The Complete Drive-In

8

All the while Popalong had been talking, images were flashing on his face. Clips from movies and television shows. Now a series of commercials went lickety-split across the screen; everything from exercise machines to Boxcar Willie’s Greatest Hits. Damn if I hadn’t always wanted to try Boxcar Willie’s stuff, though I hated to admit it. If I ever got home, I was going to order his album.

I suppose there were subliminals at work under all that film stuff, but maybe not. I like to think it had no effect on me because I’m just too much woman to be taken in by a subliminal message; I like to think Mom and Dad raised a pretty stubborn girl and that my martial arts training allowed me to maintain my focus on who I was and what I thought.

Course, maybe the only subliminal in the whole mess was for me to buy a Boxcar Willie album, and that seemed to be working. Maybe all those people who had fallen for Popalong’s line of corn were just stupid. My dad always said, “Grace, most people are idiots.”

It was kind of cold-blooded, but life seemed to sort of be bearing him out.

The commercials wrapped up, and in spite of myself I liked the last one. It had to do with these carrots, potatoes and bell peppers with stick legs and shoes and stick arms and gloves. They were hopping off the face of a box and dancing across a kitchen table on their way to leap into a pan full of water resting in the mouth of an open stove.

“My message is simple,” said Popalong. “There is pleasure in darkness and pain. The light cannot be appreciated without the dark. Entertainment is where it’s at. At the end of the highway I have formed a humble Church of Darkness and Pain. Services every day. It all plays on my face. And when someone, shall we say, becomes a star at the church, like those nonbel ievers I told you about, we record their acting and play it again and again for our pleasure. No special effects. No wooden lines. No one pretending to eat guts. The real thing. It’s addicting, I kid you not.”

He leaned close to me. “Revolutionary, don’t you think?”

“It bites the moose,” I said.

“Now that’s ugly,” Popalong said. “After all I’ve shown you and told you, you’re still an asshole. I’m afraid you’ll have to be edited out of what you call life. But don’t worry, I’ll make you a star. I’ll make sure your agony is recorded forever in the only way that really matters. On film.”

He turned to Sue Ellen. “Her, I think she’s got potential. I think she can see the light of my face and know it for what it is, don’t you? I think she’s rather pretty. She might make me a nice queen. I’d like that. I mean I may be a messiah, but to hell with this Jesus stuff where you don’t get any pussy. I’m a new kind of messiah, and I say hey, what’s the point in being a messiah with all kinds of control, if you don’t throw some pork to the women. You see, I can give them any face they want while I make love to them. Whatever star they want, man or woman, hell, Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, I can call them up on my screen, and presto, I’m who they want me to be.”

The rain had stopped and daylight was creeping beneath the tarp and poking through the holes where the rain had come through. The fires in the television sets were dying down and the smoke from them was thinning and becoming lighter, going as soft and gray as the cottony strands of an old man’s hair.

The shadows huddling against the back of the tarp were fading. Popalong’s shadow was seeping into the ground at his feet like motor oil.

“They’re fraidy-cats of the light,” he said. “Roy, would you please get the gasoline.”

The man who had cut me free climbed on the wrecker and came down with a five-gallon can.

“You should feel honored,” Popalong said. “Rare as gasoline is. You know, this will be our last trip out from the church in the wrecker. When we get back we’ll be near empty. It’s a pisser not to be able to go out and spread the word, but what’s a fel la to do?”

“You’re no fella,” I said.

“You know, you’re right. Soak her, Roy.”

“Don’t we get to fuck her first?” Roy asked.

“Now that you mention it,” Popalong said, “I do seem to be ahead of myself. Everyone for fucking her?”

He held up his hand as an example. The four men put their hands up.

Popalong turned that sixteen-inch screen on me. “You’re popular, what can I say. But you know, I’m going to pass. You have such a nasty disposition, I’m afraid I’d end up having to fake an orgasm. Roy, would you like to be first to crack open the box?”

Roy smiled and put the can down. He got a pair of wire cutters out of his back pocket and went over and snipped what held me to the wrecker, but this didn’t free my hands. They were fastened together by a separate bond.

“You going to record this?” Roy said.

“Whatever I see is recorded,” Popalong said. “Bring her out from the wrecker, please, get her pants off, and get started. I’m sort of in a hurry to see her burn. Rest of you get that tarp down.”

The three in the back went straight to the tarp and pulled it up and flipped it over the antenna in the middle and tossed it onto the wrecker.

Roy led me so that I was in front of Popalong’s antenna. Popalong stepped up on his spokes and hung his arms in the rods. He looked at me and smiled his dials.

“Showtime,” he said.