The Last Projector
Page 50
“Tying everything down, in case you take a bad turn.” Then, “Drive-thru, huh? Haven’t you seen the warnings?”
“On the burgers?”
“No,” Jack sighs. “On the drive-thru. Right next to the speaker. A cartoon of what happens when someone leans out too far pulling up. Dangerous world, man…”
The driver tilts the rear-view mirror around to search the shadows behind him as an electric whine worms into their ears.
Jack and Mary got drunk as long as they could while he told her all about his promising young career as a film major at the University of Pittsburgh, which led to a short career as a paramedic, both in the States and overseas, which led back to movies with a whole new idea, like a dog to its own sick, but only if that sick was delicious.
He told her how he’d once studied people like Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Eadweard J. Muybridge, (otherwise known as “Edweird,” in all his notes, but actually born Ed Muggeridge), even some Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All were perfect names for Oscar posters. Or porn. He told her how he once wrote, directed, and chopped an award-winning short called Engaged/Enraged where a nurse’s engagement ring got tangled in the chest hair of a man who’d come in for a little innocent EKG, and how it ended in jealousy, infidelity, and a little murder.
He was going to be the stunt hand, but his finger was too hairy for the contrast. Jack’s wife once told him that a ring on Jack’s finger “looked like Keith Richards’ headband.” She wanted him to shave his knuckles for their wedding ceremony, but he refused, having already shaved his ears and figured that was already a demonstration of his commitment. Her idea of commitment was to get “Ecnalubma” tattooed on his arm where she’d written it a decade earlier. Jack knew she’d done this just to upset her mother.
No, not “Ecnalubma.” It said “Escanaba,” that little burg in Michigan where we met, both doing our Red Cross training together, patching people up outside the casino, and chomping ice cubes on the bumper of the ambulance when the sun came up, messing around in the back of the ambulance when the sun went down, remember…
But the ring through the chest hair? He couldn’t remember whose hand they ended up using. But it was a good scene.
Jack and Mary got drunk, drunk enough to stay Jack for awhile and not go back to being Larry. They all got drunk until the sun came up and her grandson came out.
It had been a busy day, but Jack still needed to prove his theory. That a skinny, cement Virgin Mary whose feet came to a point was clearly constructed for one purpose and one purpose only. No, not a vibrator.
A baseball bat.
Jack’s grip sunk in under Mary’s chin as if she was made to be cradled by Babe Ruth himself. Jack had been hoping to give the red-faced bastard one more chance to yank on his hood ornament, pull the pin on his Grenada so to speak, but Jack surprised the red-faced bastard outside the safety of his car, right when he burst out of his grandmother’s screen door, ham hocks white-knuckled and clenched. Still, Jack’s first swing whiffed over the man’s head, dusting off his UFC cap. But the second swing connected low, right where he would have been labeled “breadbox” in the game Operation he’d had as a boy, marked “beatbox” in young Larry’s modified version, when he was still “John.”
Jack swung again. And again. And he heard the game’s buzzer and watched his nose light up with every shot. When Jack’s arms were tired, he moved the red faced, now dead-faced, bastard’s limbs around, feeling every joint pop like dry Buffalo wings, amazed how a human body finally did everything he wanted for once in his career, followed every direction, bloody shoes pointed perfect, arms and legs hanging in the air where he posed them as if suspended on invisible wires.
Jack managed to prop him up on an elbow, balanced so that anyone driving by, anyone catching his actor at just the right angle and ignoring the leaking, deflated weeks-after-Halloween pumpkin that used to be his head, they would think someone freeze-framed a baseball game right when the Red Sox were sliding into home.
Back on his new dirt bike, Jack pulled his shirt over his new girl so they could share it, something he saw the kids do once. He kickstarted the engine, then turned his head to kiss a nose cold as bone.
Even though there was no antenna for miles, songs lingered in the sky for a lifetime, and every one of them was skipping now.
“Beauty!”
-“Crabs” Dead-End Drive-In
“Meanwhile Larry made up names for the ladies
like Miss Boo and Miss Quick
He stockpiled weapons and took potshots in the air
He feasted on their lovely bodies like a lunatic
And wrapped himself up in their soft yellow hair…
Ah, poor Larry”
-Nick Cave “Dig, Lazurus, Dig!!!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David James Keaton’s award-winning fiction has appeared in over 50 publications. His first collection, Fish Bites Cop: Stories to Bash Authorities, was named This Is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year. He grew up within sight of a drive-in, and in his spare time creates soundtracks for sequels that do not exist. This is his first novel.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Thanks, as always, to my beloved reading machine Amy Lueck, who devoured this book in one marathon, sixteen-hour session. That’s at least six movies she missed. Thanks to my family, especially my brother for allowing me to edit The Crow down to 30-minutes. Thanks to my past-and-present paramedic friends, Jamie Bono and Sean Ferguson, who answered crazy questions about EMT dog-attack protocol and what happens if you put defibrillators on someone’s head (“It’ll arc through your glasses! Don’t!”). Any paramedical errors were made by my characters, not my consultants. Thanks to editor J. David Osborne for believing in this book after a rapid-fire description on a crowded roof under a plastic supermoon; Joel Vollmer for his brilliant artwork and ability to translate suggestions like “the Megaforce poster, but with the Virgin Mary” into the beautiful cover you now hold; Rachel Johnson for co-writing our doomed Spunkwater script back in the day, which ended up as the gooey heart of this novel; the songwriters who helped craft “The Rap is the Thing (or Your Blood’s Gonna Scream)”: Rachel, Mike, Matt, Mark, Nate, and Cryptozoology 101; and fellow writers, readers, and artists: Erin Keaton, Jedidiah Ayres, Chuck Kinder, Simon Jacobs, Glenn Gray, Dyer Wilk, Alec Cizak, Patrick Wensink, Sal Pane, Jason Stuart, Maggie Hannan, Sean and Jessica, Robb and Livius, and A.J. Hayes, everybody misses you already.
And finally, special thanks to the drive-in theater out our back door when I was growing up, which opened in 1949, burnt down in 1958, then was rebuilt and renamed “Butch Cassidy” in 1982, the year of The Thing. It was sold and demolished in 1990. A tornado took out its partner, the Sundance Kid, last year.
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