The Last Projector Read online

  Billy took the weight of the hatchback from her and surveyed their treasure and the torn notebook pages detailing their plans, trying to smile. When they first thought of this project, Billy thought it was the best idea Bully’d ever had. But now the pile looked ridiculous, comical, crass, like the parts of a fake bomb spread out on a terrorist’s table in a shitty movie where a camera wasn’t meant to linger too long. Whatever they were building would not withstand scrutiny.

  And her schematics were shit. He wished there was a way they could base their contraption on the shark tooth necklace his father had brought home for him from South Carolina when he was little. Simplicity of design. He wore the necklace for about five years, refusing to take it off until it snapped during a hockey game, sticking him in the throat about an inch from his jugular. But up until that savage hip check in the third period, Billy would sleep in that necklace, dreaming of that necklace spinning and those teeth cutting deeper and deeper into his neck, a nightmare that was somehow comforting as well as horrifying. And he never took it off, no matter how deep it stabbed him. To this day, teeth marks still appeared on his throat every summer he got a sunburn.

  “It was like you slept under the Chainsaw of Damocles,” Bully had whispered in awe when she first saw the ring of tiny white triangles at the beach. This would also be the first and last time she’d kiss him. She started singing a bastard version of a Rocky Horror Picture Show song.

  “Chainsaw of Damocles hanging over our heads, and I’ve got the feeling someone’s gonna be cutting my meds…”

  She squeezed his hand like she was working a toothpaste tube.

  “I fucking love our plan,” Bully whispered now. Billy’s smile stretched until it was genuine. He decided to love it, too.

  She slammed the hatch shut and brought him all the way back.

  “We’ll build this bitch, put it around the dog, let him run back into the police station, and those cops will shit a brick,” she said, and clapped her tiny hands. “They’ll have a bomb squad around that mutt before you can say, ‘Locusts are getting louder.’”

  “For real? You think they’re getting louder? I was gonna say something.”

  “Joke.”

  “Well, you’re getting louder anyway.”

  “So, how about that asshole who spit on you out of his car? Is he the next target?”

  “What? Fuck him. I don’t need another nemesis.”

  “More like ‘emesis,’” Bully corrected.

  “Huh?”

  “Look it up.”

  It’s a hot, hazy day. Daytona Beach, Florida, summer of ‘83. A young man sits on a bench facing the ocean. He’s tall but skinny, shoulders hunched out of habit, not insecurity. He wears a trucker cap way too big for his head and aviator glasses that obscure most of his face. The cap, covered in candy-like splashes of paint, features a grinning pig mascot selling its soul for a barbeque smokehouse. High behind the pig is a blank, peeling billboard with the lone, scorched eyeball of a sunscreen company logo. Higher still is the dead concrete screen of an old drive-in theater, patiently waiting for the sun to go down.

  Near the beach, someone is cranking “Second Home by the Sea” in their headphones so loud that everyone can hear it, one of the few Genesis songs not on the radio this year, as their self-titled album just landed the previous spring. The young man frowns trying to locate the direction of the muffled music, as well as place it in his memory. Just over his narrow shoulder is yet another advertisement, a toothy cartoon dog shilling for surfboards. Smiling cartoon animals are everywhere today, it seems. Their eyes are watching all while the young man stares straight ahead, unblinking, vacant. Everyone on this beach is leading a dog, their own personal doppelgängers, and every so often an animal shows a curiosity in this young man that is not returned.

  One dog passes particularly close to him, a mutt dressed head-to-tail in a purple pimp costume. Still the young man never blinks. He only smiles once while the sun is still up, when someone switches the Genesis song to a strange, all-German version of Peter Gabriel’s “Intruder,” and he realizes this person must be flying the superfan flag high to dig so deep.

  “All Dogs And Their Owners Welcome!” is scrawled on the yellow boards of the young man’s bench, but with his arms out, he covers three words to cancel out the owners’ invite. He’s done this on purpose. The boards of this bench are rotten, almost transparent. Lovers’ hearts that were carved too deeply are linked by cracks, like a child’s connect-the-dots ready to bring the bench down at any moment. The young man traces one heart with this thumb and wonders if it was one he scratched into a tree trunk as a boy, surviving the rebound down rivers and dissection in the mill, now hoping to finally upend the original vandal.

