The Complete X-Ray Rider

II | The Starlight

II | The StarlightSHE 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, g**g,” 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.

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: