Robert Coover - A Night at the Movies Or, You Must Remember This

One Moment While the Operator Changes Reels

The lights come up and a thin curtain covers the screen, but the sign behind it telling everyone to please visit the concession stands in the lobby while they're getting ready for the next feature can still be seen, and the ripply picture on it of a huge drippy banana split, which they don't even sell as far as she knows, makes her stomach rumble loud enough to give a zombie hiccups, so she decides to go out and see what she can find with less than six zillion calories in it. Her friend, who's flirting with some broken-nosed character a row back in a high school letter jacket and sweaty cowboy hat, turns and asks her jokingly to bring her back a salty dog — "Straight up, mind!" — making the guy snort and heehaw and push his hands in his pockets.

In the lobby, there's a line for everything — candy, soft drinks, popcorn, cigarettes, ice cream, even the water fountain. The soft drinks line is the shortest so she gets in it, though the smells of minty chewing gum, chocolate, and hot butter are driving her crazy. She feels like she's caught in that Chinese torture movie where they locked this guy in a steel collar with his arms tied behind him and left his food two inches from his mouth until he finally strangled himself to death trying to get at it. Her unhappy turn complains again and she grabs a fistful and squeezes it just to remind herself why she's being so mean to it.

At almost the same moment, some creep behind her, as though to say and that ain't all, kid, grabs a handful of what her girlfriend calls her holey altar — "You just kneel down and kiss it, honey!" she likes to say — numb from so much sitting, but not so numb she doesn't go lurching into the smart-alecky young schoolkids in front of her, setting off a lot of sniggering insults, mostly about her bosom, which is among more adult audiences usually her best feature. She turns to scowl at the masher behind her, but there's no one there. Instead, over by a movie poster advertising a sexy religious epic, there's this dazzling guy, all class and muscle, a real dreamboat, as they used to say in her favorite musicals, looking somehow heroic and vulnerable at the same time, and dressed in clothes they don't even sell in a town like this — and he's staring straight at her! She's almost sure she recognizes him from somewhere, not from this dump of course, it would have to be from some movie — like possibly he was a private eye with a tragic past or a great explorer or an alcoholic or a happy-go-lucky guy who gave his life for the woman he loved, something like that. Maybe even a half-naked martyr from that religious opus behind him, a show, if so, she wouldn't want to miss, much as she admires his present wardrobe. She sucks in her tummy and takes a breath to lift her breasts a tad, just in case he might be interested (fat chance, she cautions herself, all too often a fool for love, she's famous for it) — and amazingly enough, he is! He fits a cigarette between his lips, curls his hands around it and lights it, never once taking his eyes off her, glancing appreciatively down at her breasts (her sudden gasp makes them quiver in her bra cups like sing-along bouncing balls, she can tell by the way his brows bob), then back up at her eyes once more. He smiles faintly, blows smoke, then holds up the pack as though offering her one.

When she walks over toward him, her heart's beating so hard she's sure it must be showing through her blouse like she's got something alive in there trying to get out, and she knows just what they've always meant when they say in the movies, "I felt like I was walking on air." Only it's a kind of bumpy air, like any minute something might catch her heels and make her fall on her face and turn the whole thing into some awful slapstick routine, the story of her crummy life. And sure enough, just when she gets close enough to pick up his smell (which is something between pepper steak, hot bathwater, and a Christmas tree — buttered popcorn can't touch it), her knees go all mushy, and she thinks, wobbling, oh boy, here we go again — but he reaches out and steadies her with just the lightest touch on her elbow, and then, as though there's some secret signal between them, they turn and (she checks to make sure she's still got her ticket stub, you never know, don't burn your britches, as her girlfriend likes to say) step out onto the street.

Her hands are trembling when she reaches for the cigarette he offers her, and there's a kind of fog swirling around (it makes her think of steamy train stations and damp farewells, though in fact she hasn't even said hello yet) or else she's going blind with mad passion, very likely, and she's just trying to think of something brainy yet romantic to say — like, "Isn't destiny wonderful, I agree, but it's sometimes, you know, kind of weird, too, am I right?" or, "When you looked at me in there, I felt like I was stumbling on air, me and my big feet," or maybe just, "How did you guess, yum, my favorite flavor," wondering to tell the truth what kinds of cigarettes they sold nowadays, not having tried to smoke one of the things since way back before she became a cheerleader her third year in high school — when four guys step out of the shadows and grab her and start dragging her toward the curb. "Hey!" she yelps, any language fancier than that escaping her as her feet leave the ground. She twists around toward her erstwhile lover-boy, hoping, if not for a heroic rescue, at least for a little sympathy, but he only smiles mysteriously, takes a drag on his butt, flips it away, and, trailing wisps of fog and cigarette smoke like a kind of end-of-reel tease, disappears back into the movie house.

A black unmarked car with thick windows pulls up and they push her into it, two of these blue-suited meatsacks squeezing in beside her in the back seat, another jumping up front with the driver, who is hunched over the wheel in a cloth cap and a coat with the collar turned up around his ears, like something she has seen a thousand times, yet never seen before. The fourth guy flops a jump seat down in front of her and sits facing her with a machine gun pointed straight at her belly, which even in her present panic she realizes is what has gotten her into all this trouble in the first place. Maybe he can even hear it growling because, as they roar away from the curb, he tells her to shut up even though she hasn't said a word and couldn't if she tried.

It's scary enough that she's jammed into this car with a bunch of muscle-bound maniacs who, if they aren't gangsters, sure act like it, a gun poked at her stomach and the car going about a hundred miles an hour through the thickest downtown traffic she's ever seen around this place, running lights and swerving around oncoming cars and generally scaring the pants off anybody who has time to see them coming (someone who looked a little bit like her mother just went leaping backwards through a plate glass window back there — this is no joke!), but she's also got the distinct impression that the driver, who should have his eyes on the road ("Yikes!" she yips as the side of a huge bus looms before them and the guy with the gun gives her a jab with it and says: "I thought I told you to shut up!"), has them on her instead, staring darkly at her through his rearview mirror, like either he's got designs on her, evil or whatever, or he's trying to tell her something. "There's somebody followin' us," he snarls suddenly, as though to hide what he really wants to say.

The other guys whip out their weapons and roll the windows down. "Step on it!" the one with the gun on her yells and now they really get going, jumping curbs and racing the wrong way down one-way streets, taking corners on two wheels, tires screeching, crashing right through newsstands and flower carts, beating speeding engines to train crossings, leaping roadworks and gaping bridges, the gorillas beside her meanwhile leaning out the windows and blasting away at whoever it is that's following them. No one's paying any attention to her now, if they weren't going a thousand miles an hour she could just open the door and step out and never be missed — no one, that is, except the driver, who is still eyeing her through the rearview mirror like he can't get enough of her. Is he crazy?