The Complete Drive-In

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I took off the safety and waited for another car, remembered to cock the lever and jack a shell into the chamber. I felt like Lucas McCain, the Rifleman.

  Next car that came I shot at, and I don’t know if I hit anyone or not, but it veered off the road, then back on, and went under the overpass and kept going, very fast. Next car I hit someone because it went off the road and through a barbed wire fence right before it reached the underpass. I saw a man stumble out of it and fall down in the pasture and get up. I took a couple of shots at him, and I guess I finally hit him because he fell down and didn’t get up. I shot once more in his direction, then went back to watching cars.

  A station wagon was next, and I put a shot into it and it ran into the side of the overpass and a woman opened the door part of the way and fell out. The lights from the overpass were bright on the windshield in the car, and I could see a child in a baby seat on the passenger’s side. I could even hear it crying.

  I leveled the rifle and fired until I finally hit it and it shut up. I figured I had done enough then. I was a celebrity, though no one knew it yet. I could just imagine being apprehended and handcuffed and the television cameras coming out and taking my picture in my Hopalong outfit, and then taking pictures of my pistols and my loop-cock Winchester. I hoped they’d let me see myself on television in the jail. But just knowing I was going to be there was a great thrill. I was, for the first time in my life, somebody.

  At first I thought I should turn myself in, but this seemed too easy. I would let them come for me. I might take a few shots at them, then, if they fired back, I would toss out my weapons and say I quit; I had watched that sort of thing on television more than once. They didn’t kill you if you quit. After I got on television, I didn’t care what they did with me.

  I put the rifle in the trunk and drove away. I drove until I came to a little serveyourself gas station and grocery. I was very hungry and I needed gas.

  I went in there and got a Coke and a Twinkie and the girl behind the counter stared at me. I liked that. I felt like a movie star. “Who are you supposed to be?” she said.

  “Hopalong Cassidy,” I said, and pulled out my pistol and reached across the counter and put it next to her nose and fired just as she screamed. Blood went all over the cash register. I went around and opened it and got some of the money just to have something to do, got my Coke and Twinkie and started to leave.

  A man in a big black wrecker drove up then, and he walked inside just as I was about to go out. He looked at me and I saw his head jerk a little. He knew something wasn’t right. I pulled the revolver and shot him in the chest and he went back against the glass door, hitting it so hard it cracked. It swung open and he fell out on the ground. I bent over him and shot him twice in the head.

  Something about the wrecker appealed to me. I put my Coke and Twinkie in the wrecker’s seat and got my rifle out of the Fairlane and put it in the floorboard of the wrecker. I had some trouble driving the wrecker at first, but I knew how. I had learned how to drive a lot of things at the station so I could put them in stalls to have flats and oil changed.

  I drove along not thinking about much, and I saw the Orbit drive-in. I couldn’t pass that up. I had been away from a screen too long and had begun to feel unreal. I drove in there and watched the movies and waited to be arrested. I thought I might not even wait. I thought I could get my rifle and go behind one of the screens and poke a hole in it and start shooting at people in their cars like the guy did in Targets. Maybe Boris Karloff would show up to stop me. I would have liked that.

  But before I could do anything the comet came and trapped us all in the drive-in. I wasn’t going to be arrested. I wasn’t going to be on TV. It was depressing at first, until I realized an incredible truth. I was living a movie. This wasn’t like working at the filling station. This wasn’t like walking home and seeing the winos. This was even better than watching television. It was like when I was shooting from the top of the underpass, only more so. This was constant, and everyone had to be involved, like it or not. The movie owned us all and you couldn’t change channels or turn it off. Here was a movie with blood and guts and a wild monster, the Popcorn King. He was wonderful. He preached violence and religion. If he could have gotten wrestling into his talks he would have covered the three manias of television. I loved him. I wanted him to beat me with a belt. I quit wearing the Hopalong outfit. I stripped off and went around naked like a lot of the others. I was not ashamed of my body now. Everyone looked awful. The comet and the Popcorn King had made us all alike. My constant fear was a happy ending, which meant, of course, everyone would go back to what they were before. And for me, that wouldn’t have been much.

