What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [3]
She’s there, that girl. You looked for her among the faces surrounding the bathroom mirrors, but she was nowhere to be found. But you know she’s there—you spotted Dan Watson’s beautiful form gliding across the dusty lane toward the concession stand. He returns now to his pickup, just ahead, holding a box of popcorn in his hand and sporting a cowboy hat, his jeans taut, everything lean and hard the way he glides from one end of the windshield to the other before disappearing into the cab of his truck. That girl is the other shadow. He is handing her the box. Ten minutes later, the lot darkens and the second feature begins—a detective story. You can tell by the hat the lead actor is wearing. No one wears hats like that around here, unless they’re from Los Angeles. On-screen, a beautiful girl screams before a pair of anonymous hands close around her neck and she collapses as if struck by a sudden urge to sleep. She did not scream as terribly as the beautiful blond who was attacked by the monster in that other movie, but somehow it was more real, more probable, and enough to make you turn your head away and look out past the edge of the drive-in’s lot, the stretch of oil fields, the ring of mountains to the south and east of Bakersfield, to Los Angeles. Is that where the movie is set, where something like this could happen?
No one seems to care about questions like that, not by how the shadows in the cars ahead begin to blend together, one by one. Some stay separate, but most don’t. There’s been beer and slugs of whiskey and lipstick applied in the bathroom mirror and cigarettes and sweet talk. Hands on knees and short whispers and legs shaved that evening, baby smooth. All over town, getting ready, everyone knowing—or hoping—the evening would come to this, a lot of sweet talk in a dark car and the squeak of the vinyl as your polite date slides over. The taste of the beer in his mouth, slightly bitter, but sweet, too, the surprise that men taste sweet inside. All of them. Rough but sweet. Your hand on his cheek to feel the itch of his whiskers, what you can’t see but can feel. Forceful but sweet, and it’s that sweetness that calms the alarm about where his hands move, sometimes above the knee or underneath the hem at the back of your blouse, just two fingertips in that hollow space at the bottom of the spine. Forceful but gentle at the same time, his mouth moving to your neck, the smell of his hair, Prell shampoo just like your own. A moan escapes from your mouth, uncontrollable, because his weight is delicious and so is the thought that he’s leaving that sweet taste of his mouth on your skin. He reaches over to turn the knob down on the speaker, and the movie goes mute and you watch the screen while he’s occupied, the detective at a desk saying something into a phone, how you have to guess what he’s saying, the way you have to guess at everything in life—what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.
You can see Dan over in his pickup truck. His shadow has merged with the other one, slipped into the same space, the passenger side of the cab. It is that girl. It must be. She knows that sweet taste, too, what that space in the hollow of his back feels like. A moan comes out of your mouth just from thinking about him, and here, in this dark car, this boy—earnest but inconsequential, strong but too sweet—hears your moan and lets his hands glide up, cautious, to the unworkable bridge of the bra hooks. There is patience and inexperience all over