  Everything about this young man suggests blindness. The sunglasses, indifference to a parade of half-naked rollerbladers, drooling dogs chasing balls, and girls chasing their dogs chasing those balls. In his hands, he holds a pot of dirt at an awkward angle, a tiny green seedling peeking from the center of the soil. Sometimes the young, blind man shields it from the sun.

  A white American Eskimo runs by him with a dead fish in its mouth, the fish flapping faster as the dog picks up speed, dodging its master.

  The young, blind man stares straight ahead.

  A small, black-headed Münsterländer chases a bright red ball, and the young, blind man lazily cracks his neck toward nothing. A small, fawn-colored Pug dog trots by wearing a tiny hat with a propeller. Several people turn to laugh. Even the dog in the pimp costume turns toward the pug, seemingly ready to comment. The young, blind man yawns.

  Then the Münster’s bright red ball pinballs off pedestrian traffic and rolls toward the young man’s shoes. The little dog slips and scratches at the sand as it frantically changes direction to lunge. For a moment, the young, blind man seems to be teasing the dog by maneuvering the ball around his feet, just out of its grasp. Then the young, blind man kicks the ball away. Hard. The dog anticipates the kick and catches it easily. With the ball finally locked in its mouth, the Münster runs back to its master, a boy with a prog-rock mix in his headphones, who misses the impressive footwork and unlikely exchange between a young, blind man and a dog he cannot see.

  As the dog drops the ball, head cocked in confusion and anticipation, a tall, dark-skinned Hispanic woman walks by the young, blind man, confidence in her hips.

  The young man stuffs the ball in his pocket, and the dog nuzzles this bulge, immediately forgetting all suspicion. Then, when the woman is closest, the young, blind man sits up straight and turns his head toward her, nostrils flaring as the Peter Gabriel song climaxes.

  “Eindringling kommt... eindringling kommt und legt seine spur... legt seine spur.”

  “Can you please tell me what time it is?” the young, blind man asks.

  The girl ignores him and keeps walking.

  He stands to follow, and the dog runs back to his feet.

  Tomorrow, he’ll be back with his plaster cast, or maybe his badge. Of all his props, the badge is the only one that’s real. He doesn’t worry about the name on it, since most will see it for the first and last time. Staring at the animal, he thinks of his squad and their secret quota of 50 dog executions a year. Their sergeant, a Democrat, adjusted the limit to 25 if they were chained. He waits for the boy to again be buried deep enough in his music to forget about his doppelgänger, and then he kicks the dog so savagely that it folds over the toe of his work boot with one last air horn of a yelp, sailing high over the head of its master, trailing a tongue now twice its length. Because of the size of his headphones, which bob the boy’s his tiny ears like a Dobie, he doesn’t realize what’s happened until the young, blind man is long gone.

  No one remembers what he looked like. The girls either.

  Billy was sprawled out in the stones under his dirt bike, staring up into the chrome and oily guts of it all, rubbing off the last flecks of green spittle while he waited for Bully to wander by and assume he was actually fixing some
thing. She was late for their research trip to the video store, and he was gonna give her another hour before he started to get mad, or at least pretend he got mad. He kept his boombox nearby, ready to hit the button on Joe Walsh’s “Confessor” so she’d walk up right when the guitars kicked in to make him look cool. While he counted the minutes in his head, he wiggled his ass to move the painful stones off his tailbone and get comfy. Something his dog used to do.

  His old dog. His old dog was big, but he wasn’t black, but Billy called him “Shaft” anyway. Kind of mangy, and more Shaft in Africa Shaft than Shaft’s Big Score Shaft, but Billy came up with his own lyrics to go with the original theme song:

  “Shaft! Ah-Ahhh! Likes the pussy and the ass… Shaft! Ah-Ahhh! He’s a miracle!”

