Blockbuster

by Richard H. Smith

  The marquee stood on two thick polls about thirty yards from the theater. A narrow walkway with a waist-high railing wrapped around the lower part of the sign itself. I climbed the metal rungs running up one pole and squeezed through the entry door to the walkway. After fixing the letters, I glanced down to the lobby and saw Owen pointing toward the marquee as Billy laughed, Carrie too it seemed. Blood inflamed my face and neck.

  Chapter Four

  I needed time to steady myself. After climbing down from the marquee, I took a few minutes to collect stray cups and candy wrappers. Had Owen intended to embarrass me? I wasn’t sure, but he had me rattled. But when I returned to the lobby, Carrie was back to reading her book. Where was Owen? Maybe he’d snuck into one of the theaters. Fine with me. The whole thing suddenly seemed unimportant and forgotten. I went to check the projector in theater two.

  I heard a troubling sound coming from the top platter of the projector. What did this mean? With each revolution, and at the same point, the film slowed down along a feeder arm and scraped against the platter, almost freezing. It didn’t sound right, didn’t look right, not what the illustration in the machine manual recommended. Also, the print of Rollerball was old. We were the third theater to show it. I had noticed many splices in the film where it had broken and been repaired. Would it break again? Would the platter malfunction? A nightmare thought of having to deal with a frustrated crowd wanting refunds unnerved me, but I couldn’t see fixing the problem. I made a mental note to call the main office first thing in the morning to request a service visit. I would need to check it more often too.

  Returning to the lobby, I saw Bullock trying to start up a conversation with our cashier, Samantha Hicks. Good luck. I’d shown her the Jaws poster earlier, asking her opinion. All she’d said was, “That’s sick,” her thin lips narrowing even further as they parted. In the full three weeks she’d been working for us, I’d never seen her in a good mood. Why someone couldn’t get just a little excited over this movie, and our getting it in particular, was beyond me. The movie had me stoked.

  Samantha wore glasses tinted with gray, adding a flat, distant quality to her eyes, as if shaded in with pencil lead. She had just turned twenty-two, at least based on the date she put on her job application. Her hair was blonde and thick, like bristles on an exotic animal. And she carried a lot of pounds, her spreading flanks swallowing the seat of her swivel chair, challenging its strength. I felt sorry for her, but she always had a Coke and an open box of Peanut M&M’s at her side.

  Bullock asked her, “Got enough twenties?”

  He stretched his hand over the cash drawer to examine a stack of bills, his elbow brushing up against her left breast. She flinched and jerked her body away from him.

  “You gave me enough.” She took an angry suck on the straw of her drink like it was an intravenous tube on which her life depended.

  Bullock shrugged his shoulders and continued a quick thumb-through of the stack. He probably assumed his touching her would stir her interest. And I guess it was how he tested the waters because I think he liked her, I mean in an oversexed way, which seemed his only way. The test disgusted her, and I didn’t blame her one bit. I’d have paid to see her deck him cold.

  Two high school girls came in with soft drinks. They must have come from having a meal at the nearby Hardee’s and were finishing their drinks. Bullock shot toward them like a mongrel terrier defending his front yard from intruders.

  “Can’t you girls read the sign? There’s a trash can over there.”

  Bullock hated people sneaking in food or drinks. Those girls might as well be stealing from his wallet.

  They rolled their eyes and threw the cups into the trash.

  A middle-aged man wearing a U.S. Navy cap entered with a bag of chips partly hidden by a sports jacket. Here we go again. More trouble.

  “Friend, you’ll have to toss those chips. We don’t allow food from outside,” Bullock said, half-politely this time, I guessed because the man’s wife tailed behind him. And Bullock was about five-five, with wedges added to his wingtips.

  “None of your business, friend.”

  “Damn straight it is,” Bullock fired back, instantly losing his cool. He reached to lift the man’s jacket.

  This wouldn’t end well. The man swept Bullock’s arm aside. Bullock lunged again, gripping the jacket and yanking it.

  “Gimme that bag,” Bullock said.

