“...so here’s my plan, the dog is the key. He’s using the dog to cover up the crime scenes... I’m not sure how, I just know there can’t be this many bites and maulings in six years. I’m telling you, if we find the dog, we find the killer. The dog will give him up in a second. Put a dog under a harsh light and that dog will bark. You think a man is a dog’s best friend? Wrong. How does the saying go? A diamond is a girl’s best friend, a brick is a vandal’s best friend, and, well, a tree is probably a dog’s best friend actually...”
“Goodbye, Jack.”
She means it this time, but on his end of town, Jack doesn’t feel it when Jacki squeezes and crumples the Thanksgiving turkey off the magnets and stuffs it down the disposal. But he does feel something when she does this to the phone.
Jacki’s house. Same endless night.
She sits on the hard tile floor, some broken phone shrapnel between her crossed legs. The sickly blue glow of the television lights the wall behind her. The movie Chinatown is on - Toni has started it over again - and Jacki watches the wall, trying to recognize the shadows of the characters. Someone recommended the movie at a video store long ago, insisted really, almost slapping it into her hand. She used to rent a movie every Friday night and was actually relieved not to have to think too hard about her selection that time. Then she made the mistake of watching it with her daughter.
They didn’t make it to the end the first time, but one night they did, and now Toni couldn’t get enough. Jacki paid so much in late fees that she eventually just bought the damn thing.
Just from the shadows, she knows the movie is on the scene where Faye Dunaway starts getting slapped by Jack Nicholson. Jacki notices the volume dip in the other room as Toni tries to be sneaky, but they know this part by heart.
“She’s my daughter!”
Slap!
“I said I want the truth!” Jack says.
“She’s my sister!” Slap! “She’s my daughter!” Slap! “My sister!” Slap! “My daughter!” Slap!
“I said I want the truth!”
Crash.
“She’s my daughter and my sister!”
Of course she is,” Jacki says, unsurprised, then she stands up off the floor and goes to get her shoes.
At the playground, Bucky Balls finally radioed for help after staring at the baffling contraption around the dog’s neck for a good six minutes.
“Is it one of yours?” Bigby asked him.
“What? Are you fucking kidding?” Bucky said. “Since when are giant plastic collar bombs police issue? Looks like a game of Mouse Trap…”
“No, I mean the dog. Is the dog one of yours?”
“Doubt it. It doesn’t seem to have much interest in its surroundings. No real training. If it is an officer of the law, it slipped through the academy without developing the proper respect for human life. Or authority.”
“What a disgrace,” Bigby sighed. Then, to the third cop, who will remain forever nameless after this night, “Go to the exit and stop those cars from leaving! We’re gonna lose the kids responsible for this hoax.”
“Kids?” Forever Nameless frowned. “Why aren’t we thinking evacuation?”
“Just do what I said.”
A skinny teenager wearing headphones crossed his path, and Forever Nameless pulled one off his ear to bark.
“Son, go find your parents!”
Drifting through the air between this kid and Nameless was Bully’s sing-song, balloon-squeak of a voice, reporting an old crime which the officer mistook for movie dialogue:
“…at this point, authorities believe Mr. Bells was still convinced the bomb was an elaborate fake. No one knows why he allowed it to be locked onto his neck. Investigators theorized that he was convinced it was his alibi, and by pretending to be a hostage, he could later deny any involvement. He seems to have been somehow unaware that he was wearing the third such device reported sighted on the corner of Eerie and Ohio within a week. Then, at 2:01 p.m., a small key that was first mistaken as a handcuff key, but later identified to fit the lock of a child’s diary was finally removed from the device, and the very real bomb began to tick. Mr. Bells seems to have changed his mind at this point. He tried to run, and a gunshot was heard by neighbors. The bullet was later matched to a police-issue .38 revolver and determined to have been fired into the nearby radio antenna, interrupting Peter Gabriel’s ‘Shock The Monkey’ mid-chorus. This shot also stopped Mr. Bells in his tracks…”
The skinny kid ran, and the cop never made the connection. All the while, Bigby fingered the dangling snap of his weapon absent-mindedly and studied the children on the covered slide. He hated those covered versions.
