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SHE LEADS HIM by the hand back to the El Camino. “Make room for your brother, Sheldon. Go stand by Ed.”
Sheldon laughs, good-naturedly but not wholly sincere. “Oh, that’s how we’ll fit.”
He goes and stands by Ed.
“I’ll just go on back home, I guess,” drawls B.B.
They form a semi-circle around the engine compartment, the sun dipping below the horizon—the Kid at the driver’s side, standing on tip-toe, hands on the fender; Sheldon and Fast Eddy opposite, Mom and Dad at the grill. The tip of the sun casts long shadows across the pavement and over the engine compartment. Aside from the whirring of the engine and a handful of robins, there is complete silence, as though they are praying.
“What are we looking at?” his mother says softly.
The Kid listens, staring at the humming engine.
“About four years,” says his father. “One-hundred-fifty dollars per month.”
“Well...let’s hope we win the community college bid,” she says.
“We will, Mary Lee,” says his father. He nods at the engine. “Pretty nice, don’t you think? The boys can ride around in the back. And we can back in at the drive-in and put lawn chairs—”
She kisses his father’s cheek, picks at a few locks of his hair. She doesn’t seem to think much of the car, as a car, at all. “I think it will have to last us a long while,” she says.
“She’ll last,” says Fast Eddy. He takes a swig of beer, sucks on his cigarette. “She’s centered properly, see. It’s nothing you can quantify. She’s centered properly somewhere in her guts, so that everything radiating out from that is centered, too.”
His mother sighs. Everybody else listens. They listen because in spite of being a high school drop-out and not having any front teeth, Fast Eddy knows stuff—not things, no details—stuff. Stuff that seems wise.
“What you get without that center is system failure,” he says. “Sort of a Diaspora of parts, none of them connected and none of them functioning properly.” He looks at the Kid suddenly, startling him a little. “But you have to listen for the sound of trouble, and if you hear it, you have to find it. It might be something really simple, something right at the surface, like a loose sparkplug cable. But it might be something deeper. Something you have to dig down to, or look at from another angle. Sometimes you just need some help, a precision instrument, say, like a full diagnostic scan, so you can see through the walls of things. And sometimes—sometimes you just have to cut her open. Cut her open and start peeling back the layers.”
The Kid swallows, uncomfortable beneath his gaze. He looks down and watches the belts spin; smoothly, silkily, winding through cogs like water moccasins. He thinks of starting first grade at Broadway Elementary School the next day and of the summer now passed, and of all the stuff he loves; of hot-buttered popcorn at the Starlight Drive-in Theater, and 7-11 Slurpees in collectible cups—cups themed around muscle cars and sports teams, super heroes, movie monsters. He thinks of the World Trade Center, tallest buildings on earth, completed the previous summer. Of Apollo 14 and Alan Shepard golfing on the moon—Apollo 15 coming up, and the deployment of the lunar rover. He wonders what it will be like to ride with his family across the moon someday.
“Okay, gang,” his mother says, and claps her hands together—causing him to jump. “We’re going to the Starlight. First show only—if it’s okay with Dad.”
“Might be our last chance,” says Dad. “It’s September. They’ll be gone soon, all of them.”
The Kid blinks. He looks up from the humming, whirring perfection of the engine, scans the faces of everyone around it: at Fast Eddy hunched over the opposite fender, cigarette dangling, paint-spattered bangs hanging; at Sheldon, pointing and questioning, interacting with the car and the people, looking and acting nothing like he does, at his mother, uncomfortable in her skin, interested in the car because his father is interested and she’s in love with him; at his father, who pats and rubs her back, who is covered head to toe with multi-colored paint, and is not an astronaut...and back to his mother.
Who looks over at him, the last rays of the sun outlining her hair, and smiles.
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GOING TO THE DRIVE-IN is nothing new; the brothers have been going since before they could walk. Riding there, in the back of the El Camino, with wind in their hair—twilit, October wind, carrying hints of musk and smoke, mystery, danger—that’s new. For the Kid, who spends most of the ride lying upon his back, gazing at stars and the wing-lights of airplanes, at the canopies of leaves swishing overhead, it becomes even more—proof of something he has sensed but not seen: a new schema of life altogether, something previously hidden by the roof of the car, by his failure even to look. The world from another angle, as Fast Eddy might say.
The Starlight is surrounded by enormous high-tension towers, which dot the countryside all around it and are threaded with sagging power-lines, like cobwebs. The marquee reads:
“THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK: A TRUE STORY”
PLUS CO-HIT! HUGH BEAUMONT “THE MOLE PEOPLE”
ONLY $2 A CARLOAD!
The Kid and his brother stand behind the passenger compartment of the Camino, leaning against the rear window, hands spread on the black vinyl roof, as they pull up to the ticket kiosk. He watches a bill move from his father’s hand to the attendant’s—who pushes keys, causing the cash register to chime and its drawer to bang open. The numbers on the register’s bar are a blur until they stop one by one—$2.00. The attendant puts the bill into the tray, bangs down the little metal clip—hands his father three ones. His fingers are dirty with what appears to be engine oil. He bangs shut the little window as his father pulls forward, the Camino’s engine snarling, transaction completed, bang, bang, bang, like that.
