The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  “They’re like flowers, you know.” Billy said to no one. “We don’t even notice them anymore unless we smell them.”

  “Smell what?”

  “Dead deer.”

  “Maybe. We notice the dogs though. A dead dog still horrifies people. Sort of like a toddler on the road. Well, not exactly like a toddler.”

  “Yeah, they’re worse,” Billy muttered, tipping his rear-view mirror. “What was on that ‘Luck Bomb’ anyway?” he asked.

  “Everything,” she laughed.

  “When do I get one?”

  She ignored the question.

  Billy said, “Hey, remember when you said our story needed one good cop to make the other one seem bad? To balance everything out? That’s what the dog is, I think!”

  She turned around to pet the grateful beast, who jumped up panting, slobber increasing exponentially with any eye contact. Billy almost shit himself in shock. He hadn’t realized it was out of the trunk. He had forgotten about it completely, as well as most of their plans. He adjusted the rear-view mirror again to hide from its eyes. Even though the dog’s “official” collar had also been removed (which included a fun, tiny approximation of a police badge), Billy still felt like there was an authority figure in the car.

  “So you’re done, or what?” he asked, eyes shifty. “That’s why you ditched me, right?

  “I never said that.”

  “I feel you’re not as excited about blowing off ol’ Bigcheat’s head anymore.”

  “Well, I feel you’re too excited.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because if a police officer’s head comes clean off and flies through the air, that’s a

  decisive win.”

  “For who?”

  “Humanity.”

  The dog whimpered.

  “You know why your dog is so stressed out?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the horn blasting on this car! I’ll bet you forgot about that, didn’t you?”

  “I think everybody did.”

  “Well, we’re shouting at the top of our lungs. Have been for days.”

  They frowned at each other.

  “Doesn’t seem like it, does it?”

  Then they both frowned, realizing that the horn had stopped again, and they had no idea when.

  “When did-”

  “Probably about the same time your nose started bleeding.”

  He took the bait and wiped at it with a shaking hand. Nothing. She laughed. He would later wrongly remember this as the beginning of the end. In her brain, she had filed away about five “beginnings of the end” by now.

  “This better be good.”

  “Turn here,” she said.

  “This better be good,” he repeated.

  “Turn here!”

  “I’m turning!”

  “You’re gonna lose Bigwheat.”

  Officer Dwight C. Bigbee’s roller pulled over into some stones, near a patch of trees at the edge of Pierce Park, and he stepped out. A large German Shepherd followed.

  “He’s already got another dog!” Billy almost yelled, and Bully shushed him.

  They drove past slow, craning their necks for a look. They saw a strange collar on the new dog, a thick cumbersome loop of plastic with a box near its throat. They didn’t realize what it was until, just as they roll by, the dog began to bark, then flinched and rubbed its snout in the stones as if a hornet stung it in the face. Then they saw the other squad cars and other officers leading German Shepherds from their back seats. Collars bulged on muscular necks, thick pink-and-purple buckles with something like disposable cameras bouncing under every slobbering chin.

  “What the hell was that?!” Bully wanted to know, climbing over her seat to get a better look. “What kind of cruel bullshit do they use on them these days?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hold up, is that what an electric fence collar looks like?”

  “No, no, that’s one of those citrus collars. Sound activated. Spray a little mist when the dog barks to discourage it, like negative reinforcement.”

  “I thought police dogs were supposed to bark,” she said. Then laughed, “So that’s why our boy smelled like rotten fruit the day he pulled us over.”

  “Ha. I don’t remember that,” he said, then suddenly concerned, “Won’t all those dogs smell the dog in our-”

  “Do they sell that shit in the stores?” Bully interrupted.

  “Why? Do you want one for your dogs? When’s your birthday?” Suddenly Billy was convinced she’d stolen her dogs, too. “Do you know what they call those kinds of collars in the pet stores? No joke.”

  “What?”

