The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  “So I’m finishing the last ear of corn,” Little Mike is saying, “And suddenly I’m tasting metal. And now I’m worried because you shouldn’t be finding no buckshot in your corn, you know? Your turkey, sure, maybe your squirrel, but not your friggin’ corn...”

  “Uh huh,” Big Mike mutters.

  “…then I realized that my mouth feels weird, and I flick my tongue around and find this fang, and it ain’t even Halloween yet. Turns out I swallowed half my tooth.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, so? That’s a terrible combination, teeth and corn? Now when I shit next it’s gonna be smiling back at me!”

  “Ha!” Big Mike suddenly frowns. “Wait. Why do you say smiling back? Why would you be smiling at your shit to begin with?”

  “Relief? Pride? I don’t know. It’s a joke, stupid. You know what I mean? Hey, a dog smiles at his own shit, don’t he?”

  “Dogs always look like they’re smiling.”

  They stop when Jack and Rick roll the victim past them.

  “Oh, shit,” Rick says to Jack. “It’s Of Mice and Men to the rescue.” He turns to the two Mikes and waves them away.

  “Hey. I don’t know what report you got, but there’s no dogs here for you, dead or otherwise.”

  The two Mikes slump visibly in disappointment.

  “Yeah,” Jack adds. “Take Lenny to see the rabbits or something. Did you know you’re about ten miles outside of your electric fence jurisdiction? Didn’t you feel your collars buzzing?”

  “No,” Big Mike says, answering the second question.

  “We heard the call on our scanner,” Little Mike says. “We just wanted to see it.”

  “We know you did,” Rick says.

  Over the girl, Jack stops working when he notices her face. They’re in the Hispanic side of town, and she looks a lot like Jacki. He shakes it off, telling himself that any pretty girl down here would look like her, too. Still rattled in spite of the casual racism, he turns to walk back to the ambulance and starts to pull out more equipment. Rick grabs his arm.

  “What the fuck are you doing with that?”

  Jack looks down to see that he was dragging the defibrillator unit. Confused, he quickly shoves it back into the ambulance, grabbing the gurney instead.

  “Sorry,” Jack says. “I thought I knew that girl, then I thought... never mind.”

  He collapses the metal legs and reaches for her again, then stops again, as if he’s seeing something that really disturbs him. Rick quickly pulls him up by his arm and gets nose to nose.

  “Dude, your hypothetical dead dog scenarios are weird enough for one day,” he hisses. “Please get your head out your ass and get to work.”

  Jack looks past Rick to the girl.

  “Sorry! It’s just… I just think something strange is going on here. I mean, does that look like a dog bite on her calf? Or does it look like someone wanted it to look like a dog bite?

  Rick gets louder.

  “What?” He calms himself down, then says with his eyes closed. “Jack, just clear her leg so we can close these doors. You’re driving.”

  Jack leans in real close.

  “Hold on, that’s not a dog bite. It’s a tattoo of a dog bite. Why would anyone get a tattoo like this? What if every time I thought I was seeing a dog bite, it was actually just a drawing instead. This is starting to make some sense…”

  “Not at all.”

  “Listen, just switch with me on the way there. I could ask her some questions like-”

  “Dude, you’re scaring me. She’s in shock. Get up front.”

  “No, it’s worse. Was she really attacked by a dog?” Jack asks, blocking Rick from climbing in the back. “I mean, who saw a dog?”

  “That kid saw a dog.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “What the fuck are you… okay, tell me this. How do you fake a dog attack?”

  “Well, first you’d still need a dog.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you said there was no dog!”

  “You need a dog to fake a dog...”

  “That kid saw a dog.”

  Jack runs over to a nearby car and starts kicking the bumper sticker. It reads:

  “A Dog May Be A Man’s Best Friend, But A Tree Is A Dog’s Best Friend!”

