Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

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.

Dingo City.

Everything started getting fuzzy around the edges. Sometimes my lawn chair moved through time and space. (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.

I took to sitting in the lawn chair for longer and longer periods, watching the movies. They were familiar and they made me comfortable. I liked the movies better than people. They were so damned dependable. The same ghosts were revived and slaughtered again and again. Leatherface became adorable. He seemed like an action kind of guy. Knew what he wanted and went after it. Didn’t sit around in a lawn chair feeling dizzy. He ate good, too.

Bob leaned over the chair and put his face down close to mine. “You know,” he said, “you need to get you some focus. Quit looking at them movies, you’re starting to drift.” He gave me a pat on the shoulder and went away. I fell into the well of film for a time and came out when I heard voices, some laughter.

“What did you think about that?” Willard’s voice. I was too weak to turn and look at him.

“Great.” Randy’s voice. “I hit him right where you said, the way you showed me, right on the button. Did it kill him?”

“Naw,” Willard said. “You just decked him. You get a guy on the chin like that, especially when he’s not expecting it, and most of the time he’ll go down.”

The camaraderie in their voices was strange. Like Siamese twins rediscovering each other after a lengthy separation at birth. Maybe meeting at a dogfight, or something bloody.

Randy had gone from quiet and shy to swaggering, and Willard had become content, like an empty cup that had been filled.

And me, I was out in Bozo Land, flying about in a lawn chair, watching stars and planets and hamburgers fly by. Something about that bothered me, but I couldn’t nail down exactly what it was. I watched Leatherface for a time, then heard: