The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  But as she slows for a red light, Toni is cupping her hand to conceal what she’s written, and Jacki realizes it’s the first time her daughter has ever hidden anything from her. Then their car is suddenly bumped from behind, and she turns around to see Jack at the wheel of another ambulance, frantically waving for her to pull over. Jacki adjusts her mirror so he can’t catch her eyes as she debates running the light. Jack inches forward to bump their car again. After a third nudge, he flashes the lights and gives a quick burst with the broken siren.

  They all sound like that, she thinks.

  Toni starts to cry, and two burly men who are watching from another lane climb from their cars and run over to Jack. They start pounding on the ambulance window, and he rolls it down a couple inches, smiling.

  “Hey, fuckface, what the fuck are you doing?” the first man yells, spittle making Jack blink.

  “Guys, relax. I know her.”

  “Then why is she looking straight ahead?” the second man asks.

  “Please, this has nothing to do with-”

  The light turns green, and the first man turns to run back to his car. The second man waits a moment, then punches off Jack’s side view mirror and spits on his hood.

  “You’re lucky you’re driving that thing, motherfucker. It might save time later.”

  Jack sits idling, shaking his head, and the cars behind him start piling up and honking. He finally rolls out and catches up with Jacki’s car at the next light, pulling up on her left to roll down his window and talk. She’s rolling hers back up.

  “Hey!” Jack shouts. “Just listen!”

  Don’t say it, Jacki thinks.

  But he says it.

  “I’m trying to save you!”

  Jack gets out and runs around her car, Jacki watching in disbelief as he pounds on her windshield. Amazingly, Toni stops crying and watches him with interest, still drawing in her hand.

  “I’m not lying to you,” he pants. “But I have a few more questions. Like… how exactly were you fucking that guy when you crashed your car six years ago? I can’t picture it.”

  Jacki runs the light, her bumper cracking Jack in the knee and spinning him onto the road. She watches him rolling around in pain as she gets out her cell phone.

  “Hello? I’d like to report a murder.”

  She looks at her own eyes in the mirror.

  “And a rape.”

  Then she rolls down the window, breathes deep.

  “One question for you, officer,” she says as she speeds up. “Which one do you think is worse?”

  Empty apartment. Later that day. Derek the janitor is making a snow angel in his plush orange carpet. His shirt unbuttoned, a pair of binoculars rocks on his sweaty stomach. All around him are wires and pieces of a police scanner that he’s disassembled. Rows of glass soda bottles on the floor line every wall, filled to the brim with cloudy fluid. He’s staring at the ceiling where photographs and magazine pages of hundreds dark-skinned girls have been tacked and taped, all ages, toddlers to middle-age. He stops making his angel and puts the binoculars over his face, turning the dial to focus on one girl in particular.

  It’s Jacki’s daughter.

  Next to his head is a small tape recorder crackling with a muffled conversation from Jack and Jacki’s date.

  “…ever dress as something particularly creepy for Halloween and then no one talks to you for a year? Back in EMT school, me and a couple friends did ‘Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost’ for a costume, and my roommate, she just wore a sheet with holes in it, but me and my girlfriend, I mean my roommate, we dressed like a typical boy and his father, her wearing a Little League outfit, and me in a tucked-in Hawaiian shirt, mom jeans, big cell phone in a holster, and a Jimmy Buffet trucker cap. It’s ironic, but nothing makes you look more like a dad than mom jeans. So that was all creepy enough, but I think it was how I kept saying to her, ‘You remind me of your mother,’ while putting my tongue down her throat that threw everyone off for so long. Well, I thought it was funny anyway…”

  “So do I,” Derek says as the tape runs out on his hamburger and he clicks a stop button shaped like a tongue of tomato.

  Jack’s face is also visible in the photograph, as well Jacki’s leg that Toni used to hide behind. But it’s Toni that fills the frame, hiding from Jack but smiling at Derek as he snapped her picture, a smile that no one caught but him.

  Jacki’s house. Same night. Jack runs up to Jacki’s front door and knocks with the authority of someone with good news to deliver. Toni opens the door a crack, peering out through the space under the chain. She’s sniffling, tears in her eyes.

