Then I glanced at the screen. The Toolbox Murders was visible again, but there was no fun in it. It seemed horribly silly and out of place, like someone dancing at a funeral.
Voices began to rumble across the lot, voices touched with surprise and confusion. I saw a rubber suited monster take the head off his suit and tuck it under his arm and look around, hoping he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw, and that it would be some kind of trick due to bad lighting through the eyes of his mask. A bikini-clad girl let her stomach sag, having lost the ambition to suck it in.
I realized suddenly I was walking toward the exit, and that the gang was with me, and Bob was chattering like an idiot, not making any sense. The din of voices across the lot had grown, and people were out of their cars, walking in the same direction we were, like lemmings being willed to the sea.
One man fired up his car. It was a new Ford station wagon and it was full of fat. Fat driver in a Hawaiian shirt with a fat wife beside him, two fat kids in the back. He jerked the car around a speaker post with surprising deftness, pulled on the lights and raced for the exit.
People scattered before the wagon, and I got a glimpse of the driver’s face as he raced past. It looked like a mask made of paste with painted golf balls for eyes.
The headlights hit the darkness, but didn’t penetrate. The car pushed down the tire-buster spears with a clack and was swallowed foot by foot by the pudding. It was as if there had never been a car. There was not even the sound of the motor retreating into the distance.
A tall cowboy in a Stetson full of toothpicks and feathers sauntered over to the opening, flexed his shoulders and said, “Let’s find out what the hell gives here.”
He put a boot on the tire-buster spears to hold them down, stuck his arm into the fudge, up to the elbow.
And the cowboy screamed. Never in my personal history of real life or movie experiences have I heard such a sound. It was like a depth charge to the soul, and its impact blew up my spine and rocked my skull.
The cowboy staggered back, flopped to the ground and turned himself around and around like a dog with its guts dragging. His arm was gone from hand to elbow.
We ran over to help him, but before we could lay a hand on him, he yelled, “Back, goddammit. Don’t touch me! It runs.”
He started screaming again, but it sounded as if his vocal cords were filling with mud. And I saw then what he meant by “It runs.” Slowly his arm was dissolving, the sleeve going limp at the shoulder, then the shoulder folded and he tried to scream again. But whatever was eating him from the outside seemed to be working inside him even faster.
His forehead wobbled forward as bone and tissue went to Jell-O, caved in on the rest of his collapsing face. His cowboy hat came to settle on top of the mess, floated in it. His entire body went liquid, ran out of his clothes in nauseating streams. The stink was awful.
Carefully, holding my breath, I reached out and took hold of one of his boots and upended it. A loathsome goop, like vomit, poured out of it and splattered to the ground.
Beside me, Bob let out with a curse, and Willard said something I didn’t understand. I dropped the boot and looked at the darkness beyond the tin fence and the strange truth of it struck me.
We were trapped in the drive-in.
6
That we were trapped in the drive-in was realized immediately by most, but accepted slowly by all of us. And there were some who didn’t know right off, like the couple in the Buick parked near where a bunch of us had gathered, looking at the hat, boots and empty clothes of the dissolved cowboy. Neither comet nor screams had reached them. They were too wrapped up in their lovemaking. They were in the back seat of the Buick, and the girl had one ankle draped across the seat and the other on the package shelf. We were all watching the car rock, watching it threaten the shock absorbers and test the strength of four-ply tires. And as the car was at a slant, dipping its rear end toward us, we could see a pale butt rising to view, vanishing, rising, vanishing, all with a regular rhythm, like an invisible man dribbling a basketball. It was something we kept our eyes on, something that tied us to our old reality, and I really hated for it to end and for the girl’s ankles to come down, and a little later for them to come out of the car with their clothes rumpled, looking mad at first, then confused. It was our faces that did that to them, the way we were bunched up, the rumble of our voices, the fact that more people were walking our way, and, of course, there was the absolute blackness all around.
Someone tried to tell the couple about the comet, the fat folks in the Ford and the brave (or stupid) cowboy who got dissolved, and they just grinned. The guy said, “No way.”
