The Complete Drive-In

  Under the wet clothes her breasts looked nice and so did the width of her hips and the shape of her thighs. I thought about getting her wet clothes off to make her more comfortable, but I feared an ulterior motive.

  I left her there in a puddle and went back to Jungle Home, stopping on the way to look at myself in the truck’s wing mirror. My hair was wet and twisted and my scraggly little beard looked like a smear of grease. If I was going to have whiskers, why couldn’t I have a full set like Bob and Crier.

  I did the best I could combing my hair with my fingers, then went on up to Jungle Home and put on my blanket and tied it around my waist with a belt I had made of vines. Then I lay down on my sleeping bag and found that all that exertion had worn me out. I went right to sleep.

  Next thing I knew, Bob and Crier were back. They had a vine basket of fruit, but no game.

  “The great hunters return,” I said.

  “He saw a bunny,” Bob said, “and couldn’t shoot it. He got all dewy-eyed.”

  “It had a little pink nose,” Crier said. “After all that’s happened, I just couldn’t kill something.”

  “Think those fish you catch live happily ever after in our bowel movements?”

  “They aren’t cute like bunnies,” Crier said.

  “Boys,” I said, “there’s a girl down in the camper.”

  “Don’t joke me,” Bob said. “I see a fork in a tree and I get hard.”

  “I’m not joking,” I said, and told them the story.

  We brought the basket of fruit with us, and when we got around to the back of the camper and looked inside, it was empty. There was a pool of water where she had been and her clothes and tennis shoes were laid out on the tailgate.

  “Melted, I figure,” Bob said.

  “I’m right here.”

  We turned. She was about ten feet away, wearing only faded blue bikini panties. Her blonde hair was dry now and somehow she had combed it out. It fell to her wide shoulders and tumbled over them and, much to our happiness, stopped just before covering her breasts, which were firm and full with areola the size of half-dollars and the color of warm beef gravy. The nipples were thick and firm, like the tips of pointing fingers. She had a narrow waist and her ribs showed from having lost too much weight. There were faint, pink bands here and there on her body, as if she had been lashed with something. She had her hands on her hips and was looking right at us. If she was embarrassed, I couldn’t tell it.

  “Christ,” she said. “Haven’t you boys seen titties before?”

  “There’s titties,” Bob said, “then there’s titties.”

  “This is my first time, ma’am,” Crier said. “I’ve heard of them, of course.”

  “Fuck with me, any kind of way,” she said, “and I’ll break your legs off and shove them up your assholes.”

  “Me first,” Crier said.

  But the way she looked at us then made us step aside. She came over and got her clothes and started putting them on.

  “You boys enjoying the show?”

  “Very much, yes,” Bob said.

  She finished dressing, sat on the tailgate, and looked at us. I guarantee we weren’t as pleasant to look at as she was.

  She said, “Had a cousin told me about a boyfriend she’d had. Said he was so horny he’d go to the ocean and fuck the water in case there might be a shark out there that had swallowed a girl. Know what she meant now. You could at least close your mouths.”

  “We’re not so bad,” Crier said. “We brought you some fruit.”

  She eyed the fruit we had left on the tailgate and said, “It isn’t full of dick holes, is it?”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, “we’re not that bad. All things considered, we’re doing okay. We’re not trying to rape you, are we? Look here. I’m Jack, this is Bob, and this is Crier.”

  Her face changed a little then and there was something behind that pretty skin and those green-gray eyes that wasn’t so pretty. But whatever it was went away as quickly as it had arrived.

  She took a plum-like fruit from the basket and bit out of it. The juice leaped from it in gold beads and flecked her lips and cheeks and she began to chew. After a moment, she spat out the seed, and went deeper into the fruit like a lion biting the innards out of an antelope’s belly. When she finished that one, she ate another.

  Somehow, watching her eat was as good as a peepshow. None of us said a word.

  When she was finished, she said, “Now you’ve had a look at my tits and watched me eat. I hope you’re happy. Had you showed five minutes earlier, you could have gone off in the bushes with me and watched me pee.”

  “You could have called us,” Bob said.

  “Nice dresses,” she said, nodding at Bob and me.

  “Let’s not talk fashion,” I said. “Tell us about yourself. Before the drive-in and up to now.”

  “Why would you want to know?”

  “Entertainment,” I said. “It’s not like we have a pressing social calendar. We know more than we want to know about each other. Give us something new to think about.”

  “All right,” she said. “Sit down and get comfy, because this is going to take a while.”

  SECOND REEL

  Grace Talks About Frat House Fires,

  Raw Liver, and a Nine Iron to the Noggin

  1

  My name is Grace, and I come from a little burg called Nacogdoches. It’s supposed to be the oldest town in Texas. We got a sign that says so, but it doesn’t look that old—the town, I mean, not the sign.

  The place is still kind of neat, but it’s going to hell fast, and when I look at photographs Mom and Dad have of it twenty-five years ago, it really chaps my highly attractive ass.

  It’s one of those towns where the fine old houses and the massive trees have been torn or cut down so progress can slither in. You know progress. Burger King, McDonald’s, and all manner of plastic eateries where the wrappers for the burgers and the lettuce inside them taste pretty much alike, and it’s my opinion the wrappers have a more natural tint than the lettuce and are probably more nutritious.

