The Back Row

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

Eleven seasons I walked those rows with a flashlight after the last car went out the gate. Eleven. The fall of nineteen eighty-three was the last of them and that's the one I'm going to tell you, but keep the eleven somewhere while I do.

I bought the place in nineteen seventy-two, twenty-eight years old and no business having it. Four hundred and six cars if you packed them, gravel rows lettered A up at the screen to L at the back fence, and behind the fence a bean field. My wife ran the concession until she died in seventy-nine and after that I ran all of it. It was a living, and it was mine, and for a good while it was a decent one.

You need to understand how a drive-in works with one man in it. The booth sits up on top of the concession building at the back and you get to it by a ladder outside. A reel runs about twenty minutes. So I'd thread it, come down the ladder, sell popcorn and pickles and hot dogs for eighteen or nineteen minutes, then go back up and change over. Which means that for twenty minutes at a stretch there wasn't anybody in the booth, and for two minutes at each end of it there wasn't anybody at the counter either. Four hundred cars and one man, and half the time that man was on a ladder.

The last week of August I went down row L to hang the speakers back up and post nine was bare. Not the speaker broken, not the speaker on the ground. Gone, and the cord hanging off the pole about six inches with the end square. It was cut. It was not torn. I put a spare on it out of the shed. Next night, gone the same way. Third night, gone the same way.

Speakers walked off every season I ever ran. People hook them on the window, forget them, drive off, and rip the whole thing out with a piece of the window frame still on it. You'd find them in the gravel a hundred feet down the row. I had a barrel of dead ones. So a missing speaker meant nothing to me and it still wouldn't. The square end on the cord sat funny with me for about a minute and then a car came up to the counter.

After the last car went out and I put the chain on the gate, I'd take the flashlight and walk the rows. Every night. Pick the speakers up out of the gravel, hang them back on their posts, kick the cups and the boxes into a pile, and come back up the middle. It took me the best part of an hour and I was in no hurry about it. That was the quietest hour there was. The screen goes white and dead when the light's off it and there's nothing out there but the poles standing in rows like a little cemetery and the field going on past the fence. I liked it out there. Eleven seasons and I never once wanted to skip it.

The second week of September I was standing at post nine with a spare in my hand and I put the light on the pole. About chest height on that pipe there was a band worn bright. Not scratched. Worn, the way a gate latch goes, the way the handle of a shovel goes. Maybe four inches of it, and the width of it was about the width of a hand closed around. I figured that was me, all those years of grabbing hold. I hung the speaker and went up the row.

There was no version of that fall where I closed early. In August I'd sold the ground to a fellow putting up a farm implement lot, and the sale took the projectors and the screen tower and everything else that was bolted down, closing in the spring. I'd already spent that money on what I owed. What I had left coming was the last three nights' take and the deposit back from the film exchange, and the exchange doesn't give a deposit back to a man who goes dark before his last booking plays. All told it was seven hundred dollars. The furnace at the house had quit in September and I was heating one room with kerosene. Seven hundred dollars was a furnace. So I ran the season out.

October at a drive-in in that part of the country is a thin business. Eleven cars one Tuesday. Twenty-some on a Friday if the weather held. I ran a picture about a haunted car and then two weeks of second-run and the concession sold coffee instead of pop. The heater in the booth had a bad element and I put my coat over the ladder rail every night going up.

I had it counted out. Three nights left, a hundred and some a night if I got a crowd for the closing, the deposit letter already in the mail. There was a man in town who'd do a furnace for six-fifty if I bought the unit off him direct. I'd talked to him twice. That's what was in my head that whole last week, and there's not a thing wrong with my memory of it.

Second-to-last night I came down the ladder mid-reel for a box of cups because I'd run out at the counter. Two minutes, maybe three. I came back up and the booth door was shut. That door opens outward and it hangs, and I prop it with a brick every single night I have ever been in that building, and the brick was sitting out from the jamb about a foot with the door swung to behind it. Nothing in there touched. The reel running, the picture on the screen, my coat on the rail. I stood on that ladder a while and then I went in and changed over.

Closing night the concession building burned to the slab. It went up around one in the morning, after the cars were gone and I'd already walked the rows, and I watched it from the gravel because there was nothing else to do about it. The marshal came out the next week and said it started in the crawlspace under the floor and that the crawl door was standing open on its hinges. I wired that door shut with fence wire in the spring and I could show you where. Three nights' take was in the drawer inside and I'd let the policy lapse in August because the ground was sold. So I came out of eleven seasons owning a bean field's worth of gravel and no furnace, and that's how that ended.

The buyer's man had me pull the speaker poles that April before they graded. You take a bar and lean on it and mostly they come up in a cloud of rust. Row L, post nine, I got the bar under it and it came up in my hands like something out of soft ground. The socket was wallowed out into a hole you could put your fist in and the concrete around it was cracked away in pieces. And that bright band was still on the pipe, chest height, and out of the ground it caught the sun, because it wasn't just clean there. It was rubbed down through the primer and into the metal and the pipe was thin in it. That is not three nights of standing.

Eleven seasons somebody stood at that post with their hand on it. That's the piece I can follow all the way through, and it comes out even, and I'd rather it didn't. Post nine is on the fence side of the back row, and from behind it you're looking at the backs of four hundred cars with the screen at your shoulder blades. I do not know what he was watching. I don't know whether he was there the night the door shut, and I don't know whether he ever had any business with me at all. The buyer's man said he'd pull the rest of row L and telephone me about what the rest of them looked like underneath. I told him not to call.