The Complete Drive-In

5

Daylight, and things looked a little better. No ghosts melting through the car, and no film crawling. A little storm activity, but nothing special. The sun looked worse than ever, like a pie pan spray-painted gold.

The trees were rubbery-looking and the ground reminded me of Styrofoam. The fruit we found to eat was shriveled and bitter to the taste. Everything around us looked a little cheap and off center, like the way it is when you make a real close examination of what you bought at a thrift sale.

We found a few chocolate almonds lying about and some soft drink puddles, so I knew we were getting close to the highway’s end; the place Popalong had told Grace about. It struck me that Steve ought to know what he was in for. All he knew was that he was giving us a ride to the end of the highway. He didn’t know we had some idea what was there, and he didn’t know what we had in mind.

Steve had a mirror in his glove box, one of those kinds with the props behind it, and he had that and his pocket knife and a little kit with a tiny pair of scissors and a toenail clipper in it, and he was working on his whiskers. It made me hurt to watch him.

“Who you cleaning up for?” Bob asked him.

“Myself. I never could stand whiskers. I still don’t look so good when I finish, since I can’t get close enough, but it beats looking like you boys.”

“I think we ought to explain something to you,” I said.

“About what?” Steve said. He finished up and folded the mirror stand and put it and the kit in the glove box.

“About the end of the road,” Grace said.

Steve leaned on the car and got what was left of his cigar out of his pocket. When it died out he hadn’t relit it. He didn’t light it now. He put it in his mouth and rolled it from one side to the other.

“We kind of know what’s at the end,” Grace said. “We’ve got an idea what we’re going to do there.” And she told Steve a condensed version of the story she told us. When she finished Steve quit moving his cigar. He took it out of his mouth and put it in his pocket. I couldn’t help but think of Crier’s dick.

“Sound’s like you folks are going to get killed, is what it sounds like to me,” Steve said.

“We don’t expect you to go if you don’t want,” Grace said. “We’d appreciate your carrying us as far as you can, though.”

“What if I said this was as far as I was going?” Steve said.

“That would be it then,” Grace said.

“You’d walk through this stuff at night?”

“I would,” Grace said.

“I’m not crazy about that part,” Bob said. “I might even be talked out of it. I might even ride back with you the other way.”

“You?” Steve asked me.

“All that matters right now,” I said, “is are you going to the end or not. If you go back, you know what you’ve got.”

“Sounds like I have a pretty good idea of what I’m gonna get if I go forward too.” He looked hard at me. “Tell you what else, I think if I go back and Bob here goes with me, you’ll go too. You don’t look like any kind of hero to me. The gal here will keep walking, I can tell that. She doesn’t think she needs much of anybody.”

“That’s not true,” Grace said. “I can use all the help I can get. But if I don’t get it, I’m going on.”

“I’m no knight in white armor, lady,” Steve said.

“Never crossed my mind you might be.”

Steve smiled and put the cigar back in his mouth. He still didn’t light it.

“All right, I’ll haul you on, but maybe we ought to come up with a game plan. And first thing to start with is getting rid of the old boy in the trunk. He’s starting to stink all the way from the back. It bothers my driving. I don’t figure we’ll have to eat him, with all this fruit and stuff out there, so let’s get shed of him.”