  These days the old houses are gone and you can stand in the parking lot of McDonald’s on fourth Street and toss a dried Big Mac underhanded and bounce it off the front glass of Wendy’s on the other side of the street. Or you can go over to University Drive and toss a pepperoni pizza, no anchovies, out of the driveway of Mazzio’s Pizza and wing an innocent bystander on the tableladen deck of Arby’s.

  I went to high school and college in good ol’ Nac. The college is called Stephen F. Austin University, and it’s named after one of the guys that helped con Texas from Mexico.

  I was majoring in anthropology/archaeology, but what I really wanted to be was a karate instructor, since my dad, who was a black belt in kenpo, had been teaching me ever since I was five. If it matters, I’m first degree brown belt now.

  But like Dad, I couldn’t see any real future in martial arts. Or to be more precise, I think I let Mom convince me there wasn’t any future in it. She talked Dad into being a manager of an optical store and she wanted something like that for me, or as she always put it, “Kicking people is all right, but you can’t make a decent living at it. You got to have something to fall back on.”

  Well, I had been hearing this speech since I was old enough to know which was the business end of a tampon, so when I saw this National Geographic special on archaeology on television, I thought it might be just what I was looking for.

  There were these folks with tans about the color of fresh walnut stains applied to burnt mahogany, wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets, and they were swarming over these ruins. Fire ants couldn’t have been any busier.

  They were doing a lot of pointing and writing in notebooks and looking intelligent. There were close-ups of pottery shards from pots that had been made before Jesus was old enough to suck Mary’s tit, and there were skull fragments and pieces of bones from the guys and gals that had made the pots.

  The show ended with
a close-up of this woman with sweat running from under her pith helmet and onto her face and mixing with the sand there, out over these little fragments of walls, looking soulful as a Baptist preacher, contemplating the past and all the great civilizations that had arisen there and folded back in on themselves like a card table.

  It was inspiring.

  Thinking back on it now, she may have been looking out over that sand waiting for somebody to pick her up in an air-conditioned truck and drive her over to a Mideast Hilton.

  But the desire to dig holes in the ground and hold the bony remains of ancient pottery makers in my hands had come over me like the Holy Ghost. I couldn’t think of anything else. I checked out archaeology books and read them cover to cover and started envisioning ancient civilizations marching ghostlike through Nacogdoches, throwing down pots and bowls and breaking them so I could find them a zillion years later.

  What I didn’t get from those books, or refused to get, was how goddamn hard archaeology is. And it’s dirty work. Those people on National Geographic weren’t just deeply tanned, they were downright filthy.

  At the end of a day, having sifted through enough sand to fill Galveston Beach, the sun burning through my clothes like an X-ray, it was hard for me to take a whole lot of pride in a few broken pieces of pottery that some prehistoric dude had marked on with a pine needle.

  Looking back on it, it was pretty wonderful stuff, I guess, but I don’t like working in the heat and getting so dirty you have to use a putty knife to get it off your elbows. And I didn’t even have a pith helmet. Just a cap that said Nacogdoches Dragons on it, and they weren’t winning many ball games.

  If someone from National Geographic had showed up right then, I’d have stuffed a year’s run of magazines down their throat and kicked them until they shit a single bound volume.

  It’s not that I’m a weak sister. I’m not. Karate gave me patience as well as determination. But it’s mostly clean work. A little sweat and dirty feet is all. And I did my workouts in our air-conditioned garage or the college gym. If you have to use martial arts on the street, it doesn’t take but a few moments to open up a can of whup-ass, then you can find some air-conditioned building to cool off in when it’s over.

  Even indoor archaeology is hard.

  On one dig I found some pottery pieces, and I was assigned to try and reconstruct them. That’s like giving a blind, crippled monkey a hammer, a bag of nails, and a pile of lumber and telling him to build an A-frame. I’m the gal who still has an unfinished fifty-piece puzzle of a white cat in my closet at home, and I got that puzzle for my tenth birthday.

  I’d go to the lab every night and try to do that pottery, and I’ll tell you, after fifteen minutes of that I was dangerous. I wanted to kill something and drink a couple of bottles of Nervine.

  Bottom line is, I quit. And that was the turning point. Had I stayed in archaeology, I’d probably have been home studying, or up at the lab, destroying my nerves with that pottery instead of meeting up with Timothy and Sue Ellen and tooling on over to the Orbit Drive-in that weird Friday night.

  2

  So, on the night after I’d given up archaeology and my chance to have something to fall back on, I was out riding around in my old Chevy Nova trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I’ll tell you, what I was coming up with was not pretty.

  I thought about all those stories I’d heard about college dropouts and how they spent their lives working behind the counter at K-mart or pulling the train for the football team during off season. I could envision myself standing on the corner of North and Main with a cigarette jutting out of my mouth, one side of my lip pulled up in a permanent snarl, and me thinking how I can get a few dollars so I can go over to the 7 Eleven and buy me a bottle of Thunderbird wine. Nothing would be too low for me to do: prostitution, theft, drug-running, murder, working as a usedcar salesman. In time I would be shunned by winos and Baptists alike.

