“Mine too,” I said.
Bob took out his pocket watch. “This one’s dead too. First time ever.”
“Bet they’re all dead,” Willard said. It was the first time he had said a word in some time. He had just been sitting, watching the movies, eating popcorn. “Time is an outside connection too.”
“You getting at something, Willard?” I asked.
“Not really. I don’t know any better what’s going on than anyone else. But this all has a kind of artificial feel to it… like, hell, I don’t know-”
“A B science-fiction movie,” Randy said.
“Yeah,” Willard said. “I guess so.”
“Personally,” Bob said, “I think the lady in the blanket and bunnies was right. It’s the ghost of Elvis.”
“I just hope the damn bulbs and such in the projectors don’t burn out,” Willard said. “Or in the Orbit sign. They do, and it’s going to be some kind of dark in here.”
Willard got out his cigarettes, passed them around. We all took one, just as if we smoked, and Willard put his lighter to them, and we leaned against the truck and puffed them until we coughed.
“That poor cowboy,” Randy said. “It melted him like salt melts a slug. Looked like cheap special effects. Like in that movie The Hydrogen Man, or maybe The Blob.”
“And that fat family and their car,” Bob said. “Rendered right down, I figure.”
So we smoked our cigarettes and the movies rolled on.
7
After a time, I gave it up and crawled in the back of the truck, found one of the bedrolls we kept back there for camping trips, got in it and fell asleep. Kind of sleep you get from depression and absolute exhaustion.
I dreamed about what Randy had said, about this being like a B science-fiction movie, and the dream was very real. It was like I was tapped into some truth somewhere. There was this B-string god and he was making a movie. He didn’t have the power to make the Big Movie, so he just borrowed some people (us) and a setting (the drive-in) and made do with that. Real shoestring stuff. There was a bunch of other creatures with him, maybe they were gods too-hell, maybe none of them were gods-and they were like technicians and the like. They were real ugly hombres. They were speaking in a language I had never heard before, but I could understand it. The main ugly was telling them that it all had to be under budget. If it wasn’t, it was all over. He wanted them to do it cheap but be proud. Mostly, he wanted it quick. The technicians were very much in agreement. In fact, they seemed agreeable to most anything the main critter wanted.
It all seemed very real.
Then it was like someone was calling me, my dad yelling at me to come eat breakfast, but the voice didn’t sound quite right. It sounded far away, filtered. And when I woke up and ran my hand through my hair I was in the bedroll in the camper, and the voice was coming from the outside, and it was Bob’s.
I got out of the bedroll and came out of the back of the camper, still groggy.
“I was about to come in there and drag your ass out,” Bob said. “Breakfast, such as it is, is being served.”
I sat on the tailgate of the truck and looked at a line forming at the concession. People were talking in a friendly, if not happy, way, but you could feel the tension in the air, like some sort of invisible mesh. Seeing all those folks, thinking about what the line must be like over at Lot B, I realized that big as the Orbit was, it wasn’t that large, and there were a lot of hungry people here, and when it came to living here awhile, it could get pretty crowded. And fast.
But at this point, things were still not bad. This was the time between hot dogs and horrors. When people were still trying to pull together, stiff upper lip, like all those old science-fiction movies where an alien menace makes them cooperate to thwart it, and in the end Earth overcomes and learns to live as one, and Moscow opens some McDonald’s and Disneyland puts in a branch over there.
We got in a breakfast line and went through. There were three people operating the concession stand, plus the manager. I noticed the girl giving out the candy right off, and in time I would come to think of her as the Candy Girl. She was blonde and very pretty. She had cheekbones so sharp you could have picked your teeth with them. It looked fine on her. If she hadn’t been so short she would have looked like a model instead of a doll.
“There’s plenty of food here,” the manager said loudly, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. “Everything’s going to be all right. It might take a little time, but it’ll all work out in the wash…”
I felt sorry for the manager. He was really trying. But Bob didn’t give a damn.
“National Guard show up yet?” Bob asked.
The manager gritted his teeth. “Not yet.”
I got my hot dog, drink and candy, and up close the Candy Girl was no disappointment. The dark brown uniform dress she wore set her skin and hair off nicely. She had dark brown eyes, pale, clear skin. Her legs looked nice. I wouldn’t have minded being strangled between them. She was as delicious as the sweets she was passing out.
I said hi to her and she gave me a quizzical look and said it back.
So our ritual started. We would eat our meals, go back and watch the movies, visit with folks who came by and wanted to talk, mostly speculating on what was happening. Nobody had an idea any better than Willard’s and Randy’s about it all being a B movie, and nothing as loony as Elvis Presley’s ghost, which made all the other ideas a little less loony in comparison.
One guy from Lot B came by regularly. He was tall and lean and probably thirty. He carried all the information from one lot to the other, sort of a town crier. Because of that, we got so we simply called him Crier, and he liked it and adopted the name.
“I used to drive a beer truck for Budweiser,” Crier said. “Only Friday, whenever the hell that was, I got in the samples, if you know what I mean, and turned me a corner a little quick and I didn’t have the door closed tight, and I slung Bud all over the highway. Bunch of cars behind me had blowouts on the glass, and some other folks grabbed up the crates that weren’t broken before I could get the truck braked and run the hell off with them. Budweiser frowned on this and canned me. I got good and drunk and come to the drive-in. I wish now I’d stayed home and watched the Friday-night movie on television. It looked like it was gonna be a good one. One of them Godzilla-versus-another-guy-in-a-monster-suit movies. Before my wife left me for a Miller Lite driver, me and her and our dog Boscoe, he’s dead now on account of I backed the beer truck over him, used to sit up on the couch and watch them Jap movies every chance we got. There ain’t a comedy good as a Jap monster movie.”
“How are things all about?” Willard asked.
“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.