“But you’re driving,” Toni whines. “You can’t play with the radio, or you’ll crash. I can do anything.”
Jacki glares at her daughter, and she slumps back in her seat with her arms crossed, pulling on the seatbelt like it’s strangling her. Eventually she stops, defeated.
“Mommy, is daddy in trouble?”
Jacki doesn’t trust herself to answer.
“Mommy? Was I born on that ride?”
“What?” Jacki snaps, shocked.
“Back at the park. Is that where I came from? On one of those rides?
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard. You said that’s where I came from. And it was today, right? My birthday?”
“Well, we meant where you were conceived. Not born. It’s not the same thing.” Pause. “And it wasn’t on that ride.”
“What’s ‘conceived’?”
“Made.”
“Where was I made then?”
Jacki looks at her, then back at the road. There’s a crazy moment when she almost tells her daughter everything. Then suddenly Jacki turns on the radio, and the car speeds up. The song “Black Betty” is about halfway through.
“Black Betty had a baby bam-a-lam, damn thing was crazy bam-a-lam...”
“Mommy, can you conceive a sister?”
“No, I cannot,” she laughs.
“But I heard babies can recognize other baby’s faces. It calms us down!”
“You’re not a baby. And you’re talking about Furbies.”
“Am not!”
“Yes, little one. You are talking Furby technology right now. Amazing toys, more electronics than the entire Sputnik space program, I hear. Face recognition software. But that doesn’t work with peeeeeople. We don’t know who the hell we are.”
Toni pouts. Jacki looks at her a couple times, then the song repeats the chorus with more “bam-a-lams,” and she turns the car around so hard that her graduation tassel on the rear-view mirror flips up and over to the right. Jacki laughs, thinking this must mean she’s still got a lot to learn before she can stop herself.
“You didn’t even get me a Furby,” Toni says. “You got me a Blurby.”
“Okay. You wanna know? You wanna get to the bottom of this? Me, too. Let’s go.”
“Yay!”
Their car passes a pick-up truck with tinted windows that slows as they pass. It pulls a quick U-turn in the stones to follow them, but Jacki doesn’t notice.
The truck turns off its headlights. Jacki doesn’t notice this either.
Crash site.
Jacki and Toni stand hand-in-hand on a stretch of road. Jacki points to the ground at their feet.
“Somewhere right about here I think,” Jacki says, thoughtfully, kicking around.
“What’s ‘right about here?’”
“This is where you came from. Right about… here. Right before the car left the road.”“But how could I...”
Jacki ignores her as she walks toward the trees. She’s lost in thought, remembering something buried in her brain. She walks to the stumps of several broken trunks, hearing a familiar voice whispering in her head.
“Three more minutes and it never happened...”
“This is where he died,” Jacki finally says.
“Who?”
“Your daddy. Your real daddy. This is the tree that killed him.”
She reaches down with a finger and splashes the rainwater that’s collected in the stump.
“Gross!” Toni yells, hand over her mouth. “Don’t do that! There’s mosquito eggs and poop in there. Uck.”
“That won’t hurt you, there’s mosquito eggs and poop in everything we eat, baby.”
Toni’s eyebrows arch as she soaks in this offhand comment. Jacki realizes she’ll probably never forget it.
“Come over here, baby. You never heard of ‘spunkwater’ before?
“You mean ‘stumpwater?’”
“No, honey. It’s called ‘spunkwater.’ Haven’t you read Tom Sawyer yet?”
“No, we were gonna, but they said it had too many swear words, so the teacher changed her mind.”
“There’s no way you’re old enough to read Tom Sawyer. We’ll start you with Huck Finn. Well, if they woulda let you read it, you’d know that spunkwater can cure all sorts of things. Gets rid of warts on your hands, hiccups, toothaches, bad daddies...”
Jacki trails off, thinking hard.
“...or maybe Tom had to drag a dead dog on a string for the hiccups. I can’t remember.”
Toni looks down into the stump then backs up holding her nose.