  “Like hell I will,” the man replied, swinging his other arm. His elbow connected with Bullock’s nose. The bag went flying and hit the wall. It was already open, and chips scattered.

  I again raced from behind the concession counter and pulled the now bleeding and stunned Bullock away from the man.

  His wife also leaped into action. “Earl, Earl. Stop!” she said, grasping both his arms from the back.

  I said to Bullock in a low voice, close to his ear, “Calm down. It was an accident. You’re gonna get yourself into trouble.”

  Bullock tried to take a swing at the man, but I held him tight. I had a good six or seven inches on Bullock, and although I may not have looked it, I was wiry strong.

  “Let’s go, Wanda,” the man said as he grabbed her hand. “This guy’s a moron.”

  Releasing one of Bullock’s arms, I snatched a few napkins with my free hand. He took them from me, holding them against his nose to catch the bleeding. His eyes looked vacant and unfocused. I guided him over to the door leading to the manager’s office and steered him up the stairs, relieved that he then took my direction.

  I called out to Samantha, “I need a ten and two passes.”

  She gave them to me, and I caught up with the couple before they reached their car. I apologized for Bullock’s behavior and convinced them to see the movie for free.

  “Who will make up the ten?” Samantha asked when I returned.

  Her eyes, normally so dull, now sparked through her glasses, as if a match suddenly flamed inside her. Then, just as suddenly, the effect faded, the flame snuffed out. I wasn’t sure I’d seen it.

  “I’ll take care of it. You won’t come up short.”

  Why would she think I’d make her accountable for the ten when we compared the final take-in cash with the ticket numbers? It was the second complete sentence she had said all evening, leaving me irritated. When it came to Bullock, I was on her side, but she gave me no good reason to like her either.

  Chapter Five

  I took the stairs to Bullock’s office and found him in bad shape, his nose swollen and purple, his eyes streaked with red. He already smelled of the whiskey from the Jack Daniels he kept in a desk drawer.

  “Looks nasty. Think it’s broken?” I asked.

  “Naw, that’s no problem. Sue Ellen, she found out about a woman I bring up here. She let me have it.”

  What could I say? He had told me about his female companions, but we weren’t friends, and I preferred it this way.

  “Damn if that woman didn’t call Sue Ellen,” Bullock continued, slurring his words. “Why’d she have to do that? I owed her cash, but I thought she liked me. Now, Sue Ellen says I cain’t go home.”

  “I don’t know, Horace,” I said. “She is your wife.”

  “She knows I’m hot-blooded. She knows that. I’ve always had a lot of, you know, lead in my pencil. She knows that about me,” Bullock said, as if he were the wronged party. That was one way of putting it, I thought.

  He shook out a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros he kept in his shirt pocket and lit it with his Bic lighter. I saw the primitive wheels turning in his mind as he sucked in and funneled out the smoke.

  I wondered what would happen to him. What a patchwork of scars he had on his face from a lifetime of idiotic fights. His left ear was cauliflowered. I found it impossible to feel bad for him. With all his glaring defects as a human being, he went around acting superior to everyone, Black people especially. It left a stench.

  “I’ll get you some coffee,” I said, noticing the coffee maker half ful
l. The whiskey had loosened his tongue way more than I was curious.

  I poured coffee into a mug, one with a pink silhouette of a Playboy rabbit on both sides, and placed it in front of Bullock. He slurped it down, his lips extended and flapping like a camel from the zoo.

  “Nate,” he said, hesitating. “There’s another thing. I owe money. A ton.”

  Now what? Several evenings ago, a man had confronted Bullock outside the theater. His square jaw and forehead, together with the close-fitting dark suit and tightly knotted tie he wore, reminded me of the gangster played by Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets. I had been unable to make out the conversation, but the man had finger-pointed and yelled. Uncharacteristically, Bullock hadn’t fought back. Was this the person Bullock owed money to?

  “Hey, when Jaws gets here, things will pick up, Horace. Concessions will go through the roof,” I said.

  “I need it more sooner than that.”

