great cogs and wheels and gears and gauges. They had switches that made lightning. They even had lightning that came out of the tips of their tentacles. They took clubs and beat large sheets of metal for thunder. They talked in that strange language, a noise like a rat with its tail in a fan. Like before, it made no sense, yet I understood it. They were talking about motivation of scene, drama, needing something ugly and special. One wanted some cuts. Another thought there was too much sitting around and it wasn’t funny enough. He said something about humor making horror better. The gods argued. Finally they put their misshapen heads together and agreed on something, but whatever it was wouldn’t stay with me. I felt as if I had tuned in on them, and was now being tuned out.

  Then I wasn’t thinking of that anymore. The dream had gone to steak and potatoes, country gravy and toast, a big glass of ice tea. In the background of this dream the speaker coughed out screams from The Toolbox Murders, or maybe it was I Dismember Mama. It didn’t matter. I fell into a deep, deep sleep, the screams my lullaby.

  8

  Dingo City.

  Everything started getting fuzzy around the edges. Sometimes my lawn chair moved through time and spac
e. (Spin me around, Jesus, save me stars, get Scorpio in line with my moon, Lord Almighty, let my good number come up, put some beefsteak on the table and wish me luck.)

  It got so about all I could do was eat and sit in that chair. And take care of my bodily functions, and that had become quite a chore. Not only was I weak, but the restroom had gotten so bad I didn’t want to use it. The odor waited there for me like a mugger, and inside the concrete bunker the floor had gone so stale and tacky with overflowing toilets and urinals, my shoes stuck to it like cat hairs to honey. I damn near needed skis to get to the john, which was now doorless, the hinges hanging like frayed tendons. And once I made it that far, I would find the commode even more studded with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, used prophylactics and the stuff that was supposed to be there. What the toilet wouldn’t hold was on the floor. So going into that stinking pit was rather pointless. I was terrified at the idea of standing over one of those malodorous urinals or johns (this item of wisdom crayoned above the latter: REMEMBER, CRABS CAN POLE-VAULT) and having something ugly, fuzzy, multilegged and ravenous leap out at me.

  I took to using large popcorn tubs to do my business in, carried them to the tin fence and used a flat board I had found to catapult tub and contents into the blackness to be devoured.

  Take that, B-string gods.

  Sometimes I was so dizzy I couldn’t even carry the tubs to the fence to launch them, and then Bob would do it for me. He was the only one of us who seemed firm, relatively unchanged. I wondered what his secret was, or if he had any. I kept wanting to ask, but the words hung in my throat like phlegm. What if there wasn’t a secret and there was no knowledge that could help me.