The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “That’s okay, thanks, I can walk.” I started to do so.

  “Hold on. We got to go out there anyway. Most folks running a business gits it open before ten o’clock. You think she’ll be at home?”

  “Yes, they’re probably having breakfast.”

  “Having breakfast?” he chuckled and gave his associate a broad wink. “Ten o’clock and they’re having breakfast! Think they can git their street clothes on by noon?” The other man forced an unenthusiastic smile that quickly was canceled.

  “We generally stay up pretty late,” I explained.

  “I bet you do, I bet you do,” Booter wisecracked. He seemed to be in a very good mood. “Doing all sorts of things, I wouldn’t mind wagering.” He told the plump man, “This young man’s ridden in my car before on a previous occasion. Strange, isn’t it, he don’t seem too eager to accept my hospitality. I been good to you, son. You know that, and I know that. Don’t we? I could have come down hard, lot harder than I did. You’d been in Chicago, or one of those mean southern towns, you’d-a been in a lot worse fix. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you just take a seat in this car here, and we’ll go on up and wake up your friends in case they’re not down to breakfast yet. How about that?”

  I got in the car.

  Maisie ran out on the porch and yelled back inside, “Mama, Devin’s arrested. The police got him!” The company gathered on the porch to see. Fortunately, everyone was decently dressed, no one was shooting heroin, or screwing, or protesting the war, and Spurgeon was gone.

  “Good morning, Gabe. Mother, this is Mr. Booter. I believe you met last month.”

  “Yes. Mittie’s accident. How do you do, Officer?”

  “I’m doing fine, ma’am. And you?”

  “Fine, thank you. It’s gotten a bit chilly, hasn’t it? I do believe this summer is just about coming to an end.”

  I climbed out of the back seat of the patrol car.

  “Was Devin lost, Gabe?”

  “Uhhuhhuh,” he gave her a chuckle. “No, this boy just came along for the ride. He likes riding in my car. That right?”

  I went up on the porch so I could face him with the others.

  “What can I do for you?” Leila asked politely.

  “Well, now,” he strolled up to the bottom step, propped his boot on it, while his friend stayed in the car, scowling down at the ditch beside the road. “Mr. Bipple here, from our department of safety regulations, needs to take a little look-see at your the-ater, Leila.”

  She smiled. “What seems to be the problem?”

  Booter smiled too. “Why, we don’t know there is a problem. We just have to do these little checks regularly to make sure there ain’t a problem.”

  “I guess Mr. Bipple must have missed us last summer when he did his regular check-up. And the summer before, too.”

  “I guess he musta.” Booter’s grin got wider. “Lot of folks been checking into the town statutes lately. In fact, our mayor called me in just the other day over a little notification he’d gotten from a lawyer regarding one of our statutes.” He bent and lazily picked some grass out of his boot toe. “’Course the mayor was kinda surprised that three old Mexican biddies that can’t read or write or even speak English worth a damn had gone to the trouble, not to mention the expense, of hiring a lawyer to send that little notification outlining my abuses of their legal rights. Our mayor’s a nervous kind of person. He don’t like people getting upset with him. He likes things peaceful.” He stared at Leila, who just looked back at him politely and waited. “So I happened to come across a couple of statutes myself that folks had gotten slack on, had let ’em slide over the years. Safety statutes regarding public places. Seemed to me somebody ought to look into things right away before we had some kind of bad accident here in Floren Park. We can’t risk people getting burnt up and blowed up while they’re here to relax and enjoy themselves. It’s bad for business.”

  Mrs. Thurston drew herself taller. “I certainly do wish you had thought of that a month ago, Mr. Booter, before you and your associates allowed several dozen boxes of Fourth of July fireworks displays to be left sitting unattended in the middle of a public field where they could explode on an innocent passer-by.” Well, Mrs. Thurston had not, like Spur, “bitten” the sheriff, but she’d gone a lot further than I would have thought likely in her criticism of a law official.