“Well,” Bob said, waving a hand at the fudge surrounding the drive-in, “I guess we just dreamed all this crap. You think we’re giving you a bill of goods, why don’t you two just take you a little stroll out in that shit—but don’t expect to come back.”
The guy looked at the girl; she looked at him; he looked at us and shook his head.
People tried radios, CBs, and some clustered to the concession to make a stab at the phones. But nothing was in order. Just a little static on the radios.
The crowd grew. Must have been over a hundred of us standing around, and more people were coming. They were starting to congregate over in Lot B too, in little spots here and there. Some were driving cars around and around, honking horns, maybe not scared yet, but certainly bewildered. But that didn’t go on long. Pretty soon no cars were moving about, just groups of people, talking or looking lost.
A story came to us from Lot B about a motorcycle gang that was over there, about how one of their members panicked and drove his bike off into the stuff, with the same result as our fat man and his calorie-laden family in the Ford station wagon.
The theories started then, those by the loudest and most persistent ones among us being the ones heard. The man with the beer gut wearing a T-shirt a size too small with a mustard blossom on the neck of it, for instance.
“Well, I think it’s them men from outer space, whatever color they are. They’ve done this to us. With us shooting our rockets and stuff up there, they were bound to get sore with us. So they’ve come down with some of them sophisticated weapons they’ve got, and they’ve done this. I don’t see how it could be anything else.”
“I don’t think so,” said a guy in a sports coat, his hair neat and stiff as a J.C. Penney model. “I suspect the Communists. They’re a lot stronger in this country than most people imagine. And I don’t want to open any old wounds here, but maybe McCarthy wasn’t as far off as some people thought. These Communists are into everything, and they’ve said all along that they planned to take us over.”
“Why in the hell would they want some Texas drive-in picture show?” Bob said. “They like horror movies, or what? That don’t make no damn sense. I like the one about the guys from outer space, whatever color they are, better than that, and that’s dumb.”
“Hey,” said the man with the mustard-colored T-shirt.
“Call ‘em like I see ‘em,” Bob said.
“It’s the will of God,” said a girl in a long blue cotton dress. “There was so much sinning going on here, God has sent a blight.”
The couple who had been practicing the rites of the three-toed salamander in the back of the Buick started shuffling their feet and looking over the heads of the crowd as if they were expecting someone.
“It wasn’t God,” said somebody at the rear of the crowd, “it was Satan done it. God doesn’t punish. Man and Satan punish.”
“We’re uptight for nothing,” said another voice. “Tomorrow the sun will come up and shine through this mess. It’s just a freak of nature, that’s all.”
“No,” said a punker girl with orange spiked hair. “It’s dimensional invaders.”
No one bought that one.
A pretty girl in a pink bathing suit suggested, “Maybe we’re all dead, and, like, hanging in limbo or something.”
Some consideration on that. A
couple of maybes from the crowd; I think it might have edged out the Commie threat a bit in popularity.
“Ain’t none of them things,” said a fat lady with a nose like a red pickle. She was wearing a pink and green housecoat that could have served as a visual emetic and yellow bunny slippers. She had her arm around her skinny husband’s waist and two small ankle biters (a girl and a boy) were at her feet. “It’s the ghost of Elvis Presley. I read about something like this in The Weekly World News, and Elvis was involved in that. His ghost came down and did some things to some sinners. He said to them that he wasn’t happy with the way people were living on Earth.”
“Hell,” Bob said. “He’s got to be a self-righteous sonofabitch now that he’s dead. He wasn’t nothing but a fat doper.”
“He was the King,” the woman said, as if she were talking about Jesus.
“King of what?” Bob said. “Constipation? I heard he died on the floor of his toilet with a turd hanging out of his ass. Report said he died ‘straining at stool.’ He wasn’t any more than the rest of us, except he could sing. And even then, he wasn’t any Hank Williams.”
“Hank Williams,” said the fat lady, taking her arm from around her husband’s waist and looking as if she were about to leap. “Now there was a drunk and a doper. And he wasn’t near as good-looking as Elvis.”