  “You see this shit? Come on, that can’t be a coincidence. Maybe the kid saw this and got the idea. Wait… maybe the guy who owns that car has the dog we’re looking for. I’ll wait here-”

  Rick finally snaps and walks over to grab a handful of Jack’s neck. His hands are big, and his thumbs almost touch his fingertips, like any normal-sized man choking up on a baseball bat. A small crowd of children has gathered, and Jack searches their faces, finally seeming to come to his senses. Even the Mikes are confused. A little kid hands a small dead dog to Little Mike. Half its face is skeletonized.

  “Thanks, buddy!” Little Mike says. “I think this one is innocent though. Been in Doggy Heaven for more than a little while.”

  “Goddammit,” Rick whispers quiet but savage to Jack. “Do your fucking job.”

  Jack slowly untangles Rick’s hand from his throat and climbs into the driver’s seat.

  The Mikes get into their truck, too, chattering like kids, Little Mike swinging the dead dog by its hind leg like a toy. He opens the back door of his truck and throws the dog against the wall. The kids scream.

  Rick looks at them, then back at Jack. He doesn’t need to say it. Usually, Rick and Jack hated the Mikes because it reminded them of what they could end up doing.

  Today they remind them it’s what they already do.

  Once upon a time, Bully heard a story about a cop who unknowingly bore the load of a bomb on his shoulders for an entire eight-hour work day. Until it was allegedly detonated by a disgruntled former partner. Bully didn’t believe this, figuring that unless you’re Flavor Flav, there were only a few things someone would voluntarily put around their necks that could hide the weight of a bomb all day. The story was detailed in a memo marked “A.I.” or “I.A.” (Internal Affairs or Artificial Intelligence, it was all the same to her), but Bully guessed it eventually morphed into an urban legend chain letter by the time she got it. It read more like a gleefully fucked-up Aesop’s Fable, though, specifically that one with the turtle and the bunny:

  “The scene opens on the sun-cooked side of the highway. A police officer’s decision to wear his bulletproof vest 24/7 combined with a chronic lack of exercise during the holiday season has slowed him considerably. His dashboard camera reveals a weary, sluggish man who’s forgotten most of his training when it comes to approaching vehicles, and he’s clearly unaware of what is about to happen next.

  “One minute, he’s hunched over the driver’s side window, fumbling for a pen to write a reckless-op ticket, the tortoise-like hump of his vest bunching up between his shoulder blades. The next minute, both barrels of a shotgun are lifting his chin high, followed immediately by the silent flashbulbs of that figure-eight, a blast of infinity which propels his head up through the blue stop sign of his cap and out of the frame forever.

  “What the cruiser’s dash cam doesn’t show, however, is the unlucky officer’s head traveling in a lazy football spiral, rebounding off the Interstate-75 mile marker and tumbling up the yellow lines of the on-ramp. Back on the highway, it pinballs unnoticed between the wheels of rush-hour traffic for fifteen minutes, until it finally becomes lodged in the maze of a lowrider’s exhaust system. The cranium is then carried over fifty miles from the scene of the crime, pinned even tighter by some uneven railroad tracks, lower jaw still frozen in surprise, now a cow-catcher to scoop cigarette butts and gravel, even the occasional candy wrapper piled deep in its maw.

  “The boy piloting the gleaming, two-toned machine is unaware of his gruesome cargo until his last stop of the night, the King of Kings Hydraulics competition. For the first time ever, he places third and is awarded a lucky rabbit’s-foot
keychain and a small trophy topped with a league bowler whose ball had been hastily removed with scissors. The first-place winner, however, encouraged by the frenzy of a crowd who has noticed first the blood, then the deceased officer’s visage leering down from the jungle of undercarriage piping during the final Victory Bounce, surrenders his first-place title to the boy, which included the tallest trophy of them all, almost five feet from base to hood ornament, a chrome flying pig polished to perfection.

  “At the ensuing press conference, the Chief of Police explains they have no leads at all, except for a strange necklace found draped around the remains of the officer’s ragged neck, a tangled menagerie of turquoise, beads and string initially mistaken for a bomb, but which is later identified as an inexpensive dreamcatcher, sold by the hundreds at most gas stations in the area.

  “‘What’s that?’ a reporter asks.

