What Came After

by Sam Winston

  “Not to mention he’s the little girl’s father,” said Weller.

  “You might not be as smart as you think,” said the old woman.

  * * *

  He worked on. The more progress he made, the more he saw that he hadn’t guessed how aggressive the rust might have been. It had eaten right through. So thoroughly that when he’d cleared the head of the top pin and worked a sharpened bit of steel underneath it for a lever the lever just sank into the metal like into something soft. And when he put a little pressure on it, the head tore off clean. The little round disk popped away and ricocheted against the door and nearly hit him in the eye. All right, he thought. Fair enough. He could still drive the pin through, and he could do that with one of the other pins as soon as he had one out.

  He moved on.

  The pin in the center hinge broke too.

  The third one, the one at the bottom where the water leak had done less damage and the rust was lighter, came out clean. It took some patience and it took some time and it took all the rest of the grease he had, but it came out. Weller wiped the grease from it. Standing in the projection booth holding it up like a prize for just a moment, the pin gleaming darkly in his hand. Fragile and a little bent. He wanted to straighten it but he didn’t dare.

  He rubbed the grease from it again. Took off his boot to use the heel for a hammer, not caring that the old woman would hear. Positioned the pin above the middle hinge and began tapping on it. It bent more, but he kept tapping. The other pin starting to inch free. Red rust falling.

  The sound of his tapping drew the old woman. She said you quit horsing around with that projector and he said what do you care if I do or don’t. He said you worry about your granddaughter and her father of hers that went off. You worry about them and leave me alone. Not pounding then because she was right outside the door and she’d know exactly what he was doing.

  She said, “That one who went off isn’t her father. He married my girl but they never had children. Her father’s my own son. My own son by blood.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Last thing I knew, he was carrying your six-shooter around.”

  Weller understood. “So he’s the boss.”

  “You could say that,” she said. “The boss is usually the one with the six-shooter.” Using that old word again. That old word from the western movies that almost nobody had ever seen.

  “I had a gun like that myself once,” Weller said. “But I lost it.”

  “I guess that’s why you’re not the boss anymore.” The old woman laughed. Laughed like she thought Weller was funny, not like she was rubbing it in. And then she stopped. Turning away. Getting ready to go on down the stairs. “Now you leave off on that hammering,” she said. “Don’t cross me and don’t cross my boy. People who cross my boy don’t come out of it happy.”

  Weller standing behind the door with his boot off, waiting. Saying, “I understand.” Saying, “I guess if a fellow’s got what it takes to run a crew like this, he might leave behind a little bit of a wake.” Giving him his due.

  “They’re only alive on account of him,” she said. “They’d do anything for my boy.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Every single one of them had his tongue cut out because he said to do it.”

  Nothing from Weller.

  “That boy of mine,” she went on “You’re either with him or against him. That’s how he knows.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’ve got seniority.”

  “What about the girl?” he said. “His own daughter?”

  The old woman began to move off at last. “She’s with him,” she said. “What did you think?”

  * * *

  He woke in the morning to another day drawn out from nothing by the dream of his wife and daughter. Thinking this was it. This was the day he would set himself free. He got the middle pin out right away. It was broken into a million pieces and the shards of it were all powdered down into a little heap on the floor, but it was out. One more to go. He stood with one boot off and stretched up on his toes to reach the top hinge and he breathed in the thin trickle of rust that leaked down with every strike. The angle was awkward but there wasn’t anything in the room he could stand on. The projector was bolted to the concrete and nothing else was solid enough. He tried the stack of film cans but it just toppled over. Crashing down. Spilling out streamers of celluloid.

  The old woman came with his breakfast but she said he wasn’t going to get it unless he laid off. He said didn’t her son want him fed and she said yes and he said then maybe she’d better not start making his decisions for him. A man who’ll have his own child’s tongue out. How did he get started on that anyhow.

  She told him. It was as if she’d been waiting for him to ask. For anyone to ask. For anyone to be able to ask and now Weller had shown up and raised the question and made himself her father confessor.

  She took responsibility for everything. This was before the Great Dying, she said, but they didn’t have any insurance so it was really the same thing as the Great Dying and even if they’d had insurance nobody could have fixed what happened. What she’d done and what she’d caused. She’d eaten something while she was pregnant and the next thing she knew her son had come out damaged. Maybe it was the beginning of the Great Dying. Maybe her son was one of the first. Regardless he’d been born damaged and she and her husband God rest his soul had raised him up as best as they could but he’d turned out crooked in spite of them. A child who looked all right on the outside but whose insides were damaged. It had made him crooked. And in the end, she was the one to blame. Which made her to blame for her grandchild too. She took it all upon herself.

  Weller said he understood. He understood all about that.

  She said oh sure I’ll bet you do.

