Blockbuster

by Richard H. Smith

  “Jeez, Spence.”

  “I’m not saying the woman’s bad for sure. Can’t say that. Want to be fair to her. Don’t know the true facts. Facts are what you have to obey. Just saying she gets me thinking this way.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Two plus two ain’t five. Let’s be watching. You be watching,” Spence said, looking straight at me, as serious as I’d ever seen him.

  Was there really something for me to worry about? I saw no basic harm in her. But Spence’s concerns couldn’t be discounted.

  “There’s another possibility, Spence. Horace got into trouble a few years back when he was living in Georgia. A woman accused him of rape. Did you know about this?”

  “Nope. No surprise though.”

  “Sue Ellen told me about it after the funeral. Detective Riggs knows about it too. It never went to trial because a judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence. She harassed him afterward, even threatened to kill him.”

  “Kill him?” Spence said.

  “Yeah. And the theater company transferred him up here because of all the bad publicity. Maybe she hired someone to do this.”

  “We’re trying to figure which way tumbleweed gonna roll,” Spence said.

  “I hear you, Spence.”

  All the speculating about Bullock’s murder left me in a weird, agitated mood. Spence’s warning hit home. Should I be checking people for blisters? I would have a closer look at Samantha’s hands. And, come to think of it, she’d been wearing long sleeves. But wasn’t this her usual habit?

  My uneasy mood continued through the rest of the evening. And an odd thing happened later. When I left the theater for home and as I approached my car, I noticed something stuck to the front grill. What was it? I looked more closely and shivered. It was a small bird, its body shattered against the steel. When had that happened? I found a paper shopping bag from the back seat of the car and used to extract the remains. They came loose after a brief tug. The spindly feel and jumbled state of these tiny bones produced in me another, deeper shiver, disturbing me as much as Bullock’s death. I placed the bag in the dumpster and headed home.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As I started up the back steps of Mrs. Roe’s house, I heard a whimper and a scratching at the door. My heart raced. Where was Mrs. Roe? I fumbled for the door key and finally got the door open.

  Byron shot past me and down the steps as I hit the kitchen light switch. A pool of urine spread across a section of the linoleum.

  “Mrs. Roe?” I called.

  No answer. I moved through the kitchen, calling her name a second time, louder. Again, no answer.

  I found Mrs. Roe sitting in her reading chair in the living room with a newspaper folded on her lap, a half-completed crossword puzzle on the page facing her. Her head was back, her eyes open and still.

  “No, please no,” I said, as if there were a power that could reverse what I feared had happened.

  I knelt down and felt her wrist. It was cold. No pulse. She wasn’t breathing. I whispered her name and held both her hands as if by doing so I could create warmth. Her poor, weak heart had given out. Tears welled up in my eyes, blurring the letters she had written in the squares of the puzzle.

  I left Mrs. Roe as she was and returned to the kitchen. I called 911 and remained standing next to the phone for half a minute, shaken and bewildered. Byron barked weakly from outside. Keats meowed. I cleaned up the wet spot on the kitchen floor and let Byron in. He looked hungry, and I poured dry food into his bowl. I gave Keats half a can of cat food.

  For the next couple of hours, I moved about in a numbed state. It seemed impossible to comprehend that this warm, wonderful woman was no longer living. Emergency personnel arrived and performed a perfunctory confirmation of her death. A police officer soon followed and took down an account of how I found her. A coroner arrived and also examined her. It was all a gut-wrenching set of things to endure.

  I could not provide next of kin. Mrs. Roe had mentioned a sister but long ago deceased. She had no children. Marion Lester came over from next door when the ambulance arrived. She took it hard. We cried together for several minutes.

  About three-thirty, just after the coroner’s van took Mrs. Roe’s body away, there was a knock on the front screen door. It was Detective Riggs.

  I greeted him with surprise and pushed open the screen door.

  “Working a homicide case tonight,” he said. “I was just a few blocks over near the ABC store. I heard over the police chatter about Mrs. Roe.”

