by Ed Kurtz
As it happened, the movie exhibition business was booming in spite of rationing and shortages and all the sacrifices the government imposed upon the whole of the country—indeed, it was the war itself that turned him such a tidy profit. People wanted escape, even if that meant a double bill of war pictures like he’d shown the week before, and Russ never saw his auditorium so consistently crowded weekend after weekend, no matter what he threw up on the screen. It was a hell of a time to be in the picture racket, and a smart man would spend every free moment he had devising ways to make it even better, more lucrative—a second screen maybe, or big revival shows of old favourites during the week.
Russell Cavanaugh was a smart man, or at least a shrewd one. Yet he could not find the spirit to worry much about the next engagement, much less to take full advantage of the boon afforded to him by the war. In the main, he just wanted to be left alone. And to sleep. He reckoned he could sleep a month straight through, if only he could be let alone for the duration.
Of course, Barker Davis would never allow that.
That slick son of a bitch rolled into town like a forest fire and the heat was starting to get to Russ. He’d never hosted a roadshow before—this was his first rodeo—but his understanding was that they typically rented the joint out, more or less, and ran it their own way. Not so with Barker and Co. Not only did this bunch deign to include the owner and operator of the Palace Theater in their engagement, they insisted upon it. Now he was far past merely run ragged and well into severe exhaustion. The booze didn’t help, but he did not believe he could cope without it. Thinking of it now, his watery, bloodshot eyes darted down to the glass in his hand, which he tipped up to his lips and finished off. He then lit his cigarette and gritted his teeth, wishing he could blot out the growing furor in the lobby beyond his office door.
The wishing did him no good; instead, someone elected to add to the clamour by knocking at the door. He could feel each knock as though they were striking his skull from the inside.
“It’s open,” he groused.
The door squealed open and Lana poked into the room.
“Muh . . . Mr. Cavanaugh?”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Shut the door, Lana.”
She obliged. Russ rubbed his face with the palm of his hand and then poured another splash of brandy into his glass, followed by two more as an afterthought.
“I’ve seen you without any clothes on, Lana. It’s a bit kooky to keep on calling me Mr. Cavanaugh at this point, don’t you think?”
“I . . . I guess I didn’t really think about it,” she said quietly.
“I mean in private, of course.”
She nodded, her eyes huge and glassy.
“Out there—” He gestured ambiguously at the door “—you should still call me Mr. Cavanaugh. For appearances, like. Understand?”
“Yes, Mr. . . . ah, Russell.”
“Just Russ is fine.”
Lana smiled and her cheeks flushed with colour.
“Russ,” she cooed.
He knitted his brow and drew deeply on the cigarette. “Okay, fine. Great. Now, what do you want, Lana?”
“Oh, it’s Mr. Davis . . . say, should I still call him Mr. Davis?”
“Crissakes, yes—unless you’re schtupping him too, but that’s your business.”
“Schtupping, Mr. . . . ?”
“Forget it. Jesus H., forget it. What does he want, then? Davis, I mean.”
“Why, to talk to you, I reckon.”
He narrowed his eyes in the blue-grey haze of his own smoke. “He forget where my office is?”
“Forget? That’d been pretty hard to forget, Mr. . . . .ah, Russ . . .”
Groaning, he cut her off. “Where is he?”
“In the projection booth.”
“Wonderful. Take a hike.”
“What?” Her eyes glistened, welled up.
“I’ve got work to do, woman—and so do you. Go sell some goddamn cigarettes, will you?”
For a moment, she looked as though a torrent of tears was seconds away, but she composed herself and, wiping the corners of her eyes, opened the door.
“Yes, Mr. Cavanaugh,” she spat on her way out.
The door slammed shut, startling him into dropping the cigarette on the desk. He picked it back up and stabbed it out in the ashtray like he was committing murder.
Jojo was still thinking about Irene Dunne, which in turn darkened his thoughts with awful memories of Beth, when he climbed the three short steps leading up to Leroy Dunn’s sprawling front porch. It was only the second time he had ever stood on those decaying boards, the first occurring years earlier when Jackson Bondy broke into the place to see about a rumour concerning thousands of dollars in a steel safe. Jojo never determined the veracity of the safe story, but when he walked into the farmhouse early that morning he found Bondy spread out on the well-trod entryway rug with a hole in the back of his head big enough to put a fist through. By and large, folks cottoned to Leroy pretty well, but it typically paid not to cross the old coot. Jackson Bondy learned that lesson the hardest way possible.