  Weller said no. Really. Kneeling down and letting his boot drop silently to the floor and talking to her through the ventilation slot. Saying how it was the same way with him and his daughter. How he was on this terrible trip not just for her sake but also for his own when you got right down to it. Taking something he did wrong and killing himself if he had to in order to make it right. Something that wasn’t any poor child’s fault.

  After a while saying how about my breakfast. And the woman sliding it through.

  As soon as he’d finished and she’d taken the plate and gone back down the stairs, he started hammering again. Up on his tiptoes in that cramped position. Blame it on that because you might as well blame it on something. His strike was off and he was still thinking about what he owed Penny and the pin bent itself at an angle of about thirty degrees. He tried straightening it, kneeling and daring to give it just one single tap, but a rotten break opened up in the middle, leaving just two useless pieces left. Short pieces not much more than shards themselves. And him kneeling on the floor with one boot off and one boot on, cursing himself and looking everywhere for some other possibility. There was nothing else to use on the hinge. He’d already determined that. As for ways out other than the door it was hopeless. There was a ventilation grid overhead but it was only about ten inches on a side. The square opening that looked down over the auditorium wasn’t much bigger than that and even if it had been picture window he couldn’t have gone out through it. Not without some way to lower himself down. These rotten sheets and rags would never do. And even if he’d lowered himself to the balcony what then. He could feel it collapsing underneath him already. He could feel everything collapsing underneath him.

  He stayed there on the floor and sank back on his haunches and thought of Penny and Liz. What a ruin he’d made of everything. How he should have left well enough alone. The two of them were stuck in New York now without him, without him ever, and with no way to get back where they belonged. He’d made no provision for that. He thought maybe Carmichael would take pity on them but he knew that was a pipedream. Carmichael would feel that he’d been duped. Taken advantage of. Caused to waste the tiniest fraction of his
fortune on Penny, on something that meant nothing to him and never would. Weller knelt there on the floor thinking about what he’d said to the old woman. About how he’d kill himself if he had to in order to make Penny’s blindness right. Thinking he should be content, because as far as he knew he’d done just that.

  * * *

  The woman came with his supper and asked what was that crash before anyhow, you can be honest with me. Maybe feeling some kind of common cause or maybe not.

  He said it wasn’t anything. Just those movies in the cans. He’d bumped into them and knocked them over and the old woman said you’d have to bump into them pretty hard and Weller said he did. Saying they were all over the place now. A mess of film everywhere.

  The old woman asked what movies he had in there and he said what did it matter if they couldn’t watch them. They were just film.

  She said the last one she saw here was some western. That famous one. Not John Wayne but after him. John Wayne was dead when they made it. The same character but a different actor she couldn’t remember who. They used to have senior citizen specials for a dollar and now that she was old enough to qualify as a senior citizen they didn’t have them anymore. Just her luck.

  He said she was welcome to come in and take a look if she wanted. See what he had.

  She said no. Not no thanks, just no. Like she could tell he was angling for her to unlock the door. She just left him his supper and waited to take the plate back. A thin chipped plate made of plastic and no use to him but she always waited for it anyhow.

  He got thinking. He asked her how many movies she’d seen here.

  She said hundreds. “I lived in Greensboro my whole life,” she said. Her voice was less cracked and labored now that she’d been using it a little from time to time, coming in softer through the ventilation slot. The two of them whispering so nobody could hear. She said she’d seen everything in those days. Nature movies and animated cartoons when she was a little girl and James Bond when she got a little older. James Bond always keeping the world from coming to an end. It was a nuclear bomb or a death ray or something like that every time with James Bond. Remembering put a lightness in her voice, but there was a weariness there too. “James Bond never saw this world coming,” she said.

  Later on, in the smoky dark, Weller lay on the hard floor thinking about the end of the world. Thinking that thanks to him his daughter would see the world winding down at last, the way it had been going for his whole life and he hadn’t even paid attention. Crumbling and winding down and Penny seeing it clearly but not really recognizing it because nobody did. Not really. Regardless of how good her vision became she wouldn’t know where the world had been and where it might have gone and how far down it had come. Not the way that the old woman did. The old woman remembered. He watched the firelight flicker up from below and he studied how it made the projector loom up out of one kind of darkness and into another and he had an idea.

  * * *

  After breakfast he began to work on the projector. Cleaning the various surfaces with rags and blowing off dust and freeing up stuck parts. Working gently and steadily. The big lens was screwed on tight but he got it loose. It was meditative work that gave him time to think. It was quiet work too and the old woman didn’t know he was doing it so he told her when she brought supper. Just to see if she’d object this time and this time she didn’t. Instead she asked again what movies he had in there and he said again that he didn’t know. She scoffed, asking how he thought he’d show one without power anyway, and he said he hadn’t figured that out yet.