  “Mommy ain’t home,” she pouts.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack asks, crouching down.

  Toni looks past him and sees the ambulance parked in her driveway. She frowns and wipes her nose.

  “What’s ‘eck-nail-ub-muh’ mean?” she asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Right there. On the front. What’s that mean? Sounds Spanish.”

  Jack turns to look.

  “That’s just the word ‘ambulance.’”

  Toni shakes her head and holds out her hand.

  “Unh-unh. It’s Spanish.”

  Jack looks down at the red letters scrawled in her palm.

  “Yeah, that says ‘ambulance,’ honey. It’s just backwards.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does. It’s the truth. It’s written like that so you can read it when it sneaks up behind you. It’s not backwards in a mirror. You can check in your bathroom.”

  “I know all that! So, why were you chasing us?”

  “Chasing you?”

  “That truck was chasing us. And it was screaming.”

  “Screaming? Oh, you mean the siren? Yeah, sometimes our sirens are a little off.”

  “It sounded like it was hurt,” Toni says, eyes down.

  “Well, that siren wasn’t me. That was a different ambulance. They all say ‘eck-nail-ub-muh’ on them,” he smiles.

  Toni looks skeptical.

  “The siren works fine on mine though, I promise.”

  “Prove it.”

  “What?” Jack is surprised by her challenge.

  “Turn it on and prove it.”

  “I can’t, Toni. It would scare the neighbors.”

  “Why are you driving it when you’re not at work? Is that where you live?”

  “Pretty much,” he says, weary of her questions and checking the windows for her mother. “We leave the keys in them for everybody. And it has a special radio I like to listen to. Toni, why were you crying?”

  “I stepped on a spider and killed it,” Toni whispers, hand over her face. “I didn’t mean to kill anybody.”

  “Don’t cry,” Jack says gently. “I’ll bet you didn’t really kill it.”

  Toni peeks out between her fingers, looking hopeful.

  “Really?”

  “Really. You might think you killed it, but you can’t really tell with spiders. They’ve been around for a long, long time, and they know how to curl up and hide in between the treads on your shoes. You look down and think it’s dead, but it’s just waiting for you to keep walking.”

  “It had stuff coming out,” Toni says, doubtful again.

  “No, that’s just a trick they play,” Jack says, shaking his head. “They spit when they see you coming.”

  Toni’s eyes are wide and clear. She seems relieved.

  “You know. The same thing happened to me once, Toni. I hit a beaver with my car, and I was all upset. But when I got out and looked around, the beaver was running away. I thought for sure it was dead, and it wasn’t even limping. I think I saw it jump up and eat a lightning bug on its way out...”

  “Beavers don’t eat lightning bugs”

  “They don’t? Maybe it was a possum then.”

  “They don’t eat bugs neither. And they sure can’t jump!”

  “How do you know? You ever throw one a Frisbee?”

  “
No. Sounds scientific though.”

  Jack blinks. He didn’t think a child so young would have such a mastery of sarcasm.

  “So you didn’t throw one a Frisbee.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. Now go squish another spider, killer.”

  Toni slams the door, and Jack starts to leave. Then the door opens and she steps out, hopping as she puts her shoes on. She takes his hand and leads him down the steps to look under the porch.”

  “Can I show you something?”

  Jack’s heart jumps, then he’s disgusted with himself for being scared of a little girl.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Under there. You think it’s still alive?”

  “Think what’s still alive?”

  “The spider!”

  “Oh,” Jack says, relieved and checking the windows again. Then Toni reaches into the dark and pulls out a dead cat, fluid pouring from its mouth, back end flopping like a wet towel. Unnerved, Jack backs up so fast he falls on his ass. Toni just smiles, holding it at arm’s length.

  “Think this one can jump?” she asks.

  He practically runs back to the ambulance and turns up the police scanner to listen, almost burning rubber to leave before the little girl gets to his door.

