The Complete Drive-In

  (bless that popcorn)

  —is listen to me, dear hearts, the voice of the scripture. All you got to do is listen, and give me what I want.

  (amen, Brother Corn, amen)

  3

  What the nutcase in the concession wanted was simple.

  Power.

  For the King, power was the end and the beginning—the snake biting its tail. There was nothing else. For in his brains were the distant and confused memories of Randy and Willard. Two people who had seen themselves as outsiders, felt like hitchhikers on the road of life, forever watching fast cars pass them by.

  But now, they were the drivers, hands firm on the wheel. It was they who drove with the pedal to the metal, smiling, looking out at the pedestrians, passing them by, shooting them the finger, giving them a rude honk and a flicking wave.

  And if you could have heard the King’s voice, that incredible voice massaging your brain like a cat kneading a pillow, you could understand a little how he suckered those folks in, gave them the religion of violence and greed to believe in.

  And if Bob and I hadn’t had the jerky, the juice of it giving fuel to our thoughts, keeping our brains clearer than the masses (but not as clear as the Christians fueled on the higher octane of faith), we would have joined right up with old King, praised him on high, begged for the corn, worshiped the action on the screens and tried not to think about the time we would die.

  And it must be said that the Popcorn King not only had the voice, he had presence. He’d stand out in front of the concession with smiles on both his faces, plastic bags of popcorn in all of his hands (both of Randy’s and one of Willard’s—the other being permanently full of .357), and he’d close his eyes and flex his body, and the tattoos would quiver, and he’d open his eyes, and the popcorn would begin to pop in the bags, bursting them, and the King would toss the bags forward, beyond the blue glow, and it would snow corn onto the asphalt and fights would begin (the King would chuckle) as people tried to secure the puffs. But there was always plenty—least at this time I’m telling you about—and the fights were more ritualistic than desperate, like punk rockers slam-dancing.

  Then would come the buckets of soft drinks carried by the King. Big buckets with paper cups floating in the liquid. People would form unruly lines, come forward one at a time, take a cup, dip from the buckets and drink the syrupy drinks, increasing, more than satisfying, their thirst. But that was the thing that bothered me most as Bob and I stood at the back of East Screen looking over the hood of an abandoned car, those people lifting those cups and seeing little drips of liquid running down their chins. All we had for liquid was the juice from the jerky, but it wasn’t water, and we were feeling the slow effect of dehydration. But still, we held out.

  Then the weak and the dead would be brought to the King, laid before the blue glow like sacrifices, and the tiger tattoo would leap from the King’s stomach, finish off the living, then drag all the bodies inside, where later they would appear in the window, gradually losing flesh in strips.

  These eaters and drinkers were not only from Lot A, but B as well. They would all come to eat the King’s corn and drink his soft drinks, and afterward go back to their cars and sit on the hoods or roofs and quote the lines in the movies. Quote them with the reverence of holy scripture.

  And ole Popcorn King, from inside the concession, using the intercom, would talk to his congregation via the speakers, that hot-cool voice fogging their brains. He would quote the movie lines with them. He would turn the sound down, preach at them, rap at them.

  This version of loaves and fishes continued for a time to the happy contentment of the followers, and then the popcorn stopped.

  Zip.

  Nada.

  No corn.

  The King did not appear in front of the concession, and his voice did not grace the speakers. There were just the movies rolling on and on, giving evidence to the fact that someone was changing them, keeping them in order, but the King did not make an appearance.

  The faithful continued to gather outside the concession, and they would call to the King, but he would not respond. The calls turned to chants, and finally to angry cries, but still no King. The meat in the window gradually disappeared. Someone was eating it. (The bats and the skulls? Nope, cut off cleanly from the bone.)

  Bob and I got brave, and we’d go over there for a look, standing behind that same abandoned car, but there was never anything to see besides that confused crowd and those pathetic bodies in the window. People looked at us, but they looked at the shotgun too. Bob made sure they saw it, displayed it like a proud rooster tossing his comb.

  I always carried the baseball bat. I liked its weight. It was my friend, Louisville Slugger.

  One time we’re up there standing behind that old car (a Fairlane Ford with the windows knocked out, I might add), watching, not really expecting anything, but maybe hoping for something. Standing there with our mouths and throats dry as kitty litter, our bellies howling and rolling like a storm, thinking maybe how it would be to have something warm to eat and sweet to drink, thinking hard on that meat in the window there, when out of the concession steps the Popcorn King.

  The King had turned quite a bit darker, both Randy’s naturally dark flesh and Willard’s. They had blended together to make a charcoal hue, except in spots where Willard’s original flesh tone swirled amid the darker skin like twists of vanilla in a chocolate Bundt cake.

  The popcorn tub hat was now amalgamated with Randy’s head, and veins like garden hoses stood out from it and extended down his forehead and came to rest above the single eye. The eye itself reminded me of that old Pinkerton ad with the bloodshot eye and the slogan that read: WE NEVER SLEEP.

  Randy’s knees had blended almost entirely into Willard’s chest and shoulders, and the back of Willard’s skull had nestled deeply into Randy’s crotch like a large egg in a nest. Willard’s blinded eyes had sealed over, and there were holes where his nostrils and mouth had been. Even Willard’s sex had dried up and fallen off, like the shriveled stem of an overripe apple.