  “This is a tough blow,” I said as I joined him on the porch.

  “I understand. I liked her too. After only a short conversation over the phone.”

  “Want to come in?”

  “No, thanks. Can’t stay. Long day.” He paused, his expressive eyes full of sorrow. “They’ve taken her?”

  I nodded.

  We stood for a minute without talking. The air felt heavy and thick with the scent of honeysuckle. Suddenly, as if responding to a conductor, the harsh, percussion sound of crickets came to life. Maybe I had failed to notice them until that moment.

  “She had a weak heart,” I said.

  “My mother came from England too. North of London,” Riggs said. “A place called Welwyn Garden City. Turns out Mrs. Roe knew it well. Shopped there. A planned city. The first of its kind.”

  “She took me in like I was kin,” I said.

  “Had my mother’s accent exactly,” Riggs said. “Spot on.”

  After another stretch of silence, I said, “It means a lot, your stopping by.”

  We shook hands, and he disappeared into the night.

  Riggs seemed so different to me now. I had viewed him as someone filling a role and doing it well, a category of person. I would thank him again and in a better way.

  I returned to where Mrs. Lester sat at the kitchen table, her head down and her eyes tearing again. In our different ways, we were fully stricken with grief. I stared at the jigsaw puzzle and tried to guess the content of the picture. Mrs. Roe had only completed the four edges.

  “Hillary and I were the best of friends,” said Mrs. Lester. “We taught together in the same high school. Nate, I want you to stay here and keep watch over the house until the estate gets settled. I’m sure she would want this. I’ll look after Byron and Keats while you’re at work and take care of what needs to be done.”

  I thanked her. This was very kind. She was about to return home, but paused for a moment and said,

  “Let me find you something from Hillary’s books.”

  We went into Mrs. Roe’s library. While she examined the shelves, I picked up the newspaper Mrs. Roe had been using for the crossword puzzle and tucked it under my arm. I wanted to keep it safe. Mrs. Lester found what she was looking for, the collected poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. She located a particular poem. In fact, it was bookmarked.

  “Hillary loved Tennyson,” she said. “This one she loved especially. She knew she might go soon. I think it will help.”

  Once I was lying in bed, I turned to the bookmarked page. The title read, “Crossing the Bar.” Mrs. Lester’s instincts proved right. I liked it from the first stanza. It allowed my sorrow to mix with something uplifting, the last lines especially:

  Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mrs. Lester must have entered the house early in the morning to attend to Byron and Keats. I woke up to see the clock hands close to eight-thirty and all tasks completed. I’d heard nothing. A note resting on the kitchen table described what she would do to handle Mrs. Roe’s affairs.

  Mrs. Roe’s sudden passing would take a long time to get over, and knowing she would no longer be there, with her encouraging, cheerful manner, weighed on me. The world felt a much darker place.

  I read the Tennyson poem several more times, and this again helped fight o
ff constant waves of sadness. After an early morning rain shower, the clouds cleared, and the day promised to be full of sunshine, the air fresh and clean. I opened the curtains and blinds, letting sunlight find every corner of the house.

  I had much to do to help keep my mind distracted. I made stops at two wholesale dealers where we got most of our supplies of candy, popcorn kernels, cups, and popcorn boxes, arranging a double delivery of these staple items. With Jaws, I figured we were about to experience something so unprecedented that ordinary preparations would prove foolish. I didn’t want to miscalculate the category of hurricane likely to hit us.

  The new popcorn machine arrived late morning. Kenny and I jumped into the task of getting it operational by breaking it in a few times.

  “You’re looking blue, Burton,” Kenny said. We hadn’t engaged in our usual banter. I told him about Mrs. Roe.

  “Let’s keep working,” I said. “That’s what I need.”

  We were both relieved to get the new machine. We couldn’t see handling the numbers expected with Jaws without it, especially on the weekends where we could have five sold-out shows in succession each day, if we’d read the signals right.

