It was as if my head were clearing, cotton stuffing was being pulled out. “You should have told us,” I said,
“I can tell you’re feeling good already. You’re starting to get self-righteous again. First thing you’ve said in a while that makes any sense. You been out in Bozo Land, pal. All you needed was a rubber nose and some flappy shoes.”
“You could have told us,” I said again.
“Naw. Randy and Willard were out there in orbit, man. If I’d told them about the jerky, it would have been all she wrote. Willard would have taken it from us, and if we’d given him any trouble, he’d have killed us. No, wasn’t nothing friendly about it. And telling him about it and keeping him at shotgun point all the time didn’t appeal to me none neither.”
“It was needing protein that made them goofy,” I said. I closed my eyes and chewed the last of the jerky. I had never tasted anything better in my life.
“That may be, but I ain’t no hero, Jack. I was watching after me. What can I say? I knew we had us a ticklish situation here, and I wanted to have my strength for as long as I could. More meat I had, longer I could last. I took it easy on the soft drinks and the candy, tried to drink enough to keep liquid in my body, but to balance the sugar out with the meat. I figured if I could stay alive long enough, all this might go back to the way it was.”
“So how come you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know. Worse you got, worse I felt. Hell, we been partners a long time ... Look at you. You look like crap. It was tough to look at.”
“But you managed.”
“For a time. My dad always said when it got right down to it, people weresonofabitches. If it was a difference between honor and no food, he said they’d take the food every time. Looks like he was right about that. We get home, I’ll tell him so.”
“Well, you don’t look so good neither,” I said. “And to hell with your old man.”
“I ain’t feeling up to snuff, Jack, but with this jerky in me I could kind of figure which was my left hand and my right, know my pecker from my leg, know what was going on in here wasn’t just something to look at ... Man, this is humanity shredding.”
“Randy’s been a friend a long time,” I said.
“Yeah. I care about him. But you and I been friends a long damn time—since kindergarten. And Randy has gotten real weird, partner. Him and Willard are ... well, they didn’t just get that way from lack of groceries. Those two and this drive-in and the things that have happened go together like bourbon and Coke ... I think they’re happy with the way things are. Hell, I don’t know, maybe they’re queer and in love and it’s all this making them find it out. And maybe it isn’t that; maybe they’re just super fucked up and this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.”
“It still doesn’t strike me as the way you should have handled it,” I said.
“No? Here, take another piece.”
I took it without argument. In fact, I took it a little too fast. I almost ate it with the cellophane on it.
“You’re a nice guy, Jack. Kind of a bleeding heart, but a nice guy. I wanted to tell you about the meat, but I knew you’d tell Randy and Willard. A bite of jerky meat wasn’t gonna help them none, so I couldn’t have that. Finally, though, I figured, hell, I ain’t gonna make this nohow, no matter how much meat I hold back. So, I thought, me and Jack, we’ll split it, last as long as we can. I mean ... well, guess I still got some kind of hope in me, just like that manager. Maybe down deep I think the National Guard is going to come through too ... You see, I had to choose between Willard and Randy and you. And I took you.”
“Am I supposed to feel flattered?”
“Be nice if you were. You been fucked up so long, you ain’t really got a grip on your thinking. Look out there.”
He slapped his hand against the camper window and I looked. People were fighting. They were on their hands and knees going at it. They sounded like rabid dogs.
“It’s like I was saying, Jack, you’re kind of a bleeding heart. If I’d told you about that jerky a time back, when you were feeling good and full of all that social morality shit, you’d have wanted to share with Randy and Willard . . . maybe even invite Crier, some of the others over for lunch. Make a picnic out of it. Sing a few songs. We’d have been out of that stuff faster than a whore’s out of pride. And I’ll tell you again: Willard would have killed us.”
“He seemed all right to me.”
“He was. He was good to us because he needed friends. In spite of that toughguy stuff, he was lonely. I’ve thought on this some, had time to. But he’s a survivor, and Randy’s a needer. Them two are together now and they ain’t two people no more, they’re one.”
“So what if I want to share with them now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you shoot me?”
“I might. I could eat you then. That seems to be the trend around here. But I don’t think so. But I might. Just look at it this way, Jack. Randy and Willard are out there—way out there. Twilight Zone theme time. You can forget them two boys unless the manager is right and the National Guard comes in here and rescues us and we all get turkey sandwiches and some rest. Otherwise, you ain’t seen nothing yet. People ain’t nothing but animals, Jack. You and me too. Things get bad enough, like animals, folks are gonna eat what they can, do what they have to.”
I thought about those books I’d garbaged. All of them were junk, but the basic theme to most had been that man was better than the animals, had something inside him that blossomed like a rose and never died, even when the physical body decayed.
I looked out at the fighters in the lot. A guy in a werewolf costume with the mask missing was rolling around on the ground with a fraternity-type guy whose pants had lost their razor crease sometime back.
“And you’re saying we’ll end up like that too?”
“Could. We last as long as we can, though. Build up some hope. Gets too bad ... there’s always the shotgun.”
