Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“We kind of know what’s at the end,” Grace said. “We’ve got an idea what we’re going to do there.” And she told Steve a condensed version of the story she told us. When she finished Steve quit moving his cigar. He took it out of his mouth and put it in his pocket. I couldn’t help but think of Crier’s dick.

“Sound’s like you folks are going to get killed, is what it sounds like to me,” Steve said.

“We don’t expect you to go if you don’t want,” Grace said. “We’d appreciate your carrying us as far as you can, though.”

“What if I said this was as far as I was going?” Steve said.

“That would be it then,” Grace said.

“You’d walk through this stuff at night?”

“I would,” Grace said.

“I’m not crazy about that part,” Bob said. “I might even be talked out of it. I might even ride back with you the other way.”

“You?” Steve asked me.

“All that matters right now,” I said, “is are you going to the end or not. If you go back, you know what you’ve got.”

“Sounds like I have a pretty good idea of what I’m gonna get if I go forward too.” He looked hard at me. “Tell you what else, I think if I go back and Bob here goes with me, you’ll go too. You don’t look like any kind of hero to me. The gal here will keep walking, I can tell that. She doesn’t think she needs much of anybody.”

“That’s not true,” Grace said. “I can use all the help I can get. But if I don’t get it, I’m going on.”

“I’m no knight in white armor, lady,” Steve said.

“Never crossed my mind you might be.”

Steve smiled and put the cigar back in his mouth. He still didn’t light it.

“All right, I’ll haul you on, but maybe we ought to come up with a game plan. And first thing to start with is getting rid of the old boy in the trunk. He’s starting to stink all the way from the back. It bothers my driving. I don’t figure we’ll have to eat him, with all this fruit and stuff out there, so let’s get shed of him.”

I got Crier’s legs and Bob got him by the shoulders and we lifted him out of the Plymouth’s trunk. He had swelled up a bit, and he really did stink.

We carried him over to the side of the road and put him down. I said, “I told him I wouldn’t do this. I promised I’d get him to the end of the highway.”

“Me too,” Bob said, “but a person doesn’t always get what they want, and you can’t always keep your promise. Besides, if he’d known he was gonna stink like this, maybe he wouldn’t have asked it of us.”

Crier’s dick had come out of his pocket and rolled up next to the spare, and since it was past the handling stage, and looked like a big jalapeno going to rot, Steve got a couple of sticks and scissored it out of there and carried it over and dropped it next to Crier.

“We ought to bury him,” I said.

“Something will just dig him up,” Steve said, “and this ground isn’t any kind of ground for digging. But if you want, there’s a worn-down spot over there and we can throw him off in that, maybe find something to cover him up, for all that amounts to.”

We carried Crier over to the worn-down spot and put him in it. He was stiff as a tire iron and lay there in the indentation as if he had fallen sideways out of a chair and frozen. Steve kicked the dick on over and into the hole and we got some brush and limbs and the few rocks we could find, and put them on top of him. We got everything covered but the bottom of his shoes. Our hands sure did smell bad.

We got in the car and drove away. Bob said, “I guess we could have at least put his dick in his pocket.”

All over the place were these TVs and antennas and papers, and the darker it got the more those papers came and swirled and collected in the trees with the film, which was now thicker than the leaves.

Over to the right, just above the trees, you could see what looked like an inverted tornado dipping down, and all of its swirls were filled with posters and bags and stuff. And on the ground were lots of TV sets. It was like we were getting closer to the garbage dump.

It got darker and we kept driving, but now we had all the windows up because the paper storm had really gotten bad, and it somehow seemed safer from the ghosts that way, even if they weren’t really dangerous.

All along the highway were people impaled on antennas, and the headlights would wink at the metal between their legs, and sometimes you could see blood and shit on the antennas. But the more often you didn’t, and as we looked closer, we saw why. There were few real people impaled. Most of what was there were dummies.

A thing I couldn’t put a name to began to move in the back of my mind, but whatever was crawling back there went away when I saw what was in the distance.

The Orbit, its tall tin fence sparkling in the lightning flashes like a woman’s wedding band catching the fire from a candlelight dinner.

From that distance, it looked like the crumbled remains of an old castle, way the shadows fell over and moved around on it, way the lightning popped and fizzled overhead, way the paper and posters swirled around and into it like ghosts heading home.

We pulled off the road near one of the impaled dummies, turned off the lights, and talked about it.

“Seems to me,” Steve said, “driving on in isn’t the answer, not if it’s like you say it is, Grace.”

“That’s how he said it was, though he called it a kind of church.”

“This is your show,” Bob said. “What do you want to do? Tell us, and then I’ll tell you if I’ll do it.”

“Wait until morning. Let me sleep on it. Turn the car around and pull off near the trees on the other side, and take turns at watch. That way nobody comes up on us. In the morning I’ll know what to do.”

“In other words,” Bob said, “you’ll be ready to do something even if it’s wrong?”

“Pretty much,” Grace said. “One of you guys take first watch.” She leaned against her side of the car and closed her eyes and went to sleep, or pretended to.

“Yes, Commandant,” Bob said.

“Once they got the right to vote, it’s been downhill ever since,” Steve said.

“I heard that,” Grace said.

We guys tried to talk for a while, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. We knew Steve’s life story. I took the first watch and we took turns doing that all night, and the last watch was Grace’s, I think, because I’d come awake from time to time and see who was on duty. Anyway, next thing I knew it was morning and Grace had the door open and was dumping some fruit in my lap.

It wasn’t good fruit. It was kind of sour, but I ate it anyway, and lots of it. I looked at the morning and thought it looked pretty fresh, more real than usual. The papers had stopped swirling and the film lay in the trees and on the ground like burnt bacon.

Grace, Bob and Steve were over by one of the dummies and Steve had a stick and was poking it. I got out of the car and went over there.

Bob said, “Popalong sure works to make things look scary. Speaking of scary, you look like hell.”

“Thanks.”

“We sort of got us a game plan,” Steve said. “Or rather Grace has one.”

“All right,” I said, “let me hear it.”

It wasn’t complicated. It went like this. We’d wait until near dark, then start toward the Orbit, going along the edge of the jungle until we got around on the left-hand side of the place and could work around to the back, then climb up on the fence and have a look over. After that, we could play it by ear. Locate Sue Ellen, go in there and nab her and get out of there. As for Popalong, Grace said, “don’t worry about him none. I’ll take care of him, come hell or high water.”