“Indians confuse me. They look like white people in blackface.”
“Christ,” Jacki shakes her head.
“Listen, don’t think we’re like that, Miss Ramirez. Smallberries has a cousin who adopted a black baby.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asks.
“That’s what I told him! Really, my only concern for two white people adopting a black baby is if that baby is seen out in public with both parents. You start getting that infidelity vibe,” Big Cop shudders. “But if the baby is seen with one adopted parent at a time, they’ll just assume the other parent is black and the baby isn’t a cuckoo egg. No harm, no foul.”
“Amazing. Like I said, I have to take my daughter to school. Now.”
“What did I say?”
“When you left the scene, what was Anthony doing?”
“I don’t know. I was distracted.”
“Distracted by what?”
Pause.
“I don’t know. I think there was a dog loose in the woods.”
At this, the two cops look at each other. They seem to decide something.
“We may have more questions,” says Big Cop. “We’ll let you know.”
“Stay away from that road,” orders Small Cop. “You want to show anyone else in your family where you wrecked your car, draw them a fucking map.”
They walk out, but Big Cop leans back in for a last word.
“Keep those cats under control, ma’am. I’ve had to Taser one before. It caught on fire.”
Then he slams the door. Jacki doesn’t watch them go. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out an identical matchbook and studies a burn in the center. Written on the cover are numbers so scorched and tiny they’re practically unreadable. She’ll decode it all later, she decides, and grabs the phone after she locates her daughter again outside the window.
Then she notices Toni reach down to pick up something crawling across her shoe, and Jacki puts down the phone to watch. Toni looks down at her tiny hand, then smacks her palms together. Jacki blinks in surprise, then balances the phone between her chin and her shoulder as she opens the window to yell.
“It’s time to come in! And what did you just kill?”
Toni runs toward the house.
“Don’t worry, Mom! It was a ladybug. That’s how you make a wish!”
Jacki nods her head in agreement. Why not.
That night, Jacki dreams of law enforcement, interrogations and interrobangs. She dreams of taking a police officer’s face in her hands and gently removing his mirrored glasses from his nose. The she squeeze his head, and insects boil up to the surface of his skin, covering him in wriggling, glistening black beads. When she stops squeezing, the bugs vanish back into his skin, now only visible behind his eyes, where there’s never been anywhere to hide.
Jack’s Apartment. Same day. Jack is washing a large brown Doberman with the attention usually reserved for European Indian funerals. The dog is in heaven, slowly chewing a squeeze bulb with the slow pulse of a horror movie soundtrack coming from the television. Jack checks the dog’s ears for mites, its nails for debris, scrubs its feet with a sponge, dipping it into the soapy bucket and laying it gently on the dog’s back, like everything could break at any moment. He brushes the dog’s teeth with his own toothbrush.
A knock on his bedroom door breaks the spell. It’s his roommate, mercifully with gum instead of ice filling her mouth this time. But she’s chewing faster, inspiring the dog to do the same. This competition goes on between them for several moments.
“What?!” Jack finally yells, squirting suds out of his sponge.
“God!” she says, nose wrinkled. “They’re here to pick up the dog. Fuck you for yelling at me.”
“That was a quick week,” Jack mumbles.
“You only watched him for a day,” his roommate says.
Jack says nothing to this, and towels the dog’s feet dry.
“You better not try to sneak a dog in here, like, permanent. I’ll tell the landlord.”
“Come on,” he says to the animal that’s no longer his.
“This is the last stray you bring home, too.”
They both brush past her. The dog has no interest in her either.
“I’ll tell. I mean it.”
Evil paid his two bucks at the drive-in ticket booth, then hopped and angled the front wheel of his dirt bike for the playground. He figured this would be the best vantage point to see everyone who was in attendance. He was sure Bully would at least make a guest appearance. Either that, or she was all jungled-up in a car with someone else. She probably was. It was a supermoon after all.
He sputtered up near the monkey bars, then reached down and ripped a flyer from under his front wheel. It was one of Bully’s posters on the ground, advertising a Triple Feature:
“She’s Having a Baby, Baby Boom, and Three Men and a Baby! And Kids Under 5 Drink Free!”
