The Complete Drive-In

4

I’ve peed. I’ve eaten. Had some boiled fruit. I had to go outside the drive-in, in the jungle, to pick it, and I was scared, doing it by moonlight, but I was more hungry than I was scared. I brought back a stick with the fruit. I wrapped the fruit in my ragged shirt and tied it to the stick and toted it back that way. Later I put the stick in the community fire and got it ablaze, came back to my bus, and using wood I had carried from the jungle and stored in the bus, I boiled water in a hubcap-the water taken from the community water-put the fruit in the hubcap and cooked it down and made a kind of goo, ate it with my fingers, which I burned. It gave me strength (fruit power, baby), and now I feel better. Less hypoglycemic. More organized.

But my fingers hurt.

Now, here are my plans. I write this feeling better, less loopy. I can write now without feeling like the script itself will come off of the page and dance.

This is what I am going to do:

There is a trail that leads into the woods. An animal trail. It’s fairly wide. It has to be to accommodate dinosaurs.

Once, while hunting down the trail, looking for something weak, looking for eggs or edible roots, me and Steve and a couple of the boys, as we call the “Popcorn Kids,” came across-now get this – a school bus.

That’s right.

Just off the trail, parked between two great trees, out there in the weeds. Vines had grown around the tires and twisted up under it and through cracks and under the hood. The vines held it tight to the ground like they owned it.

There were other things around as well, all of them just as inexplicable. A large pontoon boat. A World War II plane, not to mention a Confederate flag on a flagpole, just stuck up in the dirt, and lying about, a bunch of beer cans, a pack of rubbers, and some cigarette butts.

Above, in the sky where a break in the trees let us see it, was a great funnel.

No shit.

The small end of it dipped down out of the sky, and the rest of it flared wide and gray and up into the heavens, and all we could figure was the bus and all the other stuff had come down that great funnel, come to rest here in the jungle.

I’ve thought on it a lot, but I’ve never come up with any explanation that satisfies, but then again, this world is full of unsatisfactory questions and few if any revelations.

But, anyway, we found this bus, and we came across the bus many times after that on our treks, and finally we managed the door open, and began using it for storage. It was a pretty good place to hide from critters chasing us, as well. A kind of halfway station. We got the front door to work and the back door to work, and one day, just for fun, I turned the key, which was in the engine, and – it started.

No shit.

Fired right up.

The gas gauge rocked forward. A near full tank.

Like everything here, it didn’t make sense.

Where did it come from?

Had it come another time?

Who had been in it?

Kids on their way to school?

A band trip?

Football team on its way to or back from a game?

We didn’t know.

Over the next few… days? weeks? months? years?… Steve and I, and a couple of others, have been working to free it of the vines. The tires are all flat, blown out and ripped up to be exact, and the bus looks to have run on the rims, driving like crazy, pursued by… who knows what?

That comet that sucked it in?

Giant aliens with tweezers, ready to grab hold of it and fling it down the funnel?

Who knows?

But there were a few tires on a few vehicles in the drive-in lot that fit, so we jacked it up and loaded it down with rubber, and, with handmade bellows and the remains of a bicycle pump, we inflated the tires.

One day, I drove it back to the drive-in, and they opened the great barrier we had made at the fore of the place, and I steered it inside. I closed it off, began living in it.

So when I determine tomorrow has come (keeping in mind I say this often), I am going to drive out of here in my sacred little home.

Not down the highway, but down the trail where the bus was discovered, just drive off into a new mystery.

And perhaps a short existence.

It has to beat this.