“That may be,” Bob said, “but you don’t hear of his ghost coming down to bother nobody. He knew to mind his own business.”
This went on for a time, not really solving anything, but it was entertaining. I got to thinking about how much time had elapsed, and looked at my watch. It had stopped.
Bob and the lady with the red pickle nose had finally quit going at it, and a black guy wearing a straw hat and a worn-out gray sweatshirt with “Dallas Cowboys” on it spoke up then. “We could be here a time. What about food? We’re gonna need that.”
I thought about the cookies and junk back at the truck and wished we’d brought something more substantial, but then maybe that was carrying worry too far, projecting this strange situation too distantly in the future.
The manager of the main concession joined us then. “Look, it isn’t going to come to that, worrying about food, I mean. This will pass. Whatever it is, it can’t last long. But to ease your minds, let me tell you that if we’re here awhile, if food becomes a problem, we’ve got enough back there in that concession, and over on Lot B, to last a long time.”
“How long is a long time?” Willard said.
“A long, long time,” the manager said. “But let’s don’t jump the gun here. This’ll pass. Maybe some sort of industrial accident put this mess around us.”
“And the comet?” Randy said.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a logical explanation to it all, and I don’t see any need to get worked up over starving to death. We haven’t been in this mess but a few minutes, and I can tell you now, it won’t last.”
“God has spoken,” Bob said, and the manager glared at him.
“I think we all ought to hold tight,” the manager said. “Go on back to your cars, try to forget all this, get your mind on the movies. Pretty soon someone will come to get us out of this. Some kind of accident happened out there, someone knows about it. Hell, they’ll have the National Guard in here pretty soon.”
“That makes me feel comfy all over,” Bob said. “My uncle is in the National Guard and he don’t know dick about nothing, has a belly that hangs down to his knees. Great, the National Guard.”
“You boys think like you want,” the manager said. “Me, I’m going back to the concession, try the phones again, see if they’ve got to working. Tomorrow we’ll all have something to tell our families about.”
“Right,” Randy said. “A comet smiled at us, put us in Limbo Land, and the edge of Limbo Land ate a station wagon full of fat people and dissolved a cowboy.”
The manager tried to smile. “I’m not saying this isn’t a dangerous situation, but I am saying we have to make the best of it. Keep our spirits up, stay away from that gas ... jell, whatever it is ... and you’ll see. We’ll be fine. Now I’m going on back to the concession to try the phones.”
The manager went away and Randy said, “Yeah, fine.”
“He’s right, though,” a tall guy said. “We can’t do much else. We’ve got to make the best of it ... unless someone here has a great idea.”
No one did.
One guy went out to the trunk of his car, came back with an old box and a shovel. He scooped up the cowboy and put him in the box. The mess had lost its acidic quality and was congealing. The box remained intact. He used the point of the shovel to scoop up the clothes and the boots, dropped the hat on top of it all.
“I’ll just ... keep him in my trunk,” he said. “Wife said she didn’t mind ... seems like the decent thing to do. Maybe we can figure out who he is ... get his folks to bury him when we get out ... Anybody here know him?”
No one said they did.
“Guess he came by himself,” the guy said, and carried the shovel and the cowboy in the cardboard box away.
“What a way to end up,” Bob said. “In the trunk of a car next to a spare tire.”
“In a dirty box, no less,” Randy said.
Now to make a long story short, or at least this part of it, this went on, this standing around and talking, this looking at the black mess and waiting for the National Guard, but no one showed up to rescue us.
“We’ve talked and talked about it,” Willard said, “but nothing’s gotten any better.”
“I’m gonna get me a Baby Ruth,” Bob said. “It’s good for my skin.”
“Not much else to do, is there,” I said.
“Let’s just do like the manager suggested,” said the black guy in the straw hat.
We drifted away from the crowd, and the crowd started to break apart, wandering back to their cars with a stunned look on their faces. The immediate drama was over and nothing had changed. We were still trapped in the drive-in, and the adventure of it was old already.