“Why is it all white? Looks like Egg Drop soup. It’s sooooo gross. Please, can we go home now?”
Some twigs crack behind them, and Jacki jerks her hand out of the water as if something bit her.
“Yeah, okay, let’s go-”
Suddenly a man steps from the shadows. It’s Anthony, furious as always. He bridges the distance in three seconds and shoves Jacki back, tripping over the stump.
“I can’t believe you brought her here,” he snarls. “I can’t believe you keep coming back here to rub this shit in my fucking face…”
She jumps up, grabs her daughter and turns to run. She stops. She looks to the ditch along the road, remembering something else now. Her eyes are distant, and the only sound is their three heartbeats hammering. Even Anthony feels the weight of this moment, and he stops coming toward her, looking around nervously.
Then the low growling of an animal makes him flinch. Almost in a trance, Jacki walks toward the drainage ditch, still dragging her daughter by the arm. As he tries reaching for them, Anthony leans out awkwardly, afraid to move his legs because of the growling, which is getting closer and closer. Jacki ducks out of his reach easily.
“Where are you going? You’re showing her! Why not me? Show me where he died. Show me the tree he was hanging from.”
Lost in thought, she continues to march toward the ditch. Anthony is screaming now, and the sound of the growling is louder. He slaps a nearby tree and tries not to wince.
“Is this the one?! Did he die here? Where did that motherfucker die?”
He punches another tree, aiming for the yawn of a black knot on the trunk.
“Is this the tree? Fucking tell me...”
He punches another trunk and blood splashes across the bark.
“Is this where he died after you fucked him?! This one? C’mon. I want to carve our initials in it. Maybe build us a birdhouse. One question? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? Six years of this shit…”
Toni is crying now, tugging on Jacki’s arm as she keeps walking, oblivious to both of them. Then Jacki snaps out of the trance and turns on him as she moves her child toward the car.
“What good would it have done to tell you anything?” Jacki asks him. Her calm is infectious and he stops punching trees. They stare at each other for another moment, then she pulls Toni into the car, starts it up, and peels out. Watching her drive off, Anthony punches one last tree with his bloody knuckles, showing off to nobody now.
“Fuck you. Just fucking tell me where-”
He’s throwing another fist in case she’s watching in her rear-view mirror, when a shadowy figure drops down from the tree he’s under. Before Anthony can react, he’s knocked down so hard and fast that his face and shoulders are almost underground. Then he’s underwater instead, struggling as large hands drag him over the lip of the stump to push his face deep into the murky stew. Anthony splashes and bubbles as he flails around and digs into the arms of his assailant. But the hands hold him easily until his struggles wane. The last thing Anthony hears through the burbling of stagnant water is a dog barking, seemingly a hundred miles in the sky.
Then the dark figure is quickly up and stomping away through the brush, and an animal’s shadow runs to follow. Anthony’s body spasms one last time, that final jolt of electric protest through his nervous system, not nearly strong enough to discourage the insects already finding his mouth.<
br />
Even after the sliding glass door hissed closed behind him, he could still hear the song “Tropical Hot Dog Night,” playing on his car stereo. Larry loved that song. His stereo was shot now, so sometimes it played too slow or too fast. But luckily with Don Van Vliet, born Don Glengarry Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, this rarely mattered. He loved this song in particular, a song his ex-wife was convinced chronicled his chosen profession.
“Two flamingos in a fruit fight! This is your captain speaking!” he cackled along with a song no one else could understand. “You were right! What else could we be?”
Impossibly, Captain Beefheart started skipping, too, just like it was an old vinyl LP.
“And the sky turned white in the middle of the night… sky turned white in the middle of the night… sky turned white in the middle of the night...”
His stereo had eaten a Thanksgiving feast worth of his tapes, especially when it rained, but it had never skipped like this. Sometimes eating tapes was a blessing. It made him work harder to hear a song, pay more attention to the meaning behind lyrics. If getting through an entire song wasn’t so rare, he never would have discovered that Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” started off by saying his name, his real name, in the first verse. Even “African Queen’s” version of the song, that reggae cover band, they did it, too.
