The Complete Drive-In

  “Grab hold of something, and good luck to us all,” Steve said, and with the beams on high, a fresh yell on his lips, he punched the gas, and we jolted forward, and Reba sang at the top of her lungs: “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

  “With bad insulation,” I said.

  PART FOUR

  In which a yellow school bus is the vehicle for a bizarre

  exit and becomes a kind of projectile turd that won’t

  float. The great shining bridge is seen again. Ghosting

  is experienced. Dog urine fruit is digested.

  Chicken Little rules. Toys are found.

  1

  Let me tell you, time can stand still.

  It stood still as the bus went over the lip of the shitter. I envisioned us perched on the edge of a giant, dark toilet bowl full of someone’s little dividend, and we were about to dive in as if we had good sense. Shit-busters to the rescue.

  Our own rescue, we hoped.

  But, BAM. There we were, on the lip, frozen in time.

  We just hung there.

  Or so it seemed.

  Then all of time gathered up and pushed, and we came unglued.

  The bus, a long brightly lit, yellow, pontooned turd, dripped over the edge and took just two days south of forever before it hit that mess.

  I was in my seat, facing down at the dark doom below us, my butthole biting at the upholstery, clutching the seat in front of me so hard my fingers ached.

  And the shit hit the windshield. Hard.

  I thought:

  With our luck the windshield will blow and that pile of fish turds will smash us all the way to the back of the bus, fill our lungs with digested refuse, then, if we have a chance to live, if any one of us might be a survivor, that fish’s asshole will chew us up like a mole in a lawn mower, and out we will go.

  Down we went, and the light was extinguished by the black goo, and I could feel Reba next to me, but couldn’t see her. I could hear her breathing hard, and there was a sensation of being like a BB sinking down into a vat of chocolate pudding, minus the nice smell and the fine taste.

  Then the bus started to twist and turn, and I knew it was that weird digestion process that the Powers That Be had constructed, maybe left unfinished. The bus began to spin, and next thing I knew I was knocked into Reba hard. Was bouncing about the bus like a ricochet shot. The smell was terrible, and I could feel that mess on my hands, which meant it was easing in through the cracks in the windows and the doors, had possibly shoved through the window Grace had latched up in back.

  But, no, I consoled myself. If that had happened, the bus would be full of that nasty stuff.

  Then, as if thought were the catalyst, I felt the horrid mess press up against me like foam, filling my nostrils with its stench, pushing me either forward or backward, down the aisle. I was uncertain which, though I could feel myself bouncing between the seats. There was a loud crunching sound, like a smartass wadding up an aluminum soft drink can, and someone screamed, a loud horrible scream that could not be identified as man or woman. Then I was pushed up against what I realize now was the windshield. The shit shoved me. The windshield made a cracking sound, and I blacked out. But the blackness into which my mind fell couldn’t have been any blacker than the world that was already around me.

  I came awake.

  I was surprised at that.

  I was still alive. I could still breathe.

  But I was surrounded by wetness. Not the thick mess that I had felt before, but wetness. I was bobbing about in the water, and I could see the water rippling, and there was great white foam, and sticking out of the foam was the nose of the bus, the windshield gone, the roof crushed in, the front right tire blown.

  I had been shoved through the windshield, and the bus had shot to the surface, if ever so briefly. Perhaps the pontoons (which had come loose of the bus) had done it, or as we went into the fish’s ass sphincter and he let us fly, the force of it had driven us out and up. Trapped air in the bus, maybe. I didn’t know. In that moment, nothing made sense.

  Reba was clinging to the front of the bus. I could see her pretty well lying in a pool of what I realized was moonlight, silver as mercury. I could see a dark patch on her face where blood had bloomed like a flower, the moonlight made it appear to be a large black rose.

  She clung to the bumper, lay across the hood in what could only be described as a dazed state. She looked in my direction, but I couldn’t tell if she was seeing me or not. She lifted her head a little, like a turtle sunning itself on a rock, then lowered her head against the bus, continuing to cling.

  The bus started down, quickly. I tried to yell Reba’s name, beg her to let go, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. The water foamed around the bus, churned the fish turds that had come up with it, then the bus dove. Water lapped over Reba and rushed into where the windshield had been, then it was gone, taking Reba with it, leaving only a wide band of chrome-colored ripples that pushed me up and down in the water like a fisherman’s cork.

  I dove after the bus, but I was too weak. My lungs wouldn’t hold the air I had swallowed. It was so dark I couldn’t see a thing below. Huge turds bounced against me.

  There was nothing I could do.

  I fought my way to the surface, screamed as I broke the roof of the water and saw the moon above me. I began to cry. I felt something touch me. A vast patch of water disappeared, and in its place was a great gray wall.

  The wall rose higher.

  And higher.

  It was Ed swimming by.

  He dove. The dive pulled me under. I fought with everything I had to make the surface, even ended up putting my foot on Ed’s back and shoving off.

  I broke the surface and looked in the direction Ed had gone. All that could be seen was a great fin knifing through the dark water. As I watched, something struck me hard in the head, almost knocked me unconscious.

