Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

So, I quit looking.

As often.

As the night passed and we dozed and the sun came up and the light that was our day wore on and became really hot, the mist evaporated, and we had a break. There was just the ocean now, and it was flat and smooth, as boring as watching your mama peel potatoes.

We ate and climbed on the roof and swam around the bus, hung to the pontoons, did this and that. Made up games, sang songs.

It was like a real bus trip.

You know, like when you’re a kid and you go to camp, and you got songs to sing and things to talk about. Only thing missing is we didn’t know where we were going or when we would arrive.

Actually, a lot of things were missing, but for that short time, we found some happiness, and we concentrated on it.

When we wore out on the songs, Steve started up the engine from time to time and we listened to tapes. What we had to talk about would always turn grim. Tales of the drive-in. So doing things like songs and swimming was better.

The swimming was really pretty nifty, because all of us stripped naked to do it. Grace was dynamite. I loved that triangle between her legs, how it looked when she climbed out of the water, stretched out on the pontoon, knowing full well we were all looking, perched atop the bus, hanging over the sides, drooling. She shook out her long golden hair and arched her back, showed us what lay inside the taco, all pink and inviting. A smorgasbord of goddess.

And let me tell you, Reba looked good too. Tiny, ribs showing from lack of food, well built, and more modest. She stripped and stood on the pontoon too, but she wasn’t trying to give us an aerial view of the canyon, so to speak.

She just did what she had to do, shook out her shorter, darker hair, pulled back on her clothes, climbed on top of the bus, lay in the sun, and dried herself and the damp clothes she wore.

Steve lay with us, hanging over the roof looking down at Grace, and he said, “Grace is such a tease.”

Homer said, “You know, I wouldn’t ask this in the real world, and you may hit me, but you got to understand, what I’m seeing there, and not having had any in awhile, ‘cept this fella’s butt hole (pointing toward Cory, who raised his hand in admission), but it wasn’t the same, you know, so can you tell me, for entertainment’s sake. Is she good?”

Steve pursed his lips, made a kind of smacking sound, looked at Homer, smiled, said, “Now, let me ask you this, Homer, my man. Looking down on that young woman, all ripe and spread out and brown, and being all uninhibited like, and you having had, at best of recent, some shitty ass off Cory, what the fuck do you think?”

“Oh, yeah,” Homer said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

“Male chauvinists,” Reba said.

We had sort of forgot she was there.

“Well,” James said, “this here is a new world, and it’s got new rules, and, shit, we don’t mean nothing by it. Besides, how much of a chauvinist is Homer. He fucked Cory in the butt.”

“I don’t like him though,” Cory said. “It was just one of those things. Me and him, we wouldn’t even hang anymore if he hadn’t gotten on this bus.”

“Maybe you ain’t chauvinist,” Reba said, “but I wanted to mention, I’ve seen you all swimming, and each and every one of you have what can only be described in euphemistic terms as having real small dicks.”

“Hey, now,” James said, “that ain’t right.”

“It certainly isn’t all that euphemistic,” I said.

“You don’t mean me,” Steve said. “You couldn’t mean me. They used to call me Horse in P.E.”

“I think they were just calling you by your first name,” Reba said.

“What’s that mean?” Steve said.

“You know,” she said, “Horse Ass.”

Night came, and we all climbed back inside the bus, and the misty world of the drive-in floated up out of the ocean, first in a cotton candy twirl, then the twirl spread, and figures began to form, coiling and uncoiling, eventually taking shape.

The drive-in ghost floated behind us for a time, then it moved forward, melted right through the walls of the bus and was part of us, our own ghostly wraiths moving past us and through us and around us; all of the events of the drive-in unfolding silently and overlapping and passing one through the other.

For awhile we watched in awe, but in time, some of us anyway (I was one) had had enough. I coiled up on one of the seats and covered my face with my arms and tried to sleep; my trained ability to do so kicked in, and I drifted off. I dreamed I was on a great rocking horse, and it was bucking, baby. I mean up and down, even side to side, and finally my head banged against something, and I found myself lying on the floor of the bus, and the bus was churning about. I climbed onto a seat and looked out the window.

Great sprays of water and splashes of white foam were striking the windows, and the bus was washing precariously to one side, then the other. Out there in the frothy splash of foam, I thought I saw large dark creatures move. Then the water slashed the bus, and anything I might’ve seen was gone.

The others were up and watching as well. There was nothing else to do. A bit of water came through the cracks in the windows, washed under the bus door, and foamed in the driver’s section like soapsuds.

But still we floated.

Someone vomited. I didn’t even look, but I could smell it. All I could think was, when this stops, that will have to be cleaned up. I visualized us at the bottom of this… ocean? Monster lake? Whatever it was. Just settling down to the bottom, the pressure of the water squeezing the bus, shattering the glass, the water rushing in. And then I thought, what if it’s not as deep as it seems, and we go down? We could hit the bottom and there wouldn’t be the pressure to crush us, the quick rush of water to drown us. It would be a slow seep. Just sitting there on the bottom with water leaking in through the windows, slowly filling the bus.

I knew if this body of water were that shallow, I would just open a window and let it all rush in.

It seemed to me you should be able to open a sliding window. Underwater pressure wouldn’t keep that from being done, would it?

And if it did, maybe I could break it.

There were ways.

All this went through my mind as the bus washed about.

One good thing, though, the misty past adventures of the drive-in were nowhere to be seen.

As I sat there in my seat, Reba slid in beside me. She took my hand. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.”

“I thought, we went down, you know, we could go down together. Someone with someone.”

“Someone with someone,” I said. “

“We don’t have to like one another,” she said.

“I know… We don’t have to dislike one another either.”

“That’s true,” she said, and squeezed my hand hard. “I thought I wanted to die a few times, but I’ve lived so long now, been through so much, I don’t want to die anymore. I just want to find my place. Isn’t that a strange thing to think? That I just want to find my place.”

“No. Not at all. I know exactly what you mean.”

The storm tossed on, and once the bus lay almost on its side, but the pontoon rig Steve had made held. The water waved us back, and the bus settled and turned, and soon the rush of the storm was no longer pushing the side of the bus, but the back of it, and that little twist of fate may have been what saved us. We washed forward, the storm propelling us like a motor.

Why the bus didn’t spin and take it on the side again, I can’t say. It was as if the storm were the hand of great child, and we were its toy, and the child was motoring us forward, on down a wet highway to who knew where.