  But things did not last. The comet came back. I put my Hopalong outfit on and drove out of the drive-in behind the others. I figured the old world would be out there and the only thing I could think of that was positive about that was that I would eventually be arrested and my picture would be on TV, and I would be recorded on video for all time.

  But the old world wasn’t out there. There was this world. This double feature.

  I became determined to drive to the end of the highway. Things got weirder as I drove along, and I wanted to see just how weird they would get. I wanted to be part of the weird.

  Once, when I stopped to find fruit, I saw a crowbar lying on the bed of the wrecker, and I got it and used it to break the padlock of the big metal box welded below the back window. Inside was a tarp, flares, knives, electrical wire, miscellaneous items. I knew these would come in handy later.

  The gas in the wrecker lasted a long time, and when I got to this place with the film draped in the trees, I knew I was on the right track.

  I pushed on. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in They Drive by Night.

  Though the shadows and the storms and the crawling film persisted, I began to see new things. Solid things. Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, for example. I never saw a live one, just dead ones. They were lying beside the highway or in it, obviously having been hit by cars. They were smashed and/or bloated. Their little caps lay beside them like markers. I passed one that someone had propped up with a stick. They also had a stick down one of his sleeves and had rigged it so his arm stuck straight out; he looked as if he were thumbing a ride.

  I passed cars beside the road. Empty. Came to one where a body was wrapped like a mummy in film; the film was pulsing like a tumor.

  Cars passed me on their way back. None of the drivers waved.

  Beside the road I saw what looked like a collapsed water tower, but it was one of the Martian stalking machines from War of the Worlds. A squid-like creature was dangling out of an opening in the top of the machine, limp as spaghetti.

  When the storms came now, they were more violent than ever. The blue lightning flashed through the films and the images on the films were cast onto the ground and into the trees and onto the wrecker. They lived and breathed during those brief moments of lightning.

  The wrecker was rigged with an auxiliary tank, and I switched that on and kept at it. I finally had to stop and use the hose from the box on the wrecker bed to siphon gas from a couple of dead cars, which turned out to be the last ones I saw on the highway. What gas I got from them you could have put in a paper cup. But it was gas that got me to the end of the highway.

  I got closer looks at the Munchkins. They were solid all right, but they weren’t real after all. They were elaborate dummies. As I went, there were more of these, and not all of them were Munchkins. They were the sort of dummies they used to use a lot in old movies, when they wanted to have a body tumble over Niagara Falls for instance. I stopped in the daylight and looked at the Martian machines. Cheap wood painted silver. The Martians were rubber octopuses.

  I liked that.

  Finally I came to the end of the highway.

  And there was the Orbit.

  It was different in many ways, but it was the Orbit. The highway was a snake biting its tail.

  Amid the wreckage that had
been made by the fools who killed the Popcorn King were strips of film, more dummies, props of all kinds, lobby cards, TV sets and fragments of antennas. In several spots there were piles of TV sets; piles that made pyramids that tipped through a continuous bank of dark clouds.

  At night there were really violent storms. Worse yet. The wind blew popcorn bags and movie posters and soft drinks and movie magazines against the wrecker with a sound like wet towels popping.

  When it rained, it rained chocolate almonds and popcorn and soft drinks—every kind imaginable: cherry, orange, Coke, Dr Pepper, Pepsi. I recognized the taste of these and more by drinking from puddles in the blacktop. Later I sat cups out at night and in the morning I drank from these, picked up chocolate almonds and popcorn and the occasional unwrapped Snickers for my breakfast. I confess, I longed for Twinkies.

  I learned that the busted television sets grew up from the ground like sacrificial potatoes. Once birthed, the ground healed up behind them like a sore.

