The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  The guard tries harder, and finally a big pink ball of bubble gum inflates and covers his face completely. Little Thug sees Big Thug’s eyes inside the mask, and he realizes what’s gonna happen next.

  The heat of the blast instantly turns the wavering balloon to sugar and vapor while chasing most of the guard’s skull halfway up the wall in a supernova of teeth, blood, and burger.

  “I owe you fifty bucks.”

  A tongue starts to roll back down the wall, end over end before it hits the ground, exactly like those sticky rubber spiders you get from the gumball machine when you wanted something better. Probably because that’s where Larry had bought the sticky rubber spider to shoot the scene. He leans in close until it’s stuck to the lens of his camera.

  On their way back home, out of their uniforms and back in their uniforms, the radio by their knees starts chattering, and they slap a red light on their roof like the cherry on a sundae.

  Mike and Mike sit on the curb, splitting a tuna sandwich. Larry is sifting through a handful of bubblegum machine toys.

  “How did you like the tongue?”

  “I’ve never seen shit like that in my life,” Little Mike says. “That’s not how it would happen, would it? Human body don’t work like that. You of all people should know this.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Big Mike says. “We’ve seen some shit. I’ve seen some shit.”

  “Like what?”

  “Okay, remember that building where I used to live back in Nashville? Like most of those apartments, the building was old as fuck and sagging, but the decks were all new and straight lines, so it was like walking onto a lumberjack contest when you went out back. I was living there with Peggy, and you know how she was a talker, but I don’t think we were used to sitting on a deck, smoking, talking smack, because otherwise we would have shown a little discretion about some of the shit we were saying out loud, Peggy anyway. But everyone was out there doing the same thing. Most of the people didn’t have a nice, level-headed deck before to pretend they were normal. We were on the second floor, right between all the neighbors. Above us was April and her creepy mom, Brenda, I think. I just called her Doris, because it rhymed with ‘Loris.’ You ever see those videos of the Slow Loris? Bitch looks exactly like that, but doesn’t move nearly that fast. One time, she waddled out and showed Peg her bandages from her last suicide attempt, which invokes sympathy in some, but usually makes me imagine someone holding out a pile of dog shit and saying, ‘Look what I almost stepped in!’ And April, she was never home. She bartended every night, and most of the time she was hooking up with some barfly and creeping in at dawn, nice and early so she could wake up Garbage Dog.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll get to that fucking monster in a minute. So it was mostly just Slow Doris up there, creaking around, peeking down the steps that connect us since Doris used to steal Peg’s cigarettes, too. And her purple lighter, not that we could ever prove it. I shit you not, I ended up threatening the maintenance guy instead when I saw him smoking, might have got him fired since this was in a red state and the poor bastard was black. All I know is he never came back for his hammer, and it was a nice hammer. The Cadillac of hammers. The pink Cadillac of hammers. Oh well, collateral damage. Like he never stole a lighter before. Now, on the ground floor was the main event. Some tall, skinny kid we called Hendrix after we caught him torching a guitar in the burn barrel the day we moved in. Actually, it turned out an ex-girlfriend had torched this guitar earlier, and he was just trying to save it, but all we saw was him waving his hands like a witchdoctor over the flames like Jimi did at Woodstock. And Hendrix, he had this Chihuahua named Tom Joad, which we thought was kind of pretentious until we realized it was named after Springsteen instead of Steinbeck. Tom Joad was a gnarly little rat, yeah, but at least he wasn’t Garbage Dog, so we kind of liked him. He was tiny and purple and green around the edges from some homemade mariachi costume Hendrix forced on him in the winter, so Peg started calling him ‘Jim Toad’ instead, because maybe Tom Joad had a Mexican buddy named Jim? Who can say. Still a hell of a lot better name than anything in Grapes of Wrath or the Springsteen song - blasphemy, I know. Maybe not better than “Green Machine,” like I wanted though.”

  “No way that dog was green. Monkeys can be green, sure, like the one that started the AIDS. But dogs? No way.”

