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, went 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!”
