“It’s not like he’s got anything left to hurt anyone with,” Bob said.
“Guess you got two cents to put in on this, Steve,” Grace said.
“It was me, I’d take him out. Hell, I’ll shoot him for you if you like. It won’t bother me none. But this is your show. You name the channel.”
Grace looked at Popalong’s ruptured face, at the scrawny body that held up the massive head, the black cowboy suit that hung off of him like a kid wearing daddy’s clothes.
She went over and picked up Sue Ellen and walked away. Popcorn dribbled out of Sue Ellen’s eye sockets, sprinkled the ground like snow.
Steve sighed. “This is kind of disappointing. Kind of like a cowboy movie without a final showdown, ain’t it?”
“It’s exactly like that,” I said.
DISSOLVE TO:
EPILOGUE
We used some of the drier pieces of cardboard and paper we could find and built a mound and put Sue Ellen on it and covered her with some more pieces. Then Steve lit it with a match he’d found in one of the derelict cars, and after a while, most of Sue Ellen was cremated. What was left over we scooped up in Coke cups and took it off in the woods and tossed it around.
Popalong’s dead bodyguard was hauled off during all the commotion by one of the drive-in people, and I guess he got eaten.
Next morning, we went to look for Crier’s body. It was gone. Something had dug him out. Whatever it was got his dick too.
As for Popalong, in time he crawled back up that stack of TVs and found his place on the throne. He sat there with his tongue of blue and red wires hanging out and the inside of his face popping sparks and fizzling from time to time. But finally that quit.
He grew thin inside that cowboy suit, and when the flesh went away, there were no bones in him, just cable wire and rods of antenna held together with tightly wrapped film.
Steve brought his car into the drive-in, and he and Grace took up together and went to living out of it. I tell you, I never expected that to happen. Maybe all those bangs Grace got on the head had clouded her sense of judgment.
Bob and I built our place out of TV sets. Walls and ceiling. We used antenna pieces and part of an old car to make it work. In the mornings we wake up and watch Grace come out of the Plymouth and do her martial arts exercises. In the nude.
The bending over stuff is dynamite.
She’s got a big round tummy now. She says I didn’t pull out fast enough and the baby’s mine. She says it’s pretty far along, but isn’t showing much because she’s tall. Since I didn’t eat the King’s popcorn and neither did she, she thinks the baby has a good chance to be healthy. I don’t know how I feel about that.
The other women have had their babies and—
Yes, I’m talking about you guys. But hold up, I’m almost through here. Just be polite and let me get through this.
—they look like the Popcorn King. Two bodies welded together, one on the other’s shoulders, to make a single unit. Unlike the King, they are covered in eyes. The eyes look like the eyes that were on the corn the King puked up. Each eye blinks at a different time. I feel like I’m constantly receiving Morse code.
They’re all sexless. I mean there’s no equipment that I can see. Keeps from having to wipe a lot of asses. They came out of the cannon practically walking. They can put simple sentences together already. They’re almost as tall as me. They like to listen to me read, and though they understand a lot of the words, a lot of sentences, I don’t think they get the gist of it all—
Okay, Leroy. I take it back. You do understand. That’s all for today, guys, girls, whatever. Go find a car to tear up. I was kidding about there being a test at the end of this ...
What test?
Forget it, Leroy. Bye now.
That was about all I had written. I’m back inside the hut now and I’m sitting here finishing this out as best I can, which is just as well. I’m running out of things to write with. I’ve looked everywhere, glove boxes, the concession stand over in B Lot, you name it. I’ve written this in pen and pencil, crayon and eyeliner.
But it doesn’t matter, I’m also running out of things to say. I guess I can mention that the mothers of those kids, or whatever they are, don’t love them. But I’m not sure that’s all their fault. How can they be mothers after all they’ve seen and done?
I see some of the drive-in people looking up at the corpse of Popalong, almost wistfully, I think. At night they wander about in the storms, nothing to do. They’ve forgotten how to talk to one another. It’s a good thing those weird kids were born practically grown.
Sometimes I take the kids hunting with me. They chase down the game on foot. Bob says he thinks he saw one throw a stick without touching it the other day. Kid just willed it up and there it went, hit a rabbit in the back of the head and killed it.
Bob admits he saw this out of the corner of his eye, and it may not be like that, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Well, like I said we hunt a lot. Thought a better diet might help the people here, help them get a better frame of mind. But all it does is help them get around faster.
Sometimes I think I’ll start back down the highway, but I’d have to go on foot and I don’t like the idea of those storms or that film out there at night. Still, I think about it. Shit Town might be a better life than this. Hell, getting back to Jungle Home wouldn’t be too bad.
Let’s see ... Oh yeah, Grace has a shadow now, and Steve is starting to have one. Bob and I still don’t. I’m not sure what this means, but it worries me a little, especially when I see Grace working out and popping the air with her punches, and right behind her, capering like a chimp, making fun of her moves, is her shadow. Maybe I’ll stop getting up in the morning to watch her. That shadow takes the joy out of it.
BOOK THREE
THE DRIVE-IN
The Bus Tour
INTRODUCTION
I never expected to write a Drive-in 2, so I darn sure didn’t plan on writing, The Drive-in: The Bus Tour, which is The Drive-in 3.
Not long after the first two came out, I was asked by a small publisher to do just that, and thought, well, okay. But there was nothing there. Just wouldn’t come, so I had to pass on the deal.