  Okay, he had to admit it was more of a combination of Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft” and Queen’s “Flash’s Theme,” but it was catchy as shit. Billy loved his monster pooch, a good-looking German Shepherd, the same kind of dog they drafted into the police force, and even though he never got Shaft a collar, everyone in town knew that dog was his. Everyone.

  Especially Officer Bigby.

  Officer Bigby, or “Bigbeep” as the kids all called him, was one of those insufferable pricks who was up in everybody’s business at all times. They first met when he busted Billy for painting a fake registration sticker onto the corner of his dirt bike’s license plate.

  “That’s some wonderful artwork!” he laughed, right before he scruffed Billy’s neck like a puppy. After that, Billy seemed to see him everywhere, even when his registration stickers were up to date. And Billy honked every time he saw the bastard.

  He was pretty sure it was the same cop. Always the same cop. He didn’t care if he was wrong.

  Sometimes Billy though they might be two different guys, since a little recon showed there was both a “Bigby” and a “Bigbee” in that precinct. But with those mirrored glasses and a hat pulled down like a hardass, and that blue-on-blue shirt, it was all the same difference when you came right down to it.

  Bigby probably got his nickname just like Bigbee, Billy figured. Here was a cop so lazy he would lay on his horn instead of using his siren every time he pulled someone over. He was like those assholes who couldn’t be bothered to use a turn signal because of the effort it required to flick it, saving all their strength for the horn. Billy imagined Bigbeep’s greasy sausage thumbs resting on the center of the steering wheel at all times, locked and loaded.

  Then came the day that Bigbeep picked up Shaft wandering around town, like he was the dogcatcher or something all the sudden. Shaft was lassoed and driven straight to the shelter. And unlike his namesake who got out of every tight fix, even in Africa for Christ’s sake, Shaft was put down within the hour.

  An hour? The original Shaft, the shortest of the trilogy, was actually longer than the amount of time they waited to kill Billy’s dog. And Billy had no idea he’d just barely missed the end of that movie when he came busting through the door at the pound, joking about posting bail and singing his dog’s theme song. He even walked up to a cage with another smiley German Shepherd looking a lot like Shaft in Africa before it slowly started to dawn on him what was wrong. Fifteen minutes later, he was all fists and feet, flailing in a tornado of brochures detailing how to avoid heartworm, until three cops ran out to put knees into his spine.

  Heartworm.

  As Billy laid there, fighting to catch his breath under all that weight, one of the brochures a tent over his nose, he had time to read all about heartworms. He had none of the symptoms, but he was pretty sure this word was the perfect diagnosis for what he was feeling in that moment. Something had wormed its way into his heart all right. His brain, too. Something that never left. He wouldn’t need to ask the vet for a second opinion.

  Veterinarians were fucking worthless anyway, he decided. He’d already suspected they were simply failed doctors, chopping up animals instead of humans because no one could sue for malpractice. But when Bully told him about her cat, detailed the so-called “peaceful” process of animal euthanasia she’d witnessed, sniffling with her head against Billy’s chest to hear the beating of his heartworms, Billy made up his mind right then and there what he was now capable of.

  Bully’s cat’s name had been Little Stupid, and, according to her, yeah, that about summed him up. He was little, and he was stupid. But then one day he was suddenly more dizzy than stupid. He may have eaten a piece of plastic, a rubber band or mothball, but with no warning, he was puking up something like dish suds all weekend. Then all week. He puked so much, Bully and her brother considered changing his name to “Wyatt Urp.”

  “Don’t worry. Cats puke,” everyone kept telling her. “They’re like little vomitoriums,” they insisted. “Like Caligula’n’ shit,” they shrugged. “Nothing to worry about!” they shouted. Then the suds turned yellow, and now they were telling her it was bad news instead of cracking jokes. So she took Little Stupid to the vet.

  “Might as well have thrown him in a fucking wood chipper and cut out the middle man,” she said.

  She told Billy they did blood work first and concluded he was dehydrated.

  “No shit, right?”