Sooo dangerous.
Kids got jammed up in there and never came out with any consistency. It drove him nuts. He couldn’t believe anyone would allow their kids to play on such a contraption. Once, he watched a covered slide at a playground for three hours straight. He could never prove it, but he was pretty sure the same little bastards that were piling into the hole on the top were not the ones shooting out of the bottom.
Because those were even worse.
Evil Boll Weevil traced a figure-eight in the dust as he waited for the ramp truck to line up behind the row of cars heading for the drive-in exit. He counted 25.
But they were long ways. Which made it more like 60.
He balanced a soda can on the boombox strapped to his handlebars and gave the accelerator a snake bite. He was going to do a practice run next to them to see what top speed he could achieve.
But a man in a wheelchair rolled in front of him, and he was forced to abort the trial run. He took his hand off his throttle to hear what the disabled man was saying.
Then he started counting the spider tattoos on the man’s face with a shocked “Whoa!” and didn’t hear most of it anyway.
The spider-faced man was motioning to some current action on the screen where a baby with a mouthful of fangs was screaming bloody murder.
“I can’t decide what’s more overused,” Spider Face was saying. “The bat-like shriek every creature stops to make in every horror movie…” He cocks a thumb at a man cradling a hubcap being shoved out of the concession stand, head down in the mud. “…or the moment when the monster catches up with the hero and throws him across the room to give him another chance.”
The man stealing hubcaps collected himself from the mud and ran back inside the booth.
A young woman with thick glasses and a fistful of popcorn suddenly joined them to add to the conversation.
“Ah, yes. The ol’ ‘You’re not worth it!’ moment,” she says while spitting out some hulls. “The worse case I ever saw was in Roadhouse II: The Prequel, when the ghost fetus of Swayze says that same crap to the main villain. After both Swayzes just killed everyone in the fucking house to get to him?! Ridiculous.”
Evil revved his engine to get their attention and pointed to the tow truck.
“Hey, guys? Can you move aside, please? I’m gonna jump those cars.”
They all turned, nodding and smiling, eager to watch, and Evil turned up his headphones to hear Bully’s voice in his ears explaining that, “‘The noise produced by a single dog park can reach as much as 115 decibels, the equivalent of every car horn under every palm of the angriest cab drivers on Earth, and way too much for me!’ This was an excerpt from the delivery man’s suicide note, later determined to be fake…”
“Hold on, boy. You’re gonna what?” the old man in the wheelchair started wheeling after him, right about when a German Shepherd blindsided Evil and upended him and his bike into a puddle. Evil gunned it to steady himself again, then the police dog bounded over the loose-spinning wheels and went for Evil’s arm. Evil was able to turn his handlebars at the last second, and the dog got a mouthful of rubber instead.
Biting down, its jaws cranked the gas even harder, sending the bike, Evil, and the dog flying toward the ramp, a shitload of broken bones, and immortality.
Empty apartment. Night. Jack
steps through the door, clicking on the base of the one swinging light bulb. This apartment is new but familiar, resembling every apartment he’s ever infested. And he’s still carrying his camouflaged bag over his shoulder as he walks to a window, opens it, and breaths in the crisp air. He sees a willow tree in the distance. He’s always been able to spot them easily on the horizon, the only trees that move like some vast underwater organism, seeming to beckon other creatures into its grip in hypnotic, spineless slow-motion. Jack thinks back to when he was a boy, when he was drawn in just such a way into the huge willow tree behind his house, how he climbed it so often that he knew every big branch by heart, especially any branch thick enough to sleep nestled comfortably inside their wishbones, safer than he ever felt in his mother’s arms. He climbed that willow tree so much that one day the cradle had to fall, of course, and even though the bark took most of the skin off his arms and elbows on the way down (“the epiphyseal connected to the synovial…”), that shimmering tree caught Jack’s ankles right before he hit the ground, hanging him upside down for hours until his family finally came home from his brother’s baseball game to untangle him, all of them laughing while he cried, the snarl of branches never letting go until his brother cracked them all easily in his fists. Sometimes between dreams, Jack could still feel the branches snake around his feet in protest, maybe to save him from hitting the ground all over again, but also to make sure that Jack stared at that ground as long as possible, if only to remember exactly how close he came to breaking his goddamn neck and how easily the world could do this to a boy as small as him.