The first thing he hears upon their turning into the lot are steel brushes upon cymbals; a stealthy, metallic sound, made more metallic, tinny, by the metal speakers from which it emanates. The sound accompanies them into the nearest aisle, the Camino prowling along in tune while his father looks for an opening. The Kid looks at the screen, 3 stories-tall and long as an ice rink, watches as pink gaseous nebulae transform into Blake Edward’s Pink Panther, who sits coolly on his haunches, holding a cigarette in a long, slim holder, tapping ashes. A saxophone plays Henry Mancini as his father kills the lights and noses the Camino away from the screen, begins backing into slot #29.
The kid turns around, looks across the lot as the rear of the car begins tilting upward. He’s looking at the supple mounds that radiate out in a semi-circle from the screen, “like bench seating in a Greek or Roman amphitheater,” his mother once said. The mounds are smooth and solid and black. Upon them, all around, big tires crunch to a halt and brakes chirp. All around, wide hoods cant toward twilit screens like missiles.
The first movie image he sees from the back of the El Camino is from The Legend of Boggy Creek—a blonde boy running through a field in which everything is painted redden-gold by the setting sun, which flares off the lens and makes multicolored circles. The boy runs and runs, terrified of something behind him—something in the trees, some-thing which howls—climbing over a barbed wire fence, scrambling over stones.
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THEY HIT THE SWINGS RUNNING, depositing rumps in rubber hammocks, grabbing onto chains, pumping pleated-toed sneakers in the sand. The sky swoops in and out of view as they swing, one ascending while the other falls back, and visa-versa. It is intermission.
He catches glimpses of his brother beside him, of his flushed cheeks and glittering eyes, his thick, wavy hair. He catches glimpses of the Camino, too, sees his father dusting off the lawn chairs, and digging amidst the ice chest. He doesn’t see his mother but knows she is probably at the snack bar, ordering pizza or hamburgers or hotdogs in metal foil—like the heat shielding on the lunar lander— knows she’ll come back smelling faintly of grease and hot-buttered popcorn and Aqua Net hairspray. Still, it is odd that she has gone rather than their father, who used to use the walk as an excuse to smoke a cigarette, as if everybody didn’t know exactly what he was doing.
He pumps his own feet in the sand, begins catching up to his brother.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Dunno. She was walking toward the snack bar—there she is.”
The snack bar is a blue and white rancher-style building with a flat roof of corrugated metal, which glows ghostly in the back of the lot. He scans the yellow picnic tables, sees a man in an olive-green military uniform talking to a woman with hair like a beehive, and another man with black hair and thick sideburns playing cards with two children. He sees two women smoking cigarettes—no, one is a man, a “Hippie,” as his father says, like his eldest half-brother. She has already gone in, he thinks. She is somewhere behind the black glass with the muted hints of light, like distant galaxies. And there is the sun! The projector’s beam—exploding from a row of small, uniform windows. The projector’s beam is a white nimbus, a sun flare—an eye too potent and piercing to meet. Next to it, at another yellow picnic table, sits his mother. She is only a silhouette, but he can tell it is her because of her thickly coifed hair and the tilt of her head. He wonders what she is doing, just sitting there. She is watching them, he decides. She is smiling. Smiling at him.
He grips the cold chains of the swing, kicks harder against the sand. He knows she is watching. Watching as if he were a movie star on the drive-in theater screen. He waves at her gleefully. She does not wave back. He waves again—he needs her to wave back. The silhouette with the thickly coifed hair and tilted head does not wave. Why would she not wave? Maybe it is not her. Thinking about this causes him sudden terror. He looks around for his father, finds him hovering in the gloaming behind the Camino—a smudge of white and Khaki in the dark. He waves at him. But his father does not wave back, either. What is he doing back there? At last he says, “Think Dad is lying?”
“About what?” says his brother.
“About not smoking anymore.”
“Duh. Why do you think he’s always going to the snack bar?”
“He didn’t tonight. Mom did.”
“He will.”
The Kid shrugs. He is unconvinced. “But why would he lie?”
“Grownups lie. So Mom won’t worry. So we won’t want to copycat him.”
“He wouldn’t lie.”
Sheldon laughs and imitates their father, “Whew, it sure is smoky in there!”
Now they both laugh, swinging higher and higher, swinging in unison. The Kid imagines he is Spiderman, high above Manhattan, leaping from web-line to web-line. He watches his Keds—now dangling over the sand, now suspended in space—breathes it all in—his brother’s company, his mother and father who are close, though not waving, the world.
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THE SECOND MOVIE IMAGE he sees from the back of the El Camino, with everyone chewing and resettling and sipping from straws, is the Universal International logo, the one with a cloudless planet earth spinning slowly in outer space, which seems vaguely frightening to him. The logo is in black and white because the movie it precedes, Virgil W. Vogel’s The Mole People, is in black and white, and is overlaid with the opening strains of the film’s soundtrack, which is full of horns and drums and cymbals.
The Mole People is about a group of archeologists, one of whom is played by Hugh Beaumont, father to the Beaver, who discover a patriarchal society of albinos living beneath the earth; a society that makes human sacrifices of pretty young virgins, and employs a race of mole monsters as laborers. But what makes its mark upon the Kid is the movie’s depiction of an entire underground world—a hollow earth—and how there seems to be a mysterious source of light down there, one powerful enough to illuminate everything, though what this source is they never explain. That and the mole monsters bursting from the ground—grabbing luckless victims with their big, pebbly hands, yanking them below the surface in a swirl of sand, after which, each time, Mom laughs and says, “And awaaay we go!”