Joe Lansdale: The Complete Drive-In

“Hey,” said the man with the mustard-colored T-shirt.

“Call ‘em like I see ‘em,” Bob said.

“It’s the will of God,” said a girl in a long blue cotton dress. “There was so much sinning going on here, God has sent a blight.”

The couple who had been practicing the rites of the three-toed salamander in the back of the Buick started shuffling their feet and looking over the heads of the crowd as if they were expecting someone.

“It wasn’t God,” said somebody at the rear of the crowd, “it was Satan done it. God doesn’t punish. Man and Satan punish.”

“We’re uptight for nothing,” said another voice. “Tomorrow the sun will come up and shine through this mess. It’s just a freak of nature, that’s all.”

“No,” said a punker girl with orange spiked hair. “It’s dimensional invaders.”

No one bought that one.

A pretty girl in a pink bathing suit suggested, “Maybe we’re all dead, and, like, hanging in limbo or something.”

Some consideration on that. A couple of maybes from the crowd; I think it might have edged out the Commie threat a bit in popularity.

“Ain’t none of them things,” said a fat lady with a nose like a red pickle. She was wearing a pink and green housecoat that could have served as a visual emetic and yellow bunny slippers. She had her arm around her skinny husband’s waist and two small ankle biters (a girl and a boy) were at her feet. “It’s the ghost of Elvis Presley. I read about something like this in The Weekly World News, and Elvis was involved in that. His ghost came down and did some things to some sinners. He said to them that he wasn’t happy with the way people were living on Earth.”

“Hell,” Bob said. “He’s got to be a self-righteous sonofabitch now that he’s dead. He wasn’t nothing but a fat doper.”

“He was the King,” the woman said, as if she were talking about Jesus.

“King of what?” Bob said. “Constipation? I heard he died on the floor of his toilet with a turd hanging out of his ass. Report said he died ‘straining at stool.’ He wasn’t any more than the rest of us, except he could sing. And even then, he wasn’t any Hank Williams.”

“Hank Williams,” said the fat lady, taking her arm from around her husband’s waist and looking as if she were about to leap. “Now there was a drunk and a doper. And he wasn’t near as good-looking as Elvis.”

“That may be,” Bob said, “but you don’t hear of his ghost coming down to bother nobody. He knew to mind his own business.”

This went on for a time, not really solving anything, but it was entertaining. I got to thinking about how much time had elapsed, and looked at my watch. It had stopped.

Bob and the lady with the red pickle nose had finally quit going at it, and a black guy wearing a straw hat and a worn-out gray sweatshirt with “Dallas Cowboys” on it spoke up then. “We could be here a time. What about food? We’re gonna need that.”

I thought about the cookies and junk back at the truck and wished we’d brought something more substantial, but then maybe that was carrying worry too far, projecting this strange situation too distantly in the future.

The manager of the main concession joined us then. “Look, it isn’t going to come to that, worrying about food, I mean. This will pass. Whatever it is, it can’t last long. But to ease your minds, let me tell you that if we’re here awhile, if food becomes a problem, we’ve got enough back there in that concession, and over on Lot B, to last a long time.”

“How long is a long time?” Willard said.

“A long, long time,” the manager said. “But let’s don’t jump the gun here. This’ll pass. Maybe some sort of industrial accident put this mess around us.”

“And the comet?” Randy said.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a logical explanation to it all, and I don’t see any need to get worked up over starving to death. We haven’t been in this mess but a few minutes, and I can tell you now, it won’t last.”

“God has spoken,” Bob said, and the manager glared at him.

“I think we all ought to hold tight,” the manager said. “Go on back to your cars, try to forget all this, get your mind on the movies. Pretty soon someone will come to get us out of this. Some kind of accident happened out there, someone knows about it. Hell, they’ll have the National Guard in here pretty soon.”

“That makes me feel comfy all over,” Bob said. “My uncle is in the National Guard and he don’t know dick about nothing, has a belly that hangs down to his knees. Great, the National Guard.”

“You boys think like you want,” the manager said. “Me, I’m going back to the concession, try the phones again, see if they’ve got to working. Tomorrow we’ll all have something to tell our families about.”

“Right,” Randy said. “A comet smiled at us, put us in Limbo Land, and the edge of Limbo Land ate a station wagon full of fat people and dissolved a cowboy.”

The manager tried to smile. “I’m not saying this isn’t a dangerous situation, but I am saying we have to make the best of it. Keep our spirits up, stay away from that gas… jell, whatever it is… and you’ll see. We’ll be fine. Now I’m going on back to the concession to try the phones.”

The manager went away and Randy said, “Yeah, fine.”

“He’s right, though,” a tall guy said. “We can’t do much else. We’ve got to make the best of it… unless someone here has a great idea.”

No one did.

One guy went out to the trunk of his car, came back with an old box and a shovel. He scooped up the cowboy and put him in the box. The mess had lost its acidic quality and was congealing. The box remained intact. He used the point of the shovel to scoop up the clothes and the boots, dropped the hat on top of it all.

“I’ll just… keep him in my trunk,” he said. “Wife said she didn’t mind… seems like the decent thing to do. Maybe we can figure out who he is… get his folks to bury him when we get out… Anybody here know him?”

No one said they did.

“Guess he came by himself,” the guy said, and carried the shovel and the cowboy in the cardboard box away.

“What a way to end up,” Bob said. “In the trunk of a car next to a spare tire.”

“In a dirty box, no less,” Randy said.

Now to make a long story short, or at least this part of it, this went on, this standing around and talking, this looking at the black mess and waiting for the National Guard, but no one showed up to rescue us.

“We’ve talked and talked about it,” Willard said, “but nothing’s gotten any better.”

“I’m gonna get me a Baby Ruth,” Bob said. “It’s good for my skin.”

“Not much else to do, is there,” I said.

“Let’s just do like the manager suggested,” said the black guy in the straw hat.

We drifted away from the crowd, and the crowd started to break apart, wandering back to their cars with a stunned look on their faces. The immediate drama was over and nothing had changed. We were still trapped in the drive-in, and the adventure of it was old already.

We all went back to the truck, and I took up my position in the chair and recovered my bag of popcorn. I even found I could get interested in the movies again.

Bob came back with his Baby Ruth and smacked his lips over it enough to make me look through our stuff for some cookies. I had eaten so much I was beginning to feel queasy.

We watched the movies, but after they had run through and started over again, I began to lose interest and really worry. With that many movies shown, and them starting a second run, it ought to be getting toward dawn. There wasn’t a ray of sunlight, however. Just the same artificial lights. I was getting sick of movies, the drive-in, even the goofballs who were wandering around in monster suits. I couldn’t even feel any warmth for the gals in their bikinis. I felt like a roach in a toilet bowl with someone’s hand on the handle, ready to flush. I wanted to go home to my nice warm bed, with Mom and Dad down the hall.