  He rubbed his eyes, now so full of worry, almost fear. Normally, his thoughts bounced about in a self-congratulatory echo chamber. Circumstances had forced him to do something rare, to reflect on the consequences of his behavior.

  What about his car? He drove a new Chrysler Cordoba. What was he doing driving a luxury car? A tacky, bright yellow, but he could sell it, easy. He had another car, an old Ford Falcon.

  “How about selling your Cordoba? You could get a lot for it.” I tried to find within me an ounce of pity.

  He glared at me as if I’d recommended selling his daughter to the highest bidder. “I couldn’t do that. Anyway, I owe too much on it. And I love that vehicle, more than anything.”

  He stumbled, slack-jawed, over each word, the coffee having no effect on the alcohol in his bloodstream. He mashed his cigarette in the desk ashtray. Then, his mind seemed to go blank. Or a voice inside told him to shut up.

  I knew the car was special to him. He washed and waxed it every week and sprayed the tires with something that kept them shiny black. But his days enjoying the Cordoba were numbered. The bank would take it away.

  Wild, evolving images of Bullock’s future came to me. He was careening down a narrow mountain road in his Cordoba chased by some goons in a black sedan, one guy firing a gun from a side window. A woman in the passenger seat with poofed-up hair and thick makeup hammered his head with her fists. Sloshed with Jack Daniels, Bullock pumped the brakes, but the car gathered speed instead. The images seemed so real. Things were closing in on him, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

  I returned to the lobby. He could stew in his troubles.

  Samantha had already taken off, leaving her cash drawers for me to bring up to Bullock. She sometimes got a ride from a small, bony man with a wedge-shaped face. He drove a pickup with an oversized Confederate flag decal on the back window. He had been leaning against the truck for a good half hour, smoking. What an odd pair, I thought. If they were a pair.

  Owen, lucky him, was waiting for Carrie in his van. Maybe he hadn’t snuck into a theater after all. As they drove away, I fought off a rush of jealousy.

  I took both the ticket and concession drawers up to Bullock’s office. He was open-mouthed and asleep, his head leaned back and his nose even more blue and puffy from the hit he’d taken. Perhaps his mother would have been moved to pity. Me, not so much.

  Placing the drawers on the desk jolted him awake. Without looking up at me or saying a word, he licked his thumb and began counting. Money was filthy stuff, but he didn’t care. He loved counting bills, wrapping them by denomination, and rolling the coins.

  “A good haul,” I said, although his routine never failed to disgust me.

  He said, “Sweet-smelling cabbage.”

  The coffee might have started helping because he no longer slurred his words. Evidently so pleased over the profits from concessions, he suggested I leave early when Rollerball let out.

  “Want me to make the deposit?” I said, secretly preferring not to do it. But I figured he might need to stay overnight at the theater and use his cot. Bullock usually handled the job of placing the deposit bags in our bank deposit box on the upper deck of a nearby mall. But, sometimes, I did it.

  “I’ll shack up later with my buddy, Wayne. I’ll do it.” Great. I was off the hook.

  To make the deposit, all we had to do was unlock a chute by the side of the bank and insert the bags. The chute was just to the side of the main entrance at the end of a bridgeway stretching from the upper parking deck to the mall. A lamp above the entrance provided plenty of light, but the area was deserted at that time of night unless the cleaning crew was still working. I felt exposed and defenseless. The place got me jumpy.

  “Swofford?” I said. He was Bullock’s main gambling connection, I figured from things Bullock had told me.

  “Yeah, Wayne Swofford’s my buddy.” Buddy? I wondered. Swofford was playing him for a fool. I was sure of it. But how much did I care? This was a bed he had made for himself.

  I said, “Oh, the platter system is acting up. It doesn’t look good.”

  “What? Damn,” Bullock said, as if he suddenly remembered that he had other responsibilities. “I need to take a look at that daggum thing tomorrow.” He grabbed a few antacids from a jar he kept on his desk and crunched down on them.

  “We need to call the main office to have it checked out, Horace.”

  “How about you do that for me?”

  “First thing in the morning,” I said. Why didn’t I get a cut of the concession profits?

