Small Hours at the Starlight

The Starlight Drive-In stood a mile east of Kestrel, Nebraska, on the north side of U.S. 30, where the town gave up and the corn and the alfalfa began.

In daylight it was nothing much: a gravel road off the highway, a ticket booth like a tollgate with a striped awning, and then a great fan-shaped field of black cinders, laid out in curved ridges like the rows of a theater, with a post every few yards holding a pair of gray metal speakers on hooks. At the far end stood the screen, a huge white wall of painted boards on a steel frame, four stories high, with STARLIGHT spelled across the top of its back in tall red letters for the highway to see. In the middle of the field stood the concession building, low and square, cinder block painted pale blue, with a hot-dog counter and a popcorn machine and restrooms inside, and on its flat roof, like a small house set on top of a larger one, the projection booth.

That was where Mara worked, that summer of 1962.

Mr. Ansgar Thorsen, who owned the Starlight, had hired Mara in May, after the old projectionist retired to Arizona for his lungs. He had shown Mara up the narrow wooden stair at the back of the concession building, through a door with a sign on it that said BOOTH — NO ADMITTANCE, into a room the size of a farm kitchen, hot as an oven, smelling of machine oil and warm metal and the sharp, clean, electric smell of burning carbon.

"Two machines," he had said, laying a big freckled hand on each of them in turn, the way a farmer touches his horses. "Simplex, nineteen forty-eight. Carbon arc lamps. Twenty minutes of film on a reel, so you run one machine, and when the reel's nearly out you start the other, and you change over on the cue marks so nobody in a car ever sees the join." He showed Mara the little round marks that flashed in the top corner of the picture, twice, near the end of every reel. "First mark, you start your motor. Second mark, you throw the changeover. Miss it, and four hundred people honk at you." He smiled. "You won't miss it. You've got good hands."

There were two small square windows in the front wall of the booth, the ports, one for each machine, and through them the beams went out across the dark field to the screen. Beside them, a third window, larger, with a stool in front of it, looked out over the whole field: every row, every car, every speaker post. In the back wall, over the rewind bench, there was one more, a little square window that looked north, over the back fence and the alfalfa, toward nothing much at all. A projectionist, Mr. Thorsen said, saw everything at the Starlight. That was half the job.

"What's the other half?"

Mr. Thorsen thought about it, leaning on the doorframe, with his hat pushed back.

"Not saying anything about what you see," he said. "People come out here for all kinds of reasons. Families with the kids in pajamas in the back seat. Farmers who fell asleep before the cartoon. Old couples who've been coming every Friday since we opened in forty-nine." He looked out of the big window at the empty field. "Folks think a car's a private room. It isn't, from up here. But we act like it is. That's the rule."

The season opened on the first Friday in June with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and a cartoon, and by the second week Mara could run the booth half asleep.

At dusk the cars came in off the highway in a long slow line of headlights, past the ticket booth, where Beverly Okerlund took the money and talked to everybody, and out onto the cinders, and the drivers found their places, and reached out of their windows and lifted the speakers off the posts and hung them on the glass. The sky over the screen went from orange to violet to deep blue, and the first stars came out, and the field filled with the murmur of four hundred car radios being turned off and four hundred car doors closing. Then Mara struck the arc, and the white beam leapt out across the dark, and the screen lit, and the whole field sighed.

From the stool by the big window, between changeovers, Mara could see every car on the field, every one of them: dark shapes in curved rows, faces lit blue by the screen, a cigarette glowing, a child asleep against a window, a dog with its head out, watching the screen as seriously as anybody.

At intermission the field came alive again: car doors banging, kids running for the restrooms in their pajamas, a line at the concession counter for hot dogs and popcorn and root beer, and the smell of all of it drifting up through the booth floor. Then the countdown leader flashed on the screen, ten, nine, eight, and everybody ran back to their cars, and the second feature began.

It was a good job. Mara liked it more than Mara had expected to.

It was on the second Monday, the eleventh of June, that Mara first noticed the green car in row nine.