Blockbuster

by Richard H. Smith

  Spence looked misty-eyed. My body shivered. The sense of history here was overwhelming. I hurt inside. And I wasn’t sure what to make of it, what to do about it. What did it all mean? The swivel stool—might it be preserved and placed as its own exhibit in the Smithsonian or somewhere? Blind Boy Fuller’s music in the background. Would such dreams, so long delayed, ever happen? If they did, Spence’s soul would sing. Yet I knew in my bones that this was a pipe dream. My hopes, one moment soaring, seemed to fizzle in mid-flight. History was a string of cruel turns, mostly forgotten.

  But soon we each had us a plate of glistening, fried catfish, nestled in a bed of greens, along with coleslaw and a basket of cornbread muffins. I forked down a chunk of catfish, following it with slaw and cornbread.

  “This is so excellent.”

  The taste and aroma brought back a memory of my dad’s catfish stew. He had made it during a camping trip to Lake Mickie. One evening, we took our flat-bottomed boat and set trotlines in a little cove on the eastern part of the lake. In the morning as the sun rose, mist still hanging low over the water, we returned and found three catfish, hooked and ready for hauling in. This was the way to fish. No waiting with a pole when you could be doing something else. They caught themselves on the trotlines. They struggled when we pulled them up, as we avoided being speared by the barbed horns on their back and side fins. We knocked them out cold. Later, we pinioned their heads to a pine tree with a few rusty nails and peeled their skins with pliers. After filleting them with my hunting knife, we sliced up the flesh into good-sized wedges for stew. My dad used a special mix of other ingredients and seasonings he kept secret from everyone, even my mom.

  “You okay, Nate?” Spence asked.

  “In heaven,” I said and told Spence about all the things Bullock had said that evening while drunk on Jack Daniels. I filled him in on everything I knew as I shoveled in the food between sentences. One by one, we went down the list of people who might have killed Bullock, starting with Sue Ellen.

  We eliminated her right away. Physically, she couldn’t have pulled it off. And, anyway, it turned out her sister had been staying with her that evening, visiting from Atlanta, maybe helping her deal with Bullock’s latest fooling around.

  As for Hogan, I was glad to learn that Spence had seen him moving about in the projection booth until at least twelve-thirty and had then seen him leave. This was way before two o’clock when Riggs told me Bullock was likely killed. And we reminded ourselves that even if Hogan had wanted to do it, he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to do it right in front of the theater.

  No one except Riggs or Dupree had talked with Samantha about it. Well, we assumed. Spence had a funny feeling about Samantha.

  “She’s got Freon flowing in her veins,” Spence said.

  “Mixed with lighter fluid, Spence. I’ve seen her angry too.”

  However, I didn’t believe she had cared about Bullock one way or the other. She was from another planet. And she’d left just before ten o’clock. Except for the men Bullock owed money to, including Wayne Swofford, we couldn’t think of anyone else. We figured Riggs would be looking into these possibilities too. Spence seemed to be holding back his thoughts.

  We finished lunch, and I needed to get going because I wanted to attend Bullock’s midafternoon burial service.

  As he paid for both of us, he glanced in my direction and said, “They be putting Mr. Bullock in the ground quick.”

  “My guess is that Sue Ellen had no reason to wait on it,” I said. But it had seemed mighty quick.

  I tried to leave a tip, but Spence covered that too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sue Ellen, her sister Alma, and Kaywood Turrentine were the only people attending the burial. Several minutes into the service, Bullock’s gambling buddy, Wayne Swofford, also showed up. I had never seen him up close. A tall and bony guy, his droopy assemblage of body parts hung downward as if he were pinned to a wall. He stood, fidgeting and shifting his weight from one leg to another.

  The second the service ended, Swofford lit a cigarette and handed something to the minister. Two cemetery employees appeared out of nowhere to lower the casket into the ground.

