Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

The crowd had spread out, and I got up. I felt a little on the limp side.

“Take off your belt, Jack,” Bob said, “and give it to that preacher fella to put on the woman. He doesn’t make her a tourniquet pretty quick, she’s gonna die.”

“She’s gonna die anyway,” a man in the crowd said. “Why don’t you just let us go on and eat her, and you two can join in. Hell, you can go first.”

“That’s a good idea,” the greasy-haired girl said.

“No thanks,” Bob said.

I took off my belt and gave it to Sam. He got down on his hands and knees and applied it to Mable’s arm, about six inches above the wound. It cut off most of the bleeding.

“I think you’re supposed to let that off now and then,” Bob said. “You don’t, she’ll lose her whole arm… if it don’t kill her.”

“I got some idea how to do it,” Sam said. When he leaned over to make an extra adjustment on the belt, a can of sardines tipped out of his pocket. All eyes went to that can.

“They’ve got a lot of those,” I said to Bob. “That’s how they’ve been holding things together. And nobody’s tried to take it away from them because they’ve got the bus rigged with a bomb.”

“You don’t say?” Bob said. “And here I was thinking this was all just the power of the Lord, and it’s cans of sardines.”

“You mess with that bus,” Sam said, “it’ll blow you out of this drive-in,”

“That’s an idea,” Bob said. “Okay, Mr. Preacher, get your wife there. Jack, give him a hand. Ya’ll come with me. Rest of you Christians just sort of lick up here while we’re gone.”

Sam and I got our arms around Mable and got her up. She came to briefly, but she couldn’t walk. We dragged her away, the toes of her house shoes scraping the asphalt. I looked back over my shoulder as we went away from there, and the greasy-haired girl grabbed the sardines and tried to make a run for it. She was swamped. At the bottom of the mound of thrashing arms and legs you could hear her yelling, “Mine, mine.”

The guy who had dropped the hubcap snatched Mable’s hand from it, sprinted off tearing at it with his teeth. He rounded an elderly Chevy, practically leaped from one row to the other, weaved into some other cars and disappeared into shadows, perhaps to lie under some automobile and chew on his prize like a contented terrier.

A middle-aged woman in jean shorts and a red blouse dove down on the hubcap and began to lap at the blood there. A man dropped to his knees to join her. They growled at each other like Dobermans.

“Praise the Lord,” Bob said.

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

When we came to the bus, Bob made Sam put Mable down and give him the key. Sam said he would give him the key if he was going to be so foolish, but he would rather be shot point-blank with the shotgun before he would open it himself. The results would be too terrible, and the death of all of us would be on his hands.

Bob put the key in the lock and opened the back door.

He looked at us and smiled. “Boom,” he said.

“Well,” Sam said, “it worked up until now.”

Bob climbed inside and we went after. The bus had shelves and the shelves had wire over them, and behind the wire were oodles of canned goods, mostly sardines and Vienna sausages. Two of my all-time non-favorites under normal conditions. Right now they looked rather attractive. My stomach growled like an attack dog.

“Comfy in here,” Bob said.

Sam and I helped Mable over to a bed that folded away from the bus wall, and Sam got a bucket and put that by the bed and took the pressure off the tourniquet. Blood shot out of the wound and into the bucket. “We were afeared of a nigger takeover,” Sam explained as he tightened the tourniquet again. “Figured it came down to us or the niggers, we’d have this food put back, and that would hold us for a time.”

I looked around more now that my eyes were adjusted. There was all manner of stuff in there. Plumbing tools, carpentry tools, painting equipment, even a welding torch and the tanks to go with it arranged on a dolly.

“Guns?” Bob asked.

“We hadn’t gotten around to that,” Sam said. “That was next.”

“Wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“I’m telling the truth… Damn you, why’d you have to shoot Mable’s hand off?”

“Seemed sort of necessary,” Bob said. “She was about to cut my buddy’s throat. “Though I figure the dumb sucker deserved it. Christians, my ass.”

“Watch your language,” Sam said. “If it had been her foot, that wouldn’t have been so bad. But her hand. She likes to cook and give me back rubs, and she needs two good hands to do them things right.”

“She wasn’t holding the knife with her foot,” Bob said. “Just be glad I’m shooting slugs, or you’d have all got peppered.”

I looked at Mable. Her face was as pale as a baby’s ass, and her eyes were foggy. I figured she wasn’t going to make it.

About then she opened her eyes and said, “You know, the thing that would do me some good right now is a chicken fried steak. Maybe some mashed taters and cream gravy and rolls with it. Big ole glass of ice tea.”

“Rest now,” Sam said.

“It’s the batter does it on them steaks,” Mable said. “Don’t got that right, it ain’t worth eatin’. You dip the steak in the milk-and-egg batter, then into the flour, then back into the milk and egg, then back into the flour. Makes it extra crispy.”

“Ssshhhh, now, sugar bee, you rest.”

“Don’t do it that way, you don’t get that good flaky crust, and I do like a good flaky crust.”

She passed out again.

Bob came over and gave me one of the pistols from his belt. “Here, you might want to shoot someone later.”

I took it and walked to the open door at the back of the bus and looked out. The Christians were fist-fighting, probably over drops of blood on the asphalt, or what was left of the sardines Sam had dropped. I could see the greasy-haired girl lying on her side with her eyes wide open. There was a young man with a knife cutting strips of meat off her legs. I took a deep breath and closed the door.

Bob and I ate sardines while Sam lay asleep on the floor near Mable, who now and then came awake and gave us in great detail one of her favorite recipes. We had been through cherry pie, buttermilk biscuits, chili and hominy cakes.

“I feel kind of bad eating another person’s food,” I said.

“They were going to eat you,” Bob said. “Look at it that way.”

“A point,” I said, and ate a little faster.

“You’re going to need your strength when the Christians come for us. They’re not going to be worried about the bomb anymore. They’ll have it figured now, since we didn’t get blown up.”

“How’d you know the bus wasn’t rigged with a bomb?”

“Just figured… didn’t know for sure… Hell, Jack, I don’t care anymore. If this is life, it ain’t worth living. I think what you and I ought to do is something real foolish. Otherwise, we’ll end up licking blood out of hubcaps.”

“What you got in mind?” I asked.

“Destroy the Orbit symbol.”

I mulled that over awhile. “It has a ring to it. Any reason?”

Bob looked back to make sure Sam and Mable were still sleeping. “Come with me.” He pulled the lever and opened the door and we went outside, “You’ve been a mite busy to notice, but when I woke up and seen you were gone, I figured you’d joined the Christians.”

“Okay, I was a jackass. Happy?”

“It’s just your way, Jack. I’m used to it. Anyway, I woke up and come out of the camper and the first thing I seen was that.”

He pointed at the Orbit symbol. “And it’s worse now than when I’m talking about.”