The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  He scratched at his elbow, pushing aside dead skin, purple fluids, and fading scars of his teenage dog bite to reveal more of the spider web underneath. And the spider in the center. A classic and popular piece of body art, those elbow spider webs, especially for ex-cons. Larry rolled down his window, feeling his muscle strain with the effort, and he pitied the new generation of kids with power windows who wouldn’t gain the strength that years of this motion could give you. A little exercise was better than nothing with the scrawny kids these days.

  He leaned his head and arm into the night air, feeling the strips of skin peel from his elbow like bacon, debuting the glistening, red-marbled meat beneath. Looking up, he saw what he thought was a layer of fog, then realized it was actually a thick haze of insects, swarming easily above every car on the highway, adapted to no longer fear windshields at all.

  Halfway to his destination, he got a flat. And when he checked the tire, he found the tip of a broken bone. He realized that everything was changing, coming up with defense mechanisms. You could run over any creature you wanted, just like you used to do, but now a busted bone or stinger might take your car with it. He drove on the rim anyway, leaving a trail of sparks likely visible from space.

  He blew threw a dozen red lights, but stopped at one intersection when he heard the echo of music. It was the kid on the dirt bike. The kid he’d accidently covered with mouthwash on Pennsylvania Avenue. He recognized the tiny, winking battery light coming from the radio strapped to his handlebars. They both turned off their electronic voices and stared at each other for the duration of the red light, the green light, the yellow light… then another red again. Larry gunned it before it could change again, and the dirt bike turned to follow him and the blazing fishtail of fireworks coming from his rim until they came to the edge of some woods and the curve of the monstrous crop circle that marked the borders of the drive-in.

  There was a line of cars filing in past the ticket taker, more machine voices rumbling towards those movies than either of them had ever seen. Then Larry’s rim got stuck in the mud and started to spin, and the kid on the dirt bike passed him up to join the line of vehicles. Larry eventually slunk out of his driver’s seat to walk around the gate and study the old lifeguard booth where the teenagers were making up prices depending on your face. Larry knew there would be a hole in the fence. In the back. There was a hole in every fence. And he knew this hole would be the exact shape of his new body. His younger body. The body that had been waiting underneath.

  Once through the hole, Larry stood in awe of the spectacle. He’d seen deserted drive-ins on occasion, and he pitied anyone too young to know that deep shudder of excitement that came with such a vision. But the only thing more haunting than a deserted drive-in was one that was not.

  “Yeah, just a bunch of cars watching a fucking movie,” he laughed sarcastically, not sounding crazy at all. “No big thing.”

  VI.

  Assholes and Elbows – Big Cop Small Cop Good Cop All Cops – The True Origins of the Make-A-Wish Foundation – Seeing “Die” Dog Revealed – Three Blind Mice Arrive at the Eleventh Hour (or A Cop Unsnaps His Gun for the First Time in His Life) – Green Monkey Blues – Larry Asks Just One Question – If a Tree Falls in the Forest, Find Out Who Was Last to See It Alive – Fuck Turtles, Trophies Are for Rabbits – The Bastard Sons of Plagiarists and Their Lonesome Balloon Animals – Heartbleeps

  “I went to the movies, and I saw a dog 30 feet high

  And this dog was made entirely out of light”

  -Laurie Anderson “Walk the Dog”

  When Larry came to the clearing, he had to blink to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. There were no speaker stands, no umbilicals connecting the vehicles, no speakers leaning on windows like the roller-skating waitress just dropped off a burger, fries and Cherry Coke. Everyone was locked inside their cars, sealed up, windows tight. They looked unnatural. More like a gathering of machines and less like rows of human beings.

  He looked up to the screen and saw a giant husband and his pregnant wife beaming over their new crib. He thought he might scream if he saw the baby at that moment.

