The Complete Drive-In

2

We crawled under the truck and tried to sleep. The grass made it pretty soft, but there were bugs crawling on me and it began to get cold and I was feeling stiff in the hands and feet. One thing I had gotten used to in the drive-in was the constant moderate temperature, and that made the chill seem even chillier.

I got one of the larger bugs off of me and crushed it with my thumb and forefinger, a movement that made my sore hand throb. The bug’s body collapsed like a peanut husk. I tried to look at it closely, but under the truck with only a stray strand of moonlight, there wasn’t much to see. It looked like a crushed bug. Maybe I was expecting little silver wires and a battery the size of a pinhead.

I suppose Crier started feeling guilty, because in the middle of the night he came and woke us up and pulled us out from under the truck and helped us into the camper, which he had, in fact, cleaned out quite well, though the odor of Sam’s last bad meals clung to the interior like moss.

Still, it wasn’t cold in there and the bugs, real or synthetic, weren’t crawling or biting.

After we lay down, and Crier was about to shut the back of the camper, Bob said, “No kiss and story?”

Crier held out his hand, palm up, made a fist and let the cobra rise.

Bob looked at Crier’s stiff middle finger and said, “That’s not nice.”

Crier shut the back of the camper and went around to the front seat and lay down.

Bob managed to get up on his knees and thumped his forehead against the glass that connected the camper to the cab.

Crier sat up and turned to look. I’ve seen more pleasant faces on water moccasins.

“Night-night,” Bob said.

Crier did the trick with his finger again, only with less flourish this time, then lay down out of sight.

Bob wiggled onto his sleeping bag, got on his side and looked at me and said, “You know, I like that guy, I really do.”

That night the dreams came back, the same sort I’d had in the drive-in. They seemed more like visions than dreams, like I had tapped into some consciousness that controlled things. Bob and Crier didn’t have the dreams, so I could only guess that through some quirk of fate, or by alien design, I had been given this gift. Or, I was as crazy as a cat in a dryer.

Hot-wired to aliens or not, the dreams/visions were clear. I could see the aliens in them, their bulbous heads sporting wiggling tendons tipped with eyes, tentacles flashing about, touching gears and punching buttons. Lights and buzzers and beepers going off and on around them. And them leaning forward, conversing with one another in a language that sounded like grunts, squeaks, burps and whines, and yet, a language I could somehow understand.

And some of the things they were saying went like this:

“Slow, uh-huh, uh-huh… that’s it.”

“Nice, nice…”

“Very pretty, oh yes, very pretty… tight and easy now.”

“All right, that’s it. CUT!”

Then the connection was cut as well, and the dream or whatever it was, ended. The next thing I knew it was morning and Crier had joined us for breakfast, such as it was: a can of sardines that we had taken from Sam’s bus before we blew it up.

Afterwards, Crier got us out of the back of the camper and made us take turns walking, him supporting us, so that we could exercise our sore feet. Mine had started to curl like burned tortillas, and Crier said if I didn’t make them work, they’d quit on me, and that at best, I’d end up having a couple of lumps that had all the mobility of potted plants.

I believed him. I exercised. So did Bob, though he grumbled about it.

Worst part about the exercise, worse even than the pain, was the thirst. It had been a long time since I had had a drink of water, and of course, this was true of Bob and Crier too. In the drive-in, for a time, we existed on soft drinks, and later on, Bob and I had nothing but the juice from jerky, and now the liquid from sardines.

If that doesn’t sound so bad, go out some summer evening and do some kind of hard work, like say hauling hay, then try quenching your thirst with a big glass of soy oil or meat broth.

The bottom line was we were dehydrating, starting to look like flesh-colored plastic stretched over a frame of coat hangers.

“I figure,” Crier said, after we got through exercising and were sitting with our backs against the truck, “any place as full of trees and grass and critters as this, ought to have water.”

I wasn’t so sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come to what looked like a stream only to discover it was colored glass or rippling cellophane.

We were looking at Sam’s grave while we talked, examining his ankles sticking up, his feet wearing the hubcap, and all of a sudden, we grew silent, as if possessed of a hive mind.