  “Now, whether or not any ‘innocent passers-by’ were involved in that particular incident you’re referring to ain’t been proved, ma’am,” he grinned evenly. “But I agree we got to be more careful in the future. So let’s you and me go on down, Leila, and take a look around the place with Mr. Bipple here.”

  Maisie and Davy burst into tears, as if they thought their mother were being taken to the Tower. They had become more and more reluctant to be separated from her as the summer passed. I went, too, to see injustice done. Mr. Bipple discovered, in forty minutes’ time, thirty violations of the town safety regulations—fire hazards, electrical hazards, sanitation hazards.

  They pasted CLOSED and CONDEMNED on the doors with a printed explanation of the violations violated. We were shut down.

  “As of when?” Leila asked.

  “As of now,” the sheriff let her know.

  “Look,” she said, “I’ve got posters up, tickets have been reserved.” It was true about the posters, we’d put them up in Boulder. But nobody had ever reserved a ticket, even in good times. Leila’s quickness impressed me.

  “Well, take them down. And unreserve them.”

  She walked him back to his car. I went with them. Maybe, like Maisie and Davy, I was afraid he was going to take her away.

  “Gabe, you think you’re really being fair? I know the Menelades told you to close the place, and I know my father-in-law told them to tell you.”

  “Look here, honey. Don’t tell me what you know. I think I’ve been more than fair. More! Have I been riding you hard? Did I or didn’t I look the other way when that crazy husband of yours got himself blown to smithereens? When your boyfriend was selling shit, and your pals were peeing on each other?”

  Leila’s head turned away from him. As if filmed in slow motion, I saw the gold swirling of her hair.

  “I let you stay in my sister’s place despite all the drinking and sex, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if there was drugs. But you just went too far.”

  Her head jerked up. “When was that, Gabe? When I tried to help three old women keep the right to sell their flowers on your fucking street?”

  “Don’t you curse at me, young lady! Look here, you went over my head, rubbed mud in my face. I don’t like it when people I’m good to stab me in the back.”

  “Neither do I, Gabe. Neither do I.”

  “Christ Almighty, why didn’t you come back to me about it? I didn’t realize you were so fired up about those Beaners. Maybe we coulda talked. But with that freak out on my streets—”

  “Gabe, it’s the principle! And none of this is the point anyway. You know that. Even if I hadn’t called the lawyer, you’d still be closing me down. How much did Bruno tell the mayor he was going to invest in Floren Park?”

  The sheriff’s face bulged purple, “Are you accusing me of being bought? Well goddamn…” All of a sudden, he turned on me. “This is none of your damn business! Git the hell out of here! Christ Almighty, I let him off too!”

  “Are you all right, Leila?” I asked.

  His face turned a darker purple. “You think I’m going to horsewhip her? Police brutality, is that what you think? You punk college kids, somebody ought to horsewhip you! Git out of here before I make up my mind to do it!”

  “It’s okay, Devin, I’ll be inside in a minute.” So I left them. It was funny. Booter was acting as if she’d hurt his feelings.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Sabby asked.r />
  “There’s nothing we can do,” Pete told her mournfully.

  We sat around the living room after lunch. Though no one really had known why we were doing All My Sons in the first place, when the theater had clearly already folded, most of the company was gone, and Wolfstein was too ill to be working—still, once Booter told us we couldn’t do it, everyone, even Ronny, was despondent.

  Leila put more logs on the fire for the weather had been turning cooler each day. “Nate, put this blanket around you. Maybe it’s all for the best. I don’t think you ought to leave the house today, anyhow. It’s stupid, I suppose, letting something that counts so little get so important.”

  “No, it counts,” Wolfstein said hoarsely. He put down his coffee. His hands shook out a cigarette, and he fumbled for his lighter in his old bathrobe pocket.

  “Nathan, don’t!” Mrs. Thurston stood up, then sat down. “Oh, Good Lord, why shouldn’t you? Go ahead.” She smiled back when he grinned at her. The grin was like a grimace in his emaciated face.

