The Complete Drive-In

8

I don’t know how long we stood at the back of the bus, watching, but I know it was a long time. I felt sad. Tears kept running out of my eyes, and when I looked around, I wasn’t the only one. Only Grace still had it together, centered inside somehow, and maybe, just maybe (because it had occurred to me more than once) she was in her element now. Strong and needed, lusted after and feared. A kind of shiny queen bee in a hive of colorless drones.

But I didn’t think on that long. I turned away from Grace and kept on looking at that ghostly drive-in.

In that spectral world we all looked so happy, and healthy. And though we had not aged in any classical way, here in the present drive-in world, we had, to put it mildly, gone to seed. It was obvious looking at our ghostly shapes. Even in their transparent grayness, they looked so much better than we looked now.

Again… except for Grace. Still strong and clean of limb, with hair like a shampoo commercial.

So there we were, looking grimly back into our past. And as we watched, a gray version of the great red comet appeared at the top of the misty ghost of the drive-in, smiled, and things went bad.

I realized I could stand there forever, watching our past lives unfold.

I said, “You know what, gang. I don’t think this is healthy. The past is the past.”

“Besides,” Steve said. “This story seems to have gotten to the bad part. We’ve seen all the good we’re going to see.”

“I can see myself,” Reba said, pointing.

“We all can,” James said.

And this was true. The spectral shape twisted and misted and reformed, and showed different parts of the drive-in, like cuts in a movie. Faces. Close-ups. Medium shots. Long-distance shots. Dissolves. Fade-ins. Fade-outs.

“Something is fucking with us,” I said. “Something has always been fucking with us.”

We all made a deal to stop looking at the misty drive-in.

As much as we could stop looking, that is.

We still looked. Just not as much. I just looked now and then when I didn’t have anything else to occupy my mind.

Which, of course, was all the time.

It was a little easier to stop looking when the misty events moved forward in time and showed me the horrible things that had gone on, back when the food first ran out and there was nowhere to go and everyone was so hungry. I knew the Popcorn King and his horrid activities, the blood corn events, were coming up, and that helped me not look. I didn’t want to see that. I had lived that, and I hadn’t liked it much.

So, I quit looking.

As often.

As the night passed and we dozed and the sun came up and the light that was our day wore on and became really hot, the mist evaporated, and we had a break. There was just the ocean now, and it was flat and smooth, as boring as watching your mama peel potatoes.

We ate and climbed on the roof and swam around the bus, hung to the pontoons, did this and that. Made up games, sang songs.

It was like a real bus trip.

You know, like when you’re a kid and you go to camp, and you got songs to sing and things to talk about. Only thing missing is we didn’t know where we were going or when we would arrive.

Actually, a lot of things were missing, but for that short time, we found some happiness, and we concentrated on it.

When we wore out on the songs, Steve started up the engine from time to time and we listened to tapes. What we had to talk about would always turn grim. Tales of the drive-in. So doing things like songs and swimming was better.

The swimming was really pretty nifty, because all of us stripped naked to do it. Grace was dynamite. I loved that triangle between her legs, how it looked when she climbed out of the water, stretched out on the pontoon, knowing full well we were all looking, perched atop the bus, hanging over the sides, drooling. She shook out her long golden hair and arched her back, showed us what lay inside the taco, all pink and inviting. A smorgasbord of goddess.

And let me tell you, Reba looked good too. Tiny, ribs showing from lack of food, well built, and more modest. She stripped and stood on the pontoon too, but she wasn’t trying to give us an aerial view of the canyon, so to speak.

She just did what she had to do, shook out her shorter, darker hair, pulled back on her clothes, climbed on top of the bus, lay in the sun, and dried herself and the damp clothes she wore.

Steve lay with us, hanging over the roof looking down at Grace, and he said, “Grace is such a tease.”

Homer said, “You know, I wouldn’t ask this in the real world, and you may hit me, but you got to understand, what I’m seeing there, and not having had any in awhile, ‘cept this fella’s butt hole (pointing toward Cory, who raised his hand in admission), but it wasn’t the same, you know, so can you tell me, for entertainment’s sake. Is she good?”

Steve pursed his lips, made a kind of smacking sound, looked at Homer, smiled, said, “Now, let me ask you this, Homer, my man. Looking down on that young woman, all ripe and spread out and brown, and being all uninhibited like, and you having had, at best of recent, some shitty ass off Cory, what the fuck do you think?”

“Oh, yeah,” Homer said. “That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

“Male chauvinists,” Reba said.

We had sort of forgot she was there.

“Well,” James said, “this here is a new world, and it’s got new rules, and, shit, we don’t mean nothing by it. Besides, how much of a chauvinist is Homer. He fucked Cory in the butt.”

“I don’t like him though,” Cory said. “It was just one of those things. Me and him, we wouldn’t even hang anymore if he hadn’t gotten on this bus.”

“Maybe you ain’t chauvinist,” Reba said, “but I wanted to mention, I’ve seen you all swimming, and each and every one of you have what can only be described in euphemistic terms as having real small dicks.”

“Hey, now,” James said, “that ain’t right.”

“It certainly isn’t all that euphemistic,” I said.

“You don’t mean me,” Steve said. “You couldn’t mean me. They used to call me Horse in P.E.”

“I think they were just calling you by your first name,” Reba said.

“What’s that mean?” Steve said.

“You know,” she said, “Horse Ass.”