The Complete Drive-In

3

After we made love on my blanket, we stumbled giggling to the camper and smeared fruit on one another and licked it off. Between licking and giggling, we made love again. Every time we moved apart our bodies made a sound like two sheets of flypaper being pulled apart.

When we finished we went down to the lake and rinsed off again and tried to make love again, but neither of us was up to it. We went back to the camper and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

I dreamed good for a time. Kind of dreams a man dreams when he’s holding a woman in his arms. But the dreams didn’t last. I thought about my aliens and I thought about Grace’s story about Popalong Cassidy and the Producer and the Great Director. I thought about all that movie junk on down the highway. I tried to make everything add up but nothing would.

It all went away and folded into a cloud the color and texture of Grace’s pubic hair.

Next morning Bob woke me by pulling on my foot. I got my head out from between Grace’s legs and looked up.

“That’s disgusting, you know,” Bob said.

I picked up Grace’s shirt from the floorboard and draped it over her. I got my clothes and sat out on the tailgate and put them on.

“Well, I hope we enjoyed ourselves,” Bob said.

“We did.”

Bob went away and I woke Grace up and she got dressed and we helped Crier and Bob load some fruit and bamboo water containers in the camper. Then we were off.

After a few days we came to Shit Town. The post Grace had told us about was gone, and now there was an official sign made of crude lumber. On it was: SHIT TOWN, POPULATION: WHO GIVES A FUCK.

Civic pride.

Shit Town wasn’t much. Some shacks made of sticks and crooked lumber mostly. It looked like a place the Big Bad Wolf would blow down.

Out next to the road was a line of cars, and people were living in those too. Some of the cars were fixed up with huts connected to them. Snazzy stuff.

We parked on the opposite side of the highway, locked up and walked over to Main Street, which was a dirt track, and went down it.

A few people ogled us, and we ogled them back.

No one offered us the Key to the City.

In spite of Shit Town not looking like much, I suppose by present standards it’s pretty prosperous. There were a lot of people moving about and there was an aura of industry in the air.

Down at the end of the street was a well house. Most likely it had been built over an open spring, as I figured that was what had attracted folks to this spot in the first place, as the lake had attracted us to Jungle Home.

Beyond this I could see a lot of stumps leading to the jungle. In a short time, with only their hands and crude tools, these people had cut a lot of trees.

I figured eventually this kind of industry would lead to Shit Town having burger joints that served dinosaur and rabbit burgers, and eventually the place might move up the evolutionary line to having a kind of thrift store where you could get shower curtains, house shoes, bird feeders and Bermuda shorts.

A lot of women were pregnant, and though I’m not good at guessing things like that, they looked pretty close to domino date to me. Of course, time here is too hard to judge.

There were little huts along the street and some of them had plank counters out front with things to trade on them. There was one that had flat-in-the-middle green bread with flies on it, and behind the counter was this woman leaning on a hut post with her dress hiked up and her butt free to the air. There was a guy with his pants down against her, and he was putting it to her. If the woman liked it, it didn’t show, and the fella looked like a man called to duty.

It didn’t take long, and when they finished she let down her dress and took the loaf of bread and went away. The man pulled up his pants and looked at us.

“Ya’ll want bread?”

“I don’t think so,” Bob said.

“We went on down the street and came to another stand, and on its counter was a turtle shell turned upside down, and there was a wooden pestle in it. All around the shells were piles of fruit.

A guy with a belly that looked like a bag of rocks under his shirt got off a stump when he saw us coming and came over and smiled at us. All this teeth had gone south except one dead center of his bottom gum. The rest of him didn’t look too good either.

“Want me to make you a fruit drink?” he said. “Mashed right here while you wait.”

“Nope,” Crier said.

Next to the fruit juice place was a hut with a sign out front painted in black mud that read: Library.

“They’re kidding,” Bob said.

I went over and pulled the curtain of reeds aside and looked in. There was just enough room for one person in there, and that one person had to sit on a rotting stump because the roof was low. There was one crude shelf of books, and under the shelf was a little sign that said: PLEASE RETURN BOOKS.

I went inside and looked at what they had to offer. There was a Bible covered in red plastic with a zipper on it. I unzipped it and looked inside. Saw that everything Jesus had said was printed in red so you could tell it from ol’ So-and-So.

Alongside it was a collection of Rod McKuen’s poetry and a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull with “This book belongs to David Webb and is his inspiration” written inside.

There were two copies of the Watchtower, one concentrating on the dilemmas of dating in the modern world, the other on the deterioration of the family unit.

There was also a pamphlet for raising chinchillas for fun and profit (neither the fun or profit being to the advantage of the chinchillas); a postcard with a gerbil’s picture on the front and a note on the back that said they could be seen at some petting zoo; a photo-novel of Superman 3; and a souvenir hand fan from Graceland with a picture of the erstwhile King of Rock’n’Roll on one side (prebloat) and the words to “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog” on the other. There were also a couple of poems that didn’t rhyme written on some dirty popcorn bags with eyeliner pencil.

I took the Elvis fan and fanned myself, then put it back and went outside. The others had wandered down the street, not having felt the pull of the arts.

The guy with the one tooth said, “Find anything?”

“I fanned myself a little.”

“It’s checked out right now, but there’s a pretty good Max Brand novel we got, ‘cept the last couple of pages are torn out. Some fella wrote an ending for it, though. He wrote on the inside back cover, ‘He rode off into the West and everything was okay.’ Seems a good enough ending to most anything, don’t it?”

“Does at that. I take it you’re also the librarian?”

“Yeah, but people want fruit juices more than they want books. Only thing is they don’t always have something good to trade. Tell you, I’ve had all the dry pussy I want. It’s making the head of my dick raw. In the long run I get the bad end of the trade. I’d really rather have some kind of meat, fish, maybe some roots that are good to boil.”

“Commerce can be a bitch,” I said.