  At any drive-in built in the ‘70s, the cement bunker that housed a projector was kind of like a real bunker. And because the beam was so low to the ground, some places put up barbed wire to stop you from stuffing something into those flickering peepholes, just like they stopped the Allies at Normandy from stuffing something into those machine guns. And until they started making what the drive-in veterans called a “Glory Hole” higher up off the ground, if you were the kind of kid that wasn’t afraid of getting your clothes torn or leaving a little bit of blood in your popcorn, you could hop that fence and walk face-first into the firefight, 20,000 lumens of blazing lighthouse to be exact, and you would effectively disrupt everyone’s movie. Hell, you could make giant shadow animals in that beam if you had the balls.

  And that’s exactly what Bully had. And that’s exactly what Bully did.

  The Last Projectionist had just switched over to Larry’s film, and he really did have his thumbs in his overalls like some sort of blue-collar hero for a good minute or two while the movie started threading through its extra bit of tail. But no one would ever see this. The Last Projectionist had already received notice that he was losing his job for good and this would be his last weekend, so tonight he’d brought something special when he stole a nip from his bottle. He’d brought a set of wooden goblets recently carved on the spinning lathe in his garage, the finest drinkware he’d ever crafted. He used green wood this time, so he could carve those edges paper thin, not quite as transparent as glass, but good enough to hold up to the sun. And he wanted to hold them up to the sun just once, for a toast. But it had been a gray, miserable week. They were right when they said the sun was usually Kryptonite to a drive-in (translation, “Kryptonite to a projectionist”), but lately he’d craved the sunshine more and more. He even found himself day-dreaming of the worst thing in the world for his chosen profession, a day the sun never went down. Hell, even an extra hour would be a drive-in disaster.

  So when the sun ran to hide, he took his two wooden goblets to the “Glory Hole” to catch the living light of the beam, to see if he’d carved them thin enough to disappear.

  He’d gone through quite a few prototypes, and settled on the two goblets that had warped the least, the only two that didn’t explode on the bell of the cup’s flower like the rest of them, always splitting into rivers of cracks just after drying. These were the only two that had survived the process, and he planned on filling one with a bit of rye and toasting a job he’d done for twenty goddamn years, hopefully sharing a drink with someone. Or not. Didn’t matter really. He was going to ask that crazy fucker who brought the last movie, but he’d ran off way too fast.

  So he held his drink high.

  But the beam was wrong. It felt too hot on this end, shook his cup, as if the light was… bulging, or like someone was pinching off a vein just as their heart sped up.

  He put down the rye and glanced at the reel in a panic. There was still plenty of movie for the projector to eat. So he got on his toes to look out through the peephole and see what was clogging the works.

  It was a naked girl. And she was overshadowing the other naked girls on the screen. The last movie Larry had given him was probably Larry’s best film, but to everyone at the drive-in that night, it would have looked as unremarkable as interchangeable oceans of skin, fucking away their indifference on a monolith that was grayer and bigger than the one that educated the apes in 2001, only this monolith was laying on its side, with nothing left to teach us.

  But something weird was happening with Bully’s shadow dancing in front of all this. Although an Amtrak-size cock was leveling, steadying, and getting prepared to penetrate an asshole the size of the largest production trunk (one day, that would be a 2008 Pontiac Grand Prize, and Larry would own it), Bully’s shadow somehow made these alarming images acceptable. Reasonable. Oddly touching? Poignant. All words Larry dreamed as blurbs one day adorning his posters.

  The pornography was a surprise to everyone. Even Larry had forgotten he’d shot this scene. This was Larry’s masterpiece, sure, and finally flickering up there on the big screen was his life story, his monument, and this would be the magnum opus to redeem him in the eyes of respectability.

  But for the popcorn eaters, there was always gonna be some butt sex.

  So the train went through the tunnel, bending a little in the middle to maintain the best visible angle, as tunnel-bound trains in the movies are wont to do, and Bully danced. And she wasn’t really naked, as the spectators first assumed. It just seemed that way with all that light shining through her as she spun around. Out on the playground, knee-deep in battle, she seemed especially naked to Larry, who pretty much saw the world as naked anyway. Larry had seen so many people in the nude that he was like a walking, talking exercise in imagining that hypothetical naked classroom in order to feel more relaxed during a presentation. Except it was just the opposite with Larry. In porn, you had to imagine people wearing a lot of clothes when you really needed to focus.

