The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  The second fireman cocks a thumb back at a Mike just in time to see them break the “needle bones” in the deer’s legs to fold it up and slam the doors. Someone in the gathering crowd sees this and screams.

  “Bullshit,” says Jack. “They’re not even on duty. You heard them. They’re only here for the meat.”

  “Aren’t we all?” the Second Fireman says.

  He has a point.

  “No, you don’t get it,” Jack says. “The only reason those fuck-ups are even here is because they’re on a list to be called when there’s roadkill to clean up. Hell, they’ll probably mount the head. Hunters always pretend they eat antlers.” He points a finger at Rick. “Now, we’ve never mounted a head in our lives.”

  The second fireman isn’t interested. He’s been noticing this animosity between paramedics for a couple of years now, ever since hospitals made the mistake of outsourcing their ambulance services to private first responders. Now whoever got there first won the honor of billing the patient. It turned the whole thing into a race. Not that it wasn’t a race already. But now it was a game, too. And that was bad. Mother, Jugs & Speed was now a reality show. Firefighters were finding ambulances flipped like turtles everywhere these days, wannabe Ghostbusters running into walls when they took a corner too fast (and they always took the corners too fast in those boxes). Firemen rescuing EMS guys rescuing firemen getting shot at by gangs from fire escapes.

  Bad timing really, but just thinking about such things, at this moment, is the last straw for the second fireman on the scene, and suddenly he’s angry enough to punch a paramedic, any paramedic. At least in the stomach. He’s been wanting to do this for about a year. So he does.

  The fireman is short, so he hits Jack mostly in the belt. But the fireman is strong, so the punch is enough to knock the wind out of Jack and bounce him off the bumper of the wrecked car like ropes in a wrestling ring. Jack curls up in pain and doesn’t see Rick turning the second fireman around with a handful of shirt. But Jack hears the smack, and from his angle, he sees several people on the sidewalk recoil from something horrible.

  “Just stay the hell back,” the second fireman is saying from somewhere else when Jack stands back up. Jack looks around and finds the second fireman sitting ten feet away, holding his head in his hands like he’s trying to keep it on, cross-legged on the street like a preschooler on a carpet square.

  The first fireman on the scene stands with the buzz saw like he’s ready to use it on Rick. The boy inside the car is screaming.

  The dog is pawing at the windshield like he’s trying to bury it.

  “I won’t tell you again,” the First Fireman adds, less convincing than a guy with a saw should be.

  “Listen to the man, Jack,” Rick says, fist still white.

  “What’s happening?” Jack asks everybody, even more confused than before the punch. “Where’s the girl and the horse?”

  Rick stares at his partner like he’s never met him before.

  Ambulance. Minutes later. Jack and Rick are heading to the hospital and something is wrong with the siren again. It emits a strained, choked warble like a bird under a bicycle tire, and Rick is turning it off and on to try to fix it. But his actions only make the sound of the siren ever more distressing.

  “Just leave it!” Jack says from the back. The boy is on the gurney under him, calm from a vein full of pain medication. His arm is less like a scarf knotted around his neck now, more like a gutter a storm ripped off a house. “It’s better to just get used to it.”

  “How is he?” Rick asks.

  “Stable. Where do you think this kid was going in that car?” Jack leans down to the boy. “Where do you think you were going in that car?”

  “Dude. I’ve been doing some thinking…” Rick starts.

  “You couldn’t’ even see over the steering wheel, kid,” Jack goes on. “You’d have done better with that dog driving.”

  “…I don’t want to sound like one of those buddy cop movies but, I’ve been thinking about… requesting another partner.”

