Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

A lot of women were pregnant, and though I’m not good at guessing things like that, they looked pretty close to domino date to me. Of course, time here is too hard to judge.

There were little huts along the street and some of them had plank counters out front with things to trade on them. There was one that had flat-in-the-middle green bread with flies on it, and behind the counter was this woman leaning on a hut post with her dress hiked up and her butt free to the air. There was a guy with his pants down against her, and he was putting it to her. If the woman liked it, it didn’t show, and the fella looked like a man called to duty.

It didn’t take long, and when they finished she let down her dress and took the loaf of bread and went away. The man pulled up his pants and looked at us.

“Ya’ll want bread?”

“I don’t think so,” Bob said.

“We went on down the street and came to another stand, and on its counter was a turtle shell turned upside down, and there was a wooden pestle in it. All around the shells were piles of fruit.

A guy with a belly that looked like a bag of rocks under his shirt got off a stump when he saw us coming and came over and smiled at us. All this teeth had gone south except one dead center of his bottom gum. The rest of him didn’t look too good either.

“Want me to make you a fruit drink?” he said. “Mashed right here while you wait.”

“Nope,” Crier said.

Next to the fruit juice place was a hut with a sign out front painted in black mud that read: Library.

“They’re kidding,” Bob said.

I went over and pulled the curtain of reeds aside and looked in. There was just enough room for one person in there, and that one person had to sit on a rotting stump because the roof was low. There was one crude shelf of books, and under the shelf was a little sign that said: PLEASE RETURN BOOKS.

I went inside and looked at what they had to offer. There was a Bible covered in red plastic with a zipper on it. I unzipped it and looked inside. Saw that everything Jesus had said was printed in red so you could tell it from ol’ So-and-So.

Alongside it was a collection of Rod McKuen’s poetry and a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull with “This book belongs to David Webb and is his inspiration” written inside.

There were two copies of the Watchtower, one concentrating on the dilemmas of dating in the modern world, the other on the deterioration of the family unit.

There was also a pamphlet for raising chinchillas for fun and profit (neither the fun or profit being to the advantage of the chinchillas); a postcard with a gerbil’s picture on the front and a note on the back that said they could be seen at some petting zoo; a photo-novel of Superman 3; and a souvenir hand fan from Graceland with a picture of the erstwhile King of Rock’n’Roll on one side (prebloat) and the words to “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog” on the other. There were also a couple of poems that didn’t rhyme written on some dirty popcorn bags with eyeliner pencil.

I took the Elvis fan and fanned myself, then put it back and went outside. The others had wandered down the street, not having felt the pull of the arts.

The guy with the one tooth said, “Find anything?”

“I fanned myself a little.”

“It’s checked out right now, but there’s a pretty good Max Brand novel we got, ‘cept the last couple of pages are torn out. Some fella wrote an ending for it, though. He wrote on the inside back cover, ‘He rode off into the West and everything was okay.’ Seems a good enough ending to most anything, don’t it?”

“Does at that. I take it you’re also the librarian?”

“Yeah, but people want fruit juices more than they want books. Only thing is they don’t always have something good to trade. Tell you, I’ve had all the dry pussy I want. It’s making the head of my dick raw. In the long run I get the bad end of the trade. I’d really rather have some kind of meat, fish, maybe some roots that are good to boil.”

“Commerce can be a bitch,” I said.

When I caught up with the others, they were standing beside the street looking out between a couple of shacks made of mud and sticks, staring at a man hanging from the limb of a big oak tree. He was spinning around, kicking his feet and working his elbows as if in a square dance. The elbows were all he could work of his arms, since his hands were tied behind his back.

On a bench near the oak sat two men and a woman. They looked like benched baseball players waiting for their turn at an inning.

“Suicide tree I told you about,” Grace said. “Come on.”

“I don’t want to see that,” I said.

“Me neither,” Bob said.

“I’ll pass too,” Crier said.

“Do what you want,” Grace said to me, “but they’re going to hang themselves anyway and you fellas need pants.”

“Pants?” I said.

“You think those folks are gonna need them later?”

“I got pants,” Crier said. “They’re ragged, but they’re pants. I’ll just hang out.”

Grace led Bob and me over to the tree. I looked up at the guy. His face was purple as a plum and his neck was swollen out in such a way it was starting to spread over the rope. His tongue was flopping against his chin and he was biting through it. His eyes were crossed and the lid of one was drooped halfway down and the other eye looked like a table tennis ball being pushed out of the hole from behind.

We went over to the bench. The woman was sitting on the end near us and the men were sitting next to each other. She looked at us. The hair on one side of her head had been burned off, and the hair on the other side wasn’t anything to be proud of. It was dirty-brown and kinky as wire. I’ve seen Brillo pads with more class. She had on a filthy T-shirt and her nipples were punching through it. The jeans she had on were thin enough to shit through. Her face wasn’t any kind of special. It was covered with pimples and red welts. She was barefoot.

The two guys weren’t fashion models either. They had beards full of dirt, bugs and fruit seeds. Their dark coloring wasn’t the result of the sun’s rays. You could have packed lunches on the pores of their skin.

I hated to think what I looked like.

“Bench is full,” the woman said. “Come back tomorrow. Three’s about it for a day. Them’s the rules.”

“We’re not here to hang ourselves,” Grace said.

“If you’re going to watch,” she said, “stay back out of the way. This bastard won’t never choke. I bet he’s been up there an hour.”

“He looks about gone to me,” I said.

The man beside her, the skinnier of the two, said, “Who can tell how long he’s been up there. Time isn’t worth a duck fart here. But you should have seen him just a little while ago. He looked worse than this. I think he’s gotten him a second wind.”

“Maybe he’s changed his mind,” I said.

At that the hanging man began to kick his legs vigorously. “No, don’t think so,” the woman said.

“Look at him,” I said.

“You can’t pay that any mind. It doesn’t mean a thing. He wanted to go worse than the rest of us. He bit Clarence there to get first in line.”

Clarence was the skinny fella. He held up a sticklike arm and pushed his short sleeve back. There was a crescent of teeth wounds.

“He called me some things I’ve never heard,” said Clarence, “then he pushed me on the ground and bit me. I told him to go ahead. Hell, I wasn’t even next in line. Fran was. But look who he bit. That’s the way it’s always been for me. I tied his hands for him and boosted him into the rope. More than he deserved, I’ll tell you. Which reminds me, you folks around when Gene here goes, maybe you could tie his hands for him. It works better that way, otherwise you claw at the rope, no matter how bad you want to go.”