  “Neck Bombs.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “Yep. That’s the brand name.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “I wonder if that dog hates him,” Bully mused, watching the dog huffing its nose in the dust. “That dog must hate him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I read the other day that they were going to discontinue the K-9 program in Erie because the dogs were so poorly trained that they supposedly kept attacking the handlers. Maybe the citrus collars are the final solution.”

  “Crazy.”

  “I’ll bet he never even bothered to name it,” she hissed.

  “The police academy in this town is truly clown college, ain’t it?”

  “Those dogs hate them,” she decided as they parked around the bike trail and out of sight. They went tree to tree until they were close enough to hear the police radios crackling on their shoulders.

  “Why do people always brag about how they could kill someone with their bare hands? That’s just poor planning.”

  “Shhh!” It was Billy’s turn to shush her.

  Billy and Bully crunched through the woods, as close to the cops and the dogs as they dared. The dogs looked back occasionally, but Bigbee never did. This may have been one of Bully’s worst ideas yet, but it was relatively easy to stay out of sight and orbit the cloud of rotten oranges.

  “Can’t say I hate it,” Bully said, inhaling deep. “Smells like fruit. And dog.”

  “Do you think he knows we’re following him?” Billy whispered.

  “The dog sure does.”

  “I keep thinking it’s gonna bolt, but it never does.”

  “I know.”

  “Why are we doing this again?”

  “Because it’s fun.”

  Billy wasn’t so sure.

  “Imagine putting one of those collars around that asshole’s neck.”

  “I think we’ve got his collar covered, you know?”

  “I’ll bet it would stop him from barking,” she giggled.

  “You know what I like about dogs and cops?” he offered. “When they see a squirrel out your window and you put their nose up to the glass. It’s like putting a baby on a nipple.”

  They weren’t surprised by the sudden clearing near a sign that read: “Pierce Park Cemetery.”

  Recognizing this as the site of a renegade brushfire she had started a week earlier, Bully hauled Billy down, and they both quickly collapsed on all fours, heads low like felids. Excited, they pushed aside the ironweed, bloodshot eyes big as pizzas.

  It was a search party of about fifty officers and a dozen dogs, heads down, kicking leaves, upending deadfall. Every thirty feet or so, cops would pull out lighters, thumb them on, then stretch tiny flames high above their heads.

  “It’s a search party.”

  “It’s like the worst concert of all time,” Bully giggled.

  “They’re checking the wind,” Billy explained. “Isolating the fear scent. Which means I’m fucked.”

  “Get down.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the radio? They’re supposed to be looking for-”

  “Down!”

  “They’re looking for a dead body.”r />
  “It probably smells the same as your fear scent.”

  “Then I’m double fucked,” Billy sighed. “I heard that a dog’s senses are 10,000 stronger than ours. When you smell a pot of stew, they smell the ingredients.”

  “10,000 times, huh? That means that dog probably hates our boy 10,000 more than we do,” Bully muttered. Then, “Lay the fuck down, dummy!”

  She pulled him into the brushwood, and as he fell, he breathed in the sweet sweat on her scalp, tumbling, tumbling. She made a dirt angel after they rolled, not feeling the ant bites. Only once they popped up to watch an officer yawn, passing a silent scream down the line like a lazy baton between losing teammates. Occasionally, Billy would lean over to smack an ant on her thigh to steal a kiss. They laid there holding hands on an anthill for a half hour, listening to the search party’s conspiracy theories and the hiss of the wheat. Billy stole all the kisses he could, waiting patiently for their bodies to be discovered. He had his story ready. Just a couple kids messing around in the woods. Must have fallen asleep, Sheriff…

  Voices got close, closer, then faded completely. They stood up to see submissive tails curling into J’s in the distance and sun-burned necks scratched in frustration. The search party had missed them completely.

  “Unbelievable. What does that tell you?”

  “That this field might have a marching band in it and they’d never know it.”

  “Maybe those fruit bombs are screwing up their noses.”