We all went back to the truck, and I took up my position in the chair and recovered my bag of popcorn. I even found I could get interested in the movies again.
Bob came back with his Baby Ruth and smacked his lips over it enough to make me look through our stuff for some cookies. I had eaten so much I was beginning to feel queasy.
We watched the movies, but after they had run through and started over again, I began to lose interest and really worry. With that many movies shown, and them starting a second run, it ought to be getting toward dawn. There wasn’t a ray of sunlight, however. Just the same artificial lights. I was getting sick of movies, the drive-in, even the goofballs who were wandering around in monster suits. I couldn’t even feel any warmth for the gals in their bikinis. I felt like a roach in a toilet bowl with someone’s hand on the handle, ready to flush. I wanted to go home to my nice warm bed, with Mom and Dad down the hall.
The concession manager we had talked to spoke over the speakers. “The phones still aren’t on, folks, and we haven’t been able to pick up anything on the radio, but I’m sure the National Guard is on this, and we’ll be out of here soon—”
“Guy has a hard-on for the National Guard,” Bob said.
“—until then, we’re going to keep right on showing the movies, and if there’s no help by the time of the third one, we’ll be serving breakfast here at the concession—on the house. No eggs and bacon, I’m afraid. But we’ve got hot dogs, fresh hot popcorn, plenty of candy and soft drinks, plus some real good orange drink we got in just for tonight.”
The manager went off then, and Bob said, “Here we are surrounded by acidic goo, and all this guy can think about is the National Guard, free hot dogs and good orange drink.”
“The odd thing to me,” Randy said, “is how come the electricity works here in the drive-in, but radios, things that connect us to the outside world, don’t? Hell, my watch has even stopped.”
“Mine too,” I s
aid.
Bob took out his pocket watch. “This one’s dead too. First time ever.”
“Bet they’re all dead,” Willard said. It was the first time he had said a word in some time. He had just been sitting, watching the movies, eating popcorn. “Time is an outside connection too.”
“You getting at something, Willard?” I asked.
“Not really. I don’t know any better what’s going on than anyone else. But this all has a kind of artificial feel to it ... like, hell, I don’t know—”
“A B science-fiction movie,” Randy said.
“Yeah,” Willard said. “I guess so.”
“Personally,” Bob said, “I think the lady in the blanket and bunnies was right. It’s the ghost of Elvis.”
“I just hope the damn bulbs and such in the projectors don’t burn out,” Willard said. “Or in the Orbit sign. They do, and it’s going to be some kind of dark in here.”
Willard got out his cigarettes, passed them around. We all took one, just as if we smoked, and Willard put his lighter to them, and we leaned against the truck and puffed them until we coughed.
“That poor cowboy,” Randy said. “It melted him like salt melts a slug. Looked like cheap special effects. Like in that movie The Hydrogen Man, or maybe The Blob.”
“And that fat family and their car,” Bob said. “Rendered right down, I figure.”
So we smoked our cigarettes and the movies rolled on.
7
After a time, I gave it up and crawled in the back of the truck, found one of the bedrolls we kept back there for camping trips, got in it and fell asleep. Kind of sleep you get from depression and absolute exhaustion.
I dreamed about what Randy had said, about this being like a B science-fiction movie, and the dream was very real. It was like I was tapped into some truth somewhere. There was this B-string god and he was making a movie. He didn’t have the power to make the Big Movie, so he just borrowed some people (us) and a setting (the drive-in) and made do with that. Real shoestring stuff. There was a bunch of other creatures with him, maybe they were gods too—hell, maybe none of them were gods—and they were like technicians and the like. They were real ugly hombres. They were speaking in a language I had never heard before, but I could understand it. The main ugly was telling them that it all had to be under budget. If it wasn’t, it was all over. He wanted them to do it cheap but be proud. Mostly, he wanted it quick. The technicians were very much in agreement. In fact, they seemed agreeable to most anything the main critter wanted.
The Complete Drive-In Page 5