  Larry knew this drive-in well. They used to have two around town. There was The Butch Cassidy Drive-In, closer to the city and much more popular, until it got hit by a tornado (“Why don’t tornadoes ever go through cities?” his wife wondered about a week before the storm. “You never see anything on the news where a tornado is zigzagging around some skyscrapers!”). So with Butch Cassidy reduced to rubble, only The Sundance Kid remained. It was tucked away in the ‘burbs, next to a baseball diamond, and when he was younger, Larry and his friends used to lay out a blanket on the top of the concrete bunker where the projector was buried and watch all the movies for free, barely catching a bit of dialogue here and there from the loudest speakers, but not caring if they couldn’t follow the story.

  But everyone called the Sundance Kid “The Spotlight Kid” these days. First it was just a mistake on the flyers, but Larry thought Damon did that on purpose. He was the one who pushed all those insane Captain Beefheart albums on him back when Larry first got hired, Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid being Damon’s favorites. Damon told him it was rumored Vliet had retired nearby on Everglades Street to be a painter. There were regular sightings in the area, both on the ground and in the sky actually. Damon once claimed he enrolled in flight school with him and about 15 Saudi Arabian teenagers. Damon bought one of his self-portraits for six-hundred grand. He also swore the name “Beefheart” was based on a nickname. Vliet’s uncle had given a fistful of wrinkly balls and cock when he terrified his nephews. Then someone changed the story to claim it meant having “a beef in your heart against the world.” Larry liked the sound of the second story better, but he never forgot the first.

  “And if you’re talking about a drive-in, a ‘spotlight’ makes a hell of a lot more sense than a ‘sundance,’” Damon told him. “Hell, the sun is Kryptonite to a drive-in…”

  That shit again? Kryptonite was everywhere these days, Larry thought. Like these green-eyed monsters…

  He’d always hated the theaters’ namesakes anyway, considering that particular movie the flashpoint of all the smug, self-satisfied Hollywood westerns to follow, the cult of personality intruding onto the screen, famous people playing dress-up instead of making you believe they were doing shit for real. Fiction shouldn’t be a vacation. Fuck those rich fucks.

  Larry followed the beam of the drive-in projector to the stone bomb shelter that housed the important equipment. He decided this would be his target. Under one arm, he carried his movie like a metal pizza, loving the weight of all his hard work. If Larry was going to be reduced to a career as a lowly projectionist, he figured he might as well take Damon’s demotion tonight. And if they were switching to adult movies at this drive-in, he knew that the end was nigh. No drive-in stuck around long after it started showing porn, even if the movies were as good as his.

  He looked back at the screen over his shoulder, squinting through the movie. It was an old one screen, the last of the concrete slabs they were replacing everywhere with thin steel ribs and siding, like the flimsy walls of an above-ground pool. No, this one was solid. Thick and white, eroded smooth around the corners, sort of like a piece of monstrous, crumbling Wonder Bread. Larry thought it looked vulnerable but beautiful. Dying but glorious, with the deathbed glow of a loved one.

  He decided to go straight for the bunker, and jogged straight through the playground under the screen, happily swinging his 15-inch projector reel under his arm as if he worked there. He doubted anyone would try to stop him. Security was always lax at these artifacts. You were still expected to smuggle people in your trunk, like it was good sport, and no one was ever in the booth at the end of the movie to even notice that the heads in every back seat had suddenly multiplied on the way out.

  But this would all change once they started showing X-rated films. Security would tighten up.

  Larry w
alked up to the first car he could find with wires hanging out of its window.

  Finally, a speaker, he thought, looking forward to holding the box to his head and hearing the voices more clearly, maybe even the ocean. But the shadow hanging out of the window wasn’t a speaker. It was an elbow trailing tattered shreds of a flannel shirt sleeve, with a spider web on it, of course. He was disappointed it wasn’t an anchor.

  He grabbed it and pulled it up high until it cracked. Over the scream, he finally heard the voices from the movie, coming from their car stereo now like all the new drive-ins.

  “Can you hear that?!” Larry yelled. “They’re talking on the radio!”

  “That’s how a drive-in works, you dumb fuck,” a kid from the back seat said, not as scared as he probably should be. Then another elbow caught Larry along the jaw and spun him into the stones. His movie rolled free and disappeared under another car where he could see the driver jumping up to pull on his pants.