There’s the obligatory bark somewhere in the distance.
“Seize the dog!” someone yells.
“Carpe canem!”someone yells back.
The willow tree stops moving in response, and Jack holds his breath until it starts dancing again.
Hallway. Same night. Jacki stomps her way through Jack’s apartment building, glancing down occasionally at the address on her blackened matchbook, checking numbers on the doors as she passes. When she finds the right one, she stops to knock, but the door flies open so fast she jumps back. A girl holding a drink and crunching an ice cube blocks the doorway, looking Jacki up and down. The girl is blonde, tall, wearing only an oversized t-shirt that reads:
“EMS: Where The Rubber Hits The Road.”
She finishes chewing her ice and swallows. She seems ready to talk to Jacki, then reaches into her glass of soda and grabs another cube, offering nothing but an arched eyebrow.
“Uh, does Jack live here?” Jacki asks her.
“Uh, sorta?” she mocks her, chomping and pointing to the door across the hall. “Sorta lives there, too. And there, too, I think,” she says, pointing to a third door even further down.
Jacki frown and turns. When she turns back around, the blonde girl is holding a small cardboard box.
“Here. Tell him this came for him,” she says, then slams the door.
Jacki knocks on one of the doors, then another. She’s bending down to leave the box in front of the third door when it swings open. It’s Jack, blinking at her in confusion.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hello,” he says, peering up and down the hall around her. “What’s going on?”
“I came to see you,” she says, holding up the matchbook and cocking a thumb at the other doors. “But you gave me the wrong address.”
“No, that’s the right address, I just...” He notices the box. “You bring me brownies?”
“No, your roommate said this came for you.”
“Oh,” he mumbles, taking it from her hand, still keeping his door half shut.
“Are you okay?” she asks. Then to herself, “Who am I kidding? You’re never okay.”
He scratches his head and looks around some more, clearly rattled. Then he sighs, opening the door wide to wave her in. His long bag is lying in the middle of an empty floor, and the light bulb above it is swinging, its chain having just been yanked.
“Well, c’mon in if you want,” he tells her.
Jacki steps inside and looks around. White walls. Suspicious bag. She doesn’t need a roadmap. She starts to back out again.
“Are you coming or going?” Jack sighs.
“Neither. What the fuck are you doing?”
“Nothing!”
Jack follows her eyes to the bag and grabs it, swinging it around to the front of his chest. Something metal rattles, and Jacki puts an arm out towards the door.
“Wait, no,” he says. “It just looks like a rifle. Watch.”
“Who said it was a rifle…”
Jack unzips the bag, and a jumble of green canvas and metal rods clang to the floor. Jacki jumps back, scared. Jack reaches down, and, in a quick flurry of movement, pulls on the rods until, like a particularly well-rendered page in a children’s pop-up book, a fold-out green hunting chair snaps into existence in the middle of the room. They both cross their arms to appreciate an empty room with a lonely chair dead center.
“Looks good,” Jacki laughs. “Well done. Now it’s a home.”
“Have a seat,” he says. She just stares. He tries to put her at ease with a story.