  I grabbed at it.

  It was one of the pontoons. It had snapped in half, but it still floated. I grabbed hold of it and clung, tried to climb on top of it. It rolled with me, and I lost it a couple of times, but finally I had a solid grip on it, straddled it, latched my legs around it tight.

  Across the water I saw a white mist. And then I saw it was not a mist at all, but the ghost of the drive-in. It slowly floated toward me. Floated until it was over and around me. And inside the drive-in I could see everything that had happened while I was there. I could see me and my friends, all dead now, in the camper, tooling along the highway, heading for what we thought would be a great weekend.

  There were dinosaurs and such, and all the events that had happened after we escaped the drive-in theater—or so we thought. All that and more. Overlapping, running together, seen simultaneously like a bad TV connection, one program blending into another.

  The mist stuttered. Was followed by a sound like electricity shorting out. A snap of light and shadow, a crackle like cellophane being chewed by a goat, and the mist was back.

  The Popcorn King.

  Those dinosaurs.

  Poplalong Cassidy and his carnivorous film.

  Grace. Shit Town.

  The bus. All gray and ghostly and us inside. Outside the bus. Inside the bus. Every view you could imagine. All that had taken place. Reba and I making love. Grace kicking Cory to death. All of us, looking like some kind of ride at Disneyland, a bus full of escaped specters from the Haunted Mansion.

  The past and the present rolled in and out. Everything was caught up in that white mess of memory.

  I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but my voice was still too hoarse.

  I dropped my head against the pontoon, stretched out on it as best I could. And clinging like I was riding a rocket to that silver moon above me, to escape the mists and all it contained, I fell into a stupor as the water rode me up and rode me down.

  2

  “It’s okay,” I heard Reba say, and I could feel her stroke my hair.

  I awoke to find she wasn’t there. T
here was only me and the pontoon, and it was a breeze moving my hair, not Reba’s soft fingers. The moon was gone, and the sun was warm but not too warm, and the water was a bright sheening blue. Beyond, there was a great cloud bank, and in little patches, like glimpses of car metal as seen through clouds of white dust in a dirt-track race, I could see the great silver bridge.

  I thought of Reba again, bright eyes, fine face, skin made hard from life, her navel like the end twist on a gut-stuffed sausage, the tangle of hair between her legs.

  I thought: That’s about right. Here I am floating on what is essentially a goddamn log. I’ve lost all my friends, and my lover, and what I’m thinking about is not her sweetness, and kindness, but the fine wet thing between her thighs.

  Men. They ain’t worth killing.

  And I be one of them.

  As I clung to the pontoon, I was thinking: This might be my chance. Just to let go. Just to drift down, the way poor Reba had. Drift down into the great deeps and fill my lungs with water, and end it all.

  Wasn’t drowning supposed to be pleasant?

  Or did I read it was actually very unpleasant, and the idea that it was pleasant was a myth? Which was it?

  Just the thought of unpleasantness was enough to make me dismiss the idea. It was never anything I was in love with anyway.

  “Jack,” a voice called.

  I thought: Here I go again.

  But this wasn’t Reba calling.

  It was a man’s voice. Sounded like Steve.

  Then came Grace’s voice calling my name.

  I rolled my head to the other side, and out there on the water, floating up and down, were two heads and a body. The body was between the two heads, and they were hanging onto it. It was not floating very well, and I slowly deduced it was Homer, face down. On one side of him was Grace, on the other, Steve.

  I tried to yell at them, but my voice came out in a bark. I realized then that the rushing water had gone into my throat and filled my belly and caused me to throw it up at some point, scalding my throat with stomach acid.

  “We’ll come to you,” Grace said, and they let go of Homer and swam to the pontoon. Homer’s body floated lower in the water, so there was really little to nothing left of him to see.

  They gripped the pontoon at the front and back. I continued to straddle and clutch the pontoon like a spider on a stick; I began to cry.

  “You’re okay,” I said.

  “More or less,” Grace said.

  She was at the end where my head was, and I lifted my eyes and looked at her. It was really the first time I had ever seen her look the worse for wear.

  There was fish shit in her matted hair. Her face looked haggard. Her flesh was waterlogged, her lips were purple. There were patches on her face where the fish’s stomach acid had burned her; red spots like flung paint. The look in her eye, for the first time, appeared distant, that hundred-yard stare. She too had finally felt the bite of fear.

  But, it was still a beautiful face to me.

  She said, “Reba?”

  I shook my head.

  Steve reached out and patted me on the foot, said, “Can we all share this thing a little better?”

  So, the three of us, one at either end of the busted pontoon, one in the middle, shifted positions throughout the gnawing hot day to prevent boredom, floated about on what by late afternoon looked like a wine-dark sea.

  I noted that the skin on my arms was burned, and I could feel it on the back of my neck, and on my face as well, and I knew soon I would burn even more, and by tonight, or early the next day, I would feel it and not like it.

  Grace and Steve were burned as well.

  I was thinking about all this, when I saw something that made me croak out. I could hardly make the word.

  “Lund.”