  Later, Dan Drucker came by as we were about to open and employees were arriving. He was heading back home to Raleigh after a long day of checking on theaters in his district. He asked about the new popper and tried a fresh batch along with a Dr Pepper and Milk Duds.

  “You see, this is the only time I get to eat this good stuff. My wife won’t let me—”

  Drucker was about to say more, but he had stopped in mid-sentence. Carrie had just arrived, and he rubbernecked in her direction. Whatever he had intended to say seemed to vanish from his mind.

  She wore a white skirt of a soft cotton material and a light-blue blouse, which gave an even greater blue charge to her eyes. One side of her hair was held back by a brooch containing a small yellow flower. She smiled, and the sum total effect of her presence was jolting—that someone so radiant and fresh could walk into the Yorktowne Theater in Durham, North Carolina and, what’s more, work for us.

  Drucker seemed to forget that high school for him was twenty years ago—and that he was married with kids. As for me, she took my breath away. I’d heard this could happen, but I thought it was just an expression. Now, I knew it to be true. My bad mood disappeared.

  “How’s my favorite Yorktowne girl?” he said, a swelling of milk chocolate bubbling at both corners of his mouth from the handful of Milk Duds he was already working on. I doubted Carrie liked being called “girl,” but she was a good sport about it.

  “Fine and dandy, sir,” she said without a hint of irritation.

  He may have realized how uncool he looked with his mouth chipmunked with candy because he said,

  “Oh, I’m trying out some Milk Duds. Quality control. See with Milk Duds, you need to eat at least five or six at a time. This way they make a nice ball of caramel to roll around in your cheeks. You get the flavor and then, you know, the hunk to chew on.”

  Carrie said, “I like my caramel the Milky Way.”

  “How’s that?” Drucker said, slow on the uptake, as I burst out an involuntary laugh.

  “You both are too smart for me,” Drucker said. “Anyway, how’s my new manager doing? You know he’s just a kid. What are you, Nate? Ain’t you still nineteen?

  “That’s right,” I admitted. I didn’t feel like a kid though.

  Carrie stared at me, her eyes wide and unconvinced. Others who were in hearing distance said, all together,

  “Nineteen?”

  Even Samantha, who hadn’t bothered to place the book she was reading to the side when Drucker came in, gave me a fresh inspection. The straight line crease of her lips parted.

  “Mr. Burton, I can’t believe you’re only nineteen?” Mindy Hawkins said, as if I needed to prove it.

  “Guilty as charged,” I said, this attention to my age making me uncomfortable.

  I led Drucker to the back of the concession area to show him features of the new popper.

  “Jeez, Mr. Drucker, why did you tell them that? They’re looking at me like my voice changed last week.”

  “Didn’t mean to undermine your authority,” Drucker said, slapping my back. “Figured they knew.”

  “Anyway, thanks for this new machine. It’ll pop a lot more than the old one. It works great.”

  “Well, you needed it, and you will need it. Listen, gotta hit the road. Two more stops to make. If there’re any problems, just holler.”

  “Mr. Drucker,” I said in a quiet voice. “Sorry about Samantha doing that reading. She gets her job done.”

  “No problem, Nate. Unless it becomes one. I saw her reading it. Valley of the Dolls. My wife loved it. The Love Machine too. And, by the way, that girl, what’s her name, Carrie—she’s cute as a button—like a scoop of butter melting on a stack of blueberry pancakes.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree with you there.”

  Soon, he was on his way out, using his expansive, pillowy rear to push through one of the lobby doors as he poured the last portion of Milk Duds into his mouth. He tossed the empty box my way. I caught it and relayed it to Mindy, who flipped it behind her back into the trash can. Mindy, she was all right, but I still needed to talk with her about the stealing.

  Carrie turned to me.

  “I’m stunned. You’re only nineteen.”

  “How old did you think I was?”

