Joe Lansdale: The Complete Drive-In

Plenty of dog-urine fruit… Well, that wasn’t so good.

Most likely we would learn to catch fish, and maybe there was other food on the island. Had to be. From the sound of that scream, that was a predator, and predators had to have something to eat besides dog-urine fruit.

And maybe this wasn’t an island at all. We had come to call it that because of the way it looked. But it could have been the edge of a continent. A place away from all the weird movie worlds and strange occurrences; an oasis in a morass of what Reba called Weirdity.

And, of course, for me, there was Reba.

She was pretty and smart and we didn’t seem to age.

How would that work for children? The children in the drive-in hadn’t aged a lot. They grew, but, come to think of it, none of them ever made adulthood.

Then again, how long had we been here?

The oldest the kids had been was three or four, and most of them died. Or got eaten.

And there were the weird creatures. The results of the Popcorn King’s poisoned sperm. They had grown very fast, to a kind of retarded adulthood on one level, and on another, to an advanced childhood where they could move things with their minds.

And there was the drive-in mist. When we were close to the sea, it would come out of nowhere, floating along the black water. But it never came to shore.

Never. It was a seagoing thing, or so it seemed. And Grace had a theory about what it was.

It was similar to my own idea. Television ghosting. If this was a movie world with different stories going all at once, perhaps our past and our present were colliding; different channels and episodes running together; movies mixing and misting, and falling apart.

It was a disturbing thought.

My mind rambled like that, going from this to that, as Reba and I lay in the boughs, she cradled in the crook of my arm, my eyes on the sky.

And I thought: What a pretty thought. To stay here. To have children. To live naked and free and full of piss and vinegar to the end of our days.

Lots of lying about in the sun.

Lots of fucking.

Lots of doing nothing and needing only something to eat and drink.

Life was really simple if you let it be.

But life was never simple here. You could never let down your guard. My arm had gone to sleep, and I wanted to move it, but hated to for fear of waking Reba and disturbing the wonderful fact that I had a fine-looking woman on my arm. For she had recovered fast. The puffiness was gone. Her hair had lightened. Her body was lean, but not starved, and her skin had developed a glow. She also wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes. Always a plus.

Yet, even with that wonderful thought to consider, we were still here.

On the drive-in world. And this was a world where Chicken Little would be right.

The sky was falling.

On the morning after my night contemplating, thinking maybe this place was as good as it got, and that was good enough, I awoke and climbed to the top of our tree and saw an amazing and disturbing sight.

First off, the world was blood-colored; the sun had sunk halfway into the sea, and great clouds of steam were rising up from it.

The water was drying up, running away from the shore. Fish were leaping about as they were boiled alive. All of this I could see, and when I told the others, we made the decision to hasten our pace, to see if we could reach the great bridge to the sky.

Steve said, “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to go back there and get some of those boiled fish.”

“And I was thinking,” Grace said, “the time we spent doing that might be a bad idea. We too could soon be boiled. And if the sun goes completely down into the sea, will it rise again? Will there be only night? Will the moon come out? Will it fall too? Will the stars drop off? Time, however it works here, is not on our side.”

So we went along swift in the blood-red light, and in time that light turned stranger yet as night fell. The sun didn’t want to go away, so there was a red stain across the night sky. The moon shone silver, and full, and the stars were dots of fire, and if you looked real close, there seemed to be creases in the night, as if dark velvet cloth that had been stretched was no longer taut, but was in fact drooping.

We ate the dried dog-urine fruit, and kept pushing, and just as the moon dipped away, and the day came on bloody-dark, we began to smell the odor of death. It was a stiff odor that shoved at us, but we ignored it. We could see the bridge clearly above the trees, and we pushed on in that direction, the stench growing strong enough to cut and make bricks.

It got so stout, that each of us took turns puking, but we kept on keeping on. In time, though the smell never went away, our nostrils and our stomachs accepted it.

By the time night had come, and we had slept, and risen again before the moon fell down, we came upon the source of the odor. The tropical forest had disappeared, and there was just a bleak stretch of ground, and a great milehigh (I’m guessing here as to the height) pile of something we couldn’t identify. We stood there looking at it, and as we did, slowly, the moon fell off, and the dying sunlight was all we had, giving us a rusty glow and a view of the clearing and the pile in the middle of it.

“My God,” Steve said.

“If God had anything to do with this,” Grace said, “then he’s just as big an asshole as I’ve always thought.”

I had to agree.

It was a great black pile, and the pile buzzed and flexed and moved.

When we came closer, an immense cloud of crows rose up against the red sky with a caw and a savage beating of wings, and with them rose a swarm of humming flies.

The bloody sunlight, formerly shiny on the dark wings of the birds and the bright green-and-black bodies of the flies, now shone on a pile of human shapes. Some of the shapes were of wood, some of metal, some of plastic. There were crudely whittled soldiers with tall hats and chin bands, painted up red and black with big blue eyes and Groucho Marx mustaches. There were less crudely molded metal soldiers with turnkeys at their backs. There were women, too, and unlike the male soldiers with painted-on clothes, they were roughly shaped with blonde and red hair and big bow mouths and wide blue eyes, pink knobs for nipples and quick swipes of black paint for pubic hair. Some of them, like the soldiers, were made of metal and were slightly better formed with windup keys at their backs. Their flesh tones varied: there were white, black, and yellow, and even green; there were all manner of shapes and sizes. Amongst these human-sized, crudely whittled, and sophisticated windup toys, were what looked like mannequins with perfect-painted features and real hair on their heads, male and female. And on these were truer anatomical features; missiles for the men, grooves for the ladies, patches of what looked like real pubic hair.

Twisted in amongst them were long green tentacles and bulbous heads and huge pop-eyes. Rubbery-looking aliens and some that looked to be made of flesh; flesh going gray and dripping with slime. I had dreamed of such beasts from time to time. Up there in the sky somewhere, twisting dials, moving cameras, proceeding along dolly-runs. Making movies, with us as their reality show. And here they lay.

Further up the pile were what appeared to be real human bodies, rotting, arms dripping off like melting plastic, legs falling free of the bone, heads twisted, coming loose, the eyes plucked out. At first I thought some of the bodies were moving, but soon realized it was the maggots squirming amidst the real corpses and the termites chewing about in the wooden figures, the crows flapping about, giving the glancing illusion of the human shapes making movement on their own.