  I checked out the concession over in Lot B, but though it was intact, it was a shambles inside; there wasn’t anything of use in there. The projectors looked okay, but unlike when the Orbit was in that black stuff, they didn’t work without electricity. It was a depressing discovery. All those films and no way to show them.

  The lightning gave me glimpses of films, because of the way it made images jump, but it was really more of a tease than anything else. What I would have given even for a complete dog food commercial.

  I picked magazines—Screen Gems, TV Guide, and the like—off the windshields of the cars and off the ground, and spent my days shaking the soft drinks out of their pages and reading them carefully. It was okay at first, but a lot of the magazines were the same. I began to get bored. This place was certainly like a movie set, but it wasn’t as satisfying as before, not the way it had been when it was at the other end of the highway. Then it had been more than a set. It had been a movie that I was part of. There was action and drama and comedy, and now there was just me. I didn’t care much for me.

  I decided to climb one of the pyramids and go up into the constant cloudbank. I doubted it was high enough for me to need an oxygen mask up there, and then again, I didn’t really care. I wanted to see where all the chocolate almonds and soft drinks came from, and it was something to do that was like being in a movie.

  I started up by sticking my feet into the busted faces of the sets, clutching them like lovers. After a time I realized the pyramid was much higher than I thought. I began to get frightened. I was reminded of the movie The Bible and the scene concerning the Tower of Babel. Was I defying the gods? Or was it a test?

  Once again, I decided it didn’t matter. I was living a movie and that was what counted. I would rather die as part of a movie than live as part of the normal world.

  When night set in with its storms of papers and its rains of soft drinks, chocolate almonds, and popcorn, I was not even halfway up. I found a twenty-three-inch television with the tube busted out and I crawled into the opening and pushed out the back and found myself in a den of sets and movie magazines. It looked like someone or something had been living in there at one time. I crawled back through some more sets and found a comfortable spot with plenty of room and stretched out on top of some magazines and tried to pull a few over me. I lay there pretending I was Stewart Granger and I was trapped in King Solomon’s mines.

  When I awoke the next morning, I felt awful. I let down my pants and took a shit, got out of there and started climbing. I went like that for three or four days, sleeping in what TV caves I could find, traveling as long as I could take it each day.

  Finally I came to a wisp of cloud. I was right, the clouds were low. They were also made of cotton and they bunched tightly around the top of the pyramid. I pulled the cotton away to make the going easier, and kept climbing.

  As I went up, I saw there were hundreds of thin, white strings holding the dark clouds up on either side of me.

  I didn’t go much farther before I came to a spot where the blue lightning jumped and crackled constantly and swarmed around my head like a halo. The electricity made my hair stand on end and pushed my hat up so that it seemed to be supported by porcupine quills. The hair on my body poked through my clothes like tacks.

  Above me I could see an opening in the blue sky. I went up through that and felt my hair go soft and my hat settle down on my head. When I got through the hole I was at the top of the pyramid and I stepped off of it and found myself inside a tremendous room full of gigantic cameras, sound systems, and gadgets I couldn’t identify. None of it looked designed for human hands.

  Leaning against a distant wall was a backdrop. It was of the Orbit, and it was the Orbit when it was acidic and the Popcorn King had ruled. My favorite time.

  I took the long walk over and touched it. It rippled under my hand and I was able to move into it. It was suddenly real. On the screen nearest me, Night of the Living Dead was playing. It wasn’t one of the good parts. No one was getting ripped apart or eaten.

  There were people moving about among the speakers and cars. They looked stunned, mechanical, thin and wasted. But they didn’t look as bad as they were going to look.

  When I turned, I expected to be trapped in the Orbit, and I wouldn’t have minded too terribly, but behind me was a backdrop of the room full of equipment. I reached out and touched it and walked forward, and I was out of the Orbit; it was a backdrop again. I was a free agent.

  I looked around.

