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  The Drive-In: The Bus Tour

  Copyright © 2005 by Joe R. Lansdale.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket and interior illustrations

  Copyright © 2005 by John Lucas.

  All rights reserved.

  Interior design

  Copyright © 2005 by Tim Holt.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com [email protected]

  FADE IN/PROLGUE

  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.

  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, were 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.

  But it wasn't safe. Dinosaurs and strange things roamed about and dotted the skies.

  Showed teeth. Showed claws. Sometimes they knocked down the fence and came in for a drive-in dinner. Jack and his people had learned to run the eaters off with spears of wood and car metal, fire-licked torches, rocks slung from slings made of shoe tongues and fan belts.

  Even the water hole where they had to go for the wet stuff was a dangerous place. Critters waited there for them.

  Finally great catapults made of jungle wood and twisted vines were fashioned and cocked and made ready behind and along the fence. Got loaded up with car transmissions and engines, old tires, batteries, anything worn out and real damn heavy.

  Sometimes, when a person died (remember those eaters stacked by the fence, dear hearts?), they were catapulted into the jungle for the scavengers to take. It got so scavengers, smaller critters, lurked there all the time, in beg position, hoping for an offering. This dead-body launching was decided not to be a great idea. But burying was no good. Outside the drive-in they got dug up anyway, and inside.. .Well, the smell of the dead wasn't a good idea. Critters could smell them even if the gravel and asphalt was scraped back and they were buried way under. Once, after Jack and others slaved to bury a body beneath the asphalt, a great pterodactyl, beating its wings faster than a teenage boy can beat his meat, swept into the drive-in and clawed the body from the ground. A brave woman, some friend or relative, tried to protect the corpse, but the winged beast took her and the body away, one in each claw. Dinner and dessert.

  In an unknown year, the Great Jack died, and the drive-in tribes divvied up, and the ones who had known Jack the best, the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe, struck off on their own.

  Jack had founded the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe himself, after an especially flavorful event that involved the poking of two women. Upon emerging from the old bus, in which he now lived, his privates wet with sex, he yelled, "Yippie-Ki-Pussy."

  This seemed like a good and humorous idea, and thereafter, the tribe, looking for some identifying name, called themselves the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe after their leader, Jack.

  Jack, now there was a good looker. A fine specimen of manhood made of bones and a hank of hair, dressed in rags, the flappy remains of shoes on his feet. He walked fast. He looked like a tired and perhaps alcoholic Bozo the Clown coming into the center ring to do some stumbling trick.

  But still, he was arresting, ole Jack was.

  Yes, I am.

  Well, there goes the third person and here comes me, the first person narrator. I can't keep me out of it. I should. But, hell, this is all about me and all about them, and that means it's all about us, but mostly, since I'm telling it all, writing it down, it's about, you guessed it.

  Me.

  I wanted to mention that me part again.

  But now and then, when you're raving in a near hypoglycemic semi-comatose state, you want to stand back and leave the me, the 1, the yourownself out of the picture.

  You can't do it.

  You think you can, but you can't.

  No matter what you think, or try to think, or try to do, it's always about, guess who?

  You.

  Or, to be more exact. Me.

  Me. Me. Me.

  But I said that already. Hypoglycemic or not. It's always about me.

  I'm merely telling you what Republicans already know. To hell with everyone else as long as I got mine.

  What I'd give for a steak.

  From a cow, of course.

  Besides, hell, I didn't die. Everything I've written dow
n so far except the part about me dying is the truth, no shit, as if there's anyone here to argue with me (well, there's myself, but I'm not up to it today).

  Oh, all right. There's another part that's a lie. But we'll hold off on that and come at it a short time later.

  I guess, I should confess to you, Oh Journal, Keeper of the Goddamn truth, that maybe I wish I had died. I've thought about dying. You know. A do-it-yourself job, but, baby, it ain't in me.

  I like living too much.

  Even if you can't call this living, it's the excuse for living I'm living, and I don't know no other way to do than to keep on trucking.

  Which brings up something.

  Trucking.

  Gonna be doin' me some.

