“I guess it’s better than heart disease at the moment, but it’s about to turn real nasty. There are signs. I always had a knack for signs. I could watch the news or read in People magazine about something, and I could always project, you know. Meaning I could look at a thing and see where it was really going. It’s a gift.”
“Well, where’s it going then?” Willard asked, shaking us all out a cigarette.
“As I was saying,” Crier said, taking a smoke and putting it in his mouth and producing his own lighter, “there are signs. Over in Lot B a man and a woman pulled their car up close to the tin fence, got on the roof of the car and climbed over the fence into that black crap. So long, sweeties. Suckers went out like June bugs on a hot griddle. It was quick, though. I seen a fella fall under one of them rollers they use to flatten out tar on the highway once, now that was tough. And it didn’t kill him right away. Can you believe that?”
“Yeah?” Willard said.
“Yeah,” Crier said, and he gave details, then went away.
Without clocks, the sun and the moon to measure time by, it was up to the projectionists to mark the hours. They did this by counting the number of movies they changed. They kept them running constantly. Six of them. Three from our concession stand and film house, another three from the concession in Lot B. When one film was finished, they would measure by its reel time. Usually about an hour and a half per flick. That way, when enough films had been changed, they could compute time for meals. The manager would then announce over the speaker: “Snack bar will be serving breakfast now.” Or whatever meal was on the roster. Not that it mattered, since it was the same stuff every time.
“Hot damn,” Bob would say, “popcorn. They make a mean bag here, don’t they? Regular four-star restaurant.” And he would always ask the manager about the National Guard.
That Bob. What a kidder.
For a while I tried using one of Bob’s old history composition notebooks and a Bic pen to keep time by the number of movies seen, like the projectionists. But I could never remember if the mark on paper was for the previous movie or the one I had just seen. Things ran together kind of rapid like.
I don’t think I was the only one having trouble with time. I think the projectionists were missing it now and then too. Certainly, I was pretty hungry a few times, and I think they missed calling us for meals. But mistakes were expected. I could attest to the fact that keeping time by the number of movies shown wasn’t an exact science. And I was sick of the movies. I knew them by heart. You could hear people across the drive-in chanting the dialogue ahead of the actors. Sometimes I dozed when the zombies were eating guts, or when Mitchell was using the industrial nailer on the pretty woman from the shower.
People continued to be patient. Or most. There were a few fights. I saw a guy slug a guy in front of us once, but I don’t know what started it. It was fast and explosive. But mostly, people were doing pretty good. It was still like what I was talking about earlier, about those old science-fiction movies where we all pull together against the menace. Only our menace was silent and surrounded us, and we didn’t have any bombs to throw at it, and the damned old National Guard didn’t seem likely to show up.
When we were tired, we slept in the camper using the bedrolls, giving Willard spare blankets and an old backpack for a pillow. Sometimes one of us would sleep in the cab, or lie down on our bedroll under the truck. We didn’t always sleep at the same time. Bob especially seemed to have a different body clock. He would usually climb into the camper for a nap when we were waking up. There seemed to be something furtive about this, but I couldn’t figure what it was, unless he wanted to masturbate.
We used the bathroom at the concession, but I could see that wasn’t going to last. It didn’t work well. It was getting so bad I longed for the toilet at Buddy’s Fill-up.
My highlights were saying hi to the Candy Girl and eating. It got so I was getting kind of fat. I took up exercising, but I couldn’t stay with it. Just too damn tired. Nothing seemed real or important. The idea of being trapped in the drive-in, though depressing, began to seem normal, as if we had always been there. I wondered why ants in ant farms didn’t commit suicide.
The weather in the drive-in was fairly consistent. Not too warm, not too cold. Yet it did change occasionally. Wild winds would twist up out of nowhere and tear across the lots, blowing paper cups and popcorn bags before them like frightened coveys of quail. The paper would fly against the wind-rattled tin fences or over them and into the blackness to be consumed. Sometimes the wind was so strong it shook the truck like a mechanical pony ride.