  “What?” Grace said.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Land.”

  And so it was. There was a dark line of greenery and a fine line of brown shore, and way beyond it we could see the dark bridge, or ladder, rising up into the fluffy white clouds. We kicked our legs and tried to work the pontoon in that direction.

  We paddled all day, and finally night fell, and we didn’t look any closer to me than when we had first spotted the shore.

  We paddled throughout the night, one taking turns straddling the pontoon, sleeping a bit, then swapping out to let another do the same. The mist came back and surrounded us all night, and it was hard to see the land there in the dark, even with the moonlight (and tonight there were two moons), and on we paddled, like angry beavers, and when daybreak broke, we were still some distance away.

  The current was carrying us toward the shore rapidly now, and so we merely clung for a long time, resting.

  When land seemed truly within our grasp, we began to paddle again, and it was just growing dark when we made the white sandy beach, abandoned the pontoon, and crawled up on shore to rest.

  We didn’t make it any farther than that, and I awoke to the water lifting and tugging at me, realized if I didn’t get up and move, that it would take me out to sea.

  The mist was floating about again, but I didn’t even look at it. I shook Steve and Grace, and the three of us staggered farther inland, found a spot beneath a tree with limbs hanging so low and thick they almost touched the ground.

  We crawled under them and lay near the tree’s thick trunk. It was good and dark under there, and there was plenty of room, and the sand was soft and warm. We couldn’t see the mist. There was only the sound of the sea crashing against the shore, and a smell of healthy greenery.

  Almost immediately, we were asleep.

  3

  Next morning I awoke to light slipping under the thick tree limbs. I pushed my way from beneath them and out into the sunlight, staggered toward the beach and the sea.

  The water was blue and the sky was blue, and the blues were dark and rich in color and blended one with the other. In that moment, it gave me the impression of being at the bottom of a china bowl. The sun, in all its warm glory, was like a bright yellow flower painted on the bowl’s insides, and the beach sand beneath me was some fine ingredient, flour perhaps, and here I was standing on it. Probably waiting to be mixed into some kind of cake if my current bad luck continued.

  I blinked and turned and looked toward the inner shore.

  Trees. Huge and green and beautiful. Beyond it all, rising up into the blue and disappearing into it, as if poking a hole in the sky, was the bridge, or whatever the hell it was. It was the closest we had been to it, and I could see now that it was gold and silver, and there were black lines running along the sides of it, and slowly, it came to me that they were massive cables. I had a sudden hot mental flash that savage lines of electricity were being channeled through those cables, and that the whole thing was plugged into the ground, and if the plug were pulled, the world would be sucked into a vacuum, all that was here: sand and trees, sky and sea, us, we would all go, SsssssssssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuCK!

  And we would be gone. Like spilt paint pulled into a wet vac.

  When I turned back toward the sea, I saw a curious thing. The great sky sagged. Like someone above had poked it with a large finger. It sagged low out at sea, almost touched the water.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I was standing there looking at it, when I heard Grace say, “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

  I turned and looked at her. Steve was crawling out from under the tree limbs, starting in our direction.

  “No,” I said. “But you do see something every day that you didn’t see the day before. That something is something new, and this is today’s new thing.”

  “Perhaps one of many,” she said.

  Steve stood next to us, said, “Holy shit. What happened to the sky?”

  “We were just contemplating that,” Grace said.

  We shopped around for food and found some fruit growing on a strange-looking little tree. Steve tasted it, pronounced it sour as dog urine (I don’t kno
w if this evaluation was from personal experience or not), and we passed on it.

  We walked along the beach, looking for other foods, a dead fish maybe, and then I saw her.

  Reba.

  She lay on the shore on her back.

  We ran to her.

  She wasn’t looking good.

  Her face was puffed out from the water, and her hair was pushed down over her eyes.

  “She’s dead,” Steve said.

  I knelt down and put my arm behind her head and lifted her to a sitting position.

  When I did, she coughed, and water projectile-vomited from her lungs. It went all over her legs. She coughed some more, opened her eyes, and tried to focus.

  She almost smiled.

  She tried to speak, but when she did, no words came out. Only water.

  I picked her up and carried her inland, set her down so her back was against a tree.

  “You don’t look much like the Little Mermaid,” I said.

  “Don’t feel much like her either,” she said.

  “We thought you were gone,” Steve said.

  Reba actually smiled this time. “Not yet. This is it? This is all of us?”

  “Homer made a pretty good float,” Grace said, “but I think he was dead before the bus reached the surface. He was at the back. The mess came in through the window there, smothered him.”

  Reba stared off at the water, said, “My God. What’s happened to the sky?”

  We looked at what we had already seen, but now, there was a portion of the sky actually dipping into the water. That piece moved when the water moved.

  We sat there for awhile, and while Steve stayed with Reba, Grace and I went down the shoreline looking for something to eat. We finally did find a dead fish or two, chose the one that was in the best condition, and carried it back. It wasn’t a large fish, but it was something. We tore it open with our fingers and shared the cold innards among us. Had I not been starved, it would have been disgusting.