“That’s funny, Bob.”
“Okay, I’m doing fine. She was just some ole gal. You worry about other people too much. Me included.”
“Yeah, I’m a regular bleeding heart.”
“Well, you are… but, yeah, I’m okay. I’m going to miss her some.”
“There’s nothing to miss, Bob.”
“I don’t know. Them tits were sure nice and warm.”
Randy was leaning on the truck when we came out.
“I was about to organize a search party,” he said.
“Well,” Bob said, “we got to talking, you know, and damn if we don’t have all kinds of things in common.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You just wouldn’t believe.”
Randy rolled his eyes. “How about we get in the truck?”
We drove over to Larry’s Garage, got there fifteen minutes early, but Willard was out front, smoking a cigarette, the damn thing hanging off his lip like a leech. His long hair was clean and combed back and he wore a black T-shirt with a cigarette pack stuck under one short sleeve. He had a faded blue-jean jacket tossed over one shoulder. He looked like he was waiting for someone to come along so he could mug them.
He strolled over to the truck. “Ready?”
“We’re always ready,” Bob said.
“You look ready,” Willard said. “What happened to your eye?”
“A truck named Wendle Benbaker.”
“Get in,” I said, “and he’ll tell you how he ruined Wendle’s pants, and how to hide from him under a muffler.”
Randy got out of the truck and made Willard take his place at shotgun. He went around to ride in the back, carrying a Fangoria with him to read.
“He’s a nice little guy,” Willard said when he was seated, his arm hanging out the window.
“That’s the truth,” Bob said, cranked the truck and drove on out of town. As we went, I took the whole place in, noticed for the first time some houses and stores I had looked at before, but hadn’t really seen. We drove down the main drag, past the university that I planned to attend, past the big pines that were slowly being thinned by idiots with no concept of city planning but a firm grasp on the concept of greed; drove past the stinking chicken plant and the plywood plant and the aluminum-chair factory, which Willard saluted with an upward push of his middle finger; drove on out of there with me photographing it all in my mind, perhaps sensing somehow it was for the last time.
5
It didn’t seem like a night for horrors. Least not the real kind.
It was cool and pleasant. We got there a little later than usual due to some bad traffic. Quite a line had formed. You could see the Orbit’s Saturn symbol spinning blue and silver against the night.
“I’ll be damned,” Willard said.
“We’ll all be if we don’t change our ways,” Bob said.
“Wait until you see the inside,” I said.
We moved up in line, finally drove by the outdoor marquee. It listed I Dismember Mama, The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Toolbox Murders and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Inside, the big party had already started. There were lawn chairs planted in the backs of pickups, and folks planted in the chairs. There were people on the hoods and tops of their cars. Punkers. Aging hippies. Conservative types. Fraternity and sorority kids. Families. Cowboys and cowgirls with beer cans growing out of their fists. Barbecue grills sputtered away, lifting sweet smoke into the fine Texas sky. Tape decks whined in conflict of one another. A few lovers on blankets were so hot at it, Willard suggested that they should charge admission. Cars rocked in spastic rhythm to the sexual gyrations of unbridled youth. Someone somewhere called someone a sonofabitch. Other people yelled things we couldn’t understand. Bikini-clad women walked by. People in monster suits walked by. Sometimes young men in monster suits chased the bikini-clad women by. Dogs, let out of their owners’ cars to do their business, pissed on tires or left deposits of another nature in the vicinity.
And, most important, of course, there was the screen.
One of six, it stood stark-white against a jet-black sky, a six-story portal into another dimension.
We tried to get as close as we could, but most of the front rows were taken. We ended up in the middle of a rear row.
We got the lawn chairs out, the goodies. Bob and I went to the concession stand and bought some bloody corn for all of us, and by the time we got back with it, the sleaze classic I Dismember Mama had started.
We rolled through that one, drinking, eating, laughing, shouting at the gory spots, and finally The Toolbox Murders came on, and it was halfway through that one that it happened.
I don’t remember any great change in the atmosphere, anything like that. Everything was normal-for the Orbit. Sights, sounds and smells as they ought to be. The bloody corn was gone, so were several Cokes, and Bob and Willard had made good work of the beers. We were about a third of the way through a bag of chocolate cookies. Cameron Mitchell had just opened his ominous box of tools to take out an industrial nailer, as he had designs to use the wicked instrument on a young lady he’d been spying on in the shower, and we were ready, hoping as much for blatant nudity as celluloid gore, when
– there was light.
It was a light so bright and crimson, the images on the screen paled, then faded.
We looked up.
The source of the light was a monstrous red comet, or meteor, hurtling directly toward us. The night sky and stars around it were consumed by its light, and the thing filled our vision. The rays from the object felt soft and liquid, like being bathed in warm milk and honey.
Collision with the drive-in seemed imminent. My life didn’t pass before my eyes, but I thought suddenly of things I hadn’t done, thought of Mom and Dad, then, abruptly, the comet smiled.
Split down the middle to show us a mouthful of jagged saw-blade teeth. Instead of going out of life with a bang, it appeared we were going out with a crunch.
The mouth opened wider, and I was turning my head away from the inevitable, thinking in a fleeting second that I would be swallowed by it, like Pinocchio by the whale, when
– it whipped up and away, dragging its fiery tail behind it, leaving us awash in flickering red sparks and an even more intense feeling of being engulfed in warm liquid.
When the red pupil paint peeled away from my eyes and I could see again, the sky had gone from blood red to pink, and now that was slowly fading. The comet was racing faster and faster, ever upward, seemingly dragging the moon and stars after it, like glitter swirling down a sewerish drain. Finally the comet was nothing more than a hot-pink pinprick surrounded by black turbulence that sparked with blue twists of lightning; then the dark sky went still, the lightning died out, and the comet was memory.
At first, it looked as if nothing had changed, except for a loss of the moon and the stars. But the exterior of the drive-in was different. Beyond that seven-foot, moon-shimmering tin fence that surrounded it was… nothing. Well, to be more exact, blackness. Complete blackness, the ultimate fudge pudding. A moment before the tops of the houses, trees and buildings had been visible beyond the drive-in, but now they were not. There was not even a dot of light.
The only illumination came from the drive-in itself: from open car doors, the concession-stand lights, the red neon tubes that said ENTRANCE (from our angle) and EXIT, the projector beams, and, most brilliantly, the marquee and the tall Orbit symbol, the last two sources being oddly located on a spur of concrete jutting into the blackness like a pier over night ocean. I found myself drawn to that great symbol, its blue and white lights alternating like overhead fan slats across the concession, making the Halloweenish decorations against the window glass seem oddly alive and far too appropriate.
Then I glanced at the screen. The Toolbox Murders was visible again, but there was no fun in it. It seemed horribly silly and out of place, like someone dancing at a funeral.