  Tomorrow (and I'll have to decide when tomorrow comes, 'cause, baby, in here, who really knows), but tomorrow there will be time to evaluate, lay some stock, and maybe some pipe if any female that isn't scary looking is willing, and with any volunteers I get, I'm jiving on out of here, bouncy-assin' in a big ole ride, headin' for —

  - well, that part ought not to be discussed or considered or contemplated or too far planned.

  Because, I'm not sure there's anywhere to go.

  P.S.

  I really didn't emerge from a bus after having banged two hot women with my snake flapping and my lips jackin' with, "Yippie-Ki-Pussy!"

  But, I wish I had.

  Actually, I complained of my back.

  I avoid sex now.

  Mostly.

  I mean to anyway.

  Sometimes you can make a woman pregnant and not know it. Not know if it was you, I mean. There are so many sharing in the festivities, you see. And then, if the women get pregnant, well, there are the babies.

  And, of course, so many are eating their young, and though it has begun to have its appeal (so soft, so pink, so bakeable - though most go in for raw, as fire is difficult to create), we are trying to keep some semblance of civilization.

  Or at least I am, goddamnit.

  So, our declaration is simple.

  No eating babies.

  Raw, anyway.

  Keep your top button buttoned.

  And pee at the far end of the fence. Over where it already stinks.

  2

  That night (and it has been night for a long time, I am sure; well, pretty sure) it rained goo.

  Black goo.

  This was nothing different. It did this frequently. Most likely it was from the sewer dump deposited by whoever was in the heavens above.

  Aliens it was believed. Up there behind the night, behind the clouds, ass-cracks perched for delivery.

  Least that was my theory, backed up by certain events.

  But I've written about those events already. Of the Popcorn King and the long road to nowhere, the dinosaurs, and Popalong Cassidy, of the beautiful Grace who took up with the goof-ball Steve (how could she even consider such after having such a manly stud-muffin as myself?), and of poor Crier, dickless (actually, he carried it in his pocket) and dead, toted off and eaten, his dismembered dick as well. Perhaps the critter that got him used the dried up dick to pick his teeth. On this world, in this world, wherever this world was, you thought about things like that because you had a lot of time to think.

  I sit here and think about the children born here, many of them fathered by the Popcorn King. 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 that look like the eyes that were on the corn the King threw up. Each eye blinks at a different time.

  They are sexless. Smooth as Barbie dolls without the attractive build. No ass cracks either. Here's the scoop. They don't shit. They eat, but they don't shit. Their pores ooze something that substitutes for that. They stink, by the way. But, I suppose you have guessed that. Whoever you is.

  They used to be kind of sweet. As they've grown older, they've banded together. There are few left, actually. Most have gone off into the forest to survive on their own. When they reached, what I suppose could be called adulthood, they lost interest in us.

  A side note. They can move small things with their minds.

  Creepy, baby.

  Speaking of children.

  I had one. Grace, who went off with Steve, she was carrying my child. Or so she said. The baby was born dead. Good thing, really. Steve and Grace ate it. Being the father and all, they offered me the placenta.

  I passed.

  I regret that now and again when I'm hungry.

  But you have to draw the line somewhere.

  Bad things. Bad past. Bad memories.

  And, there's always the new stuff to worry about.

  I'd like to have less new stuff.

  Jesus. I'd like to go home.

  All this, it's one hell of a tale, my friends, a whale of tale, and a ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum, which I don't have. But, the writing. I got that. It helps me focus, except when it doesn't.

  Course, my writing all this down is most likely a waste. Who will ever read any of it, anyway?

  I'm sitting up watching Chainsaw like I might even like it. Sitting here in the driver's seat of the bus, my diary on the dash, me with a dying ink pen that has Get Your Car Lubed at Willies printed on it, writing to the light from the drive-in as flashed to me between plops of alien shit, or whatever it is. My left hand is in my pants and I'm cupping my balls like they're a sweaty, hairy teddy bear. They comfort me.

  But, I really think I will catch the rhythm of this stuff, the plopping of the shit, I mean, and when I do (Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Shit), I'll go to the back of the bus and lie down, and I'll really sleep, listening to the cadence of the falling crap, lulling me into slumber, pulling me happily down into the arms of Hypnos and Morpheus.

