stuff was on the TV set.
Grace moved ahead of us, and came out at the front of the crowd and looked up at Popalong.
I saw that Sue Ellen (it had to be her) was dead. Had been for a while. Her face and hands were the color of pee-stained sheets. Her knucklebones punched out of her papery flesh like volcanic eruptions. Her eyes were holes filled with popcorn. One kernel dangled from her left socket like a booger in a nostril.
A tremor went up Grace’s back. She yelled at Popalong, “Remember me?”
“It’s like a movie,” Popalong said. “You coming into my lair.”
There was a surge of wind and a mass of paper and popcorn and soft drink slush blew through the drive-in and passed on.
When the wind was gone and the paper had quit rustling, Grace said, “You and this place look all worn out. Your church is light in the pews. I think you’re nothing more than a walking TV set with a line of shit.”
“It’s good of you to come,” Popalong said. “Of course, you know what comes next.”
The two toughs got up and turned toward Grace. They didn’t look as weak as the others. Better diet. More human flesh maybe.
“Good to see you boys.” Grace said. “I think about you lots.”
The one on Grace’s left got to her first. He had a piece of glass wedged into a short stick and he tried to stab her in the stomach.
Before we could make any kind of move to help her, Grace sidestepped the glass, slapped the thug’s hand down and kicked him between the eyes so hard his head went back more than his neck allowed. He folded up like an accordion at her feet.
The other tough bolted.
He was a good runner. We didn’t chase him. He headed for the exit. He wouldn’t last long out there. Not at night, not with the film crawling.
Popalong’s followers seemed uncertain. This was the sort of thing they saw a lot of, but in this case it was short and sweet and not nearly melodramatic enough. They shuffled their feet. Maybe they wanted to see it on film.
If any of them had it in their heads to go for Grace, it was an idea that went away when she turned and glared at them.
Popalong’s followers were now no more than a pack of pregnant women and skinny men, their brains no better than straw. They might as well have been the dummies that the sky kept raining.
We pushed to the front. I looked up at Popalong. A Western was playing on his face. Just as a Hollywood Indian took a bullet and fell off his horse, Popalong made the tube go black. “You’re just a television set,” I said. “We can turn you off anytime we want.”
Grace grabbed at one of the dummies and pulled at it. It came loose of the antenna that held it. She grabbed the antenna and pulled it out of the asphalt and stepped up on the base of the television throne and poked at Popalong with it.
“Come down so I can change your channels,” she said. “Come down so I won’t have to bring you down. I want to see you come down, King Popalong. Come on down where you belong.”
“Stop it,” Popalong said. “You fools are ruining things. I’ve got anything you want to see. There’s not a show so exotic that I don’t have it. Anything happens to me and you’ll be back in darkness. You’ll have to talk to entertain yourselves.”
Grace poked him again. He stood up. She poked his knee and his knee buckled and he went down and tried to get up again, but the knee twisted under him and he came tumbling down the sets. As he went, he grabbed out and got hold of Sue Ellen’s hand. She came off her throne and tumbled after him.
Popalong hit with a crunch and a smash of glass. Sue Ellen lay on top of him.
Popalong tried to get his hands underneath him. Steve went over and straddled him and pulled Sue Ellen off, then took the guns out of Popalong’s holster and stepped back.
Popalong folded his knees under him and lifted his body upright. A chunk of glass fell out of his face. There was a gap dead center of the set and dozens of hairline fractures went out from it. The entire thing pulsed like an asshole straining to shit. Something sparked in the ruined depths, and the sparks jumped about like little red rats trying to abandon ship.
He tried to get up again, but his legs weren’t having it. A rope of smoke twisted out of the hole in his face and rose up. The rabbit ears under his hat pushed it back and felt the air, as if searching for signals. But nothing was on that face but wreckage.
The rabbit ears went away and the hat fell back into place.
“It’s all over now,” Grace said, and started forward.
I grabbed her elbow. “That’s enough.”
“Not hardly,” she said.
“Don’t be his high priestess,” I said. “You’re giving him a TV or movie ending. Kind where the wronged person deals out revenge on the bad guy. He’s too messed up to be a bad guy. He’s pathetic. He’s out of it, through. Don’t martyr him for yourself and these people. It won’t do a thing for Timothy or Sue Ellen.”
“It’s not like he’s got anything left to hurt anyone with,” Bob said.
“Guess you got two cents to put in on this, Steve,” Grace said.
“It was me, I’d take him out. Hell, I’ll shoot him for you if you like. It won’t bother me none. But this is your show. You name the channel.”
Grace looked at Popalong’s ruptured face, at the scrawny body that held up the massive head, the black cowboy suit that hung off of him like a kid wearing daddy’s clothes.
She went over and picked up Sue Ellen and walked away. Popcorn dribbled out of Sue Ellen’s eye sockets, sprinkled the ground like snow.
Steve sighed. “This is kind of disappointing. Kind of like a cowboy movie without a final showdown, ain’t it?”
“It’s exactly like that,” I said.
DISSOLVE TO:
EPILOGUE
We used some of the drier pieces of cardboard and paper we could find and built a mound and put Sue Ellen on it and covered her with some more pieces. Then Steve lit it with a match he’d found in one of the derelict cars, and after a while, most of Sue Ellen was cremated. What was left over we scooped up in Coke cups and took it off in the woods and tossed it around.
Popalong’s dead bodyguard was hauled off during all the commotion by one of the drive-in people, and I guess he got eaten.
Next morning, we went to look for Crier’s body. It was gone. Something had dug him out. Whatever it was got his dick too.
As for Popalong, in time he crawled back up that stack of TVs and found his place on the throne. He sat there with his tongue of blue and red wires hanging out and the inside of his face popping sparks and fizzling from time to time. But finally that quit.
He grew thin inside that cowboy suit, and when the flesh went away, there were no bones in him, just cable wire and rods of antenna held together with tightly wrapped film.
Steve brought his car into the drive-in, and he and Grace took up together and went to living out of it. I tell you, I never expected that to happen. Maybe all those bangs Grace got on the head had clouded her sense of judgment.
Bob and I built our place out of TV sets. Walls and ceiling. We used antenna pieces and part of an old car to make it work. In the mornings we wake up and watch Grace come out of the Plymouth and do her martial arts exercises. In the nude.
The bending over stuff is dynamite.