I thought about Dad kidding Mom about the last two bullets back ... when? Christ, who could know? Yesterday? Today? A century ago? What exactly was it he told her ...? “When the going gets rough, and it looks like we’re not going to make it, I’ll save the last two bullets for us.”
I looked out the window again. There were people lying on the ground, not moving. A naked man was taking a swift kick in the nuts from a near-naked girl with a punk haircut. There were other people on the ground, on their hands and knees, grabbing for spilled popcorn and candy. One woman was lapping a spilled soft drink like a dog. She had her rear end to me and her dress was hiked up and she didn’t have on any underpants. It was far from sexy. She looked like a desperate, dying animal. I felt sorry for her. For them. For us.
“Maybe you’re thinking about going out there and giving a speech on the unity of mankind?” Bob asked.
“No,” I said. “Guess not.”
“That’s wise. Now take one more piece of meat, chew it slowly, and be a happy animal.”
10
We sat there for a time, not talking. I was thinking, watching the storm out there, and the people. I didn’t want to watch them fight and kill one another, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. It was sort of like watching the Dallas Cowboys play when they were bad. You hated looking at it, but you had to see it through.
Physically, I felt better. Not ready to do any hurdles or anything, but it seemed my senses had floated to the top once more. A lot of things I’d seen while lost in the ozone clicked together now, and I could see them in a truer light. The little girl with the cape getting kicked to death, for one. Seemed to me I had wanted to kick her too. I could remember thinking that, but for the life of me couldn’t remember why. Had I really watched her father get shotgunned out of the air and thought it funny? And hadn’t there been something about eating a baby? (Raw as opposed to grilled.)
I thought about the jerky I had eaten and remembered what my father’s friend had said about it, how it was li
ke chewing on a dead woman’s tit. The thought of that and what was happening out there, people eating one another now and then, made me feel weak and dizzy.
Maybe Bob was right. Animals. That’s what we were. No different from the animals except for an opposable thumb and a desire to make popcorn and hit each other over the head with rocks, or whatever instrument was available.
Outside, it looked as if things had calmed down. No one was fighting and there were only gawkers. Standing and looking at the bodies on the ground (there were a few of those) and maybe considering them as steaks, but not quite ready to make the move.
But the calm didn’t last long. A guy came walking up, and he had a revolver in his hand, a .357 Magnum. He had a big, loud voice and he was using it.
“Can’t do this crap to Merve Kinsman. Merve Kinsman don’t take this off anybody. I come here to get my food, real polite like, and I’ll be damned if a punk without any drawers with a nigger on his back is gonna tell me dip. I don’t take that crap, nosireebob. I’ll blow their heads off, is what I’ll do. Knife or no knife. I’ll not have it, I tell you.”
Merve didn’t seem to be speaking to anyone in particular, but he was turning his head from side to side as he talked, as if those who were still milling about were hanging on his every word.
I looked at the concession itself. There wasn’t any more activity there, and I hadn’t seen Willard or Randy come out. It seemed pretty obvious that they were the “punk without any drawers” and the “nigger.”
Merve Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody stopped outside the concession and waved the revolver and talked to the air some more. “Ain’t nobody gonna talk to my ass like that, you hear. I’ll pull their damn head off and piss an ocean down their throat is what I’m trying to tell you.”
Merve looked at one of the closest bystanders, an aging hippie dressed in old blue jeans and high-top tennis shoes and no shirt. The hippie tried to look casual.
He tried a friendly smile.
“Don’t you be looking at me like that, you weird little fart.” Merve grabbed the hippie and gave him a rapid pistol-whipping about the head and ears and threw him down on the ground. The hippie lay on his side and tried to look dead, but I could see he was blinking. Blood was dribbling down his face. This was a long ways from sixties flower power. I imagined he was trying to figure exactly how he had looked at Merve, so if the situation came up again be could play his cards differently.
Merve pulled open the concession door and put a foot in there quick as a door-to-door salesman. He threw his chest out and stepped inside, saying, “Got some bullets here with your names on them, assholes. Come and get ‘em.”
Then he moved to the right inside the concession, out of view. Patrons who had been hanging around, and still had enough functioning gray matter, sauntered briskly off. A few lay down on the ground like whipped dogs. The aging hippie remained stone-still.
A shot was fired inside the concession.
More patrons scrambled. More briskly this time.
When no more shots followed, the hippie rolled quickly to his right, came to his feet and darted off. He looked to have been taking lessons from the guy Willard had hit with the baseball bat.
The moments moved by slower than dental work, then Merve Kinsman made his appearance. He came out of the concession walking like a drunk trying to look sober. He had Willard’s knife in his right eye. It was buried halfway to the hilt. Merve Kinsman Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody was complaining, though not as loud as before. He was now Merve Kinsman Who-Would-Not-Be-Messed-With, By-God, and he wanted every damn one of us to know it. He said something about hell to pay when he found his gun, then he went face down on the lot, the knife point punching up through the back of his head.
Willard came out then. Randy was still on his shoulders, wearing the popcorn container. Willard had to duck to let Randy through the door. Willard had the .357. He looked real happy. He smiled. There was blood on his teeth (or maybe chocolate). Maybe he had been hit in the mouth or had bitten somebody. (Or had eaten an Almond Joy.)
