The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (57 page)

What a night this is. Dusk to Dawn features, two dollars a carload. Great movies like
The Toolbox Murders, Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Zombies
, and
I Dismember Mama
.

We finally inch our way past the pay booth and dart inside. It’s a magnificent drive-in, like the I-45, big enough for 3,000 cars or better. Empty paper cups, popcorn boxes, chili and mustard-stained hot dog wrappers blow gently across the lot like paper tumbleweeds. And there, standing stark-white against a jet-black sky is a portal into another dimension: the six-story screen.

We settle on a place near the front, about five rows back. Out come the lawn chairs, the coolers and the eats. Before the first flick sputters on and Cameron Mitchell opens that ominous box of tools, we’re through an economy-size bag of “tater” chips, a quart of Coke and half a sack of chocolate cookies.

The movie starts, time is lost as we become absorbed in the horrifyingly campy delights of
Toolbox
. We get to the part where Mitchell is about to use the industrial nailer on a young lady he’s been watching shower, and suddenly —
there is a light
, so red and bright the images on the screen fade. Looking up, we see a great, crimson comet hurtling towards us. Collision with the drive-in is imminent. Or so it seems; then, abruptly the
comet smiles
. Just splits down the middle to show a mouth full of grinning, jagged teeth not too unlike a power saw blade. It seems that instead of going out of life with a bang, we may go out with a crunch. The mouth gets wider, and the comet surprises us by whipping up, dragging behind it a fiery tail that momentarily blinds us.

When the crimson washes from our eyeballs and we look around, all is as before. At first glance anyway. Because closer observation reveals that everything outside the drive-in, the highway, the trees, the tops of houses and buildings that had been visible above the surrounding tin fence, are gone. There is only blackness, and we’re talking BLACKNESS here, the kind of dark that makes fudge pudding look pale. It’s as if the drive-in has been ripped up by the roots and miraculously stashed in limbo somewhere. But if so, we are not injured in any way, and the electricity still works. There are lights from the concession stand, and the projector continues to throw the images of
Toolbox
on the screen.

About this time a guy in a station wagon, fat wife beside him, three kids in the back, panics, guns the car to life and darts for the exit. His lights do not penetrate the blackness, and as the car hits it, inch by inch it is consumed by the void. A moment later, nothing.

A cowboy with a hatful of toothpicks and feathers gets out of his pickup and goes over there. He stands on the tire-buster spears, extends his arm… And never in the history of motion pictures or real life have I heard such a scream. He flops back, his arm gone from the hand to elbow. He rolls on the ground. By the time we get over there the rest of his arm is collapsing, as if bone and tissue have gone to mush. His hat settles down on a floppy mess that a moment before was his head. His whole body folds in and oozes out of his clothes in what looks like sloppy vomit. I carefully reach out and take hold of one of his boots, upend it, a loathsome mess pours out and strikes the ground with a plopping sound.

We are trapped in the drive-in.

Time goes by, no one knows how much. It’s like the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about Pellucidar. Without the sun or moon to judge by, time does not exist. Watches don’t help either. They’ve all stopped. We sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry. And the movies flicker on. No one even suggests cutting them off. Their light and those of the concession stand are the only lights, and should we extinguish them, we might be lost forever in a void to match the one outside of the drive-in fence.

At first people are great. The concession folks bring out food. Those of us who have brought food, share it. Everyone is fed.

But as time passes, people are not so great. The concession stand people lock up and post guards. My friends and I are down to our last kernels of popcorn and we’re drinking the ice and water slush left in the coolers. The place smells of human waste, as the restrooms have ceased to function altogether. Gangs are forming, even cults based on the movies. There is a Zombie Cult that stumbles and staggers in religious mockery of the “dead” on the screen. And with the lack of food an acute problem, they have taken to human sacrifice and cannibalism. Bob takes down the shotgun. I take down the baseball bat. Dave has taken to wearing a hunting knife he got out of the glove box.