  Then they took X-rays and explained they couldn’t find anything else wrong. Then that Tarot reading somehow turned into “bone cancer.”

  “Let me get this straight, you put the lime in the coconut?” Bully swore she sang these words.

  “Why are you singing?” the vet asked her.

  “Because you’re a witch doctor. Nothing then… boom. Bone cancer. The one thing the X-rays magically can’t show you.”

  Billy agreed it was no accident that fucker picked an ailment no one could prove either way without some insane amount of cash. And the X-rays and blood work had already broke the bank on her summer “mad money.” So her family decided to put him to sleep. Bully told Billy they called it “putting an animal to sleep” because calling it “putting an animal through a gauntlet of Death-Row-type limb shavings, fumbling injections, and wheezing, shrieking, strangled death rattles” didn’t really roll off the fucking tongue. She told Billy she tried the grab the cat and run out the door at one point when Little Stupid was howling, but the vet and his fake nurses stopped her.

  The “vet.” Bully didn’t need sarcastic air quotes when she said that word. And after her story, Billy already hated vets almost as much as he hated cops. Failed doctors, all. In fact, the previous Veteran’s Day, Billy saw signs on telephone poles reminding everyone to “Thank Your Vet For Freedom!” and tore every one of those suckers down.

  So, checking the final bill, Bigbeep owed him a dog. And veterinary medicine owed Bully a cat. So, fuck it, they decided they’d charge Bigbeep for the cat, too. It was easier that way. Especially when friends of theirs just started noticing Bigbeep rolling around town with a new, fuzzy partner, all Turner and Hooch-style, sniffing trunks and back seats and bonding together while teenagers lined the curbs until they showed enough fear and/or respect to be free to go back to skateboarding.

  Bigbeep’s new partner was a big, healthy German Shepherd with enough training and shiny leashes and fancy collars and shine in his thick coat for ten scrappier mutts like Shaft. He was a good-looking dog, they had to admit, and he probably didn’t deserve anything too bad to happen to him just because he drew the short straw with Canine Selective Services and got paired off with that cocksucker.

  But neither did Shaft.

  Billy wasn’t sure how far they’d go with their plan, but he figured he had to start doing something, right? They’d talked it to death.

  He was scratching at the rust on the bike’s exhaust like a real grease monkey when Bully pulled in. He quickly reached up to wiggle something that would rattle while she was walking up and totally forgot to cue up “The Confessor.”

  “What are you doing, dipshit? Quit pretending you’re a mechanic.”

  “The world makes sense under here,” he tried. She didn’t buy it. “So, what did you
do last night?”

  “Snuck into the movies.”

  “Without me!” Billy bonked his head on something metal he couldn’t name. “The Double Feature? Come on! That was my idea to go see those flicks!”

  “It’s always your idea to go see everything.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “I’m saying you’re worse than The Boy Who Cried Wolf. You’re more like The Boy Who Cried Important Movie You Must Watch This Instant.”

  “Was it any good?” Billy asked, still pouting.

  “I’m just fucking with you. I didn’t sneak anywhere. Why bother? I just watched them from my window.”

  “You’ve got to be the best lip reader by now.”

  “Maybe. Haven’t had a chance to try it on lips that aren’t the size of a semi.”

  “What was showing again? ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper’s flicks, right?”

  “Well, you’ve seen Hell Comes to Frogtown, of course. But They Live, though, man. I don’t know. You’ll either love it or hate it.”

  Billy detested that phrase. In his experience, if something was ever described as “love it or hate it,” it was, without fail, fucking terrible. He’d studied this phrase for a decade, and so far there had been no exceptions to this. And even though she gave him crap about him wanting to see a ton of movies with her, she watched ten times as many every week. It was just another reason he loved her.

  “Really. So it sucks,” he sighed.

  “Nah,” Bully shrugged. “It was cool. There were these sunglasses. And if you wore them, you’d see we’re surrounded by these alien skeleton assholes, right? But the best part was it turned out there are words and messages all over everything around us at all times, but we can’t see this without the sunglasses, and...”