  “‘Bunch of shit hanging off a hoop,’ the Chief answers, impatiently looking around for a better breed of question, the kind a fallen hero deserves. ‘Catches dreams,’ he adds.

  “‘Sure does, motherfucker!’ the boy shouts at his television, now a local celebrity who’s been quickly cleared of any connection in the shooting. His trophy stands proudly on top of the TV, mere inches from the ceiling, vibrating to the beat of something called Kraken XIII, the only CD he owns.

  “The next day, the boy’s sister raises the hydraulics and checks every inch of the 1973 Impala’s undercarriage, finding everything that, impossibly, the forensic team has missed or ignored: a garage sale sign, the rest of a turtle, a child’s jumper covered in pink starfish that would have likely solved an unrelated kidnapping, one of the new ten-dollar bills, a dust cover to typically sanitized version of children’s fables, and exactly half a gigantic foam cowboy hat.

  “‘It’s like when they cut open sharks,’ she whispers, cradling as much of the treasure in her arms as she could.

  “‘Only if they kept on swimming,’ her brother answers proudly, baffling her.

  “‘Is all of this stuff under every car?’ she wonders.

  “The question terrifies him, minimizing his little victory, and they never crawl under one again.”

  Bullshit, Bully thought, every time she finished it.

  Variations included remnants of a bomb around the cop’s ragged neck instead of a dreamcatcher, or even the “tangled menagerie of turquoise, beads, and string being initially mistaken for a bomb.” However, the chain letter always ended with a happy “Send this to five of your friends for good luck!” or some solid fear-mongering like “Have you looked under your car lately?!”

  Bully practically lived under her car, looking for treasure and bombs and dreaming of bullet-proof vests even before the chain letter.

  Then, one day, she actually tried on a Kevlar vest that one of those over-eager, “Just Say No To Drugs” officers brought to her high school.

  Then she let him give her an over-eager ride home.

  Then she let him take her to Butch Cassidy drive-in by his house to play some over-eager grab ass over the gear shift and the shotgun lock. He’d had all sorts of props for his school demonstrations tucked away in his squad car, some more realistic than others, some trying to pretend they were fake, like the bricks of modeling clay with a couple token birthday candles jammed in the top.

  Those birthday cakes turned out to be way more powerful than a ring of rat traps could ever hope to be…

  Bully watched the three officers lead their dogs toward the playground and imagined explosive vests and dreamcatchers strapped to all their chests.

  Dare to dream, she thought. Oh, the Fourth of July fireworks I always wanted…

  She saw a little boy listening to some headphones and dug a cassette tape out of her pocket to give to him. The little boy ejected his song, and pushed play on hers. He listened as best he could, mostly because the girl’s voice on the tape that was reading the otherwise official-sounding report sounded fun. Barely older than he was:

  “On August 28th, at 1:30 p.m., a woman named Angela ‘Stretch’ Strongarm, a 10-year veteran dispatcher, went to a nearby gas station around Eerie Drive and Ohio Rue, Pennsylvania, called Mama-Mia’s Pizza-Ria and ordered two sausage and pepperoni pies, one with pineapple. The gas station’s surveillance cameras record them arriving at the station and later speeding away, knocking over a dumpster during their escape. Mike ‘The Machine’ Green, a local man whose number was logged as he ordered the pizza, was later revealed to be a vegetarian. He would also deny making the call. A jury of his peers would agree that this combination of ingredients was, at best, ‘inedible.’ Note manual correction as a court stenographer accidentally typed, ‘impossible’ instead. Soon after this getaway, at 2:00 p.m., 41-year-old Ryan ‘Hells’ Bells set out to deliver this suspicious order for two pizzas to an even more suspicious address, which turned out to be the location of a local radio tower on 371 Peach Street. The collar forcibly attached to Mr. Bells at this location was ‘unique in its construction,’ including a lock with five keyholes and a 9-digit combination dial. It was set by the perpetrators to detonate in precisely 75 minutes. Bureau officials also said it was a triple-banded metal collar that had been fastened and locked around the bomb victim’s neck, and that the crude locking mechanism kept it in place. The attached bomb had several facades, including turquoise, beads, and string, as well as several copper wires that went nowhere, connected to nothing at all, only making it appear as if the device was much more complicated than it was. It was also determined, before detonation, that the collar had a faint, citrus odor. This was reported by the bomb squad as ‘not entirely unpleasant in small doses…’”

  “As soon as we got off the ride, he said he was done with me,” Jacki is saying. “With Toni and me.”

