A fella named Crier, who was kind of a friend of ours, but who was planning on eating us if we got cooked, took us down from the crosses. Mable, who got crucified with us and was really dead this time, wound up burned and buried under some lumber left over from where the concession exploded while we were in the process of killing the Popcorn King. Sam died shortly after all this, about the time he got loaded in the back of the camper, but I didn’t know this at the time.
Crier had to help me and Bob to the truck, and Bob got put in the back with Sam, and I rode up front with Crier, who did the driving. My feet weren’t in any condition to push pedals. Getting crucified is not like stepping on a sticker or having a splinter in your palm, I’ll guarantee you. It takes the rhythm out of your step and saps your will to clap to inner music.
So Crier drove us out of there, and at first things looked fine as the missionary position, but when we saw that the highway was buckling and cracking and grass was growing up between the cracks and on either side of the concrete was thick jungle, none of us had to be a nuclear physicist to know things still hadn’t gone back to normal. And while we were contemplating this, letting those old inner wheels turn and squeak, a Tyrannosaurus Rex came goose-stepping out of the jungle on one side of the highway, looked at us with contempt, and disappeared into the foliage on the other side.
It was an exhilarating experience. Scary too.
And that’s where this part of my story takes up.
SHOWTIME
FIRST REEL
A Burial, a Tree House, a Burned Man, and Titties Close Up
1
There was some nice scenery out there. Big trees that climbed to a sky bluer than a Swede’s eye, and next to the highway was some grass growing so tall and sharp it looked like green spikes.
After being cooped up in that drive-in for who knows how long with the tarcolored sky overhead and people so close together you couldn’t scratch your ass without elbowing your neighbor, I suppose I should have been grateful. No one was trying to crucify and eat me, and that was worth something, but even with everything so pretty, it had a sort of landscaped look about it that I couldn’t explain. You know, like a movie set that could afford to use real trees and grass and what looked like a real sky but struck me as a little too blue and perfect. It put me in mind of an old woodcut I saw in an art magazine once. The woodcut was from the sixteenth century, I think, maybe earlier, and there was this monk on his hands and knees and he was poking his head through the fabric of a night sky and looking at all manner of gears and machinery on the other side, stuff that made the world work, that swung the sun and moon across the sky and popped out the stars and turned things light or dark.
As we rode along, I thought about the dinosaur, and the way he walked, and thoughts spun through my head like pinwheels in a blue norther. The Tyrannosaurus Rex had moved smooth, all right, but slightly mechanical, and had I heard a sort of hum as he crossed the road, like the soft buzz of a battery-powered watch?
Probably not. But I had dreamed off and on that there were these many-tentacled, bladdery, eyes-on-stalks aliens that were doing this to us, making us the stars of low budget movies they were filming. And if my dreams were, as I suspected, more than dreams, were in fact my tapping into their thought processes, then they could be doing to us again what they had done with us in the drive-in. Didn’t low-budget movies nearly always show as part of a double feature?
Odder than the dreams was me wanting to see someone. Meaning not someone from the drive-in. They were on my shit list. But I wanted to see someone out there, someone who could make me feel this was more than a movie set. I think I might have felt better if I’d at least seen some beer cans or Frito wrappers lying out beside the road or thrown up in the trees. It would assure me that humanity was out there, ready to start fucking up anything it could get its hands on. There’s nothing like pristine wilderness to incite in human beings the need to start chopping down trees, tromping grass, killing animals and throwing down beer cans, so I was pretty certain there wasn’t a human being within a hundred miles of us.
Not counting the folks who left the drive-in ahead of us, of course. They hadn’t had time to respond to natural tendencies, and after our ordeal, it was doubtful anyone had a beer can or a wrapper to toss. Everything that could be eaten or drunk had been consumed at the drive-in and the containers and wrappers tossed down there.
