"You were so little then."
"What am I now?"
"Now? Now you’re a book-reading, star-gazing young man."
"No,” he says, grimacing. "I’m eight years old. And I just remember things."
We have come out here, widower and son, to watch the last movie show of the summer at one of the last drive-ins in the country. The last of the lasts.
Tamara—Sam’s mother, my wife—died eight months after Sam was born. Since then, I have found a parental usefulness in moviegoing. In a darkened cinema (or here, in a darkened corn field) Sam and I can find an intimacy without the dangers of talk. There’s something distinctly male about it. The closeness fathers and sons find in passive, mostly silent hobbies, like fly fishing or watching baseball games.
The guy at the admission booth pauses when he spots Sam in the passenger seat. Tonight’s main feature—a spooky Hollywood thriller currently raking in the last of the easy summer dollars—is R-rated. I hand the guy a bill that more than covers full price for two adults. He winks and waves us on, but offers no change.
The place is packed. The best spot left is in front of the concession stand, well off to the side. Sam wanted to try further back, but I know that’s where the high school kids go. Pot and smuggled rye, teenaged boys and girls and all the things they get away with. It’s not concern for Sam’s moral education, but the nostalgic envy that being so close to these crimes would cause in me that makes me stay up here with the rest of the respectables.
"It’s starting!” Sam announces as the floodlights cut out.
It leaves me to pull our chairs and mothballed sleeping bag out of the trunk with only the light of the commercials to see by. I slide along the side of the car keeping my eye on the screen. This, for me, is the best part of the whole drive-in experience: the vintage ad for junk food. A dancing hot dog, leering milkshake, a choir of french fries. And there’s something about the tap-dancing onion ring that always breaks my heart.
I set up Sam’s chair, then my own. Snuggle up next to each other under the sleeping bag.
"En-joy Our Fea-ture Pres-en-ta-tion!” Sam says, reading the screen.
The parked rows await the sky’s final turn from purple to black. A single honk to our right, a minivan rollicking with sugar-freaked little leaguers, brings muffled laughter from the vehicles around us. But there’s something nervous in these sounds—the bleat of alarm, the reply of hollow mirth. To make this impression go away I try at a laugh of my own. A dad laugh. And once it’s out, I inhale the familiar mix of gas fumes, popcorn, burnt hamburger. Along with something else. Something like fear. Faint as the perfume a previous guest leaves on a motel pillow.
The movie starts. A scene of introductory horror: a dark figure pursuing its prey through a field at night. Flashes of desperate movement, swinging arms and boots and jangling keys on a belt. Jump edits between the killer’s certain stride and the other’s panicked run, fall, then sobbing, crab crawl forward. A brief shot of hands dripping with what may be oil, or wet earth, or blood. A close-up scream.
We don’t know who this person is, this certain victim, but we recognize the context of hopeless struggle. It is the dream all of us have had, the one in which our legs refuse to carry us, the ground softened into black syrup, taking us down. And behind us is death. Faceless and sure, suffering no such handicaps.
We’re so close to the screen that to look at anything else forces me to turn all the way around in my chair. An audience of eyes. Looking back at me through bug-spattered windshields.
I sit forward again and tilt my head back. The autumn dome of night, endless and cold, lets me breathe. For a moment. Then even the stars crowd down.
"Dad?"
Sam has turned at all my fidgeting. I force myself to look straight ahead at the actors on the screen. Enormous, inescapable. Their words coming from every direction, as if spoken from within me. Soon the film becomes not just any dream, but a particular one I’ve had a thousand times.
I’m standing before I know I’m out of my chair. The sleeping bag spilling off my knees.
Sam looks up at me. Now, his face half in shadow, I can see his mother in him. It’s what gives him his sweetness, his open vulnerability. Seeing her in his features brings the strange feeling of missing someone who is still here.
"You want anything?” I ask. "Tater tots?"
Sam nods. And when I reach my hand out to him, he takes it.
We shuffle toward the source of the projector’s light. The blue beam and the glimpsed orange of matches lighting cigarettes in back seats—along with the dull glow of the quarter moon—the only illumination to see by. And the same dialogue broadcast from the speakers hooked to every car window.
It’s him.
What are you talking about?
The thing that lives under your bed. The eyes in your closet at night, watching you. The dark. Whatever frightens you the most…
Somebody opens the door to the concession stand and a cone of light plays over our feet. Sam runs to stay within it. Pretending that if he touches the unlit gravel before he gets inside he’ll be sucked into another dimension.
Which we are anyway. The Mustang’s snack bar belongs to neither Sam’s generation nor mine, but to whatever time it was when men wore ties to buy cheeseburgers. Just look at the posters on the walls: beaming sixties families stepping from their fin-tailed Fords to purchase treats for adorably ravenous Beaver Cleaver kids. It’s almost enough to put you off the food.
But not quite.
In fact, we need a tray. On to which I pile cardboard boats of taters, foil-wrapped dogs, rings so greasy you can see through the paper plate they sit on, as well as a jumbo soda, two straws.
But before we can leave, we need to pay. The girl at the till is speaking into the air. "No way," she says, hang-jawed. "No way.” And then I notice the cord coming out of her ear. The little mouthpiece thingy under her chin. "For real?"
"I’ll meet you where we’re sitting,” Sam says, grabbing a hot dog off the tray.
"Just watch for cars."
"They’re parked, Dad."
He gives me a pitying smile before running out the door.
Outside, after I’ve paid, the sudden dark leaves me blind. A tater tot leaps off the tray and squashes under my shoe. Where the hell did I park anyway? The movie tells me. The angle I’d been watching it from. Up a bit more, off to the side.
And there it is. My ancient Toyota. A car I should really think about replacing but can’t yet. It’s the lipstick and eyeliner Tamara left in the glove box. Every time I open it to grab my ownership certificate they spill out into my hand and she is with me. Sitting in the passenger seat, pulling down the visor mirror for a last-minute smearing. When we’d arrive at wherever we were headed to, she would turn to me and ask, "Do I look okay?" Every time I said yes, it was true.
I keep my eyes on the Toyota’s outline and stumble toward it, right next to the van of little leaguers. Quiet now. Their attention held by the movie’s suspense.
Why is he doing this? Why not just kill us when he had the chance?
The tray falls from my hands.
It’s not the movie. It’s what’s in front of my car that does it.
There’s our fold-out chairs. The sleeping bag.
Except the sleeping bag is lying on the ground. And both chairs are empty.
A couple of the minivan kids are sniggering at me, pointing at the unsheathed hot dog on the ground, the dixie cups of extra ketchup splashed gore over my pants. I look their way. And whatever shows on my face makes them slide the door