There was also a now-and-then movement in the blackness overhead. It bulged down, made lumps. Fuzzy blue lightning leaped out of it, produced crackling stick figures that danced across the strange sky to the rhythm of metallic thunder and ran together like idiots to explode in dazzling displays of fireworks.
It never rained, however, and it got so the electrical storms were welcome. They were a break from the monotony. They gave more light. People would lie on the ground, or on top of their cars, hands behind heads, looking up, entranced.
And when there wasn’t the lightning, there were the meals at the concession, and the movies. The movies, ever rolling: chainsaws and zombies, drills and screams, common as spit.
With all of us so close together, it got so sex was super casual, damn near a spectator sport. There had always been this element at the Orbit, but it was more blatant than ever, and the romance had gone out of it. To the front of us a group formed that participated in orgies. We were hurt no one invited us over. We used to sit in lawn chairs and watch them wallow on the asphalt. Bob would cheer them on and call out points, and I would wonder where they got their energy. Watching them made me tired.
I remember this little girl who used to walk her poodle between the fornicating bodies. She must have been about eleven. The bodies could have been hedges for all she and the mutt cared. The dog had a pink bow, the girl a red one. The dog was too small in its white fur, the girl too small in her dress. The red ribbon against her oily blonde hair looked like a wound.
There were fights. People got mad over very little. Over to our right a fellow wearing a welder’s cap got into some kind of shindig with a hatless fella over the quality of the chainsaw Leatherface was using in yet another viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They did some excellent name-calling. Even Willard and Bob were impressed, and they were well versed in tongue-lashing. Willard had been raised on the streets, and Bob had a dad who thought most of humanity was a sonofabitch, and that the word “sonofabitch” itself was the period to a sentence. “I’ll be a sonofabitch. There goes that sonofabitch. You got to watch them sonofabitches. Remember now, boys, folks are just sonofabitches.”
The guy with the hat was the sharper of the two, as he had a three-foot length of two-by-four, while the hatless fella had only a popcorn sack, and that mostly empty. Even as Leatherface chased an intended victim across the screen, Hat laid a lick on Hatless’s noggin that would have made a sadist wince. Hatless, wobbling a little from the blow, flapped his popcorn bag at Hat, and the bag burst open and sent popcorn bouncing into the night.
It got better than championship wrestling. Folks nearby, maybe friends or relatives, or just interested parties, got in the act, chose up sides, started kicking and slugging. After a while, sides didn’t matter. It was getting the good blow in that counted. One guy got crazy, ripped a speaker off a post, went at everyone and anyone with it. He was good, too. Way he whipped that baby around on that wire made Bruce Lee and his nunchukkas look like a third-grade carnival act.
He started coming our way, whirling the speaker fast as a propeller, yelling. He smashed the windshield out of the car next to us.
From my lawn chair I could see him coming straight for me. Bob had already vacated his seat and beat a hasty retreat. He called for me to do the same, but I couldn’t move. I was excited and wanted to move, but couldn’t quite find the energy to get up. Lately everything was a major chore, even fleeing before a madman. I waited for my destiny. Death by drive-in speaker.
Willard calmly got the baseball bat out of the truck and stepped smoothly over and swatted a home run with the guy’s head before he could reach me. The best part of me feared the fella was dead, the worst part of me hoped he was.
“Thanks, Willard,” I said. I could have been thanking him for a cigarette the way it came out.
“Hell,” he said. “I was going to do that anyway.”
The fight was still going on, though it was now moving in the other direction. There was a guy in the car that had gotten its windshield knocked out, and he was sitting there behind the windshield with glass in his hair and on his shoulders. He looked as if he’d tried to ram his head through a block of ice and made it. “Who’s gonna pay for all this?” he said. “That’s what I want to know.”
