Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

The moon was out and it was bright, but that old lunar wad nodded from time to time, as if it might doze off and drop into the waters below. We watched for awhile, until the drive-in ghost had regrouped and began to float over the waters, then we decided to wake the others, keep climbing, making time while the moon was up and its light was high.

As we climbed, Grace and Steve in the lead, Reba (carrying the pack now) and I lagging slightly behind, Reba said, “What do you think about all those bodies down there, the toy soldiers, the mannequins, and such?”

“I don’t know. I’m having some thoughts, but they aren’t altogether formed, and what thoughts I’m thinking I can’t express, but, baby, somewhere back to the rear of the old bean, I’m not liking what I’m thinking at all.”

“Want to share?”

“I meant what I said. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s more a feeling than an expression. But it comes to me, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I think I do know what you mean. Something is nagging me, too. And it feels uncomfortable. Like a pretty bad thought is trying to burrow out, and I won’t let it.”

“I hear you,” I said.

Many days and nights passed, and sometimes there was no place for us to really rest, so we had to keep on cl imbing. And sometimes, when we found a bolt, where the wires were always clustered, we decided to stay for a day or two, if anyone could in any way decide on what a day was.

In time, more stars fell, and the water rose up way high, and soon there was no land or trees below us. Oh, for a few days it was there, in patches, and the water would roll back and show us at least the tops of trees, and now and again a patch of mud, but eventually that went away too. And then one night the thing we had feared happened.

The moon came up and went down fast and furious. Striking the sea so hard it sounded like an atomic bomb had gone off. The great beam vibrated and the metal sang with a sound like a scream from a robot’s lungs.

The ocean yawned, and the water went all about, then it gathered itself together with what sounded like a moan and rushed forward. All the waters of this drive-in earth appeared to have loosened their bounds, and they had gathered together in one great wet flood; it thundered below us with a gush, and it began to rise, like a plugged toilet, and in a time so short as to be somewhere between our taking a deep breath and cutting a fart of fear, the water charged up and around the beam, rose nearly to our feet.

Well. Okay. That’s an exaggeration. But it rose up as high as we had been two drive-in days before. Had we decided to hang out a little longer down there, we would have bathed the big bath, baby.

The flood brought with it a bullet-hard rain and a cloud of mist, and the mist collected itself and became the drive-in ghost. We looked down on it and I saw within it the island and us on the island, and then I saw us and the pile of corpses, false and neat, and I quit watching then. Feared it might show me our future. And, frankly, I didn’t want to know.

“All these wires,” Steve said, “I think they run the drive-in world. They travel along these great beams, and the interconnecting parts that look like ladder rungs. They run through those. They go from the sky to the ground. They’re worked into this world’s fabric. They give it light. They make the sun, the moon and stars, night and day work. Or did. They’re starting to go bad. Shorting out maybe. No maintenance. The whole goddamn thing is breaking up. I don’t know, maybe it’s on purpose. But down there, it’s all over. I’m sure of it. From sea to shining sea, from one end of the jungle to the other, all the way down that single stretch of highway, the drive-in at either end. It’s done, companions. Done.”

We were resting in a mess of wires by one of the huge bolts, and Steve, he was running on, talking ninety miles an hour, as if he were on some kind of caffeine high, which he wasn’t, unless the dog-urine fruits were naturally rich in it.

And maybe they were, because we were all in one of those late-night type of conversational, philosophical moods that one usually associates with coffee houses or university lifers or chat-it-up smart guys trying to score pussy.

Only thing was, it wasn’t late night, it was day, but the day wasn’t much. The sun was down low, literally, and it was leaking its light over the water, making it the color of rich bourbon. There was a lot less water now. Much of it had been steamed away. But still that sun dripped into the sea, and our version of Sol had begun to lose its shape, like a rotting fruit going quick-fast to liquid. On the seabed all manner of creatures, giant squids, fish, and even our great catfish friend, Ed, squirmed in the mud.

From where we were, we could see the great fish clearly. The dark things, the ravenous cancers, or pissed-off shadows, whatever they were, those hungry things that had been inside of Ed, had exited the old boy’s ass. The shadows fluttered about the muddy seabed like crickets. There was too much light for them, fading or not, they hopped and twisted and fell about like dying locusts, came apart in little black pools that ran into the mud and were absorbed.

The people who had been inside Ed exited as well. They were very small from our position, the size of termites. But we knew they were people. They came out of the gaping mouth of the fish and disappeared into the mud. It probably went very deep, that mud. Maybe miles.

If anyone was still in the fish, they might stay on the surface for awhile, as Ed covered a lot of space and was sinking more slowly, spread out like that, but he was sinking. We could see that big buddy going down.

Goodbye, Bjoe, if you’re still there. Goodbye you man-eating, dick-jerking asshole.

The horizon had become a charcoal gray band, and it was broadening. Soon, all the world below would be dark.

Above us, the clouds were near touchable. Puffed up and white as a Jesus robe.

I said, “I think, tired as we are, we should start moving again, while we can see to climb. If the sun holds out just a while longer, I think we’ll reach the clouds.”

“And if we do,” Reba says, “who says that means anything? It can be just as dark inside a cloud as out. The sun goes, what the fuck does it matter where we are?”

“I’m thinking the beam leads somewhere,” I said. “Remember Popalong, he climbed up here, through that hole over the drive-in, and it was nearly as high as this. He saw things. He told us a little about them. This world has an attic.”

“But there’s no guarantee this leads to it,” Reba said. “This world, in case you haven’t noticed, lacks logic.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Grace said, “we made this decision, and now we’re stuck with it, we either ride the dick or use our fingers.”

“Say what?” Reba said.

“It’s an old saying I just made up, meaning, we’ve made a decision. We don’t know if it’s the real thing, the big cosmic fuck, or just us playing with ourselves. We won’t know till we get up there.”

“There really isn’t any other way to go,” Steve said. “Well, other than down. And if we climb down, I don’t think we’re climbing down to much. A lot of mud, dead fish, and such.”

“You’re right,” Reba said. “Of course you are. I’m just tired.”

We started climbing again.

There was something I hadn’t mentioned to the others. The clouds. I feared our oxygen would thin. But it didn’t. Truth was, the sky, the clouds, the whole arrangement, was way lower than back on earth. But it was a bit chilly. As we climbed through the clouds, they felt wet and sticky, like cotton candy.

And then we broke through a bank of clouds so thick you could swat them with your hand and knock them about. When we rose above them, struggling our way along the wires on the beam, we saw it.