  A big dog whimpered, and the biggest cop leaned down to tap its collar. The man’s sleeve slid up to reveal a tattoo in Blackletter script across a bulging forearm reading:

  “Some Are Born Brothers...”

  “Sexist,” she scoffed. “Not born sisters? You sure that isn’t an electric fence?”

  “Invisible fence. No way. Those have prongs that hit you in the two big neck veins.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Me and my buddy tried one on at a party.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Well, after getting zapped just once, I really didn’t want to leave the party.”

  “Figures,” she said, then mumbled in disgust, “Wonder what his other arm says.”

  Billy saw he was losing her again. This was where his worst ideas always came from.

  “Follow me.”

  Billy ran at a crouch, with Bully following. And when they were between two officers, they stood up tall. Downwind, with hundreds of twigs popping under boots, no one noticed at first. Without looking up, the men let them join their ranks, taking their hands like they were saying Grace.

  “I knew I wore this Steelers jersey for a reason,” Bully whispered. Billy looked around and saw that everyone, even the few civilians, were indeed in kind of uniform, if not a badge then a sports logo on their chests.

  “What’s the name of the missing girl?” someone asked.

  “I hope it’s ‘Amber!’” someone else laughed.

  “That’s not funny. Her name was Amber,” someone else said, somber tone indicating she may have just been found.

  They made it ten more steps before Billy glanced over to see that big cop’s glare locked and loaded. The big dog’s, too. Both were moving towards him, jaws working. Then all the dogs were barking, collars popping steam like manhole covers. They ran.

  Billy lost his grip with Bully. There was some excitement in a denser patch of woods, and anyone not running for them was running to see what it was. Except the dogs.

  The dogs bridged the distance in a less than a minute. A minute after that, they were passing Billy completely. They targeted Bully instead, which made sense, it being her crime scene and all. As he weaved through the tombstones, he caught flashes of famous names marking the graves of regular people. “Hitchcock,” “Stark,” “Lynch”…

  Then the real one surprised him, and he almost clipped his knee.

  “James B. Dean, 1931-1955.”

  He ran hard. Teasles peppered Billy’s torso like bullets, goosegrass burrs filling up the exposed rings of his socks to weigh him down even more.

  He couldn’t keep up. She was always faster than he was. They were all faster than he was.

  Billy slowed in disbelief at what he saw next. At first, dogs were snapping, ready to bring her down like a gazelle, then they were calm, running alongside her instead.

  Then they were gone.

  Billy looked down to see a collar at his feet, watching it spit citrus venom with the cadence of his coughs, when a voice bellowed behind him, and adrenaline fueled his legs with one final burst of speed. She was wrong. At least one dog had a name. The new dog.

  “Fat Elvis! Meat!”

  The last dog was on him, eerily silent, afraid to bark. Fat Elvis bore down on him like traffic, forcing Billy to turn and face the music.

  Billy knew from the movies you were supposed to offer your forearm. But he figured stuntmen did this because they wore a padded cuff. So Billy went for an eye. He got a thumb in before someone stood him up off his feet.

  It turned out cops offered their forearms, too, and a big one bloodied his nose to find his throat with brutal efficiency.

  Billy recognized the VNR, or vascular neck restraint, from the newspapers. Sometimes fatal, it squeezed off carotid arteries and jugular veins as easily as garden hoses under a tire. Billy couldn’t see the man behind him, but he could read his other arm:

  “…But All Others Must Earn It.”

  He didn’t have the wind to scoff. The last thing he saw were Bully’s tiny fingers smoothing down electric fur as she ran, reaching into hackles to unbuckle and release those hissing snakes along the road.

  The veins powering the tattoo swelled with effort just as Billy understood why chokeholds were usually fatal. You died because you really wanted to run.

  You died because restraint without knowing who held you made your heart detonate like a rotten orange against a garbage can.

  IV.