“Speaking of metal rods! The other day, this guy came in the E.R. with a ‘bladder injury.’ But after a little X-ray vision, it turned out here was a little more to the story. See, this guy had decided to jerk off with a metal rod shoved up his urethra. He finished that little task easy enough, but when he was done he discovered he was now a magician because the rod had poof! vanished. But after he started pissing blood two days later, it turned out the rod hadn’t really vanished, of course. It had simply taken a walkabout past the seminal colliculus, around the prostatic utricle, up through the urethral crest, past the corner where old Johnson’s barn used to be, around the block from where they were selling that snowmobile last Spring, and smack dab right into the wall of his bladder. They ended up operating. You know, you people have no idea how lucky you are that you’re able to urinate with such a high success rate. Open it up and you’re like, ‘Wait, is this a map of Pittsburgh?’ Anyway, his name sounded kinda Spanish, like yours. You ever met the guy? John Colitis, Colitas, Coitus Interruptus… no, John Colandas! That’s the fucker. Skinny, but kinda scary. You don’t want to know him. But, yeah, the freak wanted the rod back, but thank Christ he only made a necklace out of it.”
“So, what are you doing in here, man?” she laughs.
“Long story. You really want to hear it?” She still doesn’t answer, figuring one of his stories is plenty. He points, “Hey, if you’re not gonna sit there, then I…”
Jacki runs to the chair to claim it.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell your story standing up.”
“I thought you had enough of me on the phone today.”
“Guess not.”
“Well, I used to live here. Before I lived over there. And there. I lived here with my ex-girlfriend-”
“Was that her chomping ice? At one of your nine apartments?”
“No, just listen. So we lived over here for awhile, but then we decided we needed a bigger place because we were always fighting. And when we were always fighting, I would go sit in the empty two-bedroom apartment across the hall. The one where I live now. See, they were painting it, and it was taking them forever, so it was never locked. Eventually things got better between us, and, when they finally finished renovating, we moved into that two-bedroom apartment. But no one’s moved into the empty one yet. And now they’re painting another one.”
“So that is her with the ice.”
“Yeah,” Jack says, pacing around her in the chair. “Turned out, though, that the small
apartment wasn’t the reason we were always fighting after all. So then I would come back over here and sit, wondering if I’d made two mistakes now, or if hopefully the two mistakes could
cancel out each other, you follow me? Anyway, so we break up, of course, and by this time we were living with her best friend, too, to save some money.
So now it’s just me and her best friend. The one with the ice. Who is sort of a horrible person and wants me to fuck her to tell you the truth, probably so she can run to my ex and tell her how awful I am. Or something.”
“She was wearing your shirt.”
“Whoa, Sherlock. How do you know she’s not a paramedic?”
“How did you know what shirt I was talking about?”
“Whoa, Watson! Anyway, since I still had the key, the key I made my ex-girlfriend actually, I come back over here to sit and think. Or over there. Even though she’s gone. I miss this smaller place especially. I just keep coming back.”
“So you just keep coming back, huh?”
“I just keep coming over here to sit and think. I don’t know. I’ll probably keep coming over here until someone finally moves in.”
Jacki starts rocking back and forth even though the chair’s not built for it.
“So, what’s the story with the Army ‘camo’ chair? You trying to hide? You’re going to need some green walls or some plants for that.”
“No.”
“Do you hunt?”
“No. I just like this one chair. Kind of self-pitying, I know.”
“No shit,” she laughs. “Why don’t you leave it here then? Why haul it back and forth?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to leave anything here in case the landlord shows the place. And a chair in a bag looks less suspicious when I cross over the hall with it. People think I’m the exterminator of something.”
“You’re kidding, right? When that thing is rolled up, it’s quite possibly the most suspicious thing I’ve ever seen a person carry over their shoulder.”
“Besides another person.”
“Good point. But that’s your day job, ain’t it?”
“Exactly.”
“Whatever, Oswald.” Jacki gets up to look out the window.
The Last Projector Page 34