He knocked firmly on the door, loud enough for a hard-of-hearing old man to hear, and a minute later received the expected response.
“Dance ain’t ’til Saturday! And it ain’t in the house, it’s in the barn!”
“Mr. Dunn, it’s George Walker.”
“I don’t much care if it’s the King of Spain, the dance still ain’t ’til Saturday.”
Jojo smiled in spite of himself. He wondered how the Daughters of the Confederacy ever talked an irascible old bastard like Leroy Dunn into hosting a barn dance of all things.
“It’s Deputy Walker, Mr. Dunn,” he tried. “Do you remember me?”
“Deputy?” came the scratchy voice beyond the door. “You that fella with the cut up face?”
“That’s right.”
“Hell’s bells, son—whyn’t you just say so?”
A series of locks and latches clicked and cranked, and the door swung open to reveal a stooped, elderly man with a stark white beard and bright blue eyes.
“I ain’t shot nobody lately, deputy,” he said with a devilish grin.
“I’m glad to hear that, sir, though truth be told I’m not a deputy anymore.”
“What d’ya mean, you’re not a deputy? That godless little fool Ernie Rich get a thorn in his paw about something?”
“I suppose you could say that, yes.”
Dunn scowled and tugged at his beard.
“I’ve voted for him twice, but I never did like him much. Next time I’ll vote for the other fella.”
“Not on my account, I hope.”
“Bless, no. I just don’t care for the man and don’t know why he ever got my vote the first two times.”
Jojo made a show of looking over both shoulders, conspiratorially.
“Just between you and me, Mr. Dunn, I never voted for him, either.”
For a moment Dunn stared with piercing eyes and parted lips. Then he burst into raucous laughter, his small, frail body convulsing with every powerful guffaw.
“I guess you best come inside outta that heat,” he said with gasping breaths.
Dunn turned to totter down the entryway and Jojo followed behind. He was not particularly surprised to discover that it was just as hot inside the house as outside, and perhaps a few degrees hotter yet. The old farmer moved into a dingy kitchen with dirty plates and pots littering the counters. Nearly everywhere Jojo looked there were white wax candles of various lengths—the innovation of electricity had largely passed old man Dunn right on by.
Dunn cleared his throat wetly and waddled to an open cupboard. He pulled two bottles of beer from a cluttered shelf and handed one to Jojo.
“Don’t got an icebox.”
“This is fine.”
One at a time, they pried the bottle caps off with the black iron bottle opener screwed into the wall. The bottle opener bid its user to drink Atlas Beer. The beers they drank were Schlitz, and tasted hot enough to cook with.
“You still got that roadster pickup, Mr. Dunn?”
“That ole bucket? Sure I do. How come you to ask?”
Jojo swallowed a mouthful of hot Schlitz and made a face. “I got a lady in your barn with a busted wheel, if you can believe it.”
“What’s that?” The old man hunched over and stared intently at Jojo. “What on God’s Jesus-green earth’re you doin’ with a lady in my barn, son?”
Smiling a little, Jojo said, “She just fell off the road, Mr. Dunn . . . right down into the irrigation ditch. I guess she probably broke her ankle, and you know as well as me there ain’t many vehicles come along this way, not on a Thursday evening.”
“Farm to town, sure, sure. That’s Saturday. And what with that dern dance—shoot. We may have Litchfield’s first ever traffic jam, you think?”
Jojo laughed and took another swig from the bottle, which only got worse from the heat of his hand. He shivered from the unpleasantness of it and set the bottle down on the nearest counter.
“I ’spect you’ll be wantin’ to drive her into town, then,” Dunn said at some length.
“We were both headed that way, anyhow. Just a little hitch in our plans, I guess.”
“Who is she, anyhow? That your little wife in there? What’s her name . . . Beth, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid Beth passed on about a year back, Mr. Dunn. No, it’s just a lady I found in a ditch.”