  (I read that in a book once, those sleepy gods of Greece.) Yeah, sleepy time, baby.

  Really.

  I hope.

  I wonder about the bus I live in. I think about driving it down the single highway again, setting out once more, but what's the use?

  I did that in another vehicle once.

  It didn't work out.

  I done said that. Shit. I'm so tired I don't know what I have said or haven't said, or even if I remember how to say it. I sometimes struggle with my letters. You know, like, which way does the B's bumps go? To the left or the right?

  This place changes you. Doodles with your mind.

  I'm going to go back and lie down now. Thinking about all this, my head is starting to hurt.

  Please, Sleepy Time, come to me, oh sweet love. Open unto me and swallow me and hold me down in the deep dark and make me happy.

  Or at least a little less miserable.

  3

  I awoke feeling like David Innes, a character from a novel I read by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I liked feeling like David Innes because he was strong and brave and true, all the things I wanted to be, and wasn't.

  In the Burroughs book he lived at the center of the earth, and at the center of the earth there was eternal sunlight, the sun being a ball of lava or something, hanging at the top of their world, which was the center of the earth. So, this being the case, they never knew how much time passed since their sun did not move and there was no night.

  Did they sleep eight hours?

  Or eight years?

  You never knew in Pellucidar.

  (A side note which breaks my light and day and night and dark discussion, but shit, it's on my mind, so here it is:

  Like here, in Pellucidar — way down there at the center of the world —you had to watch out for man-eating beasts. Consider this a reminder and another reason I can relate to good old David Innes.)

  Back to how hard it is to know a true day from a false day, like in Pellucidar.

  Something like that.

  So, pick up with-it felt the same here on the Drive-In World, where there were changes in light, but no measure of time. This is something that has become more and more confusing, as if some devi
ce is playing out, a fuse needs to be replaced or something.

  And this is kind of scary (and what isn't here?), there's a sputtering from time to time, and suddenly there's no light (the films stop instantly), and it's dark and it's a dark beyond dark, it's so goddamn dark. Then someone pours some light that would never have been thought light before into the darkness, and what was so black it was beyond black, just becomes black. Just good old night's black.

  (Hot damn. Glad to see it. Hands are visible there in the dark, shadows coiling between the gaps in the fingers when you hold your hand before your face, where before, you couldn't see your hand before your face.)

  What if (that age old question) the fuse does go and the light doesn't come back, and, well, here we are, nothing left but the sound of each other breathing, the touch of each other's hands, the sharing of lice, the sharing of fleas.

  I think bad things would happen.

  And, hey. What if the fuse kills the climate altogether and there's nothing but void?

  V-O-I-D.

  My take on that is it wouldn't be good.

  But, as it stands now, you can start a fire and cook a meal, and the sun could rise and set and rise and set again before you finish your ration of dinosaur egg on some kind of gooey weed, or your fistful of grubs with a dirty root.

  And next time you cook, the day or night seems to go on forever.

  When it's night, there are the movies.

  Films, as we intellectuals call them.

  They show from the moment the darkness falls to the time it goes away. Throbbing light displaying horrible deeds, chainsaws and power tools. Once I found it entertaining. I see too much real life in it now, even if it has become as familiar as the flat brown mole on the top of my dick. Well, maybe that mole is on the left side of the old cable. But, you know what I mean, Mr. Journal. Old Bitch Diary. Whatever you are, made up of composition notebooks and pages here and there and backs of envelopes and such, written in pencil and ink and crayon and charcoal and mascara, all wrapped up tight and stuffed in a knapsack found in the back seat of a car, next to the remains of a dead body.

  Skeleton actually. Small. Some idiot took a child to see an all night horror show. That skeleton wasn't entirely a skeleton. It was a body of rags, and the rags were flesh, the bulk of it having been ripped from the bones and eaten. The bones had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out, and, it was no longer a horror to see that, and I knew, just a slight push, a slight change of the emotional weather inside my head, and I too would be snatching flesh and cracking bones, chewing up meat, sucking up marrow like chocolate sauce through a straw.