So the people ahead of us were forced to fight their instincts to litter, though I figured in time the urge would become too strong, and they’d start throwing their clothes out, or pulling over to the side of the road to bum their spare tires and leave the blackened, rubber-dotted rims to mark their passing.
We drove on for quite a time, and when it was getting near dark, Crier said, “Think we ought to find a place to hole up for the night?”
“I doubt we’re going to come across many motels,” I said.
The sun was going down in what struck me as the north, and I mention this because when we went into the drive-in the highway ran north and south, and when we came out we were heading in what was formerly a northerly direction. But being a creature of habit, and not wishing to give any alien movie-makers the satisfaction of letting on I noticed, I reoriented myself and called the direction in which the sun was falling west.
Besides, you never knew when someone might ask you directions.
Crier found a place off the highway where the jungle cleared out and there was some tall grass that went on for a ways, and he pulled over and parked, came around and helped me out of the truck.
My feet were sore and stiff from the crucifixion and I couldn’t walk, but I could lean a little when propped against the camper.
As our duds had been stripped off us by the mad drive-in crowd, Crier had cut holes in blankets for me, Bob and Sam, and slipped them over our heads to serve as clothes, and I took this moment to lift my stylish wardrobe’s hem and take a whiz.
Crier went around and opened the back of the camper and helped Bob out, and that’s when Crier and I found out about Sam.
“We hadn’t no more than gotten started back there,” Bob said, “when he snorted once, shit on himself and went on to glory. Or wherever assholes like him go. I won’t miss him.”
Bob was sentimental like that.
When Crier got Bob propped up next to me, Bob lifted his blanket and took a leak too. If I had waited a minute or two, we could have gone together.
Crier had gone back to the rear of the camper, and Bob called to him, “I know it’s a bother, and I hate to ask, you having been so nice to us and all, but—”
“Would I clean Sam’s shit out of the back?” Crier said.
“And they say there’s no evidence for ESP,” Bob said.
Crier took Sam by the heels and dragged him bumpity-bumpity out of the camper and onto the ground. Sam hit hard enough to make me wince. Crier pulled him over to the grass and dropped his hold on the old boy’s heels. He peeled Sam’s blanket off and went back to the truck and used it to clean the mess up as best he could. It still wasn’t going to smell like the perfume counter at J.C. Penney’s back there, but it had to beat leaving things the way they were.
Bob began to ease down so he could sit, and I did the same. We managed our legs out in front of us without wincing and moaning too awful much.
Bob looked over at Sam’s body in the grass and made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Hell of a thing, ain’t it Jack? Life’s hard, then you die, then you shit yourself. There’s just no dignity in dying, no matter how you look at it ...”
“Might not be any dignity,” I said. “But at least you don’t have to get phone calls from aluminum siding salesmen anymore.”
“Got news for you,” Bob said. “We won’t be getting those anyway, and we’re alive.”
“It’s because we don’t have a phone,” I said. “If we come across a phone, you can bet we’ll be hearing from them.”
Bob called to Crier. “You’re gonna bury the old fart, ain’t
you?”
Crier came around from the back of the camper. He was a sight. He was scrawny as a month-old corpse, but didn’t have as nice a complexion. He still had his clothes and shoes, but they seemed to be held together by little more than body odor and hope. His hair was long and shaggy and thinning. His beard looked like a nest. He had the shit-stained blanket in his hand, and he gracelessly tossed it into the grass, an act that gave me some hope. Humanity was once again on the roll.
“You’re kind of pushy, Bob,” Crier said.
“I ain’t saying you have to bury him—”
“That’s big of you.”
“—I’m suggesting it. If I had two good hands and two good feet, I might do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let your conscience be your guide.”
Crier said something under his breath, then went to the back of the truck and came out with a tire tool.
“Hey, forget it,” Bob said.