  The service saddened me more than I expected. I reminded myself that Bullock had recommended me for the assistant manager position. I appreciated this. An ignorant man, proud of his crude passions and prejudices, and yet his appetite for life impressed me in its own way. A guilty part of me had enjoyed watching him lose his temper and say things that others wouldn’t say. I half saluted him for this raw, if lame-brained brand of honesty.

  And, sometimes, he’d tried to give me advice, usually based on lessons he’d learned from his time in the army.

  One bit of wisdom I remembered well. He had said, “In the army, you had to put up with a lot of crap. But, Nate, I don’t care how bad things were. If you’d look around, you’d see some poor knucklehead who had it worse, a lot worse. That always made me feel better. You know what I’m saying?” I had to give him this because sometimes I’d found it true, Bullock’s own demise a case in point.

  And I think he had loved Sue Ellen—a flawed love, but real enough, and mutual if Sue Ellen’s tears told a story.

  The minister, sweaty and uncomfortable in his dark suit, had seemed impatient to speed to the end. Not that I didn’t share the impatience. The service itself felt like a rush job, happening so soon after Bullock’s death. The minister couldn’t go fast enough through his worn-out phrases, such as Bullock being in a better place. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Given what I knew about Bullock, it amounted to pious baloney.

  After Bullock’s pinewood casket had been lowered into the ground, no one stuck around to watch the cemetery workers cover it with dirt. I accompanied Sue Ellen to her car while her sister talked with Kaywood.

  “Horace had a mess of demons,” she said, as she fetched a pack of Lucky Strikes from her purse. “I guess you knew about the gambling. And all the money Horace owed?”

  “Some of it,” I said. “He told me he was in big trouble. You know who he owed the money to?”

  She placed a cigarette between her lips and lit it with the weak flame of a lighter, low on fluid. Her first inhaling was hungry and deep, and as smoke funneled from her nostrils, she replied, “That snake over yonder, Wayne Swofford. He was a bad influence on Horace.”

  “He does look a little shady.”

  “He’s feeling guilty about something,” Sue Ellen said, “He told me he’d pay the minister for the service, which won’t no good, in my opinion.”

  “I’ve heard better,” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said. “I had a mind to leave Horace many times. I’d pitch a fit and then never do it. Can’t explain it. We go so far back. Horace’s brother married Alma. She’s my twin. We had houses next to each other in Atlanta. But he passed last year of lung cancer.”

  “These things are hard to understand. That much I do know,” I said, hoping this would help.

  Sue Ellen said, “I near about left him for real before moving here. But let me tell you, Nate. Mr. Drucker knows this too. And I figured he’d be here. Horace was accused of assaulting a girl at the theater he managed down in Macon. He told me nothing happened, but I don’t know. She, well, claimed he raped her. It never went to trial because the judge said there wasn’t enough evidence.”

  “Horace never mentioned it,” I said. Why would he? This got me thinking. Bullock had probably been guilty. That was my read, which pulled the final plug on the remaining good feelings I’d mustered for him moments earlier.

  “That’s why we moved up here,” Sue Ellen continued. “The theater company almost fired him. They didn’t, long as we moved somewhere else. So they let him come here and manage the Yorktowne. Dan Drucker set it up. Four years ago, this month.”

  “I knew none of this. Did you meet the girl?”

  “Saw her in court. Just a once. They kept her name out of the papers. It was, Lucy, no, Lucille. Don
’t remember her last name. She was young, like seventeen, from a messed-up home. I hear tell she didn’t have a good reputation. Don’t like bad-mouthing people, but she was a slut. She’d accused two other men of the same thing. Trailer trash, if you ask me.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Don’t know. She was real mad though. Like she meant it. I’ll give her that.”

  “Did you tell Detective Riggs?”

  “Yes. Well, not at first. Later, after I got to thinking about it. She made threats.”

  I wondered whether this girl might have hired someone to track Bullock down and kill him. No. That seemed farfetched. Sue Ellen stared at the ground, and then a smile came over her face.

  “You know,” she said. “Horace liked my fried chicken.”