How crazy was that shit?
“What are you doing here, Larry?”
Who?
She was standing at the top of the stairs, pulling the belt on her robe tight, just like they always did after his movies wrapped up. He’d forgotten her accent. She was Welsh, or pretended to be last time he talked to her, some lingering method acting from her last movie. But his memory never had room for her voice, only her deceit. Well, okay, that wasn’t true. Her accent caused its own problems when she was working for him early in their second careers. Her version of “You wanna fuckin’ kiss” sounded like “You wanna fuck and kiss,” which, even in porn, was doing things in the wrong order. And don’t get him started on her penchant for the unfortunate use of a particular bit of British slang, shouting something like, “Lick my bloody tits!” Yeeesh. And all those ice cubes she loved to chomp on? Try getting through a shoot with that kind of noise. But, hell, at least she was convincing when she had to play the nurse. She still had some lifesaving moves from her first career.
Larry was halfway up the stairs before she even started to worry. All he wanted to do was get the robe off and check. Check her skin. That was it. Then he would go.
He was three quarters of the way there when Joe Fuck came out of the bedroom behind her. No hospital for him after all, it seemed.
Larry let himself look horrified, then grabbed her by the collar to pull the robe up and over her head. Joe high-stepped down to help, as Larry quickly studied her body from head to toe.
There were no words. Nothing written into her skin at all. He smiled. Of course, she would be the one person too slick for those ridiculous tattoos to stick.
Well, there was that one word. Larry grabbed her arm and spun her around. It’s that arm move usually reserved for the Boys in Blue, or at least the movie version he filmed with her, Balls in Blue. It was faded to purple like an old sailor’s tattoo, but still visible under the wispy blonde hairs of her forearm.
“Ecnalubma.”
She’d done it herself, and it faded more and more each year. Sounded Spanish. She’d been pretending she was Welsh since she saw Catherine Zeta Jones do the opposite in Mask of Zorro. It was the only tattoo in the world that Larry wished got darker over time. Like her skin.
Or was it “Escanaba,” on her arm, the name of a town along the Banana Belt in Michigan, a village named after a river originally christened by the Natives, which translated roughly as “Land of the Red Buck.” They sure did with that casino. And Jack and his wife made a few red bucks there themselves…
There was one other tattoo, though. Larry suddenly remembered and yanked the belt on her robe. A long time ago, she’d had Larry’s name tattooed into her stomach, right around the spot where her ribs stopped protecting her from surprises. Now it was gone. This was exactly where Larry sunk his fist.
She folded over his punch like a life raft over a Great White’s nose, then tumbled down the stairs past them both. Joe tried to tackle Larry and found his other fist catching him right in the bread basket.
Is that what it’s called? Larry couldn’t remember. As Joe rolled down the steps with her, he thought about the last scene he’d filmed starring both of them as E.R. orderlies. Larry knew it was gonna be rough with all the possibilities for lingering emotions. But everyone swore they’d be professionals, and Larry tried to convince himself that she was doing this job days before she met him. So what was the problem with doing it afterwards? He’d made sure the script had them under the covers, anyway, and full of background shots for no good reason. Still, he was horrified when he threw back the sheets.
“It just slipped in!” Joe had pleaded back then.
“So did this,” Larry told him now, confusing everybody.
Then he pushed his thumbs deep into Joe’s head until he swore he could feel the heat of his brain, his memories, even the warmth of the first and last Junior High kiss that meant anything to a “Mr. Fuck.” Some of these memories followed his thumbs out with a pop, and Larry respected them enough not to wipe them off, but instead stuffed them into his pockets to keep them safe.
