Authors: John Farris
Uh-uh.
Trying to flag down a stranger on a deserted road could lead to a lot worse things than a couple of boring hours in a stalled car. Better to lay low and let him—or them—pass by.
Taryn scrunched down behind the wheel and waited. It was a pickup truck (she guessed) from the sound of it, maybe Nealy’s. She wondered if he’d finished whupping that bitch Gaynell and was out looking for her. Maybe if she just sneaked a peak—but if it really
was
Nealy, he’d know his own wife’s car; by now he’d have stopped and hollered for her. Also the truck was coming from the wrong direction, not from the vicinity of Nealy’s house.
Taryn continued to lay low as the pickup idled opposite the Camaro. Now her heart was really thudding. The driver had turned his side-mounted spot on the parked car. If he was sitting up high in the cab of that truck, couldn’t he make her out? Taryn
slumped lower, her chin almost touching the bottom of the steering wheel.
Finally—it seemed like half a lifetime to Taryn, with that big spot lighting up the Camaro—he got tired of looking at whatever he was looking at, and drove on.
Taryn breathed heavily, more shaken by the experience than she cared to think about. She felt trapped in the Camaro, bathed in sweat, itchy all over.
Maybe,
she thought,
this isn’t the best place for me.
Because someone else could come along any minute, looking for something to rob, and when he found her in the car—
Taryn raised up enough to look back over the seat. The pickup truck had disappeared on up the road; at least she couldn’t make out the taillights, and she could see pretty well to the point where the road curved past the cemetery hill.
She grabbed her purse and got out of the Camaro, then remembered the keys and reached back inside to take them from the ignition. She had an idea, for what it was worth. There just might be a safe place close by, where she could spend what was left of the night.
One Dark Hour to Go
B
efore abandoning the Camaro, Taryn opened the trunk. Even without a flashlight she found what she was looking for, a tire iron. She took it with her.
There was no problem getting to the drive-in. The road was barricaded off the pike to keep kids from driving down there and parking, and to keep out those people looking for a place to dump trash. The main gates, she was sure, would be chained. But the road was unobstructed beyond the barricade, just a little weedy, with slash pine close on both sides. She walked watchfully by the light of the moon down the middle of the asphalt road, not wanting to turn an ankle in a chuckhole.
The box office was just that, a box not much larger than a telephone booth, and empty—no place to sit or lie down in there, and when she looked through the barred ticket window she heard a scuttling noise. Rat, maybe. Taryn shuddered and went on to the gates. The high wall of the outdoor theatre echoed the slightest sound: pebbles kicked away as she walked, a flattened aluminum can skittering over the blacktop ... her own breathing, but maybe she just imagined she heard that.
It was spooky here, she had half a mind to go back. But when she turned and looked toward the pike she could barely make out the Camaro parked there. She had come a long way. And she was suddenly afraid, achingly afraid, of being out here by herself in the middle of the night.
Just as she’d thought, there was a big rusted padlock on the gates. She used the tire iron, making a lot of noise as she pried the hasp of the lock out of the wood. She tried to ignore the noise and concentrated on thinking about the good times she’d had here just a few years ago, when the *Star-Light* was about the only place in the south county where, if you were underage, you could still have some fun. Part of the fun had been to sneak in for free, usually in the trunk of Walter Bevins’s old Caddy. All of them just about suffocating if the line was long ... but she didn’t want to think about suffocating, she was feeling crawly up and down her spine, and beginning to panic.
The lock-plate screws pulled out of the old wood of the left gate and Taryn staggered back, dropping the tire iron. It missed her foot but grazed an ankle. Grimacing, she stooped to rub the anklebone and, in the midst of this movement, saw something, like a partially shielded flashlight beam in the pine woods beside the drive. But it came and went so fast she couldn’t be positive what it was. Just a wink from a strong light.
Was somebody out there?
Oh, Jesus,
Taryn thought, and she groped for the tire iron. When she had it she stood with her back to the gate, knees together, staring at the woods, breathing through her mouth, a habit carried over from childhood when she was unhappy or overwrought. But there was nothing more to see. Nobody drove by on the pike. She glanced down at the L.C.D. display of her watch.
Twenty minutes to four.
Only one dark hour to go, then the sky would begin to lighten and there would be southbound traffic, early birds on their way to the Perimeter to work, she’d get a ride home ...
Taryn tucked the tire iron under one arm and pulled
at
the heavy rusted chain that held the gates together, cringing at the noise she made but desperate to be inside, not just standing there with the moon full in her face, casting
a
smudge of shadow against the fence boards, the faded remnants of old movie posters pasted there.
Eastwood, Redford. Those were some
real
men. She regretted the impulse that had prompted her to go out with Nealy Bazemore, even if they were related on his wife’s side. All along she’d planned to go right home after the George Strait concert, although she was well aware of what that cuss Nealy had on his mind, but then something happened like it always happened, she couldn’t help kissing him, and after the kiss she’d thought,
Well, just this one time, even if he is a married man ...
shit! Now look. Stranded at the damn *Star-Light* with—
With nothing. Stop it. Nothing and nobody’s here, you’re all by yourself and it’s maybe a little more than an hour to sunup, so stop! Just stop scaring yourself.
Straining, Taryn shoved open the heavy gates, slipped into the drive-in, paused for a few moments, trembling from exertion, then put all of her weight into closing the gates behind her.
There.