  “Well,” he began, speaking slowly and carefully. “What is surprising, my friends, is that, after all of it, after making such a botch of my declining years, now, when I was fairly certain I had lost the slightest capacity to care in the slightest about…anything at all, that now, I should be given—that your ‘Good Lord’ should give me, Amanda—this most improbable chance to…care very much.” He coughed through his laugh. “Improbable, you must admit, ladies and gentlemen, out here in a Rocky Mountain resort, with a half dozen young folks performing Arthur Miller in an old rollerdome. And I tell you, too… I like it more than anything I’ve done…in a long while.”

  Leila smiled across the fire at him. “Since The Good Years, Nate?”

  “Yes, since then,” he answered softly.

  That was the first time, I think, that any of us had known it. That Wolfstein had—“My God, of course,” Joely said—directed The Good Years, the movie about World War II that had won so many awards. And when I later looked him up in a book of film criticism, they said in a footnote that in the fifties he had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, that he had been praised by the committee as a “model witness” and a “true patriot,” and that he had made no other movies after that. Leila had said once that Nate was dying from self-contempt. It must have been then, with that betrayal of his colleagues, that he had simply quit on himself. That was the thing for which he could not forgive himself.

  “Yes,” he said, as we all watched the fire flame up, “it’s too bad they’ve stopped us. But we did well. Leila, as your mother would put it, we did make an effort.”

  “Maybe,” I offered. “Maybe we could do it anyhow. Why not? We could just go in, lock it up behind us, and do it anyhow. Even if we don’t have an audience.”

  We were all quiet, deciding.

  “Devin, yes! We could do it just for us!” Sabby burst out. Everyone looked at everyone else, then all together chortled aloud.

  “Call Kim,” Leila told Ronny. She sat up, started lacing her blue leather sandals on.

  “You know it’s illegal, Leila. Your performance license has been revoked,” reminded Wolfstein.

  “Had you rather not do it, Nate?”

  “Ah, dear,” he pulled himself up on Sabby’s arm, “if even Amanda agrees that at this point I might as well smoke, then surely I might as well spend a night in jail.”

  “I would certainly hope,” Mrs. Thurston replied, “that after you young people have exerted yourselves to the extent that you have, that the public officials have got better things to do with their time than to go around arresting college children.”

  “Tell that to Mayor Daley, Amanda,” Joely said. “I was listening to the news. There are ten thousand cops out on the streets of my hometown today arresting college children.”

  Chapter 28

  Intelligence

  The sun set behind the circling mountains, and down in their valley, night fell with almost a frost, then a slow, cold rain. One by one, throughout the afternoon, we had come quietly into the theater. After dark, Mrs. Thurston, dressed in her flowered summer frock, a hat with roses on it, and even her white gloves, drove up in the battered Austin and brought Wolfstein, Maisie, and Davy crowded beneath her umbrella into the theater.

  From Slough Lane, Kim—a plastic raincoat over her costume, which she and Sabby had chosen—brought her son, Cary. “I told Lady Red tonight I quit. She docked me the week’s pay I’m due, but I said to her, ‘Fuck you, Red, add it to my liquor bill.’ Kim gave a rich belly laugh. “Listen, Leila…Rings, you know, he wonders if you’d mind if he came and saw this play. Told me he’d never seen one in his life, and said if I was going to keep on yapping about being on the stage, he might as well come see this one when nobody could catch him doing it.”

  “Sure, of course,” Leila laughed.

  “I told him I didn’t think you’d mind. And he’s going to bring along a couple of friends of his too, if that’s okay. They’ll come to the back door at eight.”

  “You like Rings a lot, don’t you, Kim?”

  A blush livened Kim’s dough-white cheeks. “Tell you the truth, honey, I’m crazy about him. Thing is, you know, I’ve been slammed down pretty hard in the past. But this time I think it’s gonna be okay.”