  For a moment, she seemed to forget all about him that she hated. Her face lost its angry and complicated lines.

  “He told me it saved his life,” I said.

  “So he told you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Years back, before the theater job, Horace’s old army buddies had wanted him to go to an Elvis concert. He passed on it because Sue Ellen was making fried chicken that night. Heading to the concert, they got hit and killed by a drunk driver. What a wacky twist of fate.

  We stood, saying nothing, each of us thinking our private thoughts. I broke the silence.

  “Mrs. Bullock, I’ve got Horace’s things from the theater packed in two boxes in my trunk. How about I set them in your car?”

  “Thank you, Nate. Bless your heart.”

  I retrieved the boxes containing the sad fragments left from Bullock’s life and placed them in the back seat of her old Falcon, its exterior oxidized by the sun and from the lack of waxing.

  We parted, and I figured this would be last I’d ever see of her.

  Chapter Twenty

  We reopened on Monday. I liked being manager, if only because I didn’t have to wear the tacky assistant manager jacket, just a coat and tie of my choice instead. Mrs. Roe had given me several of her husband’s blazers. They fit me well. The change took away the clownish feeling that came with wearing the company getup. Maybe the feeling had been a foolish one of my own making, but I was glad to lose it all the same. In this small section of the wide universe called the Yorktowne Theater, I was boss.

  All of us worried about Milton, but his arrest and the publicity surrounding it was welcome in at least one respect. We stopped scaring off employees and probably moviegoers too. Those who agreed to stay took on extra hours until we hired replacements. Bullock’s murder had been a grim event, and yet what could we do about it? Anticipating Jaws helped. There was so much media attention, and the full realization we would get this movie had us jazzed.

  Hogan and I got along well. He was off the hook as the murderer, so I assumed. Also, he now seemed proud to show off his projection booth, especially after I went out of my way to praise his choice of posters.

  Kenny had started right away and was already proving to be a great help. As I’d expected, he was much better than me at maintaining the platter system. The vibes between him and Hogan were cool too.

  I had also decided to evaluate all of our employees because some I suspected of stealing. Mindy Hawkins, who mostly did concessions, was my main worry. I’d seen her pocket Reese’s Cups more than once, and as far as I could tell, she hadn’t paid for them. Ever since she was hired, we had been coming up short after the weekly inventory. I needed to solve this problem.

  But I thought about Carrie Jenkins the most. Not because she needed evaluating. She was on mind constantly. Even when we were in separate parts of the theater, I was aware of her presence, as if my thoughts worked like radar, always operating and locked in on her. When I couldn’t see her, I saw her.

  Had she noticed the change in my appearance? I hoped so. Did my being manager impress her? Why did I keep entertaining such stupid ideas? Pure fantasy. I felt like Pluto, circling the sun, out in the cold.

  Carrie must have spent time outside, because her complexion seemed more coppery, bringing out a deeper blue glow to her eyes. I could hardly stand it.

  After the first shows started, I found a chance to start a conversation with her.

  “I guess you finished Fahrenheit? Did you think about what book you’d be?”

  I liked Bradbury’s idea in the book, set in a Nazi-like dictatorship, of having people who resist the regime each be responsible for preserving an important book through memorization, a living library.

  “Good question. There’re so many I love. Emily Dickinson,” she said, showing me the cover of the book she was now reading, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  “Didn’t she write one about a bird eating a worm?” I asked, as I tried to remember a line from high school English.

  “He bit an angle-worm in halves and ate the fellow, raw,” Carrie said, reciting the line with instant recall.

  “That’s the one,” I said, glancing over at the Jaws poster.

  “Well, how about you? What book would you be, Mr. Burton?”

  I’d considered the question in advance, hoping she would ask me. At first, I had decided on Robinson Crusoe, but as I thought about it again, I figured she might not consider it great enough literature. Because she’d mentioned a poet, I instead said, almost without thinking, “I’d go with Robert Frost, his collected poems.”

  “Frost? Oh,” she said. Evidently, not an inspiring choice. Strike one, I figured.