  The tattoos, as usual, were quite busy. The animal designs made the appropriate, though diminutive, noises, fussed and snapped at one another like ill-tempered neighbors. The rude arm remarks (KICK ASS and EAT PUSSY), the bandoliers and the like moved about as if looking for better terrain. The tiger on Willard’s stomach was silent, however, and, except for the lazy blinkings of its eyes, remained stationary.

  An involuntary cry went up from the crowd, and it was a ragged bunch. They reminded me of those photos I had seen of starved, mistreated Jews in books about the war. Some of the women had little round stomachs, and it struck me that they might be pregnant. My God, had we been in the drive-in that long?

  The King held up both hands like a victorious prizefighter. His mouths smiled. And out of the top mouth came: “I have returned. I offer you manna from the bowels of the messiah.”

  With that he opened his mouths phenomenally wide, the teeth folding back against the roofs of his mouths like tire-buster spears, and with a rumble and a methane-ish stink we could smell from where we stood, out came popcorn.

  Sort of.

  The velocity of the vomit was tremendous, the well from which it gorged endless. The content of the vomit looked to be cola and popcorn. It hit the crowd like a fire-hose blast, dispersed them, knocked them down. It spewed all the way back to Lot B.

  Then it ceased. The shaken crowd found their feet.

  Again the King opened his mouth, and once more the vomit spewed. More powerful than before. And when it ended this time, the King said, “Take of me and eat.”

  The crowd, somewhat recovered, examined the corn, looked at it long and hard. And then one man picked up a big puffy kernel and closed his eyes and put it in his mouth and bit down. You could hear his sigh of contentment throughout the Orbit.

  Everyone, as of old, began to shove and fight for the corn, and a stray kernel, perhaps launched by an excited foot, came rolling our way, wen
t under the Fairlane and lay between mine and Bob’s legs.

  We looked at it.

  We looked at one another.

  We looked at it again.

  It looked back.

  It was the general shape of popcorn, slightly off white in color with a sort of scabby look between the creases, along with thread-thin veins that pulsed . . . and in its center was an eye. A little eye that had no lid, but was instead a constant thing that matched the eye in the center of the King’s top forehead.

  Bob put his foot on it and pressed down. It was like stepping on one of those big dog ticks that are flat and gray until they’ve fed and dropped off their hosts to lie big as plump raisins.

  “It moved under my boot,” Bob claimed. “I felt it.”

  “Jesus,” I said, and it sounded like a plea.

  We looked back at the people. They were popping the corn into their mouths, oblivious of its appearance, or not caring. Blood oozed from between their lips. I could see their bodies rippling as if a sonic wave were passing beneath their flesh. Their grunts and cries of satisfaction and anxiety came to me like hyena barks, their squeals and lip-smacking like the sound of hogs at trough.

  And a part of me, the hungry part, envied them.

  The King looked at us over the top of the Fairlane. It was a decent distance away, if not outstanding, and I couldn’t determine with his features the way they were, if he recognized us. I doubted it. Least not in a way that really mattered.

  “Come,” came that sweet-sour voice, “join us, brothers. Eat.”

  “Not just now,” Bob said. “Maybe later.”

  And we turned and walked quickly away, back to the camper. When we got there, Bob took some wire cutters out of his toolbox, went out and cut the speaker wire off at the post, flung the speaker far away from us.

  4

  That’s when I made my decision to join the “church.”

  If I was destined to go down before evil, or simply to starve to death, I wanted to make sure I would be embraced by the arms of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

  It was odd that I hadn’t seen this obvious truth before. Odd that it had always been right before me, and I had denied it. But now it was all very clear, as if a visionary light had opened from the blackness above, a light unlike the fuzzy blue lightning, but instead a warm yellow light that struck me on the top of the head, penetrated my skull and filled me with sudden understanding.

  Shortly thereafter, for it took little to tire us, we climbed into the back of the camper to sleep, and when I heard Bob’s breathing go regular I got up and snuck out and went over to that bus.

  As I was nearing it, the back door opened, and the contents of an improvised bedpan went flying. I was glad I wasn’t along a little farther when this happened, or my first meeting with them might have been less than auspicious.

  Watching where I stepped (for this bedpan procedure had been followed for quite some time), I went over and called just as the door was closing.

  With the door half open, the woman of the bus stuck her head out and looked at me in the same way all the Christians looked at me. With that cold stare that told me I was an outsider. She had her hair up, and some of it had escaped over her face like spider legs, She was wearing an ugly duster and pink house slippers I hadn’t seen before. They had MEXICO written across the top of the insteps.

  “I want to be one with the Lord,” I said.

  She just kept staring.

  “I am not a Christian, and I see that you folks are, and I like what I see. I want to be one of you. I want to join in salvation, and—”

  “Hold it a minute,” she said, turned back into the bus and yelled, “Sam!”

  After a moment the door cracked wider and the scrawny man stood there. Behind him it was dark, but there was enough light from the storm overhead that I could see the bus’s walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were full, though I couldn’t tell with what.