It was a joke, of course. He’d seen the marquee when he drove in. Same theme, but three very different movies:
“It’s Alive, It’s Alive II: It Lives Again and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive. No Kids Under 5, We Mean It!”
But Bully’s gag must have fooled a ton of people, because the playground was packed to the gills with children. He looked up to see a woman on the screen being wheeled into an emergency room. The movie had just started, but it was only a matter of time before people would react. He’d seen the ads for It’s Alive and knew what was coming, even though the teaser trailer was just a slow zoom on a crib with a claw hanging out of it. Combined with some inhuman crying, it was certainly creepy. Now that he thought about it, Bully was there when he first saw it.
“Does ‘Rowdy’ Roddy ‘Pied’ Piper play the baby?” she’d asked him, then laughed, “No, that would be It’s Alive V: They Live Again!”
Then he saw the dog tied to the slide. It was “Hansel,” the German Shepherd he’d stashed in her trunk. That was the name on its badge anyway. He’d been shocked that a police dog wouldn’t have been sprung from the pound immediately. But it was fallout from everybody’s German Shepherds impersonating officers these days. And Hansel stood frozen like a good German, maybe more like an American soldier behind enemy lines. Some of the children stopped to pet it, but mostly they gave the dog no notice. It was one of those crazy covered slides that drew their attention like the Pied Piper, an especially rowdy one.
Evil revved his engine to inch a little closer, and that’s when he saw the collar around Hansel’s neck. It was beautiful but hideous, alien yet familiar, a colorful menagerie of plastic, wires, and rat traps, the homemade neck bomb finally assembled in all its glory.
Bully crept her way around the cars, sticking close to the ones with the most steam on their windows. She figured they’d be the least likely to notice her, guessing there was a good chance several cars contained solitary masturbating men, like everywhere else in the world. But one steamy car did notice her. She was crouched down by a front tire when she heard a fingernail tap, tap, tap on the window above her. Then a forearm squeaked through the fog on the glass to reveal a leering face and finger pointing down below his steering wheel. Gross. She moved on faster.
She stepped on one of her own flyers and laughed. All the free advertising she’d provided this place, and not once had she asked for thanks. But she deserved The Spotlight Kid’s attention. Just like she’d deserved The Butch Cassidy’s attention a year earlier.
Last fall, right before it got too cold, Butch Cassidy had promised the “Perfect Apocalypse Triple Feature!” It was Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, and for anyone who was still awake in their cars that late, the little-known Ultimate Warrior with Max von Sydow and Yul Brynner as the titular badasses. And if you sat on the top of the tallest slide in nearby Sun Oil Park on one of those nights, mesmerized by the monstrous silent figures in the distance, you could weave all three storylines into one. Minimal dialogue, long, lazy pacing, and all of these factors revealing to Bu
lly about a third of the way through the third film that Ultimate Warrior really was the father of the two most popular end-of-the-world action flicks in recent memory. She got more of a sense of accomplishment from this light bulb over her head than all five years of community college put together.
So when Butch Cassidy switched to porn, she may have been upset. She may have snapped a little. Just a bit. She’d spotted the marquee and wrongly assumed E.T.: The Extra Testicle was a Cheech & Chong parody. And a quick glimpse at the second feature’s title, The Thang, and anyone would have been forgiven her if she mistook it for John Carpenter’s seminal film. Then the first movie started. She didn’t realize how in demand satirical titles had become in the porn industry. Shockingly, copyright law let parodies of a parody slip through, too, even if that kind of double-negative math should have caused you to end up right back where you started with the real thing. Straight-to-video knockoffs were even less regulated. But on the big big screen? She couldn’t believe it. It would have been funny if Butch wasn’t the second-to-last drive-in for miles, which pretty much made it the last drive-in ever as far as locals were concerned.
Fuck ‘em. They should have taken real movies more seriously.
“Let me get this straight, you put the lime in the coconut, drank ‘em both up…” she sang to herself.
