The Complete Drive-In

2

So, on the night after I’d given up archaeology and my chance to have something to fall back on, I was out riding around in my old Chevy Nova trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I’ll tell you, what I was coming up with was not pretty.

I thought about all those stories I’d heard about college dropouts and how they spent their lives working behind the counter at K-mart or pulling the train for the football team during off season. I could envision myself standing on the corner of North and Main with a cigarette jutting out of my mouth, one side of my lip pulled up in a permanent snarl, and me thinking how I can get a few dollars so I can go over to the 7 Eleven and buy me a bottle of Thunderbird wine. Nothing would be too low for me to do: prostitution, theft, drug-running, murder, working as a usedcar salesman. In time I would be shunned by winos and Baptists alike.

On the other hand, I was also thinking about whoever had inherited my prehistoric pottery shards, and I felt a wicked elation that while I was out tooling around, someone was hunched over those shards with their eyes twitching, their hands shaking, wishing I had quietly pushed those fragments down a gopher hole.

Anyway, I was riding around, taking back streets mostly, thinking, and I came up on this fire.

There were cars pulled over the curb and people were standing on the sidewalk and out front of their houses, watching a frat house burn down.

I pulled across from the house, behind the string of parked cars, got out and leaned on the Nova and watched.

The fire department was there and the firemen were jerking hoses, yelling and hopping on the lawn like grasshoppers. Every now and then one of them would erupt from the doorway of the burning structure like the end result of the Heimlich maneuver, land in the yard on his hands and knees, and crawl about feebly, coughing smoke like a little dragon.

I had never seen a fire like that before, and it didn’t take Smokey the Bear to tell me it was some kind of serious. A blazing paper hat would have been easier to save.

While I was watching the frat joint burn up-hating that it was an old house of the sort the city council loved to see go so an aluminum building the shape of a box could take its place, or some concrete could be laid down for a car lot-a tan van came down the street and stopped at the curb and three guys fell out of it yelling. Frats, I figured. Most likely they had gone for a six-pack, or to work their version of heavy machinery, a Trojan dispenser, and had come back to find they had forgot to turn the fire off from under the chili, and now their pad was on its way to becoming air pollution.

Two of them sat on the curb and started crying and the other one rolled around on the lawn and whimpered like a dog with glass in his belly. A fireman came over and yelled at him and kicked him in the butt. The guy crawled off and joined his comrades at the curb and they cried in trio.

I hoped like hell there wasn’t anyone inside that house. If so, they wouldn’t be graduating.

I was about to leave when I was touched lightly on the elbow and a voice said, “You start this one, baby?”

“Nope. I’m all out of matches.”

“Then you got nothing to worry about.”

I turned and looked at Timothy. I had known him all my life, had been over to his house to play when we were kids, and he had been over to mine. There had never been anything romantic between us, though when I was twelve I talked him into playing doctor and discovered what I’d heard about boys was true: They were fixed up different from girls.

“Good to see you,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

One of the firemen came coughing out to the curb across from us and sat down next to one of the frat boys. The one who had been rolling on the ground sobbed and said, “They gonna save it?”

The fireman took off his smoke-stained hat, coughed, and looked at the frat the way some people look at retarded children. “Son, we’ll be lucky if we save the mineral rights on that sonofabitch.”

The three frats really started to cry.

The roof collapsed then and the sparks from it rose up to heaven and turned clear like the souls of fireflies gone off to meet their just rewards.

“Last time I heard,” Timothy said, “you were digging holes in the ground or something. Had some night classes too.”

“A lab,” I said. “Archaeology in the daytime, labs at night. I had to let it go.”

Then I told him the whole story.

“I quit too,” he said.

“I never knew you started.”

“It was the math fixed me. Never could understand how X could be some other number. It always looked like X to me. I couldn’t make sense of it. If X was ten one time, how could it be fifteen the next? Who the hell could keep up with what X was if it could be anything?

“What I should have taken was all P. E. courses and majored in golf. I can’t make X and Y add up, but by God, I can knock those little white balls to Dallas.”

And he could. I had played golf with him before. My golfing style was akin to a frightened matron trying to beat a rat to death with a curtain rod, but I had played enough to know the good stuff when I saw it, and Timothy had the good stuff. A number of pro golfers had made the same observation, and Timothy had mentioned more than once that he was thinking about taking his clubs on the road and seeing what he could do.

“We’re on our way to the Orbit,” Timothy said. “Want to go?”

“We?”

“Sue Ellen. She loves that horror stuff.”

Sue Ellen was Timothy’s little sister. She was twelve. Last time I’d seen her was two years back, and she wanted me to explain why Barbie and Ken were smooth allover. I didn’t remember having any answers.

“I doubt she even remembers me,” I said. “She might feel uncomfortable.”

“She remembers you quite well.”

“She’s sort of young for blood and guts, isn’t she?”

“Tell me about it. Mom and Dad think I’m taking her over to see Bambi, Cinderella, The Fox and the Hound and assorted cartoons in a Disney dusk-todawn extravaganza.”

“Wonder how they got that idea,” I said.

I took my car home, told my parents where I was going, not mentioning that Sue Ellen was waiting in the car with Timothy, and we went over there in the Galaxy.

When we got there, the line was as long as the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and, of course, we got a place near the end of it. The flashing blue-and-white Saturn symbol of the Orbit was far enough away to look like a Ping-Pong ball with an oversized washer around it.

It was warm and the air was full of mosquitoes. Rolling up the windows made you hotter, and rolling them down fed you to the mosquitoes. Timothy talked about giving it up and going home, and I was for it. But not Sue Ellen.

“You promised me, Timmy. You said you’d take me. You know I want to see The Toolbox Murders. ”

I turned and looked at Sue Ellen perched in the middle of the backseat. She was blonde and fair and had moist blue eyes and a freckled pug nose and a red bow mouth. Course, it was dark enough you couldn’t see all this, but you knew it was there, and telling her no was a lot like kicking a puppy for licking your hand.

“We’ll be miserable,” Timothy said. “Besides, The Toolbox Murders ? How’d I let you talk me into that?”

“You promised, Bubba. And if any of it bothers me, you can explain it to me.”

“That’s choice. I might need you to explain it to me.”

“See, I’m old enough.”

“One word about mosquitoes, one complaint, and we’re out of here.”

“Deal.”

Had the weather been hotter, the mosquitoes thicker, or if Sue Ellen had had all the charm of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, we might have cut for home right then. Sue Ellen would have grown up to break hearts, Timothy would have gone on to hit little white balls across great expanses of greenery for unreasonable amounts of money, and I might have ended up with my own karate studio.