A lot of years passed. A lot. Fifteen, seventeen. I’m a little uncertain. Enough that now I was certain there would never be a Drive-in 3. Besides, the other two, considered humorous books, hadn’t been that much fun to write. Not all writing is supposed to be fun, but as I have said before, I’m not one of those writers who loves having written. I love writing. I can’t wait to get at it. When my feet hit the floor in the morning I take our dog out, have coffee, look at the email, and then, better than nine out of ten times I’m on my work like syrup on a pancake. Oh, there’s a day here and there when my mind is as limp as an octogenarian monk’s dick. But that’s rare, and is really my mind telling me to take a rest, or that the subconscious hasn’t been quite up to par, or whatever. But nearly every morning I go downstairs and go to work and turn out three to five pages a day, and some days more. Well, some mornings more. I usually work about three hours in the morning, and that’s it, five days a week. But now and again I work weekends, and every now and again, I work more than those hours in the morning. Now is an example. It’s after two thirty in the morning on the day of my birthday, October 28, and I’m writing this because I have to leave town in the next day or so and need to get it done, along with some other writing before I head off to a film festival where Bubba Ho-tep is showing, and then the Texas Book Festival.
So, here I am, telling you this: I had no plans to write a third novel about the Drive-in world, but Bill Schafer and I began to discuss it. He wanted me to do it for Subterranean. And then, one day, out of nowhere, the novel caught fire and I was back in that world. It was easier this time, and fun.
I wrote the novel very quickly.
It had been so long since I had written the last, I didn’t realize I had left out one of the main characters from the other novels. Just plain forgot him. A couple of readers called me out. I solved that problem with a small revision.
I’ll let the novel speak for itself on that matter.
Also, I realized when I finished this novel, I didn’t give a pure and perfect answer to the world of the Drive-in, and it’s left open for yet another that need not exist. I left it that way for the reader. But I won’t go into that anymore. My telling you that doesn’t spoil the book or have any effect on the reading of it, but I won’t explain beyond that. I will say this. What I’ve said about the other two.
Enjoy.
—Joe R. Lansdale, 2009
“God bless the children of this picture, this movie book. I’m going on into the Shade.”
—Jack Kerouac (Doctor Sax)
“God ain’t nothing but the mind working over time.”
—Anonymous
FADE-IN PROLOGUE
In which the Great Jack, during a hypoglycemic high, ponders the universe beneath God’s asshole while writing The Drive-in Bible and contemplating a journey by school bus.
1
They all lived in the great Orbit Drive-in beneath a hole in the sky that swirled with shadows and on occasion squeezed out, sphincter-style, dark sticky goo.
The goo reeked.
The goo stuck to your feet.
Some thought it edible, because once upon a time it had rained chocolate almonds and such, but this wasn’t chocolate almonds. Not by a long shot. The eaters grabbed their bellies and screamed, and they were outta there.
For awhile their bodies lay stacked by the drive-in fence, ready to go. And go they would, but not far.
(More on that later.)
The stuff, the god turds, was finally shoveled with makeshift scoopers made of car hoods, deposited up against the drive-in fence to reinforce it. This worked well. Turned hard as cement. When you piled fresh stuff on the old stuff, it stuck. And so the wall grew.
But back to the hole in the sky.
Those who lived beneath this hole in the sky in the Orbit Drive-in called it God’s Asshole. Or rather Jack did, and it caught on.
Jack was the man. Leader of all that was Drive-in, baby. Like everyone else, he hadn’t aged a day in all the time he had been there. Least not physically. Emotionally, mentally, man, he was some kind of wreck. His mind needed a cane. His emotions needed a walker.
But he had become the man.
Jack, the Drive-in man.
The drive-in movies, for some inexplicable reason, played at night and all night. We’re talking four big screens in four connecting lots which had become individual communities, christened cleverly: LOT ONE, LOT TWO, LOT THREE, and THE BIG LOT, which was larger than the rest (hence, the BIGness). It also had a larger screen. The four screens spread their flickering blue-white light along with images of blood and destruction.
Tool Box Murders
.
Chainsaw Massacre
.
Night of the Living Dead
. Others. Spread it across the screens like rancid butter on old slices of bread.
And on cool nights, which seemed evenly measured with those that were hot and dry, the residents of the Orbit stared in the direction of the screen, watched the shimmering images, quoted from the movies aloud as if praying in unison to Mecca, and did just a whole lot of fucking.
Along with all that movie watching, fucking had taken the place of good meals, intense conversation, and wondering what movie stars and rock stars were doing.
Yes sir, that fucking be helping something serious, brethren and sistern. It gave the drive-inders community as well as unwanted pregnancy and sometimes big red swellings. Fortunately, sexually transmitted diseases were not rampant, or the whole damn pack of them would have been full of it and sick of it and gone within a year. Whatever a year was in the drive-in and its surrounding jungle. Time was hard to measure. The sun seemed to rise and set on its own time scale. Sometimes the drive-in crowd sat in darkness, nothing to keep them going but the drive-in light, powered by who knows what from who knew where.
Not a happy series of communities, dear hearts. No, sir. There were strains at the seams. Always had been. True, they were no longer surrounded by a constant twenty-four hours of darkness and black goo that would eat you. That had long passed. And they had driven away from the drive-in only to find it at the end of the road again (bummer). They were in repeato situation, inside the drive-in fence, surrounded by daylight and night, sunlight and moonlight, and a big old jungle. Stuck in there, flimsily barricaded from the outside world. Trying to be safe. Wanting to be safe. Hoping to be safe.