  On the other hand, I was also thinking about whoever had inherited my prehistoric pottery shards, and I felt a wicked elation that while I was out tooling around, someone was hunched over those shards with their eyes twitching, their hands shaking, wishing I had quietly pushed those fragments down a gopher hole.

  Anyway, I was riding around, taking back streets mostly, thinking, and I came up on this fire.

  There were cars pulled over the curb and people were standing on the sidewalk and out front of their houses, watching a frat house burn down.

  I pulled across from the house, behind the string of parked cars, got out and leaned on the Nova and watched.

  The fire department was there and the firemen were jerking hoses, yelling and hopping on the lawn like grasshoppers. Every now and then one of them would erupt from the doorway of the burning structure like the end result of the Heimlich maneuver, land in the yard on his hands and knees, and crawl about feebly, coughing smoke like a little dragon.

  I had never seen a fire like that before, and it didn’t take Smokey the Bear to tell me it was some kind of serious. A blazing paper hat would have been easier to save.

  While I was watching the frat joint burn up—hating that it was an old house of the sort the city council loved to see go so an aluminum building the shape of a box could take its place, or some concrete could be laid down for a car lot—a tan van came down the street and stopped at the curb and three guys fell out of it yelling. Frats, I figured. Most likely they had gone for a six-pack, or to work their version of heavy machinery, a Trojan dispenser, and had come back to find they had forgot to turn the fire off from under the chili, and now their pad was on its way to becoming air pollution.

  Two of them sat on the curb and started crying and the other one rolled around on the lawn and whimpered like a dog with glass in his belly. A fireman came over and yelled at him and kicked him in the butt. The guy crawled off and joined his comrades at the curb and they cried in trio.

  I hoped like hell there wasn’t anyone inside that house. If so, they wouldn’t be graduating.

  I was about to leave when I was touched lightly on the elbow and a voice said, “You start this one, baby?”

  “Nope. I’m all out of matches.”

  “Then you got nothing to worry about.”

  I turned and looked at Timothy. I had known him all my life, had been over to his house to play when we were kids, and he had been over to mine. There had never been anything romantic between us, though when I was twelve I talked him into playing doctor and discovered what I’d heard about boys was true: They were fixed up different from girls.

  “Good to see you,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

  One of the firemen came coughing out to the curb across from us and sat down next to one of the frat boys. The one who had been rolling on the ground sobbed and said, “They gonna save it?”

  The fireman took off his smoke-stained hat, coughed, and looked at the frat the way some people look at retarded children. “Son, we’ll be lucky if we save the mineral rights on that sonofabitch.”

  The three frats really started to cry.

  The roof collapsed then and the sparks from it rose up to heaven and turned clear like the souls of fireflies gone off to meet their just rewards.

  “Last time I heard,” Timothy said, “you were digging holes in the ground or something. Had some night classes too.”

  “A lab,” I said. “Archaeology in the daytime, labs at night. I had to let it go.”

  Then I told him the whole story.

  “I quit too,” he said.

  “I never knew you started.”

  “It was the math fixed me. Never could understand how X could be some other number. It always looked like X to me. I couldn’t make sense of it. If X was ten one time, how could it be fifteen the next? Who the hell could keep up with what X was if it could be anything?

  “What I should have taken was all P. E. courses and majored in golf. I can’t make X and Y add up, but by God, I can knock those little white balls
to Dallas.”

  And he could. I had played golf with him before. My golfing style was akin to a frightened matron trying to beat a rat to death with a curtain rod, but I had played enough to know the good stuff when I saw it, and Timothy had the good stuff. A number of pro golfers had made the same observation, and Timothy had mentioned more than once that he was thinking about taking his clubs on the road and seeing what he could do.

  “We’re on our way to the Orbit,” Timothy said. “Want to go?”

  “We?”

  “Sue Ellen. She loves that horror stuff.”

  Sue Ellen was Timothy’s little sister. She was twelve. Last time I’d seen her was two years back, and she wanted me to explain why Barbie and Ken were smooth allover. I didn’t remember having any answers.

  “I doubt she even remembers me,” I said. “She might feel uncomfortable.”

  “She remembers you quite well.”

  “She’s sort of young for blood and guts, isn’t she?”

  “Tell me about it. Mom and Dad think I’m taking her over to see Bambi, Cinderella, The Fox and the Hound and assorted cartoons in a Disney dusk-todawn extravaganza.”

  “Wonder how they got that idea,” I said.

  I took my car home, told my parents where I was going, not mentioning that Sue Ellen was waiting in the car with Timothy, and we went over there in the Galaxy.

  When we got there, the line was as long as the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and, of course, we got a place near the end of it. The flashing blue-and-white Saturn symbol of the Orbit was far enough away to look like a Ping-Pong ball with an oversized washer around it.

  It was warm and the air was full of mosquitoes. Rolling up the windows made you hotter, and rolling them down fed you to the mosquitoes. Timothy talked about giving it up and going home, and I was for it. But not Sue Ellen.