neighbors we’d liked and disliked—and we’d climb to a little ridge that overlooked the road… and the drive-in screen.
There was a little shade tree with a canopy of low branches at the top of the hill. That’s where we’d get comfortable, lying flat on the cool grass where no one was likely to notice us. After the first movie started, one of us would sneak across the road and slip into the drive-in (there were a few holes in the fence, and I knew where they were courtesy of my friend Chris). Usually the last few parking rows were empty unless the place was really packed, and we’d turn up as many speakers as we could. This way we could hear the movie as well as see it, even from our vantage point across the road.
Sitting on that hill as one summer blended into the next, I was introduced to Count Yorga, the abominable Dr. Phibes, and Blacula. They left their marks on me, but they didn’t really scare me. Not the way the caretaker did.
All the kids in my neighborhood had heard stories about him. They said that the caretaker worked for the cemetery as kind of a night-watchman—he kept an eye out for vandals, or kids who might park in the cemetery to neck, or kids (like us) who might sneak up on the hill to watch drive-in movies for free. We’d all heard that he had a horribly scarred face, and that his face was the reason he worked nights at the cemetery—he was far too ugly to work a job where people might get a look at him in the daylight.
I’d heard that he was stone-cold crazy, too. That he did horrible things to the kids he caught. Chris’ older brother had told us stories about the caretaker dragging trespassers into the mortuary, where he’d lock them up in a pitch-black viewing room with only a corpse for company. And if part of the evening’s business was a cremation, I’d heard that the caretaker would force trespassers to watch his coworkers feed the dear departed to the crematorium oven’s flames.
Of course, I didn’t believe any of those stories. Not really. Though I didn’t know anything about “urban legends” at the time, I knew that the stories about the caretaker probably weren’t true. They couldn’t be, because they always involved “a friend of a friend,” and they never ended with the caretaker getting fired or arrested for the crazy things he did. But there was something about those stories that sent a chill up my spine, even so. They made me want to believe that they were true, even though I knew I shouldn’t. They were the kind of stories the human race had been telling since the first cavemen gathered around a fire, not much different from the stories my dad told about bloody footprints or the Green Man, or the stories my friends told about phantom hitchhikers or that ghostly haunter-of-bathroom-mirrors, Mary Worth.
So I didn’t really believe the stories about the caretaker, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid of him. I spent a good portion of my time at the cemetery looking over my shoulder, or listening for a quiet footfall on the well-manicured lawn.
But no one ever got close to us at the cemetery. Every once in awhile we’d hear a sound, or we’d see someone on the far side of the grounds walking around with a flashlight. And every now and then our eyes would follow the little road that wound through the grave-markers and we’d notice the mortuary door standing open in the middle of the night. Maybe someone would be standing there smoking a cigarette, and we’d glance at each other and we wouldn’t have to say a word, because we all knew that the only smart thing to do was run.
At moments like that, whatever was on the screen was instantly forgotten. Count Yorga, or Blacula, or Dr. Phibes… it didn’t matter. We’d run from the caretaker, hoping that we wouldn’t be locked up in a pitch-black room with a corpse for company, praying that we’d never find out what a dead body smelled like when it hit the crematorium flames. And when we reached the marsh, when we charged through the cattails and made it to the dead-end street beyond and the safety of its streetlight glow, we’d look back into the darkness and find that no one had followed us at all.
I’m sure there was no one to follow us.
I’m sure there never was a caretaker.
But that didn’t stop us from talking about him. When we were sure that we were safe, we’d sit there at the end of the street and tell all the caretaker stories one more time. It didn’t matter how many times I heard them. They always made me shiver.
I loved hearing those stories. I loved telling them, too.
And now I’ve told them to you.
I never really wrote about any of these things, until now.
I did write about the drive-in and the cemetery across the street. Much of the action in my first novel,
Of course, there weren’t any hunchbacks with muscle cars, either. No dads nearly lighting the projection booth on fire with their friends. No kids eating buckets of day-old popcorn or drinking forbidden concession- dispenser Cokes. There
None of those things happened in my first novel.
None of those characters appeared.
But in a way, they were all there. Every one of them. Because they were inside me. If they hadn’t been, I never would have written that book… or anything else.
I could go on, dear reader, but I think that’s where I’ll leave you. I feel myself straining to make a point, to make connections that aren’t really there. But this isn’t a game of connect the dots, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that real life rarely has the clarity of fiction. I learned that while riding a bucking muscle car when I was only ten years old.
I still visit the cemetery now and then. My dad’s buried there, close to that tree my friends and I used to sit under when we sneaked out to watch drive-in movies. The old man’s gone and I miss him more than I can every say, but I still remember his stories about bloody footprints and the Green Man, and I still tell them, the same way I tell my own stories.
The drive-in remains, too. It’s still right there, across the road from the cemetery. It’s been closed for many years, but no one has tom it down. These days the screen is in horrible shape. Several of the garage-door-sized panels are missing and it’s more gray than white—like the picked-over carcass of Moby Dick.
I still get a funny feeling looking up at that screen. Sometimes I can still see Gregory Peck pinned up there, beckoning with his dead Ahab arm… and I’m reminded of things I set out to do a long time ago, and things I’ve done, and things I still want to accomplish.
But I’m reminded of other things, too.
Things I saw outside the screen’s four corners.
Some of those things I saw clearly. Some of them I’m still trying to recognize.
I like to think that those are the things I write about.
I hope you’ll find some of them in these stories.
Norman Partridge
Lafayette, California
March 1, 2001
RED RIGHT HAND