  But this was not necessary with Bully. Larry could see her body was as covered in ink as his own.

  He was in love.

  During his second career, Larry had worked around pointless portraits on people’s bodies before: album covers, dead nephews, marginally famous people. But as he strode through the headlights and exhaust fumes towards her, gun now swinging impotent at his side, this giant, naked girl seemed to be covered utterly with the cast of second-tier supporting actors.

  That was weird.

  When she spun around, twirling and dancing in the spotlight, it was like an entire yearbook of Variety second-fiddles were adorning her back with their earnest “put me in your movie!” mugs. Larry imagined the roll call for their feature film, Awesome-When-They’re-Angry Character Actors Stuck in an Elevator:

  “Now starring! Ronny Cox, James Spader, Jon Polito, Brad Dourif, Fred Ward, David “Not Keith David” Keith and vice versa, Donald Moffat, Brian Dennehy, Michael Ironside, and William Atherton, with Terry O’Quinn as the Voice of Reason. Coming soon to the bottom shelf of a video store near you!”

  All men and psychodramas? Larry noted. Then, unable to shake his old recruiting habits, So she’s got daddy issues, eh?

  But those guys weren’t alone on Bully’s body. He could see she was covered in movie titles, too. Every horror flick that had a baby in it. All the movies Bully had watched from her window, on the flickering drive-in screen in the distance, like the forever earthbound watching taillights blink across the night sky. But Larry couldn’t know this, of course. He was just amazed how complete her collection was. Mostly ‘70s stuff like Rosemary’s Baby, Basket Case 1, 2, and 3. Rosemary’s Baby II? What? She had a sketch of the It’s Alive crib across her ribs
, of course, because those words rhymed. There was American Gothic, which looked more like the poster for the 1974 movie The Baby, that short-lived trend of having full-grown assholes acting like infants. But, hey, she had that poster, too! Right by her hip. That movie used to make Larry furious, until he realized it was far easier to suckle a full-grown man than it was to train a goddamn child to act. Every filmmaker eventually learned that children had no business working with adults. Was there any other profession in the world besides film where you’d let a fucking child do the job? No, no, not “children fucking,” of course. Yeesh, Larry did have some integrity.

  But, yeah, he’d trust a child as an air-traffic controller before he’d allow one in front of his camera.

  Which is why the parade of bleach-blonde moppets from Village and Children of the Damned across her belly almost made him gag. And there was the ol’ four-sheet from Who Can Kill a Child?, Chucky from Child’s Play getting choked out by Gage from Pet Semetary, the little princesses from The Bad Seed and The Pit all over her shoulder blades (although those “kids” always looked to Larry to be about 30), the terrifying Look Who’s Talking crew, the snowmobile-suit wearing, beaked rage babies of The Brood, and, dangerously close to her bathing-suit areas, Peopletoys, a.k.a. Devil Times Five, a.k.a House on Horrible Hill, a.k.a. Tantrums.

  Watch ‘em. Learn ‘em...

  It seemed like an awful lot of tattoos, but he was suddenly sure she had four arms to carry them, just like his Mary.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Larry thought he could just barely make out the squealing, limbless thing from Eraserhead and its dozens of tadpole brothers and sisters.

  “Did she really watch all of those from her window?” he asked a family pressed up against their car’s windshield, which made zero sense because there was no way he could know that. “And all those movies about babies? Is her stomach swollen in that shadow or is that just a 50-foot optical illusion?”

  But Larry didn’t need to ask. He had no doubt that viewing so many movies about killer babies from the comfort of your bed would knock anyone up. Luckily, Larry had racked up that year and a half in film school and could recognize such obscure movie references, and recognize when something was out of order. Maybe this helped him know things he shouldn’t. Maybe her body would mean little to anyone else’s eyes.