Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In
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- Название:The Complete Drive-In
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Even the B-movie gods could not be proved except in my dreams. Maybe they were not gods at all but some sort of life-form that was far enough advanced that they served the purpose of god counterfeit deities. Alien filmmakers. Youthful aliens who have had an interesting accident with their chemistry set. Or nothing more than my need for there to be reason and design where there was none; I so desperately wanted there to be gods and magic, even if they were bad.
“Timber,” yelled Sam.
I turned and looked up and the pole was starting to go, dragging its lightning after it.
“The flare,” Sam said.
I pulled the flare gun, lifted it and fired at an angle, not knowing the height of our sky. The flare went bright red and pretty against the dark and the strands of blue lightning. I dropped the gun and started running for the fence, Sam behind me, wheezing. Before we made it there, the symbol came down, and it lost its lightning; it was like the lightning was bubble gum and it had been stretched too far and had popped free. The symbol came down on the concession with a crunch, and there was a momentary crackling and sizzling that hurt my ears and made my flesh feel warm, then debris flew and the lights of the projectors went out.
I got hold of the fence and pulled myself up, straddled it. There was still plenty of light from the lightning overhead, and I could see that Bob had gotten a late start, but was coming. The old bus whined like an unpleasant child, the lights shone like miniature suns. The bus hit the concession with a screech and a blast, and a rush of flame went through it, blew the windows out and wrapped around the roof, kicked the back door open. All manner of crap propelled out the open door and went sailing, including the bed Mable was strapped to. It skidded across the asphalt, twisted sideways and struck a Volkswagen, ricocheted back toward the burning bus, stopped spinning halfway there, sat smoldering like a cheap cigar. The blanket had been torn partially free, and Mable’s arm with the plumbing-pipe hand came out from under it and struck the ground, lay there like a stiff white spider unable to run. The recipe cards had also escaped from beneath the blanket and they were fluttering down. Some had been flame-kissed and were nothing now but blackened wisps.
I saw Bob. He had jumped. He was on his feet and limping toward me. He had the shotgun and he was still wearing his hat. I felt like cheering but before I could celebrate, the debris shifted, boards lifted and dropped as the Popcorn King stood up out of the rubble. He was charred from head to foot. That part of his head that was the popcorn cup had a lick of flame fluttering out of it like a feather in a fez. A board had gone through his top chest. Glass poked out of his flesh. He looked very unhappy, and he was looking directly at me.
He reached up with his top right hand and pulled the board out of his chest and tossed it aside. He started walking out of the debris, toward me.
“Get away from there,” Bob yelled. “Run.”
But I was frozen, watching the King. He was moving slowly, staggering. He no longer had the blue glow. He looked more like a bad acrobat act, a little guy on a big guy’s shoulders.
The King opened his mouth and coughed out smoke. He fell to his knees and the tattoos dripped off him like melting licorice and formed a dark pool on the ground. The King lay face down and quit moving.
I got down off the fence and went over there. I could hear Sam calling to me to help him over, asking what was happening. I could hear Bob telling me to run, but I didn’t pay either of them any mind.
I bent down to the King and whispered, “Randy?”
The head lifted slightly. The single eye looked at me. I couldn’t tell if there was recognition there or not. Maybe it was just confusion. A tooth fell out of his mouth and clinked on the asphalt, was followed by a little lake of vomit in which one of the cyclopean popcorns floated; the eye was dead and filmed over.
“Eat and be fed, brother,” the King’s upper mouth said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Turning down a sick man,” the King said, and it was the lower mouth this time. “That’s a hell of a note.”
He laid his head down gently, his face in the vomit. His head was turned so I could still see the single eye. He opened his top left hand and there was a crumpled paper skull in it. “Second-rate materials. Second-rate effects,” Randy’s voice said. “I could have done better with household supplies.”
The one eye closed. The Popcorn King was dead.
But Mable wasn’t. About that time she screamed.
4
When I turned, I saw that at Mable’s scream Sam had made it over the fence and sprinted over to her. Bob was ahead of him, tearing off the smoldering blanket. Sam and Bob got arms around her and lifted her up and Sam said, “Oh, honey bugs, I thought you were croaked. Done gone to be with Jesus.”
Mable was clutching one of the recipe cards in her good hand. She looked at it there in the light of the burning concession and the lightning overhead. “Polk salad,” she said. “Now that’s a good one, if you get it when the shoots are young. Don’t, you might as well cook you up a mess of Johnson grass.”
I started over to join them, stopped. The patrons of both lots were coming out of the shadows, into the light of the great fire, coming toward us. A more unpleasant crowd I’d never seen. The patrons from Lot A no longer had their movies, and neither lot had their King and their popcorn.
Sam and Bob saw me looking, and they swiveled Mable around so that they were all facing the crowd. I pulled the pistol from my belt and held it against my leg and walked over there.
Bob and Sam gently lowered Mable to the ground. She sat there reading the pork salad recipe, nodding over it.
“It ain’t over,” Sam said. “It ain’t never over.”
“The King,” went the cry from the crowd. “The King.”
Then they swarmed us. I heard Bob’s shotgun roar and I got off one shot-and missed. In a crowd, no less. Jack the deadly gunman. Sweaty, hot bodies piled on me and I struck the ground hard and someone said an obscenity in my face and some other smart aleck twisted the gun out of my hand and hit me with it, which is kind of humiliating, getting clubbed with your own gun, I mean. Next the crowd started dribbling me around the lot with fists and feet and I got beyond pain and entered into nice, dark, cozy unconsciousness.
But that didn’t last long.
Lot A built a bigger and better fire out of the smoldering lumber of the concession stand so they would have plenty of light to work by, but they managed to save enough of the lumber for cooking and building.
What they built was crosses.
They got some nails out of the wreckage and someone had a hammer, and they stripped us naked and held us down and crucified us. That hurt bad enough, but when they dropped our crosses into the holes the concession pilings had been in, that was real pain. It shook my entire body until I felt as if the tips of my teeth would bulb up and squirt blood.
They packed the holes tight with junk from the concession, then piled lumber around the bottoms of the crosses and looked up at us like chefs contemplating the larder.
The nails hurt something awful, but worse was the racking pain throughout the body and the pressure it put on the lungs. Now and then I had to make my legs work so I could force myself up on the nail through my feet and get some good breaths. I’d stay that way long as I could until the muscles in my feet cramped and I had to let go. Then I’d have trouble breathing again, and I’d get my strength back just enough before my lungs collapsed, and I’d push up once more. I had just thought Coach Murphy’s calisthenics in PE were tough.
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