Campus. Jacki walks down the hall of the “Science Building” at what’s supposed to be “Emmanuellatown Community College,” according to hasty, hand-made signage. Jacki is carrying Toni in her arms. It’s an hour drive to work, and she falls asleep most days while doing it. Jacki has already put in her vacation days for the summer, but she needs to give her students their final grades. The school is a ghost town, so she’s a bit alarmed when she turns the corner of her hallway and sees the crisscross of police tape across her doorway. Her heart hammering, she tiptoes up to it, only now noticing the “Happy Birthday” balloons nearby that have broken loose. She hasn’t been around in weeks, and she decides her colleagues must have decorated her door as a joke. She rips down the yellow crêpe paper with “Crime Scene!” and smiley faces she hadn’t seen before. She steps inside her office.
She turns on the light Anthony had given her when she first got promoted to full-time. He’d painted the lampshade himself with an oil-based paint, which meant that only lower-watt bulbs could be used to keep the shade from igniting, or at the very least filling the halls with smoke. He claimed this was on purpose, that he’d painted it red and black to complete the illusion of a volcano erupting. She asked why he couldn’t have simply framed her diploma like she’d asked him to.
She puts an ear to the wall that connects to the labs where the scientists never feed the turtles. Someone is rocking out to Steely Dan, and she imagines this happening in a room of white coats and clipboards:
“So rip off your mask or the best you can ask for is a mattress in the city pound...”
Jacki lays Toni down on the yoga mat in the corner where she catches Zs during long office hours, then slumps in her chair, breathing slow, blinking slow. If any students had intended on picking up their final papers, the police tape keeps them away all day, and they both achieve the deepest sleep they have in weeks.
When she wakes, Jacki picks a yellow stream up off her foot, and that’s when she reads the tail end of the crêpe paper, where Anthony had torn it off the roll and he’d finished decorating.
“I love you, Jacki. We’re gonna have a great summer, baby. Love, Anthony.”
She wraps it around her shoulder like Miss America and curls up with Toni on the yoga mat to stroke her hair.
She doesn’t know why, but as Jacki slips into sleep again, she actually believes him.
Roadside. Same day. Jack and Rick are running up on a car wreck, tackle boxes swinging, and they’re surprised to find two bloody-nosed drivers engaged in a road-rage fistfight. A security guard from a near
by strip mall halts them with a palm, then trots over to where a pedestrian is trying to break it up. Neither man shows any signs of injury, and Jack turns to leave, even though it’s against protocol. Rick wants to examine them, but also wants to watch the fight.
“C’mon,” Jack says. “This is a waste of time. There’s got to be a better accident somewhere.”
“Who do you think you are, Batman?” Rick laughs. “You’re all serious like, ‘There’s got to be a serious crime somewhere, citizen.’ We can’t just leave anyway.”
“Let’s go, man! We’re on the border of three hospitals’ jurisdiction. There’s probably two more ice-cream trucks on the way and they don’t even need one.”
“It doesn’t work like that and you know it. What’s your friggin’ hurry?”
“Now it does and you know it,” Jack says. Rick ignores him.
Back at the fight, one man is yanking a Taser barb that caught his shirt sleeve but didn’t penetrate his skin. The man makes a lunge and catches his opponent with a clumsy sock in the ear while the security guard goes for his flashlight as if it’s a gun. Sirens grow in the distance, and Jack cocks a thumb at the bumbling circle of humanity.
“If we fuck around here long enough, someone will need to go to the hospital. Let’s go while we can still look for clues.”
“What?”
“Seriously, I’ll owe you one, okay? Hear the siren? Those guards have this under control.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Where do you want to go so bad?”
“There was something else on the scanner. I’ll tell you on the way.”
Rick stares, unconvinced.
“Please, let’s just fucking go.”
Overgrown field. Same day. Jack and Rick are at the scene of another dog mauling. They crunch through the high weeds to where a father and his daughter are crouched in the distance. The shadow of a run-down house looms over them on a hump of landfill. Suddenly, Jack starts running full-speed toward them, the first urgency he’s shown all day, and Rick is suspicious. He jogs to catch up with his partner, asking:
The Last Projector Page 25
