by phuc
"Anyway, I got all this from the note."
The wind was picking up and posters and cups and popcorn bags were tornadoing around the car and beginning to collect on the windshield and flutter into the seats and slap Crier in the face.
Steve pulled over and put the convertible's roof up and Bob took the bags off Crier's face and tossed them out. Back on the road, Steve continued his story.
"The note was stuck in the refrigerator door when I got home, on account of the bitch took all the fruit magnets with her. Even the one I bought for myself that was made like a big strawberry. The note said what she had done and that she thought the car was as much hers as mine (which was a hoot) and that the new song I said I wrote and was bragging about I didn't write, 'cause her boyfriend did, and she said she and the boyfriend were heading to Nashville to make the money off of it. She said she thought it was a better song than she thought before, now that she knew I didn't write it. She said good-bye and that she had popped the tops on all the beer in the refrigerator so it would go flat, and for me to take a water hose and run it up my ass and turn it on full blast.
"I tell you, there wasn't a cheerful line in that note. I of course went straight on over to Fred's. I was back a day earlier than they expected. I had been up to Nashville, see, and I come back early to check with the private detective guy, and to see if I could talk some things out if my suspicions were correct, so I figured I just might get the jump on them two before they were gone with my song.
"Thinking that I had left my convertible with Tina Sue and drove her damned old VW up to Nashville didn't make me no happier, and I tell you when I got up in Fred's yard and seen my Plymouth sitting there, the sides of it all muddy and the hubcaps covered over with the stuff, my eyes filled with murder. I slammed on my brakes hard enough to throw my hat in the backseat. I got that dude back on my head and went straight up on Fred's porch. Last year's Christmas wreath was still hanging on the door; one of them with the plastic mistletoe and those damned ol' gold-sprayed pine cones glued on it. I jerked that little buddy off the door and stomped the cones and kicked the rest of it out in the yard.
"One of Fred's old two-bit hounds come around from the back then and stood off the porch growling at me. I got hold of Fred's sandy old doormat and threw it at the dog and it ran off under the house where it could collect some more ticks.
"About the time I turned around, I saw that the curtain over one of the windows was falling back into place, and I knew then that Fred was home. The window he'd taken a peek out of had MERRY CHRISTMAS stenciled on it, and I yelled out, 'I know goddamn good and well you're in there, shit-bag. Come on out. And it ain't even Christmas, you dumb cocksucker.'
"He didn't come out, so I got off the porch and got hold of the cinder block he was using for a step and put it on the porch, got up there and got hold of it again and shoved it through the window with the stenciling on it.
"He come out of there then with a chair leg in his hand, and he come out swinging. We sort of run together and rolled off the porch and out in the yard. His old hound come out from under the porch then and got hold of my pants leg and started growling and tugging on it. I kicked the mutt off and wrestled up to my feet, and thought I was going to do pretty good, when Fred hit me one on the noggin with that chair leg, and the last thing I remembered was the toes of my K mart boots coming up."
"But it didn't kill you," Grace said.
"No it didn't. I woke up and the first thing I seen when I got up on my elbow was the toes of them boots again."
"And they were still from K mart," Grace said.
"Still from K mart. But the knot on my head was from Fred. Next thing I see is Fred and that hound dog. The dog is sitting on his butt staring at me, his ol' tongue hanging out like he just had him a bitch and was damn proud of it, and Fred he still has his chair leg, and he bends over me and says, 'Hurt much, Steve?'
"I tell him, 'Not at all. Sometimes when I'm home I take a chair leg to my own head.'
"He hit me again, and when I woke up, I was hot and it was dark and crowded and I could smell that perfume Tina Sue always wore."
Steve paused and pointed at the glove box. "I got a last cigar in there. Been saving it. Get it for me, will you?"
I got it out and he bit off the end and spat tobacco out the window and put the cigar in his mouth and sucked on it. "I don't care what they say, these things taste a hell of a lot better when you know they ain't made by a bunch of Cubans."
He punched in the lighter.
"All right, damnit," Grace said. "What was this dark, cramped place that smelled like Tina Sue?"
"I'm gonna tell you." He took the lighter and lit the cigar, puffed dramatically. "The trunk of this car."
"Uh oh," Bob said.
"Uh oh is right. The greedy sonofabitch had shown his true colors. I figure he decided he wasn't gonna share any song money with Tina Sue, and he killed her. Then I come along and he had to kill me—least he thought he killed me. And he put us in the trunk of the car and drove us out to the Orbit and walked off, probably hitched home. It wasn't' such a smart idea, really. I mean someone would have caught up with him. But then whatever happened to the drive-in happened, and I was trapped in there, and I guess back home in Texas there isn't even a drive-in no more. I don't know what would be there in its place, if anything. But there's no body in the trunk for the police to find, in fact there's no car. So I guess Fred did all right by accident. He's probably making money off my song right now."
"Look at it this way," Bob said. "Maybe the song wasn't any good and he couldn't sell it."
Steve sat and thought about that. The fire on his cigar went out. Finally he said, "I'm not sure how I feel about that."