  “You know,” Jack says, still working on the boy, oblivious to what Rick said. “My girl and I hit a dog once...”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “We were on our way to see a concert at The Troubadour in Hollywood, late ‘70s so it was Elton John at his best and ugliest, right before his fake retirement,” Jack tells him. “But I’m lost as usual. We were driving in from fuck knows where. And my girl was unfolding a road map, and it was getting in my way when all the sudden BAM! a fucking dog goes legs up, over the hood and then SMACK! crazy dog face hits the windshield, then it’s high up in the air again and then THUD! dog body bounces off the trunk and hits the road. I slam on the brakes. My girl’s almost hysterical, so I tell her to relax, and I grab the map. I mess with this map more than I need to so that while I’m climbing out of the car it’ll block her view of the dog. Then I hand it back to her, hoping that she’ll try folding it up the right way and stall her a little more. And then I get out and run behind the car. And the dog is dead as dog shit, bent all wrong, head facing backwards. I look back and I can see her getting out of the car, and I start thinking fast. I think that our Elton John concert will be ruined if she sees this dog - I mean, this is back when the motherfucker was dressing like Donald Duck, right? - and I think she’s gonna feel responsible because of the map and everything, and we still got like three hours in the car before we even get there. So I kicked the dog under the car. Punted it like a football. She steps out of the car and onto the road, and I think fast and run over to the ditch and act like I’m watching the dog run away. I’m like, ‘Damn! Can’t believe that tough little bastard lived through it! Not even a limp!’ And she’s squinting out into the dark and actually believing me. Doesn’t even know that the dog is right under her feet, right under the car. Then she’s finally breathing normal, so I climb back in and start driving away, the whole time thinking, ‘If I pull this off, I swear I’ll tell her the truth some day,” and right about then is when the back tire bounced over the dog’s head.”

  Rick stares at him a moment, then switches the siren off and on again. The strangled sound gets worse. He punches the dashboard in frustration and leaves it screaming.

  “Then what?” he asks, impatient.

  “Huh?” Jack says, distant. “I don’t know. We didn’t last too long after I ran over that deer’s head. Maybe if I’d just run over it once. Not twice.”

  “Deer? I thought you said it was a dog.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “So you broke up because of the dog?”

  “No, I thought you asked me why I became a paramedic?”

  “Uh, nope. Never asked that question. Nobody asked you anything.”

  “Oh. Well, I wish that had been why we broke up. It would have been a better reason,” Jack says, crawling up to the front to play with the siren, too. “What the fuck is up with this thing, seriously…”

  The siren’s wail is louder now and impossibly even more annoying.

  “Sounds the same as it always did,” Jack shrugs.

  Jack climbs into the passenger’s seat and pulls down the sun visor. A piece of paper flutters into his lap. Scrawled on the scrap in childlike script is a bloody picture of a stick-figure baby crashing head-first through a windshield. Jack looks at Rick, suspicious. Rick frowns.

  “Think you’re funny, don’t you?” Jack says.

  “It used to be funny. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You should have told her about the dog,” Rick says instead of answering the question. “You should have shared that moment with her. The hell with the concert.”

  “I was gonna write a story about it, get it off my chest,” Jack says. “But it would be my first story ever, and she’d know something was up.

  Stevey called Larry’s cell before he even made it a mile down the road, chewing his ass out. He said he’d never work for him again. He said they
were trying to salvage the shoot without him, but Head Breakfast lost his erection staring at the tattoo on her back.

  “Your fault!” Stevey barked. “He’s thinking like you now!”

  Larry remembered one of those idiots getting a tattoo on his dick, worse than that fucking fly tattoo. The guy said he was trying to give life to that old joke, the way magic gave Geppetto the bouncing baby boy he always wanted. The dick tattoo would read, “Hey!” when flaccid, then “Hello Jamaica Is Ranked 98th out of 100 on the Global Competitiveness Index In Everything Except Penis Size So Please Sponsor A Child Today!” when erect. But all the tattoo needle managed to do was damage the deep tissue so that it never drained properly, giving him half a useless erection the rest of his life. Looked good naked but couldn’t do shit with it except tell stories. Larry also heard that story was bullshit, that it was just some S.T.D. gone bad that ravaged the thing.

