Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“Damn,” James said. “That’s a creepy thing to think about. Think I’d rather slip off in that water and drown than sail on forever, or until I just naturally died.”

“A natural death don’t seem likely,” Reba said.

We heard Steve calling.

“Look,” he was saying. “Look over there.”

When he made clear where over there was, we looked.

It was an amazing sight.

Way in the distance was a great ladder, or rather a bridge. I mean it was huge, like the goddamn Golden Gate Bridge. It was silver, and at its bottom there was a cloud of mist, so you couldn’t see to what it was attached, but it rose up high and shiny and chromey, rose up and went up into the sky and into the thick white clouds that surrounded it at the top like shaving cream.

You couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended, but it was wide, and though similar to the Golden Gate, instead of stretching across something, it was rising from somewhere at a slant, going up, disappearing into some place unseen.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Homer said.

“I wonder how far away it is?” Cory asked.

“Hard to say,” I said. “Out here, on this big piece of water, it could be close, or it could be way far away. You can’t really judge how big this water is, so that bridge-ladder-it could be close and small, or far away and huge.”

“I can tell you one thing,” Grace said. “It ain’t real close. It’s big. I get the impression that it’s goddamn big.”

“How can you tell?” Reba said.

“Well, I guess I can’t. But I’ll bet you. If I had something to bet.”

“You got something to bet all right,” Homer said.

“So do you. You bet against me, I’ll kick your goddamn nuts off,” Grace said.

“Let me think on it,” Homer said, “and I’ll get back to you.”

“But what is it?” James asked. “Where does it lead?”

“Heaven,” Homer said. “That bridge leads to heaven. It has to, ‘cause everything down here has got to be hell. And look how shiny and pretty it is. God would want a shiny bridge.”

“There isn’t any god,” Grace said. “It’s just us and whatever is behind all this.”

“Well, that’s god-like enough,” Cory said. “‘Cause something is sure strange, and I don’t think it’s government work. Not all this.”

“Aliens,” I said. “I know that’s what it is.”

“Well, whatever it is,” Homer said, “there it is, shiny as a metal tooth.”

“We seem to be drifting in that direction,” Grace said. “Very slowly. Current stays with us, we’ll know soon enough how close or how far away it is.”

“It’s some kind of place we can want to be,” Reba said. “I don’t know it will be good if we get there, but I like a goal, some kind of place to go. I haven’t had a goal since I tried to get Phil Senate to fuck me, and he turned out to be queer. That wasn’t a goal I made, getting a mercy fuck from a queer, so I had to let it go. So I’m going to make a pretty modest goal now. I hope we wash up at the bottom of the bridge, and that we get to climb it, and that it leads somewhere where someone would want to be. There’s got to be some place here that’s some place someone would want to be. There’s just got to be.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

Grace was right. We weren’t even close to the bridge.

We drifted for a long time. Nights and days, half nights and half days and fragment days went by, and though we flowed with a current that carried us in the direction of the bridge, it was a slow current, and I noted little if any progress.

No land appeared either. There was just that great shimmering water all about.

But one evening, the day fell, and the moon came up, cool on the horizon, like a blonde-headed giant poking its head out of the water. And shortly after its rise came a mist.

There was something odd about it, and as it came to rest behind the bus and float there, we saw (for everyone had moved to the back of the bus) that it was not a mist at all.

It was a specter.

It took us a bit of time to really see what we were seeing, as it was so large. It was a ghostly outline of the drive-in lots, and we could see gray versions of the screens, the shapes of cars, and there were spectral folks moving about. I recognized them as the drive-in people. They were going from car to car, and the specters looked happy. Slowly but surely I realized why.

The mist was a specter of the drive-in all right, but it was as the drive-in had been before the comet, the great red comet that had come burning out of the sky, hung over the drive-in, and smiled.

Showed teeth, baby, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.

And this was as the drive-in was, just before the comet swerved away, changed the drive-in and all of us inside forever. This was the drive-in when it was a fun place, a gathering place, a ritual shrine to the youthful. There were women in bikinis, and there were folks in monster suits, barbecue grills cooking away. Everyone looked so happy in the misty drive-in world, you could almost hear them laugh.

We all watched carefully, not a one of us speaking. Just stood there and looked out the back bus window, glared into our past.

I saw the lot where my friends and I had parked, and there we were, poking one another, laughing.

Oh, Jesus. All my friends.

Gone now.

Just me left.

“Ain’t that some shit,” Homer said. “It’s a haunting.”

I don’t know how long we stood at the back of the bus, watching, but I know it was a long time. I felt sad. Tears kept running out of my eyes, and when I looked around, I wasn’t the only one. Only Grace still had it together, centered inside somehow, and maybe, just maybe (because it had occurred to me more than once) she was in her element now. Strong and needed, lusted after and feared. A kind of shiny queen bee in a hive of colorless drones.

But I didn’t think on that long. I turned away from Grace and kept on looking at that ghostly drive-in.

In that spectral world we all looked so happy, and healthy. And though we had not aged in any classical way, here in the present drive-in world, we had, to put it mildly, gone to seed. It was obvious looking at our ghostly shapes. Even in their transparent grayness, they looked so much better than we looked now.

Again… except for Grace. Still strong and clean of limb, with hair like a shampoo commercial.

So there we were, looking grimly back into our past. And as we watched, a gray version of the great red comet appeared at the top of the misty ghost of the drive-in, smiled, and things went bad.

I realized I could stand there forever, watching our past lives unfold.

I said, “You know what, gang. I don’t think this is healthy. The past is the past.”

“Besides,” Steve said. “This story seems to have gotten to the bad part. We’ve seen all the good we’re going to see.”

“I can see myself,” Reba said, pointing.

“We all can,” James said.

And this was true. The spectral shape twisted and misted and reformed, and showed different parts of the drive-in, like cuts in a movie. Faces. Close-ups. Medium shots. Long-distance shots. Dissolves. Fade-ins. Fade-outs.

“Something is fucking with us,” I said. “Something has always been fucking with us.”

We all made a deal to stop looking at the misty drive-in.

As much as we could stop looking, that is.

We still looked. Just not as much. I just looked now and then when I didn’t have anything else to occupy my mind.

Which, of course, was all the time.

It was a little easier to stop looking when the misty events moved forward in time and showed me the horrible things that had gone on, back when the food first ran out and there was nowhere to go and everyone was so hungry. I knew the Popcorn King and his horrid activities, the blood corn events, were coming up, and that helped me not look. I didn’t want to see that. I had lived that, and I hadn’t liked it much.