Crier used the tool to pop the hubcap off the rear right tire. He took the cap out to the grass and tossed it down next to Sam. He began pulling the grass and cussing while he did it. It was pretty interesting to watch. Once in a while he’d toss a wad of grass, dirty roots still intact, toward Bob, and it would land near his sore feet or slam into the truck beside him. Bob started moving his head like a nervous anaconda.
Actually, I think Crier could have hit him if he’d wanted to. It wasn’t that far a shot. Instead, he was trying to make Bob nervous, which I could kind of understand. Bob didn’t always bring out the best in a person.
As for me, I tried to sit casual with my punctured biscuit hooks in my lap, looking at the crusty wounds on the backs of my hands where the nails had come out and gone into the wood of my cross.
When Crier had a good patch of grass pulled, he took the hubcap and used it to dig with and his mouth to cuss with. He worked the dirt between his legs like a dog burying a bone.
It was almost solid dark when he finished the grave. It wasn’t much, more of a shallow trench, really. The moon came up in the north, right where the sun had gone down, the place I had decided to call west before, and I had a vision of my real or imagined multiple-eyed, many-tentacled, bladder-shaped aliens pulling levers and pushing buttons and causing gears to creak and crank and start the final descent of the sun and the rise of the moon, which spilled its light into Sam’s final resting place like thin cream.
Crier hooked his hands under Sam’s chin and pulled him over to the trench. Sam’s body rustled through the grass like a snake. Crier rolled him into the hole face first. Sam’s legs stuck out at one end, and his left arm flopped from the grave and lay in a manner that suggested he was about to push up and get out of that hole as soon as he gathered his strength.
“You’re gonna have to dig some more,” Bob said.
Crier turned slowly and looked at Bob. The moonlight on his face made him look like the man most likely not to give an ax. I hoped he knew that Bob’s sentiments were his own and that I was an independent.
“Maybe not,” Bob said. “Hell, just throw some of that grass over the spots that don’t fit, and fuck it.”
Crier turned back to his work, took hold of Sam’s free arm and brutally twisted it behind Sam’s back like a kid working his end of a wishbone. When the arm cracked loud enough to run a cold tremor up my spine, Crier pushed it down against Sam’s back and put a foot on it and pressed, rocking back and forth on it until it stayed in place. He bent Sam’s overlong legs at the knee, folded them to where the soles of his feet touched the back of his naked thighs, sat on them and bounced hard.
Every time Crier got up to examine his handiwork, the legs would creep up slowly. Finally Crier had had enough. He hopped on them one last time, got up and grabbed the hubcap and started scraping the dirt into the trench and topped it off by tossing loose grass on it.
I guess it was an okay grave, in that it beat lying naked in the grass with a blanket full of your shit nearby, but it was disconcerting to see the top of Sam’s feet and part of his ankles sticking up in the moonlight. If any of Sam’s relatives had been around, I don’t think they’d have liked it.
I suppose it got to Crier too, because he took the hubcap and set it on the soles of Sam’s feet as a kind of marker. And though it wasn’t perfect, it did sort of tidy things up.
Without saying a word, Crier went around on the other side of the truck and got in. I could tell from the way the truck moved he had lain down in the seat.
Bob leaned over to me and said, “Think it would be okay if I asked him to help us into the camper?”
“Maybe not just now,” I said.
From inside the cab we heard Crier say something about “goddamn ingrates,” and Bob and I went very, very quiet.
2
We crawled under the truck and tried to sleep. The grass made it pretty soft, but there were bugs crawling on me and it began to get cold and I was feeling stiff in the hands and feet. One thing I had gotten used to in the drive-in was the constant moderate temperature, and that made the chill seem even chillier.
I got one of the larger bugs off of me and crushed it with my thumb and forefinger, a movement that made my sore hand throb. The bug’s body collapsed like a peanut husk. I tried to look at it closely, but under the truck with only a stray strand of moonlight, there wasn’t much to see. It looked like a crushed bug. Maybe I was expecting little silver wires and a battery the size of a pinhead.