  * * *

  The man who’d gone to Washington wasn’t back and it had been a week at least. Enough time if he hadn’t gotten in trouble. Weller asked about him while he ate his breakfast and she didn’t have any answer. She didn’t know how long her son would wait before he’d make some decision as to Weller’s future without him. Until then there was still hope, she said, but Weller didn’t feel hopeful.

  He said remember that six-shooter he used to have and she said yes. He said he used to have a satellite phone, too. He said a condemned man usually gets one phone call. She said she remembered that from some movie. Except she thought it was a cigarette he got. The condemned man.

  The rest of the day he kept working on the projector. He had it pretty clean now and he began breaking off lengths of film and attempting to wind them through the various pins and clamps and gates. A maze of them. There was a diagram inside the cover but it didn’t help much because the printing on it was faded and the paper was brown and generations of mice had chewed away parts of it. The film was fragile and it kept breaking. Bits flaking off and getting stuck and Weller blowing at them and sometimes pushing them deeper into the works and having to take everything out and start again.

  The frustration nearly killed him.

  He took off his glasses and held up the big projection lens and squinted through it to see what he was doing up close. He figured out the drive mechanism and used the broken hinge pin as a crank and made it turn. Greasing it a little and cranking it more and limbering it up. Working himself into a kind of hypnotic rhythm, and rising out of it only when he heard a voice.

  It was the old woman down below, singing to herself. Making her rounds with her voice raised up wobbling in the absence of her son and his silent followers, going over some old song that Weller didn’t know. He looked out through the square window and saw the dusty sunlight streaming down through the hole in the roof and the woman down there working with her voice lifted up. The song had the word baby in it a few times but it wasn’t a lullaby. It was some old love song. He listened, wondering how many years it had been since these walls had heard such a thing and guessing that the old woman probably wasn’t even aware of what she was doing.

  Before the rest of them got home and she went quiet he tried threading some film through again and this time he had it right. It didn’t break against the sprockets now that he could turn them with the makeshift crank. There was a little gate or window that opened and closed when the film passed in front of it and at first it didn’t want to open or close at the right time but he got that worked out. He settled on a speed that seemed good. Just feeding the same length of film through again and again and looking through the gate to watch the shapes on it move in the light from the hole in the roof. She sang some other songs, one of them a religious one that he knew, and then the light began to fade and her son returned and that was the end of it.

  * * *

  She came in the night with the satellite phone. She must have. It was there in the morning, right beside him. It was dented and cracked from the crash of the Harley, with the battery pack loose and the antenna cocked to one side, but that was good news. About the battery pack anyhow. Because as long as the phone had been without power, Bainbridge didn’t know where he was.

  * * *

  While he ate his breakfast he told the old woman he’d been looking over some of the film from the cans. The labels were ruined so he couldn’t tell what was what but he’d been studying what he had. Time on his hands and all.

  She asked was there anything like that movie National Velvet and he said he didn’t know. She said it was a horse movie with a girl. She didn’t remember if she’d seen it here or on the television but it was a nice story and nobody told stories like that anymore. She’d had a horse herself when she was young, and thinking of the movie made her think of her own horse. He said he hadn’t seen any horses so far but he’d keep an eye out. He’d let her know if he found National Velvet. She said it would do her heart good just knowing it was there. Just knowing it was somewhere and not only in her memory.

  He told her thanks for the phone, and she said what phone.

  It turned out later that the battery was weak but still good. Locating the satellites took a couple of minutes and the phone beeped a number of times in the process and Weller was glad that everybody down below was gone except for the old woman. Clamping his hand over the little speaker grate and realizin
g how much trouble he could have caused her. Thinking that her son might have gone ahead and taught her not to talk to strangers as a result.

  The phone connected but Bainbridge didn’t answer. Some assistant instead. Weller said, “Hurry up and get him. My battery’s about gone.”

  The general came on saying he could plug that into the cigarette lighter on that fancy car or had he forgotten.

  Weller said, “How did you know I’ve got the car?” Glad that the other man had come up with the idea himself. It was easier than lying.

  “What a kidder,” Bainbridge said. “You’re in Greensboro. You’re on your way home.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch.”

  “No shit, sonny. We were worried sick.”

  “All for nothing.”

  “I can see that,” Bainbridge said. “So tell me about my old friend Marlowe.”

  “First you tell me about Penny. Given how well she was doing before, I’d think she’d be making really good progress now.”

  Bainbridge hesitated. Weller got uncomfortable when Bainbridge hesitated. It meant he was thinking. “The main thing to keep in mind,” he said, “is that you’re making good progress.”

  “I am.”

  “Keep it up, then. Keep it up because—to tell you the truth—she’s had a couple of setbacks.”

  “What kind of setbacks?”

  “Her mother didn’t give me the details. The only thing she said was setbacks.”

  “I don’t like hearing that.”

  “Who does? Bottom line is it’s time for you to put the pedal down and come on home. That’s all you can do.”

  “I was thinking you could talk to Carmichael and have him get the two of them home without me.”