Rape and murder are wholesale, and even if you’ve a mind to, there’s not much you can do about it. You’ve got to protect your little stretch of ground, your automobile, your universe. But against our will we are forced into the role of saviors when a young girl runs against our truck while fleeing her mother, father and older brother. Bob jerks her inside the truck, holds the family — who are a part of the Zombie Cult and run as if they are cursed with a case of the rickets — at bay with the shotgun. They start to explain that as the youngest member of the family, it’s only right that she give herself up to them to provide sustenance. A chill runs up my back. Not so much because it is a horrible thing they suggest, but because I too am hungry, and for a moment they seem to make good sense.

Hunger devours the family’s common sense, and the father leaps forward. The shotgun rocks against Bob’s shoulder and the man goes down, hit in the head, the way you have to kill zombies. Then the mother is on me, teeth and nails. I swing the bat and down she goes, thrashing at my feet like a headless chicken.

Trembling, I hold the bat before me. It is caked with blood and brains. I fall back against the truck and throw up. On the screen the zombies are feasting on bodies from an exploded pickup.

Rough for the home team. Time creeps by. We are weak. No food. No water. We find ourselves looking at the rotting corpses outside our pickup far too long. We catch the young girl eating their remains, but we do nothing. Somehow, it doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, it looks inviting. Food right outside the truck, on the ground, ready for the taking.

But when it seems we are going to join her, there is a red light in the sky. The comet is back, and once again it swoops down, collision looks unavoidable, it smiles with its jagged teeth, peels up and whips its bright tail. And when the glow burns away from our eyes, it is daylight and there is a world outside the drive-in.

A sort of normalcy returns. Engines are tried. Batteries have been unaffected by the wait. Automobiles start up and begin moving toward the exit in single file, as if nothing has ever happened.

Outside, the highway we come to is the same, except the yellow line has faded and the concrete has buckled in spots. But nothing else is the same. On either side of the highway is a great, dank jungle. It looks like something out of a lost world movie.

As we drive along — we’re about the fifth automobile in line — we see something move up ahead, to the right. A massive shape steps out of the foliage and onto the highway. It is a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.

The dinosaur does nothing. It gives our line of metal bugs the once over, crosses the highway and is enveloped by the jungle again.

The caravan starts up once more. We drive onward into this prehistoric world split by a highway out of our memories.

I’m riding shotgun and I glance in the wing-mirror on my side. In it I can see the drive-in screen, and though the last movie should still be running, I can’t make out any movement there. It looks like nothing more than an oversized slice of Wonder Bread.

Fade out.

That’s the dream. And even now when I go to a drive-in, be it the beat up Lumberjack here with its cheap, tin screen, or anywhere else, I find myself occasionally glancing at the night sky, momentarily fearing that out of the depths of space there will come a great, red comet that will smile at me with a mouthful of saw-blade teeth and whip its flaming tail.

If they’d gone to the drive-in like they’d planned, none of this would have happened. But Leonard didn’t like drive-ins when he didn’t have a date, and he’d heard about
Night of the Living Dead
, and he knew a nigger starred in it. He didn’t want to see no movie with a nigger star. Niggers chopped cotton, fixed flats, and pimped nigger girls, but he’d never heard of one that killed zombies. And he’d heard too that there was a white girl in the movie that let the nigger touch her, and that peeved him. Any white gal that would let a nigger touch her must be the lowest trash in the world. Probably from Hollywood, New York, or Waco, some godforsaken place like that.

Now Steve McQueen would have been all right for zombie killing and girl handling. He would have been the ticket. But a nigger? No sir.

Boy, that Steve McQueen was one cool head. Way he said stuff in them pictures was so good you couldn’t help but think someone had written it down for him. He could sure think fast on his feet to come up with the things he said, and he had that real cool, mean look.

