Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

These days the old houses are gone and you can stand in the parking lot of McDonald’s on fourth Street and toss a dried Big Mac underhanded and bounce it off the front glass of Wendy’s on the other side of the street. Or you can go over to University Drive and toss a pepperoni pizza, no anchovies, out of the driveway of Mazzio’s Pizza and wing an innocent bystander on the tableladen deck of Arby’s.

I went to high school and college in good ol’ Nac. The college is called Stephen F. Austin University, and it’s named after one of the guys that helped con Texas from Mexico.

I was majoring in anthropology/archaeology, but what I really wanted to be was a karate instructor, since my dad, who was a black belt in kenpo, had been teaching me ever since I was five. If it matters, I’m first degree brown belt now.

But like Dad, I couldn’t see any real future in martial arts. Or to be more precise, I think I let Mom convince me there wasn’t any future in it. She talked Dad into being a manager of an optical store and she wanted something like that for me, or as she always put it, “Kicking people is all right, but you can’t make a decent living at it. You got to have something to fall back on.”

Well, I had been hearing this speech since I was old enough to know which was the business end of a tampon, so when I saw this National Geographic special on archaeology on television, I thought it might be just what I was looking for.

There were these folks with tans about the color of fresh walnut stains applied to burnt mahogany, wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets, and they were swarming over these ruins. Fire ants couldn’t have been any busier.

They were doing a lot of pointing and writing in notebooks and looking intelligent. There were close-ups of pottery shards from pots that had been made before Jesus was old enough to suck Mary’s tit, and there were skull fragments and pieces of bones from the guys and gals that had made the pots.

The show ended with a close-up of this woman with sweat running from under her pith helmet and onto her face and mixing with the sand there, out over these little fragments of walls, looking soulful as a Baptist preacher, contemplating the past and all the great civilizations that had arisen there and folded back in on themselves like a card table.

It was inspiring.

Thinking back on it now, she may have been looking out over that sand waiting for somebody to pick her up in an air-conditioned truck and drive her over to a Mideast Hilton.

But the desire to dig holes in the ground and hold the bony remains of ancient pottery makers in my hands had come over me like the Holy Ghost. I couldn’t think of anything else. I checked out archaeology books and read them cover to cover and started envisioning ancient civilizations marching ghostlike through Nacogdoches, throwing down pots and bowls and breaking them so I could find them a zillion years later.

What I didn’t get from those books, or refused to get, was how goddamn hard archaeology is. And it’s dirty work. Those people on National Geographic weren’t just deeply tanned, they were downright filthy.

At the end of a day, having sifted through enough sand to fill Galveston Beach, the sun burning through my clothes like an X-ray, it was hard for me to take a whole lot of pride in a few broken pieces of pottery that some prehistoric dude had marked on with a pine needle.

Looking back on it, it was pretty wonderful stuff, I guess, but I don’t like working in the heat and getting so dirty you have to use a putty knife to get it off your elbows. And I didn’t even have a pith helmet. Just a cap that said Nacogdoches Dragons on it, and they weren’t winning many ball games.

If someone from National Geographic had showed up right then, I’d have stuffed a year’s run of magazines down their throat and kicked them until they shit a single bound volume.

It’s not that I’m a weak sister. I’m not. Karate gave me patience as well as determination. But it’s mostly clean work. A little sweat and dirty feet is all. And I did my workouts in our air-conditioned garage or the college gym. If you have to use martial arts on the street, it doesn’t take but a few moments to open up a can of whup-ass, then you can find some air-conditioned building to cool off in when it’s over.

Even indoor archaeology is hard.

On one dig I found some pottery pieces, and I was assigned to try and reconstruct them. That’s like giving a blind, crippled monkey a hammer, a bag of nails, and a pile of lumber and telling him to build an A-frame. I’m the gal who still has an unfinished fifty-piece puzzle of a white cat in my closet at home, and I got that puzzle for my tenth birthday.

I’d go to the lab every night and try to do that pottery, and I’ll tell you, after fifteen minutes of that I was dangerous. I wanted to kill something and drink a couple of bottles of Nervine.

Bottom line is, I quit. And that was the turning point. Had I stayed in archaeology, I’d probably have been home studying, or up at the lab, destroying my nerves with that pottery instead of meeting up with Timothy and Sue Ellen and tooling on over to the Orbit Drive-in that weird Friday night.

So, on the night after I’d given up archaeology and my chance to have something to fall back on, I was out riding around in my old Chevy Nova trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I’ll tell you, what I was coming up with was not pretty.

I thought about all those stories I’d heard about college dropouts and how they spent their lives working behind the counter at K-mart or pulling the train for the football team during off season. I could envision myself standing on the corner of North and Main with a cigarette jutting out of my mouth, one side of my lip pulled up in a permanent snarl, and me thinking how I can get a few dollars so I can go over to the 7 Eleven and buy me a bottle of Thunderbird wine. Nothing would be too low for me to do: prostitution, theft, drug-running, murder, working as a usedcar salesman. In time I would be shunned by winos and Baptists alike.

On the other hand, I was also thinking about whoever had inherited my prehistoric pottery shards, and I felt a wicked elation that while I was out tooling around, someone was hunched over those shards with their eyes twitching, their hands shaking, wishing I had quietly pushed those fragments down a gopher hole.

Anyway, I was riding around, taking back streets mostly, thinking, and I came up on this fire.

There were cars pulled over the curb and people were standing on the sidewalk and out front of their houses, watching a frat house burn down.

I pulled across from the house, behind the string of parked cars, got out and leaned on the Nova and watched.

The fire department was there and the firemen were jerking hoses, yelling and hopping on the lawn like grasshoppers. Every now and then one of them would erupt from the doorway of the burning structure like the end result of the Heimlich maneuver, land in the yard on his hands and knees, and crawl about feebly, coughing smoke like a little dragon.

I had never seen a fire like that before, and it didn’t take Smokey the Bear to tell me it was some kind of serious. A blazing paper hat would have been easier to save.

While I was watching the frat joint burn up-hating that it was an old house of the sort the city council loved to see go so an aluminum building the shape of a box could take its place, or some concrete could be laid down for a car lot-a tan van came down the street and stopped at the curb and three guys fell out of it yelling. Frats, I figured. Most likely they had gone for a six-pack, or to work their version of heavy machinery, a Trojan dispenser, and had come back to find they had forgot to turn the fire off from under the chili, and now their pad was on its way to becoming air pollution.