In her hands was a huge remote control, the kind with the big batteries. The one you got with the most expensive toys. Or the most explosive.
The three police officers passed by the booth without buying tickets. Officer Dwayne B. Bigby, Officer Something “Bucky Balls” Something, and a third cop who was mere hours out of the academy. No one would ever learn that guy’s nickname.
They all were being led by three bomb-sniffing German Shepherds, noses to the group and straining their harnesses. They were heading for the playground under the movie. Officer Bigby was on point, shaking his head in disgust at the cars with their windows shut, drive-in speakers forgotten on the ground. He hoped they were full of couples, sneaking alone time under the pretense of seeing a flick. But in his experience, he knew it was more likely there were nothing but men inside those cars, miserable and alone. Bigby guessed the drive-in’s business decision was inevitable. Once they lost the couples’ dollars, it was time for porn. And he’d heard from his superiors that this drive-in had already gotten the necessary permits to switch to an all-adult venue. Just like they’d done at the late, great Butch Cassidy across town. This was always the last resort to keep a drive-in going. Bigby sighed. He hoped when that day came, another strangely unseasonal tornado would bring this place down, too.
He kicked a speaker out of the way to get his dog to stop snorting it. Bigby had a theory about those speakers. He guessed it became impossible to stop the masturbating once they switched to pumping sound through an A.M. channel instead of such a stone-age sound system. Sure, the old-school speakers may have been crackling and muffled, but it kept the windows down, and that was half the battle.
An impossible tornado is righteous retribution, Bigby thought. Drive-ins as a way of watching real movies are done. Drive-ins were always doomed though. People needed to sit together like respectable human beings. Once they started hiding in the trunks of their cars like animals, it was over.
He looked up and down the rows of cars, then followed the glare of some headlights to the faces of the children. They’d stopped playing to watch the movie, and, for the first time, Bigby noticed how many kids were there. Then he saw the horror on their faces and looked up just in time to watch a baby the size of a Buick ripping the throat out of a nurse. More lights flickered on. Engines roared and doors slammed. Mothers and fathers started screaming for their broods, and he turned to see the brights ignite scores of terrified eyes on the playground.
Then he saw his dog tied to the slide. The other dogs did, too, and they started to growl.
He unsnapped his gun for the first time in his life.
Larry was face down in the mud and running out of air. Finding it impossible to punch someone while turtled on his stomach he concentrated on doing just one small push-up to catch his breath. Straining hard, his head cleared the muck, and his mouth kept shoveling cold grits as he wrenched his head side to side. A man nursing a broken arm with a spider web on the elbow gave Larry one last shot behind the ear, and Larry crawled under the safety of a nearby Chevy van. He looked around the tires to try to map out a new path to the bunker. He spotted his movie reel near the front wheel and lunged to shove it out the other side. The one-armed man who’d been beating his ass heard the thud and ran around to meet him. Crawling out as fast as he could, Larry hit his head on the van’s driver’s-side door and looked up to see another spider on an elbow. A real spider.
Spiders on every elbow now? Impossible.
He stood to find himself staring at an old man covered in spiders from head to hands. The old man looked down his nose in contempt while Larry tried to figure out how someone could be watching a movie at the drive-in without a speaker. He climbed the door, ready to demand an explanation, and was amazed to find the passenger door come off in his hands. So was Larry’s assailant, apparently, who retreated into the dark, wrapping his limp arm in his sleeve.
Then Larry saw the wheels inside the van, the big wheels under the legs of this ancient, spider-covered man, and he realized why the door had come off so easily. The passenger’s seat had been given some low-rent wheelchair modifications that ate up most of the metal. The seat was gone, actually, and the door was held on with wire, vice clamps, and those plastic clips you used to keep your potato chips fresh.
How about wheels within wheels within wheels? Larry thought. Why not?
