“Well, I could go check it out,” Junior said.
“Better take some company,” Spawn said. “That’s Gray Ghostrider’s turf. We have a truce with them, but they don’t much cotton to strangers.”
Junior looked at the three men. “Think you might be interested in keepin’ me company a while longer?”
“Long as you’re buyin’, that’ll be no problem at all,” Buck said. He grinned.
Gunny had come up with the pistol, just as he’d said, and Howard had collected it to bring home to Tyrone. He thought his son would be pleased — he really seemed to be enjoying practice.
When Howard knocked on his son’s door, Tyrone yelled, “Come in!”
The boy sat in front of his computer, staring at the holographic projection. The image was of a tall rectangular building, angled slightly, with what looked like a huge, orange-neon tiger on it, frozen in mid-leap. It took a second for Howard to realize what it was.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hi, Son. What are you working on?”
“Homework. English. Maybe taking a summer class was not such a good idea. This chomps.” He looked at his father and smiled. “Hey, maybe you can help. You know about dinosaurs, right? Didn’t you grow up riding one?”
“Sure. Fifty miles to school and back every day. In the snow. Uphill, both ways.”
“That’s what I figured. Check this out.”
He touched a button and the tiger dimmed and faded and was overlaid by a block of text.
Howard moved to where he could see it. It was a poem called “Dinosaurs,” but it clearly wasn’t about fossils or lizards. There was the writer’s name under it, but it wasn’t one he recognized.
Howard nodded. “Yeah. So?”
“So, what does it
Howard reread the poem. He nodded. “You can’t figure it out?”
“C’mon, Dad, you don’t know.”
“Sure I do.”
Tyrone gave him a baleful stare. “You want to enlighten me?”
“Easy clue,” Howard said. “Go back and look at the picture.”
Tyrone waved his hand and wiggled a finger, and the words and the building swapped brightness.
“What you are looking at is the back of a drive-in theater screen,” Howard said.
Tyrone frowned. “A what?”
Howard said, “There are probably still a few of them around. They were mostly gone before my time, products of the late forties and early fifties. Your grandfather and grandmother used to go as teenagers. They were outdoor theaters. You’d drive your car to them at night. You had to pay to get past a gate, then park facing the screen. The ground had little ridges that let you angle your view. Movies would be projected onto the giant screen, and you’d sit in your car with a speaker on a wire to hear the sound. It was a cheap date, and couples could, um… cuddle inside their cars without bothering anybody.”
“Cuddle?”
“An old person’s term,” Howard said.
Tyrone grinned real big.
Howard said, “People used to live inside some of the buildings, like this one. See that window on the side, right there? Usually the people that owned or managed them.”
“No kidding?”
“Nope. Your gramma took me to one when I was a little boy, when they were living down in Florida. I still remember it. If you didn’t want to sit in your car, there were benches next to the snack bar where you could sit outside and watch the show. They were only open in the late spring, summer, and early fall. After it got cold, they shut them down for the season, even in Florida. They were huge places, took up a lot of real estate. I think television mostly killed them off.”
“Huh.”
Tyrone looked at the poem again. “So, okay, it’s a theater. But what’s all this about toothpick vampires and Kools and Pik and stuff?”
Howard cast his memory way back, trying to recall the experience. He had stayed with his grandparents one summer when they’d still lived in Florida. He had been young, six, seven, and they had gone to the drive-in five or six times. And maybe a time or two when he’d been in California, as a teenager.
“Well, the vampires would be mosquitoes. Kools were a brand of cigarette — that’s what the older kids used to do, sneak off from their parents and smoke — and Pik? I think that was a coil of bug repellent you burned, kind of an incense, that kept the mosquitoes away.”
Tyrone nodded. He tapped something into his keyboard. A sub-image lit, a crawl of words. “Oh, okay, here we go—‘The Merry Go Round Broke Down.’ That’s the name of the music they play on the Merrie Melody cartoons!”
“Really?”
Tyrone was getting into it now. “I guess this part had to do with sucking face in the cars,” he said.
Howard smiled. The boy was fifteen. They’d had the birds and bees talk a long time ago. Though he couldn’t imagine having this kind of poem to deconstruct when he’d been in school, things changed.
“And this part is easy. I got it, Dad.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I understand what the writer was talking about. He’s wishing they still had outdoor movies, right?”
Howard said, “Well, English was never my best class, but I think he’s talking about more than that. What I think is that he’s looking back on his innocence. That’s what he’s wishing he had — the good old days when his life was mostly in front of him and not behind him. The drive-ins were just a part of it, they represent something larger than just themselves.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. And that youth is wasted on the young. You don’t miss it until you are too old to do anything about it.”
“Huh. You think that’s true?”
“How would I know? I’m still a young man myself. Ask Gramma next time you see her.”
They both laughed.
Tyrone said, “This idiot teacher does this all the time. Gives us stuff to analyze that doesn’t have anything to do with our lives. Why couldn’t he give us a poem we could understand based on our own experience?”
“Because then you wouldn’t have to stretch,” Howard said. “If you only work from inside your own comfort level, if you don’t have to sweat a little, you don’t learn anything new. Maybe he’s not such an idiot.”
“I’ll reserve judgment on that.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. Gunny found something for you.”
He handed Tyrone the box. And was rewarded with a very large grin as the boy opened it.
Maybe all youth is not wasted on the young, he thought. Maybe the old folks benefit from it a little now and then…
29
Michaels scanned some files on his flatscreen as he walked down the hall on his way to grab a quick lunch. There was a time when he would have changed into spandex and a T-shirt and taken his recumbent trike to a local Chinese or Thai restaurant and burned off a few calories in the process. But not today. The weather forecasters
