Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“Maybe not,” Bob said. “Hell, just throw some of that grass over the spots that don’t fit, and fuck it.”

Crier turned back to his work, took hold of Sam’s free arm and brutally twisted it behind Sam’s back like a kid working his end of a wishbone. When the arm cracked loud enough to run a cold tremor up my spine, Crier pushed it down against Sam’s back and put a foot on it and pressed, rocking back and forth on it until it stayed in place. He bent Sam’s overlong legs at the knee, folded them to where the soles of his feet touched the back of his naked thighs, sat on them and bounced hard.

Every time Crier got up to examine his handiwork, the legs would creep up slowly. Finally Crier had had enough. He hopped on them one last time, got up and grabbed the hubcap and started scraping the dirt into the trench and topped it off by tossing loose grass on it.

I guess it was an okay grave, in that it beat lying naked in the grass with a blanket full of your shit nearby, but it was disconcerting to see the top of Sam’s feet and part of his ankles sticking up in the moonlight. If any of Sam’s relatives had been around, I don’t think they’d have liked it.

I suppose it got to Crier too, because he took the hubcap and set it on the soles of Sam’s feet as a kind of marker. And though it wasn’t perfect, it did sort of tidy things up.

Without saying a word, Crier went around on the other side of the truck and got in. I could tell from the way the truck moved he had lain down in the seat.

Bob leaned over to me and said, “Think it would be okay if I asked him to help us into the camper?”

“Maybe not just now,” I said.

From inside the cab we heard Crier say something about “goddamn ingrates,” and Bob and I went very, very quiet.

We crawled under the truck and tried to sleep. The grass made it pretty soft, but there were bugs crawling on me and it began to get cold and I was feeling stiff in the hands and feet. One thing I had gotten used to in the drive-in was the constant moderate temperature, and that made the chill seem even chillier.

I got one of the larger bugs off of me and crushed it with my thumb and forefinger, a movement that made my sore hand throb. The bug’s body collapsed like a peanut husk. I tried to look at it closely, but under the truck with only a stray strand of moonlight, there wasn’t much to see. It looked like a crushed bug. Maybe I was expecting little silver wires and a battery the size of a pinhead.

I suppose Crier started feeling guilty, because in the middle of the night he came and woke us up and pulled us out from under the truck and helped us into the camper, which he had, in fact, cleaned out quite well, though the odor of Sam’s last bad meals clung to the interior like moss.

Still, it wasn’t cold in there and the bugs, real or synthetic, weren’t crawling or biting.

After we lay down, and Crier was about to shut the back of the camper, Bob said, “No kiss and story?”

Crier held out his hand, palm up, made a fist and let the cobra rise.

Bob looked at Crier’s stiff middle finger and said, “That’s not nice.”

Crier shut the back of the camper and went around to the front seat and lay down.

Bob managed to get up on his knees and thumped his forehead against the glass that connected the camper to the cab.

Crier sat up and turned to look. I’ve seen more pleasant faces on water moccasins.

“Night-night,” Bob said.

Crier did the trick with his finger again, only with less flourish this time, then lay down out of sight.

Bob wiggled onto his sleeping bag, got on his side and looked at me and said, “You know, I like that guy, I really do.”

That night the dreams came back, the same sort I’d had in the drive-in. They seemed more like visions than dreams, like I had tapped into some consciousness that controlled things. Bob and Crier didn’t have the dreams, so I could only guess that through some quirk of fate, or by alien design, I had been given this gift. Or, I was as crazy as a cat in a dryer.

Hot-wired to aliens or not, the dreams/visions were clear. I could see the aliens in them, their bulbous heads sporting wiggling tendons tipped with eyes, tentacles flashing about, touching gears and punching buttons. Lights and buzzers and beepers going off and on around them. And them leaning forward, conversing with one another in a language that sounded like grunts, squeaks, burps and whines, and yet, a language I could somehow understand.

And some of the things they were saying went like this:

“Slow, uh-huh, uh-huh… that’s it.”

“Nice, nice…”

“Very pretty, oh yes, very pretty… tight and easy now.”

“All right, that’s it. CUT!”

Then the connection was cut as well, and the dream or whatever it was, ended. The next thing I knew it was morning and Crier had joined us for breakfast, such as it was: a can of sardines that we had taken from Sam’s bus before we blew it up.

Afterwards, Crier got us out of the back of the camper and made us take turns walking, him supporting us, so that we could exercise our sore feet. Mine had started to curl like burned tortillas, and Crier said if I didn’t make them work, they’d quit on me, and that at best, I’d end up having a couple of lumps that had all the mobility of potted plants.

I believed him. I exercised. So did Bob, though he grumbled about it.

Worst part about the exercise, worse even than the pain, was the thirst. It had been a long time since I had had a drink of water, and of course, this was true of Bob and Crier too. In the drive-in, for a time, we existed on soft drinks, and later on, Bob and I had nothing but the juice from jerky, and now the liquid from sardines.

If that doesn’t sound so bad, go out some summer evening and do some kind of hard work, like say hauling hay, then try quenching your thirst with a big glass of soy oil or meat broth.

The bottom line was we were dehydrating, starting to look like flesh-colored plastic stretched over a frame of coat hangers.

“I figure,” Crier said, after we got through exercising and were sitting with our backs against the truck, “any place as full of trees and grass and critters as this, ought to have water.”

I wasn’t so sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come to what looked like a stream only to discover it was colored glass or rippling cellophane.

We were looking at Sam’s grave while we talked, examining his ankles sticking up, his feet wearing the hubcap, and all of a sudden, we grew silent, as if possessed of a hive mind.

“I could have at least spoken some words over him,” Crier said.

“And who the hell would you have been talking to?” Bob said. “Sam? He don’t give a damn about nothing no more. God? Personally, I’m not real fond of the sonofabitch. Or wouldn’t be, if I thought he, she, or it, existed.”

I didn’t say so, but I was in Bob’s camp. Like the drive-in patrons, God was on my shit list. I had tried religion during our stay in the drive-in, and it hadn’t exactly been a rewarding experience.

I had decided that if there was a God, he was a cruel sonofabitch to allow the things he allowed. Especially since he claimed his name was synonymous with love. It seemed to me that he was little more than a celestial Jack the Ripper, offering us, his whores, rewards with one hand, smiling and telling us he loved us, while with the other hand he held a shiny, sharp knife, the better with which to disembowel us.

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” Crier said, “but I feel I owe the boy some words because he’s a human being. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to the wind, or just myself. I didn’t give him the best kind of burial, so it’s the least I can do. And who knows, if there is some God out there, maybe he’ll be listening.”