Leonard wished he could be Steve McQueen, or Paul Newman even. Someone like that always knew what to say, and he figured they got plenty of bush too. Certainly they didn’t get as bored as he did. He was so bored he felt as if he were going to die from it before the night was out. Bored, bored, bored. Just wasn’t nothing exciting about being in the Dairy Queen parking lot leaning on the front of his ‘64 Impala looking out at the highway. He figured maybe old crazy Harry who janitored at the high school might be right about them flying saucers. Harry was always seeing something. Bigfoot, six-legged weasels, all manner of things. But maybe he was right about the saucers. He’d said he’d seen one a couple nights back hovering over Mud Creek and it was shooting down these rays that looked like wet peppermint sticks. Leonard figured if Harry really had seen the saucers and the rays, then those rays were boredom rays. It would be a way for space critters to get at Earth folks, boring them to death. Getting melted down by heat rays would have been better. That was at least quick, but being bored to death was sort of like being nibbled to death by ducks.

Leonard continued looking at the highway, trying to imagine flying saucers and boredom rays, but he couldn’t keep his mind on it. He finally focused on something in the highway. A dead dog.

Not just a dead dog. But a DEAD DOG. The mutt had been hit by a semi at least, maybe several. It looked as if it had rained dog. There were pieces of that pooch all over the concrete and one leg was lying on the curbing on the opposite side, stuck up in such a way that it seemed to be waving hello. Doctor Frankenstein with a grant from Johns Hopkins and assistance from NASA couldn’t have put that sucker together again.

Leonard leaned over to his faithful, drunk companion, Billy — known among the gang as Farto, because he was fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek — and said, “See that dog there?”

Farto looked where Leonard was pointing. He hadn’t noticed the dog before, and he wasn’t nearly as casual about it as Leonard. The puzzle-piece hound brought back memories. It reminded him of a dog he’d had when he was thirteen. A big, fine German shepherd that loved him better than his mama.

Sonofabitch dog tangled its chain through and over a barbed wire fence somehow and hung itself. When Farto found the dog its tongue looked like a stuffed, black sock and he could see where its claws had just been able to scrape the ground, but not quite enough to get a toe hold.

It looked as if the dog had been scratching out some sort of a coded message in the dirt. When Farto told his old man about it later, crying as he did, his old man laughed and said, “Probably a goddamn suicide note.”

Now, as he looked out at the highway, and his whiskey-laced Coke collected warmly in his gut, he felt a tear form in his eyes. Last time he’d felt that sappy was when he’d won the fart-lighting championship with a four-inch burner that singed the hairs of his ass and the gang awarded him with a pair of colored boxing shorts. Brown and yellow ones so he could wear them without having to change them too often.

So there they were, Leonard and Farto, parked outside the DQ, leaning on the hood of Leonard’s Impala, sipping Coke and whiskey, feeling bored and blue and horny, looking at a dead dog and having nothing to do but go to a show with a nigger starring in it. Which, to be up front, wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d had dates. Dates could make up for a lot of sins, or help make a few good ones, depending on one’s outlook.

But the night was criminal. Dates they didn’t have. Worse yet, wasn’t a girl in the entire high school would date them. Not even Marylou Flowers, and she had some kind of disease.

All this nagged Leonard something awful. He could see what the problem was with Farto. He was ugly. Had the kind of face that attracted flies. And though being fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek had a certain prestige among the gang, it lacked a certain something when it came to charming the gals.

But for the life of him, Leonard couldn’t figure his own problem. He was handsome, had some good clothes, and his car ran good when he didn’t buy that old cheap gas. He even had a few bucks in his jeans from breaking into washaterias. Yet his right arm had damn near grown to the size of his thigh from all the whacking off he did. Last time he’d been out with a girl had been a month ago, and as he’d been out with her along with nine other guys, he wasn’t rightly sure he could call that a date. He wondered about it so much, he’d asked Farto if he thought it qualified as a date. Farto, who had been fifth in line, said he didn’t think so, but if Leonard wanted to call it one, wasn’t no skin off his back.

But Leonard didn’t want to call it a date. It just didn’t have the feel of one, lacked that something special. There was no romance to it.

True, Big Red had called him Honey when he put the mule in the barn, but she called everyone Honey — except Stoney. Stoney was Possum Sweets, and he was the one who talked her into wearing the grocery bag with the mouth and eye holes. Stoney was like that. He could sweet talk the camel out from under a sand nigger. When he got through chatting Big Red down, she was plumb proud to wear that bag.