  Shirts Vs. Skins – Unstoppable Revenge Machine – Billy Celebrates Veteran’s Day in Jail – Leaving a Baby Luck Bomb on the Rocks (or Easter Egg Island) – Sucker! – Important Shit Revealed – Bad Hand Acting – Man Bites Shark – Larry Gets Confused about Octopus Ink

  “And now I’m ready to feel your hand, and lose my heart on the burning sands”

  -The Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog”

  …tap, tap, tap… tap, tap, tap.

  “You feel that? You feel that?”

  Larry felt it all right.

  Then, even more inexplicably than usual, Joe Fuck asked the girl under him, in his broken English, “Are you coming? You coming again are you? Are you coming again already?”

  Then the smack.

  “Choke yourself,” he whispered. And she did. They always did.

  “Choke marks are the new hickeys!” one of the girls said back when they were filming The Meaty Urologist: The Last Word on Global Warming. Then she added, “Purple is the new black.”

  Smack.

  Smack.

  “Cut!” Larry shouted. “Listen, I think we should-”

  “Quit calling me that!” Suzie yelled, still drooling.

  “No! Keep filming!” Stevey screamed from behind them. “Larry, get your head in the game. Look at the sky. We’re at sudden death here. Damon wants this in the can.”

  In the ‘can?’ Always too many jokes. Larry sighed and laughed at the same time. And two sports metaphors at once?

  Stevey loved his sports talk. Neither of those motherfuckers, him or Damon, ever played a sport in their lives. Unless maybe it was in a pool. But Larry had found himself in a tournament bracket with Stevey every year. See, even though Larry blamed the director’s beard he first grew as a tribute to Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorcese, and Coppola, and maybe Brian De Palma (“Thought I was gonna say George Lucas, didn’t you?” he told the grip with the “I’d rather kiss a Wiccan” T-shirt the last time he ran through that list of idols), Stevey always mistook it for a playoff beard instead. So he signed
him up. Larry did win the tournament one year, when some kid lost his temper and flipped out, getting a technical and landing himself on the bench for three games during the Final Four. But all his life, Larry could never watch an entire basketball game.

  Too many stupid tattoos in a basketball game. Too many dinosaurs doing reverse slam dunks and burning basketballs speckling their shoulders like a disease. Although filmmaking had taught him that tattoos looked a little better on black men, maybe, less like someone with Magic Markers caught them passed out at a party, and more like the noble shading around the arms and shoulders you’d get from working hard under a car all day. Sort of what they were doing on the court, actually. Nah…

  Not like a disease. It is a disease. Fuckin’ idiots, the lot of them.

  But his idiots kept fuckin’. No matter what. It’s what they did best. And it was what Joe Fuck did the worst. People were saying he was getting violent and trying too hard these days because of some new guy in the business, Boris something. No, it was “Aura Boris,” not to be confused with Aura Borealis, the porn star with the glow-in-the-dark condoms, an idea he’d stolen from John Ritter’s Skin Deep. No, Boris was named after “ouroboros,” the snake eating its tail, a very popular porn tattoo for obvious reasons.

  And guess what his talent was.

  Larry worked through it all best he could, getting all the reaction shots, remembering that Clint Eastwood movie about the book about the movie The African Queen, where Clint played John Wilson playing John Huston, explaining to anyone who would listen that Hollywood was simply a factory town, just like Detroit. So, so true. The intersection of North Hollywood Boulevard Road and South Florida Street was, too, which was where Larry was shooting today.

  Not as diseased as Detroit though. Larry remembered when that one asshole showed up talking about his Hepatitis C (and this was his actual asshole he was talking about), and there was a flurry of condoms at the shoots for about a month. Until the men started losing them in the women. This actually got to be a point of pride with the females, touting elasticity, muscle control and what not. Who could pull off the most rubbers by Friday. Larry thought it was a dubious honor really, but Suzie bragged for weeks how one time her partner started his scene bareback, but by the end he was standing there balls deep in a shriveled Trojan, dangling like the last scarf from a magician’s hat.