those crosses with nails in our hands and feet and our bare asses hanging out before it chose to make an appearance.
But, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. The bonfire didn’t get built, and consequently, we didn’t get eaten.
The comet did what it had done before, only this time when it went away the blackness around the drive-in went with it and folks got in their cars and trucks and drove off.
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
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