“I know an old man who swallowed a car,” Larry sang. “He’ll go far…”
Larry laughed and rubbed his eyes hard, but the old man’s spiders never went away. His wrinkled cheeks and forehead were covered in them, faded green creepy-crawlies of every size and variation, hairy, spindly, bellies bloated with babies or poison, some cartoonish, most remarkably realistic. Larry was in awe. He couldn’t imagine the kind of man who cared so little about assimilation with other human beings that he would get spiders tattooed on his fucking face. The old man spit at Larry to snap him out of it, spouting gibberish.
“You here to wash my cock? Come on, nurse. Use that oatmeal soap like I like. Exfoliate my shit. You gonna pay for that?”
In his lap, the man was clutching a stuffed animal, a key-lime-colored monkey. It looked like it had been a Curious George at one point, but now it was covered in sparkling spray paint. Larry thought of the AIDS monkey in the news recently, something that had been part of many high-level conversations in his accidental profession. Damon loved to spread that bullshit propaganda about an HIV “Patient Zero,” and how someone supposedly fucked a monkey in Africa to start that whole epidemic. Larry would try to bring up the movie And The Band Played On and how Reagan dropped the ball, but everybody loved that cowboy cocksucker.
A new problem was also rearing its head, where increasingly conspiracy-minded masturbators had Sherlocked that AIDS and condoms were invading the porn industry at the same time for the opposite reason. Those clowns would one day be convinced vaccines caused autism.
The old man made a grab for Larry’s throat, and Larry watched his sleeves come off at the cuffs to peel back more layers of the oily chicken skin that was sloughing off his body like a rotten onion. His itching had subsided a bit, though, like it was three people deep.
Larry decided maybe he should steal that green monkey just to be safe. Maybe get it back to the lab for some tests when this was all over. He imagined millions of green monkeys working in the mouthwash factory on some new-fangled AIDS repellant, every so often one monkey tumbling into the grinder and ten more pissing green on it for laughs until it all flowed out into the Maumee river and into Lake Erie with the algae to put out the garbage fires and start the cycle all over again.
So he grabbed it by the tail, and the old man howled, picking
up the passenger’s door one-handed to shield himself. Larry struggled with old arms like granite, and suddenly he knew why this man was covered in spider tattoos. This is what happened to comic book villains when they retired.
Then the old man finally got ahold of Larry’s neck and held tight, dragging his yellow old-man nails across Larry’s Adam’s apple. Larry backpedaled, bringing most of the old bastard outside with him.
Damn, old man fights like a puma. A puma in a wheelchair anyway…
There was a rip as the old man and all his spiders and wheels tumbled onto the ground, and Larry was satisfied to stand up with about half of the stuffed monkey intact. He made a wish.
But that’s when the rest of the crowd turned on him. Car doors started to slam, irate, sad-sack, moviegoer loners crashing his party with shock and anger pinching their red foreheads like toddlers before a tantrum. And right about then, the flyer for Three Men And A Baby, Baby Boom, and She’s Having A Baby flipped over to reveal an opportunistic and earnest anti-abortion ad that Larry thought was far creepier than intended:
“Before I was born, I had hiccups. Before I was born, I had a dream. Before I was born, I had fingernails.”
Ugh.
As he stood there making a paper airplane out of it, he couldn’t help singing his wife’s favorite song, the one with 984 “baby, baby, baby”s. He was singing a lot lately. He switched up the lyrics this time, making sure he stressed the right syllable so it sounded right.
“Tat-too removal machine…”
They were moving in so fast now, swarming to help up the old man but looking eager to punish Larry as soon as they were done. He retrieved his Goldberg reel again, now trailing a weary bit of tongue, and ran for the concession stand. The projection bunker was close. Directly behind the popcorn.
He turned the corner and froze. Standing in the doorway was a small boy with another toy, but this one wasn’t fluffy like the monkey. Larry recognized it as the tie-in G.I. Joe-sized skeletal monster from the horror film Alien. He laughed, remembering its hard-R rating, another attempt to move science fiction into the adult arena, while at the same time courting children with a line of tie-ins. He even saw ViewMaster cartridges for Alien, too, another desperate move in what had to be the most misguided attempt at product placement ever. Then again, there were tons of kids at a horror triple feature right now with no signs of trauma yet. Things to come?
The Last Projector Page 28