"What I want to know," Grace said, "is how did you get out of the trunk?"
"Oh, that. Wasn't nothing to that. I was hot and pissed and I bent up my legs and kept donkey-kicking the trunk till I busted the lock. When I got out of there didn't nobody care, things being like they were. I ended up using some wire I had back there to fasten the trunk down."
"Is Tina Sue . . . you know?" Grace said.
"Back there? Naw. I left here there a while, but when things got real bad back there, well, I ate her."
4
After a time, even Steve played out. Course, we had gotten most of his life story, and I guess maybe there wasn't much else to tell. The story wasn't exactly exemplary. I couldn't see it as a movie. He sang us a few of the songs he'd written. Nashville wasn't missing anything.
Grace said it all sounded like "Home on the Range" to her, no matter what words he sang.
He got quiet then, went into one of those artistic funks, no doubt. He made corners faster than ever and he wouldn't play the Sleepy LaBeef tape.
I had a hard time relaxing, way Steve was driving. And I was thinking about Crier and his dead eyeballs getting whipped by the wind. I knew it wasn't a thing to get on Crier's nerves, but it was damn sure giving mine a workout, and I didn't even have to look at him. Still, the thought of those dead eyeballs behind me . . .
When Steve had asked for that cigar, I had seen that there were some sunglasses in the glove box, and I got those out. They were neon yellow and had little bulldogs in the top corners of the frames and the dogs had black BB eyes that rolled around at the slightest movement. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it was something.
I handed them back to Bob and told him what I wanted, and he put them on Crier. It helped. Crier even looked alive. He appeared to be nothing more than an excessively cool dude with his dick in his pocket.
Course, a little later in the day he started to bloat up and stink a little, and I couldn't think of anything to help that. We had to pull over and put him in the trunk, sunglasses and all.
Steve fussed about this, because he had to work at unwiring the lid, but he did it. I think he was afraid if he didn't, Grace would kick him in the balls. She had that look.
We got Crier dumped in the back without his dick falling
out of his pocket, got him wired in, and we were off. It seemed strange not to have the old boy with us, after all we had been through, but it did smell a mite fresher, especially to Bob and Grace.
It got darker and darker and pretty soon we got to that stuff Grace told us about. Storms whipped posters and popcorn sacks and the like every which way. The moon looked even more false than usual and it shone like a projector light through the trees, hitting the strips of film that twisted and twined there. Film ghosts were no longer reflected in the mirror and the windows. The highway was full of them: cowboys with six-shooters, knights with swords and lances, apes and madmen, giant stalking machines from War of the Worlds, the smiling Brady Bunch. We drove through them all as if they were mist.
Film strips crawled onto the highway and made smashed cellophane sounds beneath our tires.
When Steve got tired, we pulled over and I got behind the wheel. I drove until I couldn't, then I swapped with Bob who drove until he had to swap with Grace.
When it got back around to me, the gas gauge showed a quarter tank.
5
Daylight, and things looked a little better. No ghosts melting through the car, and no film crawling. A little storm activity, but nothing special. The sun looked worse than ever, like a pie pan spray-painted gold.
The trees were rubbery-looking and the ground reminded me of Styrofoam. The fruit we found to eat was shriveled and bitter to the taste. Everything around us looked a little cheap and off center, like the way it is when you make a real close examination of what you bought at a thrift sale.
We found a few chocolate almonds lying about and some soft drink puddles, so I knew we were getting close to the highway's end; the place Popalong had told Grace about. It struck me that Steve ought to know what he was in for. All he knew was that he was giving us a ride to the end of the highway. He didn't know we had some idea what was there, and he didn't know what we had in mind.
Steve had a mirror in his glove box, one of those kinds with the props behind it, and he had that and his pocket knife and a little kit with a tiny pair of scissors and a toenail clipper in it, and he was working on his whiskers. It made me hurt to watch him.
"Who you cleaning up for?" Bob asked him.
"Myself. I never could stand whiskers. I still don't look so good when I finish, since I can't get close enough, but it beats looking like you boys."
"I think we ought to explain something to you," I said.
"About what?" Steve said. He finished up and folded the mirror stand and put it and the kit in the glove box.
"About the end of the road," Grace said.
Steve leaned on the car and got what was left of his cigar out of his pocket. When it died out he hadn't relit it. He didn't light it now. He put it in his mouth and rolled it from one side to the other.
"We kind of know what's at the end," Grace said. "We've got an idea what we're going to do there." And she told Steve a condensed version of the story she told us. When she finished Steve quit moving his cigar. He took it out of his mouth and put it in his pocket. I couldn't help but think of Crier's dick.
"Sounds like you folks are going to get killed, is what it sounds like to me," Steve said.
"We don't expect you to go if you don't want," Grace said. "We'd appreciate your carrying us as far as you can, though."
"What if I said this was as far as I was going?" Steve said.
"That would be it then," Grace said.
"You'd walk through this stuff at night?"
"I would," Grace said.
"I'm not crazy about that part," Bob said. "I might even be talked out of it. I might even ride back with you the other way."
