LABOUR DAY, 2007
I didn’t know my son could tell directions from the stars.
С
Sam leaves noseprints on the passenger window as we highway out of the city, reciting the constellations and whispering 'South” and 'East” and 'North” with each turn I make.
'Where’d you learn that?'
He gives me the same look as when I came into his room a couple nights ago and found him slingshooting a platoon of plastic Marines, one by one, on to the neighbour’s roof. 'I’m a terrorist,” he had answered when asked what he thought he was doing.
'Learn what?'
'The stars.'
'Books.'
'Which books?'
'Just
With Sam I know I’ll get no further than this. It’s because both of us are readers. Not by passion necessarily, but by character. Observers. Critics. Interpreters. Readers of books (most recently the later, furious Philip Roth for me, and
'North,” Sam says, his nose returned to the glass.
The two of us peer at the slab of shadow at the top of the rise. A square monolith jutting out of an Ontario corn field like the last remnant of an ancient wall.
'Mus-tang Drive-in. End of Sea-son. La-bour Day dusk-’til-dawn,” Sam reads as we pass the sign.
He leans forward to study the neon cowboy on a bucking bronco that is the Mustang’s beacon, directing us in from the night roads.
'I’ve been here before,” he says.
'You remember that?'
'The sign. The man on the horse.'
'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.