  Night time. Jack and Jacki are sitting at a table in a bar, between a jukebox and a band. The band is noisily setting up their gear on the stage behind them, and Jacki snickers when she sees the drummer roll out his equipment. Written on the bass drum is the name, “Relationshit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “So, Anthony was Toni’s father?”

  “Yes,” Jacki says, shaking her head ‘no.’ “I mean, he raised her. But he’s not the biological father. That’s one of the reasons he’s gone, I guess.”

  “You mean one of the reasons he left.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” Jacki says, unconvincingly.

  “What did they say happened to him?” Jack watches the band, worried they’re going to start playing and interrupt them at any moment.

  “He took off,” she says, tilting her head slightly. “I don’t know. No one knows.”

  “So, when I saw you in the hospital the other day, when your daughter was spitting at me like I was on fire-”

  “She wasn’t spitting at you,” she interrupts. “A doctor had just scraped the inside of her cheek. I guess he wanted to see if she was allergic to anything. Then he tricked her with a needle to take blood for the paternity test I wanted.”

  Jack smiles.

  “Actually, you got the two things backwards. That needle was to check for allergies. And they scrape the inside of your mouth for the paternity test.”

  “Really? You’d think you guys would need blood to find out who the father was, instead of just some spit. Saliva doesn’t seem nearly important enough.”

  “I don’t know. Would you rather have someone spit on you or bleed on you?”

  “What? What the hell kind of question is that?”

  Jack has no explanation.

  “Okay, now that I think about it. I love the fact that a paternity test is done with spit.” Jacki slaps her palm on the table, rattling Jack’s beer. “In fact, I downright adore it. It makes the issue seem perfectly irrelevant.”

  “Well, it’s not the saliva they’re after, but it’s still an important test,” he goes on, missing her point. “They’re scraping the inside of her cheek to collect cells to test the DNA, and it’
s more complicated than people-”

  “Anyway,” Jacki cuts him off. “Anthony always suspected that Toni wasn’t his. He made me take that test. Even though she always called him ‘daddy,’ knew him as ‘daddy,’ had no other ‘daddy,’ it apparently wasn’t enough for him. Hell, he probably made me take it to test whether I was his, too,” she laughs.

  “Did you get the results back?”

  “No,” Jacki looks away. “It doesn’t really matter now anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She studies his face as if she’s trying to decode something. The guitarist strums some catchy tune-up noodling, and Jacki mutters the lyrics to the Snow Patrol song along with it.

  “Let’s waste time, chasing cars around our head.”

  “What?” he asks.

  She suddenly decides to tell him more than she intended.

  “Let me tell you a story. I met Anthony the week my father died. We’d spent that first night talking in my car about our families and all that. And I said a lot about my father, none of it good. But I never got around to saying that he was sick or dying from throat cancer or anything, okay? Because he was, okay? I just didn’t feel like talking about it. Then, the next weekend, the day before we went out again, they call and tell me my father is gone. Choked in his sleep. I had all sorts of crazy feelings about it, and I wasn’t ready to tell Anthony because I didn’t know him that well. Neither him or my dad, actually, if you want to know the truth of it. And I still don’t know why I didn’t call off the date. So, a week goes by and, for no good reason, I’m still avoiding the subject of my father’s death. Then something happens where I finally have to tell him that my dad’s dead - I forget what - and he gives me the craziest goddamn look. It’s like first he doesn’t believe me. Then he’s wondering what kind of person doesn’t mention the death of their father, right? Especially when it happened the night before we were in bed together. I think he was convinced I was lying about it, at least at the time, maybe to get sympathy or attention or something? Otherwise, it just wouldn’t make sense to him that I would