"You?" Steve asked me.
"All that matters right now," I said, "is are you going to the end or not. If you go back, you know what you've got."
"Sounds like I have a pretty good idea of what I'm gonna get if I go forward too." He looked hard at me. "Tell you what else, I think if I go back and Bob here goes with me, you'll go too. You don't look like any kind of hero to me. The gal here will keep walking, I can tell that. She doesn't think she needs much of anybody."
"That's not true," Grace said. "I can use all the help I can get. But if I don't get it, I'm going on."
"I'm no knight in white armor, lady," Steve said.
"Never crossed my mind you might be."
Steve smiled and put the cigar back in his mouth. He still didn't light it.
"All right, I'll haul you on, but maybe we ought to come up with a game plan. And first thing to start with is getting rid of the old boy in the trunk. He's starting to stink all the way from the back. It bothers my driving. I don't figure we'll have to eat him, with all this fruit and stuff out there, so let's get shed of him."
6
I got Crier's legs and Bob got him by the shoulders and we lifted him out of the Plymouth's trunk. He had swollen up a bit, and he really did stink.
We carried him over to the side of the road and put him down. I said, "I told him I wouldn't do this. I promised I'd get him to the end of the highway."
"Me too," Bob said, "but a person doesn't always get what they want, and you can't always keep your promise. Besides, if he'd known he was gonna stink like this, maybe he wouldn't have asked it of us."
Crier's dick had come out of his pocket and rolled up next to the spare, and since it was past the handling stage, and looked like a big jalapeno going to rot, Steve got a couple of sticks and scissored it out of there and carried it over and dropped it next to Crier.
"We ought to bury him," I said.
"Something will just dig him up," Steve said. "And this ground isn't any kind of ground for digging. But if you want, there's a worn-down spot over there and we can throw him off in that, maybe find something to cover him up, for all that amounts to."
We carried Crier over to the worn-down spot and put him in it. He was stiff as a tire iron and lay there in the indentation as if he had fallen sideways out of a chair and frozen.
Steve kicked the dick on over and into the hole and we got some brush and limbs and the few rocks we could find, and put them on top of him. We got everything covered but the bottom of his shoes. Our hands sure did smell bad.
We got in the car and drove away. Bob said, "I guess we could have at least put his dick in his pocket."
7
All over the place were these TVs and antennas and papers, and the darker it got the more those papers came and swirled and collected in the trees with the film, which was now thicker than the leaves.
Over to the right, just above the trees, you could see what looked like an inverted tornado dipping down, and all of its swirls were filled with posters and bags and stuff. And on the ground were lots of TV sets. It was like we were getting closer to the garbage dump.
It got darker and we kept driving, but now we had all the windows up because the paper storm had really gotten bad, and it somehow seemed safer from the ghosts that way, even if they weren't really dangerous.
All along the highway were people impaled on antennas, and the headlights would wink at the metal between their legs, and sometimes you could see blood and shit on the antennas. But more often you didn't, and as we looked closer, we saw why. There were few real people impaled. Most of what was there were dummies.
A thing I couldn't put a name to began to move in the back of my mind, but whatever was crawling back there went away when I saw what was in the distance.
The Orbit, its tall tin fence sparkling in the lightning flashes like a woman's wedding band catching the fire from a candlelight dinner.
From that distance, it looked like the crumbled remains of an old castle, way the shadows fell over and moved around on it, way the lightning popped and fizzled overhead, way the paper and posters swirled around and into it like ghosts heading home.
We pulled off the road near one of the impaled dummies, turned off the lights, and talked about it.
"Seems to me," Steve said, "driving on in isn't the answer, not if
it's like you say it is, Grace."
"That's how he said it was, though he called it a kind of church."
"This is your show," Bob said. "What do you want to do? Tell us, and then I'll tell you if I'll do it."
"Wait until morning. Let me sleep on it. Turn the car around and pull off near the trees on the other side, and take turns at watch. That way nobody comes up on us. In the morning I'll know what to do."
"In other words," Bob said, "you'll be ready to do something even if it's wrong?"
"Pretty much," Grace said. "One of you guys take first watch." She leaned against her side of the car and closed her eyes and went to sleep, or pretended to.
"Yes, Commandant," Bob said.
"Once they got the right to vote, it's been downhill ever since," Steve said.
"I heard that," Grace said.
We guys tried to talk for a while, but we didn't really have anything to talk about. We knew Steve's life story. I took the first watch and we took turns doing that all night, and the last watch was Grace's, I think, because I'd come awake from time to time and see who was on duty. Anyway, next thing I knew it was morning and Grace had the door open and was dumping some fruit in my lap.
It wasn't good fruit. It was kind of sour, but I ate it anyway, and lots of it. I looked at the morning and thought it looked pretty fresh, more real than usual. The papers had stopped swirling and the film lay in the trees and on the ground like burnt bacon.
Grace, Bob and Steve were over by one of the dummies and Steve had a stick and was poking it. I got out of the car and went over there.
Bob said, "Popalong sure works to make things look scary. Speaking of scary, you look like hell."