  Leila pressed her hand. “I hope it works out for you.”

  “Oh, me too, Leila, me too. We’re gonna try and make a go of this nightclub idea. Guess I never will get to California.”

  “What for, anyway?” Leila smiled. “Let me help you with your makeup, why don’t you?”

  “Mother of God,” Joely muttered as we went to check the lightboard for Pete. “Seymour’s getting a little carried away, nailing all the windows shut! And did you see those friends of Morelli’s? Looks like we’re under the protection here of some sort of local underworld! Life! Life!” He laughed and jerked on his hair ’til it stood out like a halo of fire.

  Seymour hurried into the booth. “Somebody’s knocking on the front door! Joely! What’ll I do?”

  “You don’t have to whisper, Seymour. There’s nobody around but us lunatics. Go look through the blinds and see who it is.”

  “I did. It’s seven kids. Look like college kids. Maybe they’ll go away. Couple of other people did when they read the sign. It’s raining harder.”

  “I’ll go see,” I told them. I went out the stage door in the back, around the creek side. They were still there. Three girls and four guys, about my age or younger, huddled under our narrow awning. “Can I help you?” I asked.

  One of the girls, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt like my own, answered for them. “We came to see the play. There was a poster in the U.C. Student Union that said you were doing All My Sons tonight?”

  “‘Starring and directed by Nathan Wolfstein’? Is that true?” A guy asked suspiciously.

  “Yes. But we’ve been shut down, They revoked our permit.”

  “Awh, shit,” they said. “Can you believe it?” “What for?” “We came all the way from Boulder!”

  I looked around the parking lot. No one was near the cars but a couple hurrying out of their station wagon and covering their two children with their panchos. People were rushing into the Arcade. Over the shadow of mountains, the lightening pulsed in the sky.

  “Come on around this way,” I told the students, starting back toward the creek.

  “What for? Are you opening then?”

  “It’s a private benefit,” I told them, and led them through the stage door.

  “See,” said the guy who’d asked about Nathan, “a couple of us are film majors, and so when we read that, we wanted to check it out.”

  • • •

  “Shit, well that’s it!” Joely peeked through the box office curtain. “It’s Tony Menelade.” It was 8:00, and we had just bolted the front doors from the inside. I looked
out with him. Tony was gesturing at his chest with both hands and shaking his head vigorously. He motioned for us to open the window. The rain splashed off his hat.

  “I think he’s trying to tell us something,” I said. “Open the window a minute, Joely. What do you want, Mr. Menelade?”

  “Is Leila here? I called the house.”

  “What did you want to see her about?” I asked him.

  “About all this.” He waved, I suppose, at the placards condemning us. “It’s none of my doing, you know. It’s my wife owns the place, and once she sold out to Mr. Stark, and he said he wanted the plays stopped right away, you see. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I mean, I’m sorry it happened this way. It’s her. There’s nothing…I just wanted to apologize to Leila, that’s all.” He looked at us earnestly.

  “Come on around to the back, Tony. You can talk to Leila back there.” Joely motioned him with his head to go around the side. With a furtive look toward the bar, Tony did so.

  At 8:15, the house lights dimmed on Mrs. Thurston seated with Maisie, Davy, and Cary in the front row, center. Nearby in a group sat the seven summer school students from the University of Colorado. Off to the side, Tony Menelade hunched down in his chair. And in the back row, one left, one center, one right, sat Rings Morelli in his bright blue suit and his two friends—both wore ties and looked very ill at ease.

  “Who’s that sitting by herself?” Seymour asked as we looked out at the house from behind the main curtain.

  “Bonnie Ferrell. She came in with Ronny,” Sabby explained. “One. Two. Five. Six. Seven. Fifteen,” she counted the house as she always did.

  “Why, that’s not bad at all for a week night,” Joely joked. And hand over hand on the rope, “Here we go, folks,” he called, as he always did, and raised the main curtain.

  “I’m so scared, I could pee in my pants,” Kim whispered.