Joe Lansdale: The Complete Drive-In

The only illumination came from the drive-in itself: from open car doors, the concession-stand lights, the red neon tubes that said ENTRANCE (from our angle) and EXIT, the projector beams, and, most brilliantly, the marquee and the tall Orbit symbol, the last two sources being oddly located on a spur of concrete jutting into the blackness like a pier over night ocean. I found myself drawn to that great symbol, its blue and white lights alternating like overhead fan slats across the concession, making the Halloweenish decorations against the window glass seem oddly alive and far too appropriate.

Then I glanced at the screen. The Toolbox Murders was visible again, but there was no fun in it. It seemed horribly silly and out of place, like someone dancing at a funeral.

Voices began to rumble across the lot, voices touched with surprise and confusion. I saw a rubber suited monster take the head off his suit and tuck it under his arm and look around, hoping he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw, and that it would be some kind of trick due to bad lighting through the eyes of his mask. A bikini-clad girl let her stomach sag, having lost the ambition to suck it in.

I realized suddenly I was walking toward the exit, and that the gang was with me, and Bob was chattering like an idiot, not making any sense. The din of voices across the lot had grown, and people were out of their cars, walking in the same direction we were, like lemmings being willed to the sea.

One man fired up his car. It was a new Ford station wagon and it was full of fat. Fat driver in a Hawaiian shirt with a fat wife beside him, two fat kids in the back. He jerked the car around a speaker post with surprising deftness, pulled on the lights and raced for the exit.

People scattered before the wagon, and I got a glimpse of the driver’s face as he raced past. It looked like a mask made of paste with painted golf balls for eyes.

The headlights hit the darkness, but didn’t penetrate. The car pushed down the tire-buster spears with a clack and was swallowed foot by foot by the pudding. It was as if there had never been a car. There was not even the sound of the motor retreating into the distance.

A tall cowboy in a Stetson full of toothpicks and feathers sauntered over to the opening, flexed his shoulders and said, “Let’s find out what the hell gives here.”

He put a boot on the tire-buster spears to hold them down, stuck his arm into the fudge, up to the elbow.

And the cowboy screamed. Never in my personal history of real life or movie experiences have I heard such a sound. It was like a depth charge to the soul, and its impact blew up my spine and rocked my skull.

The cowboy staggered back, flopped to the ground and turned himself around and around like a dog with its guts dragging. His arm was gone from hand to elbow.

We ran over to help him, but before we could lay a hand on him, he yelled, “Back, goddammit. Don’t touch me! It runs.”

He started screaming again, but it sounded as if his vocal cords were filling with mud. And I saw then what he meant by “It runs.” Slowly his arm was dissolving, the sleeve going limp at the shoulder, then the shoulder folded and he tried to scream again. But whatever was eating him from the outside seemed to be working inside him even faster.

His forehead wobbled forward as bone and tissue went to Jell-O, caved in on the rest of his collapsing face. His cowboy hat came to settle on top of the mess, floated in it. His entire body went liquid, ran out of his clothes in nauseating streams. The stink was awful.

Carefully, holding my breath, I reached out and took hold of one of his boots and upended it. A loathsome goop, like vomit, poured out of it and splattered to the ground.

Beside me, Bob let out with a curse, and Willard said something I didn’t understand. I dropped the boot and looked at the darkness beyond the tin fence and the strange truth of it struck me.

We were trapped in the drive-in.

That we were trapped in the drive-in was realized immediately by most, but accepted slowly by all of us. And there were some who didn’t know right off, like the couple in the Buick parked near where a bunch of us had gathered, looking at the hat, boots and empty clothes of the dissolved cowboy. Neither comet nor screams had reached them. They were too wrapped up in their lovemaking. They were in the back seat of the Buick, and the girl had one ankle draped across the seat and the other on the package shelf. We were all watching the car rock, watching it threaten the shock absorbers and test the strength of four-ply tires. And as the car was at a slant, dipping its rear end toward us, we could see a pale butt rising to view, vanishing, rising, vanishing, all with a regular rhythm, like an invisible man dribbling a basketball. It was something we kept our eyes on, something that tied us to our old reality, and I really hated for it to end and for the girl’s ankles to come down, and a little later for them to come out of the car with their clothes rumpled, looking mad at first, then confused. It was our faces that did that to them, the way we were bunched up, the rumble of our voices, the fact that more people were walking our way, and, of course, there was the absolute blackness all around.

Someone tried to tell the couple about the comet, the fat folks in the Ford and the brave (or stupid) cowboy who got dissolved, and they just grinned. The guy said, “No way.”

“Well,” Bob said, waving a hand at the fudge surrounding the drive-in, “I guess we just dreamed all this crap. You think we’re giving you a bill of goods, why don’t you two just take you a little stroll out in that shit-but don’t expect to come back.”

The guy looked at the girl; she looked at him; he looked at us and shook his head.

People tried radios, CBs, and some clustered to the concession to make a stab at the phones. But nothing was in order. Just a little static on the radios.

The crowd grew. Must have been over a hundred of us standing around, and more people were coming. They were starting to congregate over in Lot B too, in little spots here and there. Some were driving cars around and around, honking horns, maybe not scared yet, but certainly bewildered. But that didn’t go on long. Pretty soon no cars were moving about, just groups of people, talking or looking lost.

A story came to us from Lot B about a motorcycle gang that was over there, about how one of their members panicked and drove his bike off into the stuff, with the same result as our fat man and his calorie-laden family in the Ford station wagon.

The theories started then, those by the loudest and most persistent ones among us being the ones heard. The man with the beer gut wearing a T-shirt a size too small with a mustard blossom on the neck of it, for instance.

“Well, I think it’s them men from outer space, whatever color they are. They’ve done this to us. With us shooting our rockets and stuff up there, they were bound to get sore with us. So they’ve come down with some of them sophisticated weapons they’ve got, and they’ve done this. I don’t see how it could be anything else.”

“I don’t think so,” said a guy in a sports coat, his hair neat and stiff as a J.C. Penney model. “I suspect the Communists. They’re a lot stronger in this country than most people imagine. And I don’t want to open any old wounds here, but maybe McCarthy wasn’t as far off as some people thought. These Communists are into everything, and they’ve said all along that they planned to take us over.”

“Why in the hell would they want some Texas drive-in picture show?” Bob said. “They like horror movies, or what? That don’t make no damn sense. I like the one about the guys from outer space, whatever color they are, better than that, and that’s dumb.”