Bloodbath at the Abandoned Drive-In

by Gray Hilmerson

By the time we had pulled through the jungle of five-foot weeds and parked our car in front of the forty-foot screen at the abandoned drive-in, I had the first three buttons of her blouse undone. “Yes,” she was saying, her mouth already at my ear, her breath hot on the side of my face. The tip of her tongue traced shapes along my neck and I was certain the shapes were letters spelling out all the unspeakable things she wanted to do to me. I cut the engine, flipped off the headlights and finished working the buttons on her blouse. An hour earlier at Dr. Meckleson’s dinner party, we had heard the drive-in was haunted, and I dared her to go there with me to get frisky. “If you’re brave enough,” I’d said. “If you love me.”

She slipped the blouse from her shoulders and tossed it in back. Then, in a single fluid motion, she leaped to the driver’s seat, pulled the recline handle and pushed until she loomed over me. “Yes,” I said as I unhooked her bra and she unzipped my pants. “Yes,” she said back.

Through the windshield, I noticed the white screen hanging behind us, catching the light of the full moon, and I pretended I could watch us there doing it, only on the big screen I had ripped biceps and a washboard stomach. She had bigger breasts and a smaller ass.

“I love you so much,” she said, cupping my hands over her breasts, which, small as they were, had the firmness of her youth. Her blonde hair flashed in the moonlight. So did her braces. She worked as a dental hygienist for Dr. Meckleson and the braces had been a free perk, but on the big screen she didn’t have braces and she wasn’t a dental hygienist at all. She was a female traffic cop who had just pulled me over for speeding. A brunette cop with large breasts, who had taken one look at me after removing her aviators and said, “It’s jail for you scumbag unless you follow me to the abandoned drive-in and do whatever I say.”

“Yes,” I said as my little dental hygienist hiked up her skirt and pulled me from my jeans. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Oh, my love,” she breathed back. We ached for each other. We would make earth-shattering love. Her back arched and I groaned. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she was saying, and on the big screen there were handcuffs now and my busty brunette’s busty partner had arrived. On the big screen I wasn’t getting married in three days and neither of these women were two months pregnant.

We both moaned as I finished. Then my dental hygienist rested her blonde head on my shoulder and whispered in my ear her undying love for me. She told me about the beautiful life waiting for us, the house we would own in the country, the seven kids we would raise, all of them boys, the dogs we would own, the cows too, and chickens, and maybe a pig. She was an animal lover. She really loved animals. She whispered that our life together would stretch out into eternity. I could already smell the dirty diapers, the cow dung, the chicken shit. I could already see the thousand covert piles of dog poop I would step on while mowing the lawn. Not to mention the ravages child bearing would take on her pert little figure. On the big screen the two busty traffic cops were done with me, driving away in a plume of moonlit dust, and I was running after them, waving my arms, begging them to take me with them.

I put my mouth against my hygienist’s ear and parted my lips, about to tell her that I couldn’t do this, that I couldn’t settle down yet, that I needed a life in which I could make love to busty traffic cops whenever the opportunity arose. I needed to be free. But before I could utter a syllable, I heard an eerie theremin melody drifting from the speakers in the dash. Then something lit up the movie screen. My dental hygienist looked over her shoulder and saw it too, credits now, saying, “Welcome to the Shelbyville Drive-In!”

“That’s weird,” she said. She slipped back into the passenger seat and kept her eyes on the screen. She grabbed hold of my hand, caressing my palm with her finger. The title credits for a film rolled. The title was grainy. There must have been twenty years’ worth of dust on the projector lens, but still I could read it. It said: Bloodbath at the Abandoned Drive-In. That’s when I saw my face, many times magnified, on the big screen, and I knew that the rumors at Dr. Meckleson’s dinner party were true. It was an establishing shot. The camera drew slowly back from my leering eyes and slack mouth to reveal my hands on a steering wheel, then the cab of my Beemer, then a busty traffic cop hovering in the window, where she wagged her cleavage in my face. “It’s jail for you scumbag,” she said in a breathy voice, “unless you follow me to the abandoned drive-in and do whatever I say.”

“What’s this?” my dental hygienist said. Her brow furrowed. Her eyes filled with tears. But her braces, which caught the moonlight with a menacing gleam, looked sharp as razor teeth. “Honey, precisely what the fuck is this?”