  There was this hallway, and on either side of the hallway were painted backdrops. I went down the hallway and stopped to look at some of them. One that caught my eye was of a jungle.

  I stepped into it. Immediately I was very hot and the air was full of the stink of mold and plants, and the trees were dripping water. I thought maybe this was a backdrop of the jungle below; maybe by stepping into this one, I was down below again.

  I heard a cracking of trees and brush, and a red, blue and yellow Triceratops poked its head through some greenery and looked at me. I know they’re supposed to be vegetarians, but I wasn’t in the mood to find out. Besides, he looked as if he might charge. I wondered if he could charge right out of the backdrop. I turned quickly and stepped back into the hallway. When I looked at the backdrop, it was just a jungle. No Triceratops.

  I walked down the hallway until a Western backdrop caught my eye. I stepped into a dusty street and began walking between rows of clapboard buildings. At the far end of the narrow street, a tall fellow with a gun on his hip began walking toward me.

  I was dressed for the part, but I didn’t like the looks of this. I turned around and walked back up the street and stepped back into the hallway.

  When I examined the backdrop, there was just an empty street, of course.

  The backdrops came to an end, and in their place were mirrors that distorted my appearance. No two had me looking the same. It seemed to me there was some great cosmic truth in this, but try as I might, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I kept walking.

  The hallway became filled with a large red ball. It towered high above me and touched the walls of the hallway. I put my hand against it and it felt as if it were made of cardboard. I pushed and it rolled back to reveal a split that widened and showed me several rows of jagged, poorly painted, cardboard teeth.

  It was the comet that had smiled and turned the Orbit into a horror movie. I pushed the ball hard and it went rolling down the long hallway very fast and disappeared into the distance like the sun falling down the dark shaft of the universe.

  I noticed now that the floor beneath me had changed and that I was standing on a dark rectangle and it was in turn linked to another and a series of these went on down the hall and disappeared into the same distance the comet had fallen. On either side and between the rectangles were gaps and out of the gaps poured a bright yellow light that hit against the ceiling.

  The light became stronger and warmer. It worked through the rectangle and it worked through me. I fell fac
e forward, went stiff and was enveloped by the flooring.

  The light went out.

  Lines I remember from my father and his Bible:

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

  And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.

  I don’t know about the waters, but there was certainly light, and plenty of it. It was stronger than before and warmer than before; it went through me like new blood. I felt as if I had never lived, except I had memories, and these seemed to belong to someone else and loaned to me. I felt as if I were a new creature in the eyes of the God (or Gods) of film; I was nothing more than a flat lifeless piece of celluloid with a great yellow light shining through me and the light was giving me life.

  In other words, I was on a filmstrip.

  I could hear gears grinding, sprockets turning, and the rectangle that was my home began to move. It rolled through what must have been a projector, because at some point the bright light became brighter and I hit a white wall and—

  I was animated, cartoon style. I held my hand in front of me, and it was blackgloved like it was supposed to be but the hand was puffy and silly, as if it were really nothing more than a glove filled with air.

  I was in a little room sitting on a stool, and all around me were white walls, and there were whisperings from somewhere, and occasional shadows. Then in front of me was this little blue glow. The glow died down and in its place was a short, dumpy cartoon woman wearing a blue-and-white dress tied in back with a white cloth belt. Her hair was silver and done up in a bun. She was holding a wand tipped with a silver star and she was using it to scratch her ass.

  In a voice that had been worked over with Brillo pads, she said, “I think it’s the riding around on the film or the light that leaves you the itch, but whatever, it’s some kind of itch. Lots of us have it. But listen, kid, I’m not here to talk to you about ass itch. We know what you want and we want you to have it. You’re made for the part, and I ain’t blowing smoke up your ass. You’re perfect. You see, the Producer and the Great Director want a show down there and we think you’re the one can give it to us. Kid, we’re gonna make you a goddamn star.”