Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

That’s right.

Just off the trail, parked between two great trees, out there in the weeds. Vines had grown around the tires and twisted up under it and through cracks and under the hood. The vines held it tight to the ground like they owned it.

There were other things around as well, all of them just as inexplicable. A large pontoon boat. A World War II plane, not to mention a Confederate flag on a flagpole, just stuck up in the dirt, and lying about, a bunch of beer cans, a pack of rubbers, and some cigarette butts.

Above, in the sky where a break in the trees let us see it, was a great funnel.

No shit.

The small end of it dipped down out of the sky, and the rest of it flared wide and gray and up into the heavens, and all we could figure was the bus and all the other stuff had come down that great funnel, come to rest here in the jungle.

I’ve thought on it a lot, but I’ve never come up with any explanation that satisfies, but then again, this world is full of unsatisfactory questions and few if any revelations.

But, anyway, we found this bus, and we came across the bus many times after that on our treks, and finally we managed the door open, and began using it for storage. It was a pretty good place to hide from critters chasing us, as well. A kind of halfway station. We got the front door to work and the back door to work, and one day, just for fun, I turned the key, which was in the engine, and – it started.

No shit.

Fired right up.

The gas gauge rocked forward. A near full tank.

Like everything here, it didn’t make sense.

Where did it come from?

Had it come another time?

Who had been in it?

Kids on their way to school?

A band trip?

Football team on its way to or back from a game?

We didn’t know.

Over the next few… days? weeks? months? years?… Steve and I, and a couple of others, have been working to free it of the vines. The tires are all flat, blown out and ripped up to be exact, and the bus looks to have run on the rims, driving like crazy, pursued by… who knows what?

That comet that sucked it in?

Giant aliens with tweezers, ready to grab hold of it and fling it down the funnel?

Who knows?

But there were a few tires on a few vehicles in the drive-in lot that fit, so we jacked it up and loaded it down with rubber, and, with handmade bellows and the remains of a bicycle pump, we inflated the tires.

One day, I drove it back to the drive-in, and they opened the great barrier we had made at the fore of the place, and I steered it inside. I closed it off, began living in it.

So when I determine tomorrow has come (keeping in mind I say this often), I am going to drive out of here in my sacred little home.

Not down the highway, but down the trail where the bus was discovered, just drive off into a new mystery.

And perhaps a short existence.

It has to beat this.

In which Jack and friends venture out into the great world which turns wet, and they see strange beasts in the shadows, an odd ghost, and, in the distance, shiny in the sunlight, the stairway to heaven. Maybe.

And so the sun came up, and I called it tomorrow. I hitched up my mind and my resolve, and I said to myself, Self, I’m driving out of here.

Today, baby, is the day.

So I went to Grace and Steve, and I said, “I’m leaving.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Hunting. Foraging?”

“Leaving,” I said.

Grace, long and lean and beautiful, and quite naked, stood up and stretched (I could smell that they had been sexin’ it up), and said, “You asking us to go?”

“I’m telling you I’m going, and you want to go you can. It’s up to you. There’s a couple others I’m gonna ask, and then I’m gonna go, without folks or with folks.”

“We have been here a long time,” Grace said. “I think. I really don’t know. But it seems like we have. Shit, I say we go, Steve.”

Steve nodded. “Beats nailing your dick to a two-by-four.”

The day was as bright as a rich man’s day, and I had all the world before me.

Such as it was.

Stuffed with dinosaurs and monsters and strangeness.

But, I didn’t want to think about that.

The sun was bright. The trail was clear.

So, what we did was this: We found a few others who wanted to go. Most were afraid to go. Afraid if they got away from the drive-in with its relative protection, they would surely be on their own.

It was amazing. Once they had all been mostly young partygoers out for a weekend night at a four-screened drive-in, and now they called it home. And didn’t want to leave. Did not want to go out into the world with a New Big Bad Wolf, but wanted to stay with the Wolf They Knew.

I guess it was best to have only a few with us. Less to worry about. Fewer personalities to mess with.

Me, I wanted to go to my real home.

Didn’t know how.

Didn’t know if I could.

But I had to find out.

We managed to take a gas tank out of a car with tools found in the trunk of another car, and we put that tank in the bus, filled it with gas we siphoned from vehicles, and we corked the spare tank with a wooden plug, as the exterior screw-on cap had been long lost, and we put it in the back of the bus for reserve. We put some fruit back there, as well. Steve and Grace had some meat that wasn’t too rancid (dead critter found in the forest the day before, ants part of the treat), some water in gourd containers, a few odds and ends, and then we gave each other our best wishes and were off.

Or we would have been, but Steve came up with an idea.

“If we’re gonna be traveling about, and we don’t even know where we’re going, I think we ought to be prepared.”

“We got fruit and a dead thing we can eat. If we don’t wait a long time.”

This was from a guy named, and I shit thee not, Homer.

He was one of our volunteers. He looked like what you thought a Homer ought to look like. Kind of tall and lean and goofy with hair the color of watered-down shit that fled over his head in good patches, but showed through in spots and was as shiny there as a dog-licked dinner plate.

“Right you are, Homer,” Steve said, “but that stuff will run out. We’ll need new food.”

“I knew that,” Homer said. “You think I didn’t know that?”

“I know you do, but what I’m talking is strapping them goddamn pontoons on either side of the bus, and if we need to float across a river, we can do it. I think, if we work on the backdoor window, we can fix it so we can take it out when we want. And we can make a rudder, stick it out the window there, and though we can’t motor this baby across a river, maybe we could guide it some.”

“It’s a thought,” I said.

“Hell, it’s a good idea,” Steve said.

We spent another day transferring the pontoons to the bus and making the rudder. We rigged the glass on the back door so we could take it in and out; rigged it so we could poke out the rudder and hook it on the window frame with some wire Steve found somewhere in the drive-in. Steve also rigged us up a tape player and we took tapes from all the cars we could find, except for Barry Manilow or similar shit, and then we were ready to go.

We put the box of tools inside, and just before we were to leave, a young woman came up the trail. She was short and pretty nice looking, or would have been, had her clothes not been made of an animal hide with a hole cut in it, draped over her head and cinched up with an old belt. It might have helped too if her hair had been clean and she wasn’t so scratched up on the legs, and she hadn’t had a look in her eye that made you think maybe she could see something just to the left of her nose no one else could see.