  I noticed the man’s tie wasn’t a real tie at all. It was painted on. He eyeballed me for a long moment. “Whatchawant, sinner?”

  “I want to be a Christian:’

  “Say you do. Want to be baptized and the like?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “Does.”

  “Then baptize me,”

  “That’s the spirit. Come around front of the bus, I’ll let you in.”

  “Sam?” the woman said.

  “Now, don’t you worry,” he said. “This here’s a nice boy. Besides, he wants to become a Christian. Right, son?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “See, there you are,” he said to the woman. Then to me: “Come around front.”

  They closed the door and I went around to the door at the front side of the bus, and Sam opened it. I stepped inside and saw that a blanket curtain had been put behind the driver’s seat, blocking off the rest of the bus from view. The woman was still back there.

  There was a special seat bolted to the floor next to the one behind the steering wheel, and hanging from the mirror was a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark, one of those things you buy across the border in Juarez. I had never wanted one. Lastly, in upraised rainbow stencil on the dash was this message: GOD IS LOVE.

  “Sit down, boy.” He patted the seat beside him, and I took it. “Now,” he said, pursing his lips, “you want to become a Christian, do you?”

  “I’ve been watching you folks . . . your meetings going on . . . Well, I like what I see.”

  “Don’t blame you . . . I was a plumber, you know.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “And a painter. Did plumbing and painting. Paint a little, plumb a little. Mostly plumbing, ‘cause I’m kind of wiry, you see. Get up under them houses like a snake, fix them pipes. Some of the other plumbers called me that—Snake, I mean. They’d say, ‘Snake, you sure can get under them houses,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I can.’ ‘Cause I could.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Painting now . . . that was different. I did it, but I didn’t care for it. All them fumes make you sick, real sick. I’d sign on to paint a house, and I’d be sick through the whole thing. Not a minute’s peace, just queasy and kind of headachy all the time. Even at night when I was away from it, after I’d cleaned up, I could smell that paint under my fingernails. It kind of hung on me like a cloud, it did. Much preferred plumbing. Sewer smell ain’t nothing to a paint smell. Sewer smell is good honest smell. Human smell. But paint... paint is just paint, you see what I mean?”

  I had begun to sense a parable. “Well ... I suppose so.”

  The blanket moved then and the woman came out from behind it. She had put on another duster, not any more attractive than the first. She had on the same house shoes. I noted that she kept the backs broken down so her heels could hang out.

  “It was just awful when he was painting,” the woman said, picking right into the conversation. “He wasn’t no fun at all. Grouchy all the time, like a poisoned dog. Hi. My name is Mable.”

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. “I guess this is your seat.”

  “Oh no,” Mable said. “You just keep it. I’ll stand right here. I’m fine. I used to say to Sam about the way he acted when he was painting, ‘Now you gonna act like that, you go out and sleep in the yard.’ Didn’t I say that to you, honeybunch?”

  “Yes, you did, dumpling. She’d just say it right out, and mean it too. ‘You gonna act like that, Sam,’ she’d say, ‘then you go out there in the yard and sleep. Take your piller with you, but get on out of this house.’ That would straighten me right up, it would. Couldn’t stand to be without my dumpling.”

  I was beginning to suspect this wasn’t a parable.

  The woman moved close to him, and he reached up and put an arm around her waist. She patted him on the head. I thought maybe she would give him a dog treat next.

  “Painting is why I got preaching on my mind,” Sam said. “They used to say, ‘Be a Baptist preacher and you don’t have to do
no work,’ and that sounded good to me. So, I started trying to teach myself about it, just so I could quit painting, you see, and you know what, son?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “The call come over me. I’d been reading the Bible, trying to get a handle on it, trying to get all them names separate in my head, you know, and one night I’d just finished all that—I’d been painting earlier in the day—and I was dozing, listening to the radio, one of them country and western stations, and God, the Big Man himself come to me over that radio and told me some things he hadn’t told none of them other preachers. Gave me some insights into His ways.”

  “Hallelujah, honey,” the woman said.

  “His name be praised. So God come to me over that radio, and I remember it was right in the middle of a pretty good ole song too, and he said, ‘Sam, I’m giving you the call, and I want you to spread my word.’ That was it. He didn’t layout no details or nothing, just matter-of-fact about it, and I packed up our things, built us a traveling home out of this bus—”

  “They come and took our house ‘cause we couldn’t pay for it,” Mable added.

  “Yes, they did, didn’t they, dumpling. And I got this bus fixed up, and we started traveling around the country, doing a little fixing here and there, plumbing mostly, little painting when I couldn’t get out of it and we needed the money, and I did a lot of preaching.”

  “It paid better than the plumbing or painting,” the woman said. “It was just a sight to see how full that offering plate would be after a night of Sam’s preaching. People just loved him.”

  “But the money wasn’t the important thing. The thing was, I was reaching people with the Lord, taking the offering to keep this bus running, to feed our faces and keep us at the Lord’s work.”

  “Sam made so many conversions,” Mable said.

  “Yes, I did. And one night while we was traveling, we come by this place, seen all those cars in line, and I thought, now wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity?”