  “Wait, almost forgot, in the apartment directly above me was Cindy. At least that’s what was on the mailbox. We never saw her. And above her are anywhere from two to five assholes, but they don’t count either. Frat types, baseball caps. No idea. It just got noisy sometimes, or someone would be out in the back yard navigating the dog shit to play cornhole, and it was always them. They were funny at first, then after the third night we listened to them one-upping each other with finger-banging flashbacks or whatever, we lost interest. One time, I thought we were hearing an honest-to-Christ argument, full of passion and hate and betrayal, but, nope! It turned out it was the drive-thru at the McDonald’s, right out our alley, about 20 feet away. Actually, it could have been some girl Hendrix just broke up with working at McDonald’s, yelling out the speaker trying to get his attention. The way the alley is set up, that shit is loud. So I know he heard her. But, yeah, Hendrix was a trip. When we were out there on the deck, we’d hear him down there smooth-talking some female, and the way he laid it on, you’d be surprised to know that this skinny Mac Daddy punk was sporting a mouthful of chrome. Here he was, about a hundred pounds, almost six foot six, voice like Al Green… and braces that filled every inch of his face. I kind of loved looking at him. He was like a James Bond villain, or at least the villain’s nephew. Every time I’d see him walking Jim Toad, I’d smile just to get one back and watch his lips work to cover those huge metal chompers. I didn’t realize they still made braces out of car parts! Thought that shit was all plastic now, seriously. But he was a cool kid, at first. Okay, he never really said, ‘Hi,’ but always said, ‘Say, “Hi!” Say, “Hi!”’ to Jim Toad, like one of those insufferable pet owners who use their dog as a way to avoid actual communication, which was probably worse.

  “But I figured maybe he’d get more chatty once the braces finally came off, like that kid in the movie who can throw a 90-mile-an-hour fast ball once he loses his cast. I used to swear to Peg, or anyone else listening to us through the floor of our deck, that one day I’d get him talking fast enough through that deep, pillow-talkin’ metal mouth of his that I’d see those sparks flying for myself.”

  “Can that happen? Are you a scientist, dude?”

  “So I feel like shit after what happened. One night, way late, I’m sitting on my deck, watching the end of my cigarette flicker, watching for Slow Doris to come sniffing around to steal one, and I hear glass shattering somewhere in one of the apartments. So I creep down, and after seeing a giant hole in the door below us, I call 911. I wait out there until I see the cops come, flashlights bobbing around near the gas meters for awhile like the super sleuths they are, then I hear them finally roust Hendrix, who is hammered from a night at the bar, probably breaking up with somebody of course, and I hear Hendrix say he was locked out and had to break his own door to get back in. It’s the most I’ve ever heard him talk to a man, but the crime is solved, right? So I start to doze off in my camping chair, and fifteen minutes later Hendrix is running up and down the alley and the McDonald’s parking lot screaming, ‘Tom Jooooooad! Tom Jooooooad!’ because either him or the police accidentally let the dog out during all the ruckus. So feeling guilty as hell and knowing it’s a full moon, and realizing this is the widest I might ever see this mouth in the moonlight, I run down hoping for a laser-light show off those miraculous incisors. ‘Jim Tooooooad!’ I yell. “Tom Jooooooad!!!” he’s screaming. He’s screaming this so loud that I’d put three exclamation points on it right now if that was even allowed. So I know there’s got to be sparks coming off those teeth by now. But as I switch my boots to the correct feet, I start to wonder: Is that the danger of metal in your mouth?
All that hardware has got to be worse than a megaphone, almost battery powered. They say people can pick up radio stations on their fillings. How about broadcast from their braces? “57 Channels and nothing on” but poor Hendrix. Turned out it wasn’t sparks I got to see after all, though, just the street light reflecting off them, but it was still an impressive display of fireworks.”

  “Fourth of Jooooo-lie!”