  Larry stared at his big toe, now popping clear through the hole in his decomposing tennis shoes. The blood blister from when he’d dropped the camera months ago was halfway to the end of the nail now. He imagined that bloodstain almost imperceptivity stretching to move under the keratin, like someone slowly tilting the bubble in a level, or that steak on the counter in Poltergeist.

  Stevey went on to tell Larry that not even the little blue pills could bring H.B.’s cock back from the grave. He said they faked it as long as they could, and Larry imagined one of those horribly limp all-nighters he’d dealt with before, right up until they’d all given up and the man’s embarrassed teardrop splashed the L5-S1 rupture scar that marked her spine. It was a common injury in this business. At least workers’ comp covered it every third time.

  “Was he crying, Stevey?”

  “He was crying, Larry.” Pause. “There’s no crying in fuck films!”

  “There’s quite a bit, actually,” Larry corrected.

  “You had Head Breakfast crying,” Stevey calmly explained. “Joe in the hospital. We’re losing use of the house. And this is all your fault. I’m sorry, but you’re fuckin’ done, man. You’re taking a break. I’m calling Damon.”

  “Good luck with that.” Larry let the giant phone sag in his hand, uninterested. He could still hear the voice loud as ever.

  “You’re taking a break, Larry.”

  “What? Three-game suspension?” he laughed down at a receiver the size of a drive-in speaker.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I quit already. Ask Gold. If you can.”

  “You better get the fuck out of town, Larry.”

  The song “New Girl Now” came on the radio, and he turned it up as high as it could go to drown out Stevey, a distant car horn that sounded stuck, and birds that had no business screeching in the trees. They should be sleeping, flying south, engulfing their babies’ heads. Then the voices came through, right on cue, and he shook them off.

  “Why would I leave town?” Larry asked the phone in the seat next to him. “This is my town.” He figured they must have found the body in the pool by now. If not, soon, and it would tell them everything, narrate the whole story, all Sunset Boulevard ‘n’ shit.

  “Joe called the cops!” the speaker was shouting.

  “What?! Bullshit,” Larry coughed. “That numbnuts barely speaks English. He probably called a locksmith by mistake.”

  “You’re done!”

  “Hey, do you have a tattoo, Stevey? Where’s yours? Let me guess, ‘Mom.’”

  “Are you still going on about… I ain’t got one. You know this. My body is a temple. There’s something wrong with you, man…”

  “Right. What temple? Machu Picchu?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “’Cause, like, it’s old. And it’s all fucked up? Forget it. Goodbye.”

  Larry hit the button. Stevey tried calling back, but he let it squawk. Then somebody must have gone to see Gold, because everybody was suddenly trying to call him. His giant phone lit up like a Christmas tree at a drag strip as he drove on. He tapped his pocket that used to bulge with his engraved lighter, a birthday gift from Glen. Thought about the crime. Oops. He didn’t know how much evidence he’d left in that swimming pool, but it was probably just everything with his name on it. No big deal.

  But he didn’t care. He had a mission. He remembered a hole in a fence that he used to crawl through as a child. It would let him get closer to the voices than he’d ever been before. He knew the hole would still be there. He scratched his elbow hard.

  Holes everywhere.

  “Did you know that in England, in the back of an ambulance, the patient faces the other way?”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Downright obscene.”

  “It’s like a 69.”

  “Cut! Cut!”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t talk about a 69. It’s a sore spot.”

  “If it’s sore, you’re doing it wrong!”

  “Why’s it a sore spot, boss?”

  “Because of the difference between porn and real life, with regards to a 69, I mean.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that both ends aren’t working equally hard. The Ultimate Paradox of the 69 is that when one end works harder, the other end can’t help but be distracted. Unlike Shakespeare’s ‘beast with two backs,’ if the couple is doing it right, the two ends of this beast swing up and down as unevenly as the scales of justice.”

  “Hey, can someone adjust that radio dial? Tired of all the voices.”

  “What’s wrong with 69 again?”