I suppose Crier started feeling guilty, because in the middle of the night he came and woke us up and pulled us out from under the truck and helped us into the camper, which he had, in fact, cleaned out quite well, though the odor of Sam’s last bad meals clung to the interior like moss.
Still, it wasn’t cold in there and the bugs, real or synthetic, weren’t crawling or biting.
After we lay down, and Crier was about to shut the back of the camper, Bob said, “No kiss and story?”
Crier held out his hand, palm up, made a fist and let the cobra rise.
Bob looked at Crier’s stiff middle finger and said, “That’s not nice.”
Crier shut the back of the camper and went around to the front seat and lay down.
Bob managed to get up on his knees and thumped his forehead against the glass that connected the camper to the cab.
Crier sat up and turned to look. I’ve seen more pleasant faces on water moccasins.
“Night-night,” Bob said.
Crier did the trick with his finger again, only with less flourish this time, then lay down out of sight.
Bob wiggled onto his sleeping bag, got on his side and looked at me and said, “You know, I like that guy, I really do.”
That night the dreams came back, the same sort I’d had in the drive-in. They seemed more like visions than dreams, like I had tapped into some consciousness that controlled things. Bob and Crier didn’t have the dreams, so I could only guess that through some quirk of fate, or by alien design, I had been given this gift. Or, I was as crazy as a cat in a dryer.
Hot-wired to aliens or not, the dreams/visions were clear. I could see the aliens in them, their bulbous heads sporting wiggling tendons tipped with eyes, tentacles flashing about, touching gears and punching buttons. Lights and buzzers and beepers going off and on around them. And them leaning forward, conversing with one another in a language that sounded like grunts, squeaks, burps and whines, and yet, a language I could somehow understand.
And some of the things they were saying went like this:
“Slow, uh-huh, uh-huh ... that’s it.”
“Nice, nice ...”
“Very pretty, oh yes, very pretty ... tight and easy now.”
“All right, that’s it. CUT!”
Then the connection was cut as well, and the dream or whatever it was, ended. The next thing I knew it was morning and Crier had joined us for breakfast, such as it was: a can of sardines that we had taken from Sam’s bus before we blew it up.
Afterwards, Crier got us out of the back
of the camper and made us take turns walking, him supporting us, so that we could exercise our sore feet. Mine had started to curl like burned tortillas, and Crier said if I didn’t make them work, they’d quit on me, and that at best, I’d end up having a couple of lumps that had all the mobility of potted plants.
I believed him. I exercised. So did Bob, though he grumbled about it.
Worst part about the exercise, worse even than the pain, was the thirst. It had been a long time since I had had a drink of water, and of course, this was true of Bob and Crier too. In the drive-in, for a time, we existed on soft drinks, and later on, Bob and I had nothing but the juice from jerky, and now the liquid from sardines.
If that doesn’t sound so bad, go out some summer evening and do some kind of hard work, like say hauling hay, then try quenching your thirst with a big glass of soy oil or meat broth.
The bottom line was we were dehydrating, starting to look like flesh-colored plastic stretched over a frame of coat hangers.
“I figure,” Crier said, after we got through exercising and were sitting with our backs against the truck, “any place as full of trees and grass and critters as this, ought to have water.”
I wasn’t so sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come to what looked like a stream only to discover it was colored glass or rippling cellophane.
We were looking at Sam’s grave while we talked, examining his ankles sticking up, his feet wearing the hubcap, and all of a sudden, we grew silent, as if possessed of a hive mind.
“I could have at least spoken some words over him,” Crier said.
“And who the hell would you have been talking to?” Bob said. “Sam? He don’t give a damn about nothing no more. God? Personally, I’m not real fond of the sonofabitch. Or wouldn’t be, if I thought he, she, or it, existed.”
I didn’t say so, but I was in Bob’s camp. Like the drive-in patrons, God was on my shit list. I had tried religion during our stay in the drive-in, and it hadn’t exactly been a rewarding experience.