  Owen entered the lobby. Damn him. I hadn’t seen him drive up. He wore a tie-dyed shirt with a hallucinatory pattern and low-slung pants with a thick rope for a belt. Leather sandals completed the picture of coolness. Once again, I felt like a clown. Strike two.

  Carrie filled him in on our conversation.

  “Robert Frost, really?” Owen said. “That reactionary?”

  What’s wrong with Robert Frost, I wondered? Reactionary? I wasn’t sure what Owen meant. This shook me. And Owen realized my uncertainty as he followed up by saying,

  “I mean, hasn’t he had his day? And kind of right-wing?”

  That’s what I had thought he’d meant.

  “At least with Frost, we still want to learn his poems by heart,” Carrie said, offering me support. I liked her point.

  “You mean in middle school?” Owen said with a laugh.

  Carrie gave Owen an irritated look. But why couldn’t I defend myself? I hated looking weak.

  “Hey, Frost is great,” Owen continued. “He needs preserving. No question. But, who’s your favorite painter, Norman Rockwell?”

  “Owen, don’t be such a snob,” Carrie said. Now, she gave him a serious frown.

  “I kind of like Norman Rockwell,” I said, mostly because Mrs. Roe had framed a centerfold Rockwell had painted for Look Magazine and had placed it in her living room.

  “He’s not an artist. He’s an illustrator. And another reactionary,” Owen said.

  I felt confused, unable to counter Owen’s claims. The Rockwell cover had been painted in the mid-1960s during the desegregation crisis. It depicted an actual event from 1960 in which a young Black girl had been led to her New Orleans elementary school by federal marshals needed for her protection. How reactionary could he have been? And just an illustrator? I wasn’t trying to claim he was Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Owen, cut it out,” Carrie said.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Owen said.

  “I need a drink of water,” Carrie said. She headed across the lobby.

  Owen trailed behind her and said, “What did I do? He is just an illustrator.”

  I should have defended myself better. Yes, Rockwell was probably best described as an illustrator. But the content of the magazine cover was hardly reactionary. And I was sure Frost was a good choice, a great poet. I didn’t know more than a couple poems, the “Two Roads” one best, which I indeed had memorized in middle school. I should have picked a contemporary poet, except that I couldn’t think of any. So what? Frost had been given the hono
r of reading a poem at Kennedy’s inauguration. I remembered seeing a photo of him taken on that freezing day in 1961. Yet he had looked about a hundred years old. All this amounted to strike three.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I made an excuse to end the conversation, claiming I needed to check on something outside. The grand, bulky shape of Spence’s old Buick eased into the parking lot. It was so long and wide it floated along with its delta wings, more barge than automobile. Spence parked halfway down the lot and soon his tall, lean frame appeared out of the darkness. He wore his Stetson hat, with its distinctive pinched look across its top. He shuffled over to where I stood next to one of the Jaws posters near the lobby entrance.

  Spence tilted the brow of his hat upward and inspected the poster, the whites of his eyes contrasting with his creamy dark skin. There was a ton of living in those eyes. He seemed to be thinking hard.

  “Scary, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Reckon so,” he said, his thoughts elsewhere it seemed.

  A bottle of Coke came from around his back, where he had been holding it with his left hand, the long sway of his arm allowing a wide motion. He lifted the bottle to the same side of his mouth and took a slow swallow, the bottle angling off even further to the left as well, as I had often seen him do. I stared at the way he held the bottle. Spence noticed my staring because he said,

  “A woman, she hit me upside my face with a two-by-four.” He pointed to his right side and continued, “Had a rusty nail on it. Stuck in my jaw. Yanked it out, but this side swelled up like a squirrel planning for winter. Lasted about three months. Got used to drinking from this here other side.”

  “She must have been real mad at you, Spence,” I said, curious why she would do this.

  “Love bite was all,” Spence said, with a smile spreading across his face. He liked talking in riddles. I wouldn’t be finding out any more about that woman, at least not now.