“I could have at least spoken some words over him,” Crier said.

“And who the hell would you have been talking to?” Bob said. “Sam? He don’t give a damn about nothing no more. God? Personally, I’m not real fond of the sonofabitch. Or wouldn’t be, if I thought he, she, or it, existed.”

I didn’t say so, but I was in Bob’s camp. Like the drive-in patrons, God was on my shit list. I had tried religion during our stay in the drive-in, and it hadn’t exactly been a rewarding experience.

I had decided that if there was a God, he was a cruel sonofabitch to allow the things he allowed. Especially since he claimed his name was synonymous with love. It seemed to me that he was little more than a celestial Jack the Ripper, offering us, his whores, rewards with one hand, smiling and telling us he loved us, while with the other hand he held a shiny, sharp knife, the better with which to disembowel us.

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” Crier said, “but I feel I owe the boy some words because he’s a human being. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to the wind, or just myself. I didn’t give him the best kind of burial, so it’s the least I can do. And who knows, if there is some God out there, maybe he’ll be listening.”

Crier said this soft and solemn like, and you could almost hear the organ music in the background. I think Bob was as affected as I was by Crier’s remarks, because he didn’t say anything rude, and something of that sort was always on the tip of his tongue. A lump, like a crippled frog trying to make it downhill, moved in my throat.

Crier went over to the grave and looked at the hubcap, picked it up and looked at the soles of Sam’s feet, put the hubcap back, sighed, looked at the jungle.

“I’m here to say some words about this man, but nothing much comes to me. I didn’t really know the poor bastard, but from what I could tell, he was about the dumbest sonofabitch that ever shit over a pair of shoes.

“Still, he was a man, and he deserved better than this. I’m sorry I couldn’t get him buried proper, couldn’t get his feet to stay down, but I did get his ass in the grave, and that was a job. I hope he rests in peace.

“I’m sorry about his wife, Mable. She wasn’t any better or smarter than he was, from what I could tell, maybe a damn sight dumber. But I guess she did the best she could, like all of us. She’s back at the drive-in, burned up under some lumber pieces, just in case you care.

“And listen, God, if you’re out there, how about some relief around here? Lighten up. Things are multiple-fucked-up, and if anyone can put things straight, it ought to be you. Right? I mean, you hear what I’m saying? Give us some sign of good things to come. It would be appreciated. Okay, that’s it. Amen.”

Crier walked back to the truck, and about the time he reached it, the jungle parted and out stepped a nasty red-and-blue dinosaur that was probably a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, or something close enough to be a double cousin to one.

Whatever it was, it stood on big hind legs and held two puny forelegs in front of itself as if pleading. Its face was mostly teeth.

Toothy sniffed the air delicately, scampered over to the grave, snapped at the hubcap with its mouthful of big, sharp teeth, and managed to gulp it and Sam’s feet down with very little chewing.

After a moment, Toothy coughed and spat out the hubcap, which now resembled a wad of aluminum foil. He used one clawed foot to scratch Sam out of the grave the way a chicken might scratch a worm from the dirt, bent and bit into Sam’s corpse. With a series of rapid head-flipping motions, he proceeded to gobble the old boy so viciously that pieces of Sam flew out of Toothy’s mouth and sprinkled the grass.

Finished with his repast, Toothy eyed us, as if giving the dessert counter a once-over.

We stayed very still. Rocks couldn’t have been that still.

He let out a little honk that shook the truck, then started to turn toward the jungle.

A weight watcher, to our relief.

But before he could make a complete turn, he froze, turned his head slightly to the side and acquired a look akin to that of a patient who has just experienced the greased finger of the doctor up his ass. Then with a grunt, Toothy leaned slightly forward and cut a monster fart that was reminiscent of an air horn, but with more tonality.

When the fart was finished and Toothy had adopted a more satisfied and comfortable look, he moved into the jungle and out of sight.

After a moment of silence, Bob said, “Well, Crier, hope that wasn’t the sign from God you were waiting for.”