  “Pick another number.”

  “How about 86.”

  “Perfect. And… action!”

  In the distance, Evil could see the glow in the trees, and he turned down the music on his handlebars to remember the night, back when he was still Billy, when he and Bully dumped her dead cat over the bridge, a cat she’d saved for years in a freezer for the perfect ceremony with the perfect boy. The freezer eventually needed defrosting, so Billy would have to do.

  They were in her car, and it was just starting to get dark. They heard a strange jingle advertising the drive-in that same night. Or at least they thought it was for the drive-in. Then they quickly realized it was dialogue from a movie. Two characters arguing about something they’d heard before. Always easily influenced, Evil started an argument with her, too, about which movie was better, The Thing or E.T., those famously vicious debut-weekend rivals. There were people who swore by E.T. and people who swore by The Thing. It was like that Elvis/Beatles thing. Or was it the Elvis/Jesus thing? All he knew was he fucking hated E.T.: The Extra Testicle and loved, loved, loved The Thing. She’d liked neither. He decided to give her more time on that one.

  When they got to the river, they popped her trunk. They pulled out her cat, a black baby bundle of garbage bag and duct tape, and they ran up to the bridge over Elbow Creek. They looked for the perfect place to drop poor little Wyatt Urp, finally stopping next to some elaborate graffiti monsters and the even more elaborate graffiti monsters that were devouring the first drawings. They decided this would be the best place to hide since it had obviously already worked as cover for at least two amateur artists.

  The water was flowing in the wrong direction, and they were disappointed because they had to dump the cat over the wrong side and run across traffic, as if they weren’t already looking suspicious enough, this teenage couple with their baby-sized bundle in the soggy paper bag. At first, they were going to fill a cat carrier with some stones and sink it. But she liked the little garbage-bag mummy she’d constructed. Honestly, she was hoping for traffic cameras or a suspicious motorist or two, actually praying to at least get questioned. Then maybe she’d stop feeling so bad about her cat.

  While they stood there, Bully tried to get Evil to imagine they were a little higher up, maybe on a real bridge, so the tiny black bundle could be a full-size person bobbing along. Bully assured Evil that her cat would take on water and sink any second now… any second now.
But he knew she was crossing her fingers that it would never go down.

  They both talked about what children might do if they found the bundle. And they held hands, actually held hands, and talked more than they ever had. A connection turned to excitement, then turned to disappointment and disgust. She let his hand drop like it was dead, too. All the emotions of a six-year relationship while they stood there, the same length of time Wyatt Urp was alive actually. Back in her car, they listened to the theme song by Isaac Hayes for old-time’s sake, as many times as they could stand it.

  It was the closest they’d ever been. The most vulnerable she’d ever seemed. She even let Evil hijack her ceremony with a memorial present that celebrated his dog. And that’s probably why she made her mistake, leaving the toddler-sized Shaft in Africa T-shirt on the cat for the police to find.

  But Evil saw she could cry, and his heart swelled in excitement in that moment. But what he didn’t realize was that it was Bully’s anger making her cry. Not sadness, an entirely different animal. And he didn’t know it, but this was also the day she realized she had the courage to betray him.

  They’d stood there holding hands and watching the tiny body go down the river, both of them realizing that they had the courage to perform if it had been a real crime, even dispose of something bigger than a cat. Sadly, she was thinking maybe a cop, but he was thinking maybe a dog, tops. Maybe a dog.

  A man, a woman, and her child, all walking too fast through a carnival. Jacki has that sweatshirt and black no-pants pants thing going on and is dragging Toni by the arm. She’s dressed just like her mom. Jacki’s boyfriend, Anthony, sweaty, red-faced and miserable, stomps along behind them both, a bundle of helium “Happy Birthday” balloons in his fist. Jacki didn’t believe it when her friends used to claim Anthony was exactly the kind of asshole who wanted a boy so bad he named his daughter after him instead. But after three years together, Jacki no longer argues the point.