The Complete Drive-In

5

We collected Crier and went out to the camper. He and Grace sat up front and talked, and Bob and I tried the clothes on. I ended up with some pants too tight in the waist, but I zipped them up high as they would go and left them unsnapped and used the belt I had made for my blanket outfit and ran it through the pants loops for extra support. The shirt fit fine and I wore it with the tails hanging out. The socks were thin but not holey. The shoes were an inch too long and they made me look a little like Bozo the Clown.

Bob’s pants fit him in the waist, but were too short. They were what my dad used to call high-water pants. The shirt he had was too narrow across the shoulders, and he got a knife out of the toolbox and slit it halfway down the back. He slit the sides of the shoes too because they were too narrow.

Grace and Crier laughed at our outfits, but just a little. I guess thinking about where the clothes came from took some of the humor out of it.

Crier and Bob stayed with the camper, and Grace and I took Bob’s gas can and went around begging for gas. The people who were living in cars that had huts attached to them were the quickest to give up their gas; they had made a stand and they were staying. Some wouldn’t even talk to us, and one guy told us he’d pour his goddamn gas on the ground and piss on it before he gave it to us. We took this as a no.

By the end of the day we had a full tank of gas, and we went into Shit Town one last time to see if we could talk someone into giving us enough to fill our can. It never hurt to have extra.

We got off Main Street and went down a little side street lined with huts and cars and we came on this tall, hatchet-faced fella wearing a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was as unusual in that he was clean-shaven.

He had the hood up on an old red-and-white Plymouth convertible, and he had a wrench and he was fiddling with something under there. He didn’t look like someone that wanted to get rid of his gas, but we asked anyway.

“I got plans for a big trip,” he said. “Need all the gas I can get. Y’all want a drink? It’s the local poison. Made out of fruit juice and piss. No kidding. It’ll put you higher than goddamn Skylab.”

We passed.

He took a swig and shivered. “Things a man’ll drink. Look here, name’s Steve.”

He stuck out his hand and we took turns shaking it and giving our names.

“Guess y’all are heading on down the highway too, huh?”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll see you then. Soon as I get this buddy tuned up, have me a damn good drunk, I’ll be ready to roll. I figure sometime tomorrow. Can’t say that I see much to keep me here.”

We wished him luck and went back to the camper without the gas. I didn’t look in the direction of the hanging tree.

It was dark by the time we got back there, and the four of us talked and ate some fruit and went to bed, Crier slept in the front seat as usual, and Bob, Grace and I slept in the back.

Grace was between me and Bob, but she didn’t try to molest me, and she didn’t try and molest Bob. Bob refrained from playing with himself.

Ilay there and thought about Grace and told myself I was too mature and philosophical and had been through too much to expect anything of our relationship other than friendship. Besides, hadn’t she said not to make too much of the other night?

Some things you just had to take like an adult. What she did was what she did and it didn’t matter to me. She was her own person. And a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, and look and see if you’re right then go ahead, and every dog has his day, and every cloud has a silver lining, and a penny saved is a penny earned, and everything works out for the best, and… it was a long night.

It was later than we planned by the time we got up. We had fruit for breakfast because there wasn’t any ham and eggs and coffee on the menu, then we got out of there. Crier and Bob up front, me and Grace in the back.

Grace talked about some books I hadn’t read and necking didn’t come up.

That’s how it went for a few days, and finally I quit worrying about IT every second, and cut down to about once an hour.

So when I wasn’t thinking about IT, I was thinking about what in hell had possessed me to agree to go along on this little run. I wasn’t any hero. I had tried to be once and I had gotten nailed up for the trouble. What I did best was mind my own business, and here I was barreling down the highway so I could confront Popalong Cassidy, who did not sound like a nice guy. Worse yet, I was the reason Crier and Bob were going too. Or at least part of it. I guess when a fella gets bored he can do some stupid things. And maybe I thought I was being macho going with Grace to the end of the highway to help her out. I was wondering how I had ever arrived at that. Grace could probably beat up all three of us.

Damn, Bob had been right when he said a set of titties made me go all to pieces. And maybe Grace had known exactly what she was doing that night in the camper and down by the lake-sealing a deal.

And maybe I was being a horse’s ass. It really hurt to discover I had a bigger streak of male chauvinist pig in me than I thought. It hurt worse to realize that I was stupid and tittie blind and was probably going to get killed for it. I preferred happy endings.

But even this kind of thinking didn’t last. You can only focus on your own death and destruction so long before it gets boring. You begin to wonder about more important matters, like do people who wear suspenders wear them because they like the way they look, or because they hold their paints up? Do people who work on garbage trucks see their work as important? Did they grow up wanting to be garbage men? What kind of tools are used to scrape dead animals off the highway? Who was the idiot who invented those Happy Face symbols, or those signs that read BABY ON BOARD or SHIT HAPPENS? Should those folks be slow-tortured by parboiling, or killed outright? What was the true story on green M amp;M’s?

I tell you, I had lots of interesting things to think about.