She felt better right away, at home here and oddly nostalgic as she looked around at the acres of hard-packed clay in front of the single screen, which was dilapidated after more than four years of neglect, shot full of holes in a
few places from kids using it for rifle practice. But she remembered how the screen had looked in the theatre’s heyday, with huge misty images playing over it, films she hadn’t paid all that much attention to except for
Rocky
and
First Blood
—when Stallone was featured at the *Star-Light* Drive-In she was there to see the movie, period. There had been in-car speakers once, but they were long gone, only a squat forest of iron pipes set in cement remained. To her right was the low building that once housed the projection booth and refreshment stand. The neon had been removed from above the long counter, the iron grill was down and probably locked. She assumed the projection booth was locked up too, but her tire iron would get her in.
As she headed for the building Taryn smiled, thinking about the time she and Jaymie Walraven had laced Becky Pratt’s strawberry Frostee with Milk of Magnesia, getting back at Becky for putting caterpillars in Jaymie’s popcorn—
caterpillars,
gross! She couldn’t remember which of them had come up with the idea to spray-paint
Lost my cherry to Hilda Berry
on Steve Webley’s car while he and Hilda were bare-assed in the back seat. But the worst, absolutely the
grossest,
thing that had ever been perpetrated at the *Star-Light*—
Taryn came to a dead stop, freezing from the roots of her hair down to the small of her back.
The door of the projection booth a dozen feet away was not locked, as she had anticipated. Because the door was opening, even as she stood there gawking like a ninny at it. Creaking just a little on its hinges. Opening slowly, so slowly—
She was off like a shot, running a weaving course through the stuck-up pipe posts, just missing a couple of them, knowing she must not slow down to look back but more afraid of not knowing who might be after her, how close he was: so she risked it, glanced wildly over one shoulder and saw—Taryn stumbled to a stop, leaned against a decapitated post, and was choked with laughter, even as her heart continued trying to jump into her throat. She tingled all over.
The cur dog she had disturbed was still standing a few feet outside the doorway, looking at her, probably as scared as she had been. At a glance she realized he was too thin and pathetic to be any kind of threat to her—but there went her idea of spending an hour or so in the projection booth, not after that dog had been hanging around. More than likely the booth would be a flea circus, and flea bites were worse than mosquito bites anytime.
It crossed her mind then that there must be a hole in the fence somewhere. After four years, maybe several good-sized crawl holes. And she’d gone to all that trouble, breaking in through the gates ...
Her heart was calming down and she wasn’t breathing so hard. Taryn looked up at the screen and imagined Stallone bare to his waist, gazing down on her, the eyes of a man who knows he has what it takes, choice pectorals gleaming with sweat,
God:
where was Sly now that she needed him? Funny how after a big enough scare you could start feeling horny, just like that, and she mildly regretted that she and Nealy hadn’t had the chance to get it on before Gaynell showed up. Never had any use for Gaynell, Taryn reflected. Nobody else in the family did either, really: “the bitch from Grinder’s Switch,” they called her, poking fun at her backcountry origins.
Taryn was still gazing at the movie screen when a sudden sharp yelp caused her to jump a foot. She looked around but couldn’t locate the cur dog in the darkness beyond the projection booth. The door was still partly open; had he gone back inside? Then what was it made him yelp that way?
Silence, now; a silence she didn’t particularly care for.
Taryn shuddered, crossing her arms, fingers digging into her forearms. From a long way off she heard the diesel horn of a train near the Carverstown yard of the Chessie Railroad. She needed to pee. But she felt embarrassed, for no good reason. It was just an unnerving thing to do, as if she could picture herself squatting and then suddenly the whole drive-in would be filled with cars, like the old days, headlights focused on her and everybody laughing,
There’s Taryn with her pants down!
She could even hear Stallone chuckling,
huh-huh,
up there on the—
Blank, empty theatre screen.
What an imagination! No bout a’ doubt it, she was purely wasting her time with counter jobs. Ought to be out there in Hollywood right now, giving them the benefit of her good looks and talent.
Make up a movie, just to pass the time. Go ahead. What kind of movie would you like to be in, Miss Melwood honey?
Well, let me see. There’s this champion stock car driver, only he’s no good anymore after a bad wreck, lost his confidence or whatever. And, uh, then there’s this rich girl, that’s me, she’s got so
much
money, but her life doesn’t have any meaning. Uh, the stock car driver, who looks a lot like Bill Elliott, is down on his luck, and she needs a chauffeur, or maybe a bodyguard, because there’s this real crazy guy who’s been calling her up on the phone—
“Don’t move. If you turn around I’ll kill you.”
The jolt of fear at the nape of Taryn’s neck was powerful enough to pop her mouth open.
She hadn’t heard a sound.
But he’d sneaked up so close behind her she could smell him—and his odor was instantly, powerfully familiar.
“Oh, come on!” she said, exasperated. “It’s me! Don’t give me a hard time, because I’ve already had—”
As she started to look around, a blow to the back of her head staggered her.
“
Shit!
”
“I said not to do that! Now, sit down. First we will have the Light. Then we will have the Truth.”
“You really hurt—”
“Sit cross-legged, with your hands on top of your head. Do it now!”
He seized her by the back of the neck; a strong thumb pressed against her carotid artery. Taryn couldn’t speak. Her knees locked and there was a surge of blackness to her brain.
Sensing she was going to faint, he eased the pressure on her throat.
Taryn took a shuddering breath which broke as a sob. She sank slowly to her knees on the hard Georgia clay, then sat down as he had dictated. Because his tone of voice allowed no alternatives.
“Hands on top of your head!”
“Why are you
doing
this to me?” He was acting big-time bad drunk; but, no, be hated liquor, he had never taken a drink that she knew of.
“First the Light.”
Taryn moaned.
“I haven’t done anything! I ran out of gas. You saw my car—I
know
it’s not my car, but I didn’t actually steal it, I can explain—”