  “But I do try to help him, fully accepting my punishment of wandering the streets with this drunk fuck, shaking bushes, looking for his green Chihuahua with the goofy name, and this is what we’re doing for three goddamn hours. I have no idea if he knows it was me who called the cops, but I figure he must at least suspect it. But I’m not gonna bring it up with him half-crying over his toad. So I keep kicking around, and we jump every time a walnut drops from the tree next door, thinking it’s Jim. Or Tom. Jimi, Bruce, whoever. At one point, I wreck another neighbor’s bush, uprooting it to look for something that was scratching around in there like Cool Hand Luke signaling for a piss. I point out my amateur landscaping to Hendrix and say, ‘Is that him in here? I think that’s him!’ But he won’t even look over. He’s on his cellphone with some ex, and he shrugs me off with a ‘No, not him yo.’ So I gut the whole stretch of Callery trees anyway, shaking those white flowers everywhere, which is doing everyone a favor since they smell like jizz, an anomaly the landlord used to blame on Hendrix, but I find nothin’. No cat, no rabbit, no clue, nada. Something had to be in there along that house making that noise, but now Hendrix is too busy calling everyone he knows for some reason, crying into his phone for sympathy and refusing to make eye contact with me. I start thinking, ‘Yeah, he knows it was me who called the cops,’ and figure my work here is done and head for our steps. ‘You’re welcome!’ And when birds start chirping and the morning is threatening, I notice that both the front and back door of his apartment are wide open. And I officially declare the rescue effort too flawed to be a part of. I go back up and climb into bed, trying to wake up Peg and tell her the story, hoping she’ll tell me it’s not my fault, but not really, and she’s like, ‘Yeah, no, you fucked up.’”

  “Yeah, man, you fucked up.”

  “Just listen. So then it’s a week later, and still no Jim Toad. Then it’s a month. Then we run into Hendrix at the art fair. He’s with another girl, of course, and I get him talking about that night, you know, wondering who called the cops. It’s weird, but he doesn’t even talk about Jim Toad, that dog he was crying over right in front of me. Instead, he’s just trying to figure out who was to blame. I lie and play along and avoid eye contact, but there’s something about him that’s off, and it doesn’t hit me until later that his braces are gone. This bothers me for some reason, and I start looking in the alley again for the dog, even splashing around in the little babbling brook next to the McDonald’s drive-thru, figuring if a stray could survive anywhere for a month, it’s next to a fast-food joint. I’m all over their lot every free chance I get, only stopping when a voice comes out of the speaker telling me I need a car to be served at the drive-thru. I want to say something about McDonald’s being the biggest eavesdropping disappointment in my life, how maybe all my trips through the drive-thru were action-packed before I moved there or something because all these motherfuckers ever do these days is order food or cry over their boyfriends. But instead I yell something about what kind of idiot puts a running stream next to a microphone?! But every time I thought I’d finally start forgetting about Jim Toad, I’d run into Garbage Dog, April’s timorous monster, and I’d start thinking like the dad in Stand by Me, ‘It should have been you, Gordie.’ And it’s true, it should have been you, Garbage Dog. Sooo many nights I’d stare at Garbage Dog and his tumors and yelping and his happy, slobbering face pushing the corners loose on our screen door, and I’d imagine sending him to a quiet place far away. Nothing violent like with my new hammer or anything, but maybe getting him in a headlock and sending him straight to Garbage Heaven, whispering in his torn ear the entire time, ‘Shhhh, shhhh. Tell Jim I’m sorry.’ Or maybe just, ‘Say “Hi!” Say, “Hi!’” Seriously, if it had been Garbage Dog that ran away, I would have slept like a baby after letting it loose, instead of being responsible for the loss of the canine equivalent of a green, shivering, naked old man. Not that it could run away, having never been restrained from shitting everywhere and anywhere anyway. Peg called Garbage Dog my spirit animal once, and it’s the closest I ever came to leaving her. Or adopting a dog. Speaking of everywhere and anywhere! I know we had a walnut tree next door that was kind of noisy, and we lived in an old creaky house with hardwood floors, but I know Jim Toad was still living on that block. There’s just no way he wasn’t around. How far could that little Benjamin Button fuck run without assistance? You never read that story? Seriously, I never even saw him walk on one of their famous walks. Hendrix could have been struggling to get his backpack to say, ‘Hi!’ to me instead of that dog for all I know. And, you know, I never really cared for Steinbeck, but this experience has definitely affected my enjoyment of any Springsteen with a mournful harmonica in it, which covers about six thousand and seventy-three of his songs.”

