The Complete Drive-In

1

Let me tell you, time can stand still.

It stood still as the bus went over the lip of the shitter. I envisioned us perched on the edge of a giant, dark toilet bowl full of someone’s little dividend, and we were about to dive in as if we had good sense. Shit-busters to the rescue.

Our own rescue, we hoped.

But, BAM. There we were, on the lip, frozen in time.

We just hung there.

Or so it seemed.

Then all of time gathered up and pushed, and we came unglued.

The bus, a long brightly lit, yellow, pontooned turd, dripped over the edge and took just two days south of forever before it hit that mess.

I was in my seat, facing down at the dark doom below us, my butthole biting at the upholstery, clutching the seat in front of me so hard my fingers ached.

And the shit hit the windshield. Hard.

I thought:

With our luck the windshield will blow and that pile of fish turds will smash us all the way to the back of the bus, fill our lungs with digested refuse, then, if we have a chance to live, if any one of us might be a survivor, that fish’s asshole will chew us up like a mole in a lawn mower, and out we will go.

Down we went, and the light was extinguished by the black goo, and I could feel Reba next to me, but couldn’t see her. I could hear her breathing hard, and there was a sensation of being like a BB sinking down into a vat of chocolate pudding, minus the nice smell and the fine taste.

Then the bus started to twist and turn, and I knew it was that weird digestion process that the Powers That Be had constructed, maybe left unfinished. The bus began to spin, and next thing I knew I was knocked into Reba hard. Was bouncing about the bus like a ricochet shot. The smell was terrible, and I could feel that mess on my hands, which meant it was easing in through the cracks in the windows and the doors, had possibly shoved through the window Grace had latched up in back.

But, no, I consoled myself. If that had happened, the bus would be full of that nasty stuff.

Then, as if thought were the catalyst, I felt the horrid mess press up against me like foam, filling my nostrils with its stench, pushing me either forward or backward, down the aisle. I was uncertain which, though I could feel myself bouncing between the seats. There was a loud crunching sound, like a smartass wadding up an aluminum soft drink can, and someone screamed, a loud horrible scream that could not be identified as man or woman. Then I was pushed up against what I realize now was the windshield. The shit shoved me. The windshield made a cracking sound, and I blacked out. But the blackness into which my mind fell couldn’t have been any blacker than the world that was already around me.

I came awake.

I was surprised at that.

I was still alive. I could still breathe.

But I was surrounded by wetness. Not the thick mess that I had felt before, but wetness. I was bobbing about in the water, and I could see the water rippling, and there was great white foam, and sticking out of the foam was the nose of the bus, the windshield gone, the roof crushed in, the front right tire blown.

I had been shoved through the windshield, and the bus had shot to the surface, if ever so briefly. Perhaps the pontoons (which had come loose of the bus) had done it, or as we went into the fish’s ass sphincter and he let us fly, the force of it had driven us out and up. Trapped air in the bus, maybe. I didn’t know. In that moment, nothing made sense.

Reba was clinging to the front of the bus. I could see her pretty well lying in a pool of what I realized was moonlight, silver as mercury. I could see a dark patch on her face where blood had bloomed like a flower, the moonlight made it appear to be a large black rose.

She clung to the bumper, lay across the hood in what could only be described as a dazed state. She looked in my direction, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. She lifted her head a little, like a turtle sunning itself on a rock, then lowered her head against the bus, continuing to cling.

The bus started down, quickly. I tried to yell Reba’s name, beg her to let go, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. The water foamed around the bus, churned the fish turds that had come up with it, then the bus dove. Water lapped over Reba and rushed into where the windshield had been, then it was gone, taking Reba with it, leaving only a wide band of chrome-colored ripples that pushed me up and down in the water like a fisherman’s cork.

I dove after the bus, but I was too weak. My lungs wouldn’t hold the air I had swallowed. It was so dark I couldn’t see a thing below. Huge turds bounced against me.

There was nothing I could do.

I fought my way to the surface, screamed as I broke the roof of the water and saw the moon above me. I began to cry. I felt something touch me. A vast patch of water disappeared, and in its place was a great gray wall.

The wall rose higher.

And higher.

It was Ed swimming by.

He dove. The dive pulled me under. I fought with everything I had to make the surface, even ended up putting my foot on Ed’s back and shoving off.

I broke the surface and looked in the direction Ed had gone. All that could be seen was a great fin knifing through the dark water. As I watched, something struck me hard in the head, almost knocked me unconscious.

I grabbed at it.

It was one of the pontoons. It had snapped in half, but it still floated. I grabbed hold of it and clung, tried to climb on top of it. It rolled with me, and I lost it a couple of times, but finally I had a solid grip on it, straddled it, latched my legs around it tight.

Across the water I saw a white mist. And then I saw it was not a mist at all, but the ghost of the drive-in. It slowly floated toward me. Floated until it was over and around me. And inside the drive-in I could see everything that had happened while I was there. I could see me and my friends, all dead now, in the camper, tooling along the highway, heading for what we thought would be a great weekend.

There were dinosaurs and such, and all the events that had happened after we escaped the drive-in theater-or so we thought. All that and more. Overlapping, running together, seen simultaneously like a bad TV connection, one program blending into another.

The mist stuttered. Was followed by a sound like electricity shorting out. A snap of light and shadow, a crackle like cellophane being chewed by a goat, and the mist was back.

The Popcorn King.

Those dinosaurs.

Poplalong Cassidy and his carnivorous film.

Grace. Shit Town.

The bus. All gray and ghostly and us inside. Outside the bus. Inside the bus. Every view you could imagine. All that had taken place. Reba and I making love. Grace kicking Cory to death. All of us, looking like some kind of ride at Disneyland, a bus full of escaped specters from the Haunted Mansion.

The past and the present rolled in and out. Everything was caught up in that white mess of memory.

I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but my voice was still too hoarse.

I dropped my head against the pontoon, stretched out on it as best I could. And clinging like I was riding a rocket to that silver moon above me, to escape the mists and all it contained, I fell into a stupor as the water rode me up and rode me down.