“The concession is ours, you sapsuckers,” Willard screamed. “Hear me? Ours!”
Nobody made with an argument. A few people who had been too dull to run shuffled their feet.
Merve Kinsman Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody, alias Merve Kinsman Who-Would-Not-Be-Messed-With, By-God, didn’t come back from the dead to debate the point, and I figured if anybody could, or would, it would be that guy.
Willard stepped forward a couple more steps, waved the .357 around. Randy beat his chest and let out with an anemic Tarzan yell. Away from the direct light of the concession, shadows falling across them, it was hard to see where one body quit and the other began, especially with Willard covered in those asphalt-black tattoos.
“We’re in charge now,” Randy screamed.
Willard waved the .357 around some more, turned, ducked back through the concession door and closed it. He pressed his nose against the glass door and looked out. You could only see Randy’s legs. The rest of him was above the door, behind solid wall, that popcorn-cup hat damn near scraping the ceiling, I imagined.
Willard went away; the smudge circle of his nose remained to mark his passing.
“Reckon that concession is theirs,” Bob said, “until someone with more firepower shows up.”
“You got intentions?” I asked.
“Not me, but you can bet someone does.”
The blackness above grew cluttered with electric blue veins, and pretty soon there was more blue than black, and the thunder and the snake-hiss of lightning was tough on the ears, even inside the camper.
Bob got brave enough to open up the back and look out. He said, “Will you look at this?”
I did. The Orbit symbol and the marquee were drawing lightning like decay draws germs. The lightning was hopping through the symbol, kicking out dark blue lights that mingled with the fairy blue and white. The marquee’s red letters looked like bright blood blisters about to pop.
We watched as the electric bolts from the symbol expanded, reached out toward the concession and touched it (like God giving the spark to Adam). The concession glowed blue and white, and those bat and skull symbols in the windows looked almost alive.
“Look at that,” Bob said.
He was referring to the symbol again, or rather what was above it. Sticking out of the black was what looked like a green-black tentacle, though it could have been a trick of the lightning, a dipping rent in the blackness like a tornado tail. Out of the tentacle (I preferred to think of it that way as it went along with my dreams of something up there, something in control) the lightning was flowing faster than ever, zeroing in on the Orbit symbol, jetting from that to the strained marquee. The word “Massacre” exploded in a flutter of glass, fizzled. The rest of it looked ready to go, but held.
Now another tentacle shape dropped down, twisted in the air and gave lightning from its tip, and this lightning went through the symbol and the marquee, and it made the marquee blow the word “Dismember.” And that damn symbol began to spin, rapidly, kicking out more and more bolts of energy, all of it going straight to the concession.
One of the black bats in the window flapped its wings and flew away into the depths of the concession. A paper skull twisted and fell to the floor, out of sight. The lights in there were blinking like a strobe show. They went out. But there was still plenty of light from the energy bolts, and it was a strange light, and it lit the concession up inside and out, bright and garish as a cheap nightclub act.
Then I saw Willard and Randy on the roof of the concession. Willard was still carrying Randy and Randy still had that damn container on his head. Willard had the .357 in his hand. They were spinning around up there in the blue glow, raising their hands, cussing, most likely, though there was too much thunder and hissing lightning to hear.
“Must be a trapdoor up there,” Bob said.
“Yeah, but what the hell are they doing up there?”
“Bel
ieve me, they don’t know.”
Willard raised his pistol and shot at the Orbit symbol, and, almost as if in answer, a thicker strand of lightning leaped out of it like a hot, bony finger with too many joints and hit Randy on top of his popcorn container hat, turned him and Willard the color of the bolt, and made them smoke. Willard did a kind of funky chicken dance across the length of the roof and back again. The lightning made him look like he was moving very fast. Randy stayed in place, didn’t even wobble.
Willard heel-toed it over to the trapdoor, and with the two of them glowing like a nuclear accident, they dropped through the hole.
The concession was lit up like blue neon. The original lights did not come back on. The movies, defying electrical logic, continued to churn.
I looked to see if there were still any paper bats and skulls decorating the window. Nope.
11
Things went from sho’ is bad to sho’ is rotten.
The lightning continued to shoot out of the blackness overhead (though the greenish-black tentacles were no longer visible), strike the Orbit symbol, and in turn strike the concession, and shower blueness over it.
Word of what had happened spread pretty fast through the drive-in, and in less time than it took for a messy dismemberment, the bikers showed.
They spun their bikes around in front of the concession and yelled some things. They roared around Bob’s truck a few times.
Most of them had guns: shotguns, revolvers of all kinds. A few had knives, chains and tire irons. They looked nasty. There were twelve of them, and I couldn’t figure exactly what had prompted them to show up, unless it was the idea of some guy with a gun and another guy on his shoulders taking over the concession that warmed their blood. Or maybe they had planned to take the concession over themselves and were just now getting around to it, mad because some chump had beaten them to it.
The Complete Drive-In Page 8