  She studied me for a moment and said, “Honestly, I assumed you had to be at least twenty-three or twenty-four. Maybe because you’re the manager.” She said the word manager with a playful emphasis, smiling at the same time. “But I did think you looked a lot younger than your actual age—well, what I thought your age was.”

  “Yeah, you look young,” Billy Gossett said.

  “Well, because he is young,” said Mindy.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  By Wednesday we were getting constant phone calls about Jaws. Ads blitzed all three TV networks.

  Owen was the only one unmoved, and whenever he stopped by, he let us know. The more I saw of him, the less respect he created in me, and I now viewed myself at least his equal. I was pretty sure he had been sneaking in to watch movies. Why did Carrie like him?

  Later, like a sore that never healed, Owen showed up again.

  “Nate,” he said as he came into the lobby and examined one of the Jaws posters. “You realize this movie’s an abomination.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Ichthyologists would object to its basic premise.”

  “What’s an ich—?”

  “Ichthyologist, from the Greek words, ‘ikhthus’ meaning ‘fish’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘study.’ Ichthyologists are marine biologists who study sharks, or any fish, for a living.”

  “Got it,” I said, barely hiding my annoyance.

  He stood with his arms folded, unable to hide his cocky attitude, which came to him naturally, I had been concluding.

  “Shark attacks happen, sure. We’ve all heard about the famous cases. They’re far from typical. Not even close. The odds are ridiculously low. Sharks aren’t interested in attacking people. It’s a myth. Ergo, an abomination.”

  He made sense, but only half sense. It was just a movie. Who uses the word ergo? I think he assumed I didn’t know what it meant.

  I said, “What you say may be true, but—”

  “Listen, man, it is true.”

  “I’d like to hear you tell this to Navy guys who lost buddies to these myths in the Pacific during WWII,” I said, now getting openly irritated despite myself. Plus, I knew a diver who had suffered an unprovoked shark attack near Ocracoke Island, and his telling of this terrifying experience had left a chilling imprint on my memory.

  “Get real,” Owen said. “Those were obviously freakish circumstances.”

  “Freakish?” I said, raising my voice. “It was a major, huge problem.”

  “Hey, take a chill pill, man. I feel sorry for those
guys. But this shark thing’s overblown.”

  “I’d like to see what you would have done in those shark-infested waters.” He’d really got to me, and I was letting it show more than I wanted to.

  Owen said, “I’ve met people who swim around sharks all the time. Never been attacked.”

  “That’s different,” I said.

  “Okay. I’m not saying it wasn’t a bad scene for those sailors. It has nothing to do with the risks of swimming at any beach. The poster is pure misleading bunk. The movie too. And more to the point, sharks have a valuable place in the ecosystem.”

  “I’m not saying we should kill all the sharks,” I said, retrieving a calmer tone. “The poster is exaggerated, but what do you expect from a movie poster? Anyway, why don’t you hold your opinion until you’ve seen the movie?”

  “It’s all about the green stuff. Hollywood, that’s where the sharks are infested. I won’t waste my time.”

  I thought that Carrie had been out earshot at first, but she must have heard most of our argument. She moved closer and said, “The poster is obviously over the top, but it’s also brilliant. It’s calculated to scare, and it succeeds. It’s a movie poster like Nate said. In most waters, fear of sharks is unwarranted, clearly. But swimming among sharks is foolish.”

  “Carrie Jenkins, always the sensible one,” Owen said.

  “Owen Becker, always the provocateur,” said Carrie.

  I said, “It’s going to be a great movie. I know it will. Have you seen the TV spots that started yesterday? The soundtrack alone is scary.”

  “Oh, I’m scared,” Owen said, with fake exaggeration on his face.

  “You are irredeemable,” Carrie said.

  I said, “The print’s coming tonight. We’ll preview it tomorrow afternoon. I, for one, am excited to see it.”

  “Count me out,” Owen said. “Last time I checked, my brain had not been surgically removed.”