  “He has more songs than that.”

  “So I see Hendrix about five more times, hear the dog rustling around about twice as many times, and I try to bring up Jim, get some indication that he’s still looking for him, that he even gives a shit. I even make sure I’m at that same art fair a year later, milling around in front of the booth where some hippie asshole spends her spare time covering dragonflies in scalding plastic to pretend they’re amber paperweights and that she’s not killing shit. Hendrix loves those kinds of trinkets, I guess, or maybe just the hippie selling them, but not enough to drop forty bucks. He just hangs around her booth to fondle some big, plastic balls, and when I see him again, I imagine Jim Toad frozen in one of those paperweights like Hendrix has stumbled onto a fortune teller. And maybe there’s a little movie projected on the dragonfly wings, a flickering image of Jim sizzling at the bottom of the McDonald’s grease trap in the back of our alley. I pretty much confess the last time I run into him, though, saying, ‘Whoever called the cops, they may have been pretending to do a good thing, but it was really a bad thing, don’t you think? And they should feel bad.’ He says nothing. ‘I mean you should feel bad, too, right?’ I say. Still nothing. He just keeps changing the subject, but not in that ‘It’s too painful to talk about’ kind of way. It’s the ‘I don’t give a shit’ kind of way. And his teeth are so straight I can’t even hear him really. His voice is probably normal now. ‘57 channels and nothing on’ for real this time.”

  “Good song. Terrible album.”

  “Anyhow, some time later, I can’t remember when, I crawl into his apartment when he’s sleeping, which is real easy since he’s never fixed that hole he made when he broke in. And I take my new hammer, and I give him two shots with it while he sleeps. Just two for some reason. One to make sure he stays sleeping, and the other one to see if I can bring back the sparks. He wakes up between the hammer strikes, if you can believe it, and even though he’s conscious for only about a second and a half between those shots, for about the time it takes Bruce to suck in that harmonica between notes, I still have time to talk to him. I tell him, ‘I’m sorry I lost your dog, but can’t you see that we’re bad people?’ Then the hammer hits his teeth, and I can see why the ladies always loved him.”

  “Why?”

  “His smile lights up the room.”

  “Good work, Mike,” Larry says, slapping his thighs. “You, too, Mike. You’re the best cops I could have asked for. You guys were born to do it. You look like just the kind of assholes who would love Springsteen that much.”

  “Hey, they might call him the poor man’s Bob Dylan, but at least he’s not jockeying for the honor of being a poor man’s Bruce like Bon Jovi or John Cougar! Like you, the poor man’s doctor.”

  “Ignore him. It was fun. Let us know when the movie comes out.”

 
“Sure.”

  “What was the point of that story again?”

  “Didn’t you ask why I rescued animals?”

  “Nope.”

  Little Mike starts singing “Neighbours” by the Rolling Stones, accent and all, to remind Larry of jolly old England.

  “You know that neighbours steal off my table, steal off my table… ain’t doing all right.”

  Larry is learning not to look so confused when people talk about his movies. He used to get them mixed up, the ones he saw with the ones he made.

  “What about that other movie we made? Boys in Blue.”

  “You mean Balls in Blue?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I used some of it. Couple scenes here, couple scenes there. Mixed it all together like a stew. But, you know, with balls.”

  “Is this a fucking joke?!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You ditched me!”

  “You weren’t fast enough.”

  “You left me there on purpose.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me!”

  She didn’t tell him, but she moved a little closer and laid a head on his shoulder. He was driving again, but it didn’t feel like his car anymore, not that it ever should. She’d been parked outside the drive-in, of course, and the only reason he was giving her another chance is the way he found her, sitting in the passenger’s seat. Like she was waiting for somebody. He hoped it was him.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Bully said, her voice as sweet as he’d ever heard. He hated it. “You’ll see. Three more turns and you’ll forget you were mad.”

  But before they took three more turns, she had him slow the car to a crawl so that she could leave a cassette balanced on an orange traffic cone. As he watched her turn the spool with her thumb so that the tape was tight, he smelled the rot of a deer carcass somewhere nearby.