  Assholes and elbows! Larry thought crazily. He’d first heard this phrase when some Sergeant was screaming at the ROTC kids at his school. Later, he heard it meant something about working so hard that’s all you could see. Fighting for something until you almost disappeared.

  He always thought this applied perfectly to pornography, too.

  Next day. Two cops, one big, one small, like every pair of everything in the world, are standing in Jacki’s living room, questioning her about the murder of her boyfriend, Anthony. They’re wearing police blues but talking more like detectives. Criminals pretending to be cops pretending to be detectives would be a more accurate description. They’ve been questioning her hard for a while now.

  “You say you were showing your daughter the scene of your accident?” Officer Stansberries, the Small Cop, says. Jacki doesn’t answer. She’s watching her daughter out a window and lost in thought, having tuned them out nearly an hour ago.

  “I said, ‘You say you were showing your daughter the scene of your accident,’ am I right? Why were you doing this?”

  “It was her birthday. She wanted to see where-”

  “Where what?” Officer Garcia, the Big Cop interrupts.

  “Where we crashed. Where she was conceived.”

  “That’s a very strange place to take your child,” Big Cop shrugs.

  “So?”

  “Sounds like a lot has happened on that stretch of road,” Small Cop says. “Someone born, someone dies-”

  “Two ‘someones’ died,” interjects Big Cop.

  “That’s right. Two someones,” Small Cop agrees. “And what do all these people have in common?”

  Jacki steps closer to the window to make sure her daughter is still in the yard.

  “Hello?” Big Cop taps his chipped front tooth. It sounds like someone knocking on a door. “What were you arguing about?”

  “Same thing as always,” she sighs.

  “So tell us.”

  “Jealousy.” Jacki turns. “He is always jealous about something.”

  Small Cop reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a matchbook. Jacki frowns when she sees it.

  “You mean “was jealous.” You know those matches, don’t you? Did these have something to do with the argument?”

  “It was an old argument.”

  Small Cop reads off the matchbook.

  “‘Bob, Jerry, Steve, Randy, Mike...’”

  “He wanted me to write them all down-”

  “...‘John, Dave, Rob...’”

  “Wanted you to write what all down?” Big Cop laughs.

  “The names of everyone I’d been with before him.”

  “What’s this squiggly line here between ‘Anthony’ and the second-to-last name?”

  “It’s just a mark, to show when the line was. You know, between Anthony and everyone before.”

  “No, I don’t know. Wait, who’s ‘Mark’? Did you say ‘Mark’?” Big Cop asks, almost tripping over himself.

  “What? No, I said it was a mark, to show-”

  “I thought you said the squiggle meant ‘Mark.’”

  No one notices the cats creeping into the room, asses low, one stalking the other.

  “Jesus Christ. That’s not what I said.”

  “Do you know anyone named ‘Mark’?” Small Cop asks.

  “You guys are some kinda miracle, you know that?”

  “I said, do you know anyone named ‘Mark?’”

  “No. I said-”

  “Because this squiggly line looks like you started to make the letter ‘M.’ Then you changed your mind.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jacki snaps. “Why would I do that?”

  A muffled electronic voice on the officer’s shoulder crackles some sort of information, and he leans down to bark a quick, “10-4” into his CB. The noise causes both cats to go on Red Alert, now stalking the Small Cop’s black shoes. He doesn’t notice, adjusting his radio and sighing at Jacki.

  “Maybe because he asked you for the list, and you started to write down the name ‘Mark’ and then realized that Anthony knew him, and you’d been with this “Mark” while you and Anthony were still together,” he says, then louder, “Or maybe this ‘Mark’ was someone you swore you never had sex with before, so you left a squiggly line instead. Squiggly means, what, almost?”

  “You keep saying ‘Mark.’ It’s not ‘Mark.’ It’s a mark. And why the fuck would I just not write anything at all if I had something to hide?”

