“This is stupid,” I say. “We came to watch a movie, not hunt all over creation for—hey, look!”
Two rows down, Anna May Fenton is disappearing into the sea of automobiles. For an instant, we see her against that bright screen. She’s lovely in that electric dark.
The boy with her is anything but lovely, because it’s Everett Scott again. That big galoot we saw after getting ice cream.
“Ugh, him again.” I grimace.
“Is she really going with him?” Frankie asks.
At first nobody answers.
But then Pete says, “Hard to tell, Frankie. Maybe she is. But maybe she ain’t.” Then Pete’s face lights up, as if he’s just gotten an idea. “Say, Will, why don’t you go say hello? You still got some time before the movie starts.”
Will looks at him for a long moment. He knows what Pete’s doing. So do we all.
Down at the front of the field, the music is getting louder.
Will waits just a second longer, then without a word he wanders down the row of cars too.
Pete watches him go.
The opening credits are running on the big screen now. The movie has started.
“Can we please go back now?” I ask. I’m whining now and I know it.
“Lead the way, Jack,” Pete replies.
“Where’s Will?” asks Ma when we get back. She and Dad are sitting in the cab, windows down, waiting for the movie to begin.
“Trying to steal Anna May Fenton away from her boyfriend,” Pete says as he climbs up. “I give him good odds. Poor old Everett. If his brains were dynamite, he couldn’t blow his nose.”
“Anna May Fenton?” Ma asks. “The preacher’s daughter?”
She looks at Dad, but he ain’t paying any attention. He’s watching the movie.
Frankie and me sit on the roof of the truck. We get a good view from up there—of the screen and the cars around us. There’s a boy and a girl kissing in the one next to us. They’re in the back and all hunkered down so nobody walking by can see. Reminds me of what Pete calls the drive-in: “the passion pit.” We watch them a while, passing a greasy bag of roasted peanuts back and forth, but then Clyde shoots a man and those gunshots pull our attention back to the movie. Now our eyes are glued to that big screen that’s blazing a hole in the soft dark.
Something about the movies lets you forget where you are and go into a whole different world. You just float, and time goes by without you hardly even knowing it. You forget.
I forget about the boy and the girl next to us.
I forget about Uncle Leone’s shooting and Bobby Kennedy’s killing.
I forget about Kemper and his plan to flood our valley.
I even forget about the war. Just for a while.
The movie lays hold of me, sight, sound, even touch: under me, the truck’s cool metal trembles with each gunshot.
There are plenty of those. That Clyde, in his blue suits and wide-brimmed hat, is a real killer. But awful as he is, it’s Bonnie, his partner in crime, who is the more frightening. Cold as ice. Cruel. Beautiful—and deadly.
At last, I feel the movie coming to an end. It’s the end for Bonnie and Clyde too. On a dusty road that looks a lot like Hopkins Road, they pull over to help a man with a flat tire.
It’s a trap.
I hear Ma’s gasp from below when the policemen begin with their machine guns. It’s loud and sudden, and it makes both Frankie and me jump. The boy and the girl in the car next to us stop their kissing to watch Bonnie and Clyde get shot to pieces.
Those machine guns rattle on, blasting out of the speakers from a thousand cars across the lot. After a horrible minute, they’re both dead.
Next thing I know, the screen is blank again, swaying like the sail of a giant ship against the night sky. The closing credits roll.
Frankie turns to me then.
“What’d you think?” he asks.
“There was a lot of shooting,” I say.
“Pretty great, huh?” he asks.
“You bet,” I reply. We clamber down from the roof. My legs feel funny from sitting so long. And my bladder feels like a balloon about to bust.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Take this on your way,” says Ma, handing me an empty popcorn bag.
Pete stays with Ma and Dad so it’s just Frankie and me wandering our way through the narrow alleys toward the fuzzy yellow light of the concession stand.
When we get there, we find Will worse than I’ve ever seen him.
He stands at the edge of that pool of yellow light, leaning against the fender of a parked car. A crowd of kids pulses around the concession stand.