  Chapter Six

  On my way home, I made a long detour through the Duke University side of town. A full moon created a smoky brightness as if a late dusk or an early dawn was frozen in time. I had seen Carrie’s address on her job application, and I knew her home was in the Duke Forest area. This was where the University sold lots for faculty to build homes. I had never driven through the area, even near it, since I lived on the other side of Durham. I hoped to see where Carrie lived.

  The faculty houses were on streets intersecting with a two-lane highway that wound through the mostly pine-forested land. It didn’t seem like a residential area at first because broad sections of trees lined both sides of the highway cloaking all but a few blurry outlines of homes. I turned onto the street where Carrie lived, slowed, and followed the street numbers on the mailboxes, looking for her address.

  The lots were big, and each house had its own, unique design. The first, set on an upward slope, had a set of white columns florescent in the moonlight. Facing opposite was a single-story structure, spread out in sections, no section alike. Its driveway had two entrances circling to a front entry door.

  I felt pricks of longing. These were homes likely built with the owner’s preferences in mind and with the help of a well-paid architect. That would be fun. I had lived in small, simple homes, all looking much the same. Not that the owners of these faculty homes were wealthy. They probably weren’t. Yet they had enough money to build homes reflecting their separate tastes. And I could only assume that what went on in these homes was as interesting as their exteriors suggested. I wondered whether one could guess the academic area of its owner by the details of each design. I wanted what these people had, and with each home I passed, I felt smaller and more trapped.

  The road took a wide, sweeping curve, and then sloped downward. Each home continued to vary. But as the road shifted back and upward, crossing several other streets, the lots shrank and the homes less varied. Some fronts were more like what I was used to, such as split levels and ranch styles. These looked older too.

  I saw Carrie’s house number. My pulse raced. I didn’t dare stop, but I was intensely curious to learn what I could about it. It was a two-story home, ordinary by the standards set by the first homes, and less distinctive than I expected for a historian owner. Perhaps historians were low on the faculty pay scale. Light shone from a second-floor window. I imagined it might be hers. Was she reading?

  No. Owen’s van was in the driveway. Anger surged through me. I felt betrayed. But what right d
id I have to feel this way? What should I have expected? A rush of competing emotions caused my heart to pound, scrambling my thoughts. I sped down the street and left the neighborhood, awash in ugly feelings, and even more angry that they surfaced in me so strongly. Never had I been so thrown off balance, so full of desires, so dissatisfied with myself, so full of frustration and bitterness. I slammed my palms against the steering wheel, causing them to sting.

  Hoping to turn my thoughts away from what I’d just seen, I switched on the radio. After scanning a few stations, I heard someone refer to Jaws. It was the last part of an interview with Richard Zanuck, one of the producers of the movie.

  The interviewer said, “Mr. Zanuck, it’s interesting that you picked a director, Steven Spielberg, who’s not well known. Are you trying to enhance his career?”

  “No, just the opposite,” Zanuck replied. “I’m trying to enhance my career. I know how good this guy is, how he can tell a story. I knew this kid will do something brilliant.”

  Shifting to another topic, the interviewer said, “Some time ago there was a story in Time magazine. It had a photo of the mechanical side of the shark.”

  Zanuck said, “Yes, the photo got out and wound up in Time. We all were worried about it. Steve thought that it might kill the picture. The curtain was pulled back, ruining the scare. But, like I said, it’s not been a problem.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard when some of the actors see the movie, even they get into the story and go with it. Like it’s real.”

  “It’s a great story,” Zanuck said, ending the interview.

  I got to thinking about how different it would be at the theater when this movie started. We’d sold out the larger theater for The Godfather II, back during Christmas, but only the first weekend. We’d run out of ice, and we wouldn’t want that to happen again. Not during the summer.

  I reached home and turned up my driveway. The kitchen light was on. Mrs. Roe, my landlady, didn’t sleep well and often waited up for me. I cut the engine. She must have heard the tires on the gravel. By the time I’d exited the car and reached the rear of the house, she stood at the top of the back steps.