  “Exactly!” Big Cop says, excited. “Maybe you already told him the number of men, and if you left off ‘Mark’ you’d get the wrong number-”

  “Seventeen,” mutters Small Cop.

  “Bullshit. There aren’t seventeen names on there,” Jacki laughs. “How the hell could someone write seventeen names on a matchbook?”

  “That was our next question,” Small Cop says, smiling.

  “That squiggly line was for the math, right?” Big Cop asks. “So that the number matched? Sure it was. But mostly it’s for you, so you won’t forget this mystery man, right?”

  There’s another crackling voice on Small Cop’s shoulder, and now Jacki sees the cat about to strike. She almost warns him, then stares another minute, slowly starting to smirk. She shakes her head. The cops look at each other, and one shrugs while the other can’t help but smile with her.

  “What’s so funny?” he says.

  “You. Both of you. All of you. Loco for Cocoa Puffs.”

  “All of who?”

  “Men. Monkeys. You and him. Every goddamn one of you plays the same game.”

  “What?” asks Big Cop, laughing, too.

  “This is exactly the conversation I had with Anthony. I’d say you both remind me of him, but you know what? It’s not just you. Listen to me right now… it’s all of you.”

  Small Cop stops laughing.

  “Also, you should turn down your CB. Electronic voices set off my cats. I have no idea why.”

  “Let’s get back to this talk of how men all sound the same…’”

  “No, no, no,” Jacki cuts him off. “You do! You sound exactly the same! How do you do that? What kind of effort must it take to always cover the same ground? How come it all comes back to ‘Who the girl fucked’? Are you men so hopelessly insecure? Are you? Even when you’re talking to a stranger like me, you find it necessary to stand in for the dead man ‘cause God-fucking-help you if someone doesn’t get some hateful jealous bullshit thrown in some woman’s face before the end of the day…”

  “Jesus, just calm down, please,” says Small Cop. He seems sincere, until he grabs her upper arm and squeezes to half its size. She tries to keep the fear out of her eyes. The cats scatter.

  “I think you misunderstand the situation,” Small Cop says. “We’re here because the last two men you fucked died within five feet of each other. I don’t see how you even pretend to be surprised that these circumstances would bring us to your door.”

  Big Cop holds out an arm to calm him down.

 
“This is for your safety, too,” he adds, squeezing harder. Resisting the urge to shout, Jacki shows her teeth.

  “If people around you are ending up dead, then… wait. Do you see what you’re doing with your mouth? When a chimp does that in a movie, they think he’s laughing. But that’s because they’ve been whipped by their trainer. That’s how they show fear. What are you afraid of?”

  Satisfied, he pushes her into a chair and tosses the matchbook in her lap. Jacki throws it against a wall.

  “There was a fucking car crash,” she says. “And his name was Eric. I didn’t write it down because it was already over. If you check ‘the file,’ you’ll see there’s no mystery to who was hanging dead in the tree, you dumb fuck.”

  Small Cop glares.

  “Your math doesn’t add up and you know it.”

  Their eyes lock for a solid minute.

  “Then who’s Mark?!” Big Cop laughs, not really laughing or asking.

  Jacki glares at the men for another minute, thinking of one of her classes, how she tried to discourage exclamation points in their papers by allowing only one per semester. But she let them use unlimited interrobangs, that trendy punctuation from the ‘70s that added a question to peoples shouting and saved just a little more ink in their typewriters. She decides to rethink that policy. Then she stands as if she’s remembered something important to do.

  “I have to take my daughter to school soon.”

  “Here’s the thing, Miss Ramirez. We’re also investigating a series of assaults in the area. Have you heard of the Bardstown Rapist?”

  “You mean that poor bastard the police killed for no reason?”

  “No, like you said, that was the wrong guy. We’re looking for a man who has raped several women, several Hispanic women.”

  “Latino,” Small Cop corrects him. “Or Chicano.”

  “Not Indian?”

  “Like ‘scalps’ Indians?”

  “No, dumbass! Like from India?!”