“Widowers both, us,” Dunn said sorrowfully, shaking his head. “I reckon a house needs a woman in it. Ain’t been no woman in this’un for nigh twenty years. And that ain’t no kind of house at all.”
“No,” Jojo agreed. “I suppose not.”
“Truck’s out back,” said Dunn. “Go on ahead and get you another beer for the road, if’n you want to.”
Theodora lay on the hay bed, occasionally swatting at flies, and thought about the former deputy with the sad, scarred face.
Story was that he’d stepped out on his wife, which was fairly bad enough in and of itself, but to compound the scandal the man’s mistress was a Negro girl from the Shacks. Theodora could not recall the girl’s name (if she ever knew it) but seemed to remember she worked in town, cleaning houses and running errands for the white folk. Whether or not she cleaned the Walker house she didn’t know either, but some way or another Jojo Walker became acquainted with her and must have wasted little time climbing into bed with the girl.
Pretty bad, she thought. She figured a man could get away with something like that if he was in Paris or someplace similar, but in Litchfield it was a severe kind of social death. Not many folks wanted much to do with a man like that, and it all seemed to go underground for a spell until it burned back up again and left two bodies in the wreckage. That was the first she’d heard of it, when a woman named Beth Walker saw the coloured girl enter a neighbour’s house to work and followed her inside with her husband’s revolver. It was by all accounts a nasty scene that came to a head when Beth squeezed off three shots in rapid succession that all but annihilated the other woman’s skull. The sheriff’s department was called out—by the murderess, no less—and when the senior deputy arrived at the scene he found himself enmeshed in an armed showdown with his own wife.
Theodora imagined the horror of it, put herself in Jojo Walker’s shoes. She envisioned herself standing in her own living room, a few feet away from a grief-maddened Russ who waved his own gun around in a teary, screaming panic. Jojo would have begged with Beth, pleaded and made a hundred promises, anything to disarm her and save her life—but would she? Could she even be bothered to speak as Russ raised the gun and pressed its barrel up against his temple?
She shuddered, suddenly disgusted with herself. Disgusted and, she thought, perhaps a little frightened. Poor, loveless Russell with his own infidelities and quiet, simmering rage. What was it about men’s wives, she wondered, that imprisoned them so? Was Holy Matrimony always such a terrible burden on men like Russ and Jojo and, she figured, damn near every other fellow with a wandering eye and a hole where his heart used to be?
Was everybody truly so utterly, irremediably alone?
She felt wet warmth on her cheeks and at the same time heard the distant thunder of a rumbling motor. As it drew nearer and grew louder, her thoughts shifted to the eerie doll and its macabre innards, and she knew in that moment she had always been alone.
The crowd subsumed them like drops of water falling into the river, or minor stars in a clear night sky. A hollow-faced man in a tweed jacket stood at the doors beside the box office, taking tickets, which meant they were home free. Margie heard a door slam above the din of the crowd and glanced over to see Mr. Cavanaugh storming through the lobby, parting the densely packed assembly like Moses and the Red Sea. He disappeared behind another door marked projection booth and she promptly forgot all about it. Scooter looked down at her and grinned anxiously.
“In like Flynn,” he said.
People milled everywhere, all shoulders and elbows as they squeezed past one another to snake toward the concession counter or the toilets or some person they recognized. Margie saw a man’s face brighten as he called out, “Why, Jason Agee, you old so-and-so,” and she was suddenly quite apprehensive that she might be recognized, too. It went without saying that it was a small town—she could hardly go anyplace without somebody nosing into her life or asking after her father or, worst of all, expressing their condolences even after all that time—and it certainly wasn’t unthinkable that half the people in there recognized the egregiously misplaced preacher’s daughter. When she felt a hand on her shoulder she leapt with surprise. Her heart flew up into her throat and stayed there even as she realized it was only Scooter.
“Say, I need to hit the head.”
“The head?”
“Navy talk, Margie. It means the toilet.”
Since when did he know anything about Navy talk? Maybe, she considered, he’d gone off to join and just hadn’t told anyone yet. She felt the tiniest bit ashamed of herself that she didn’t much care one way or another.
“Don’t be long,” she instructed him. “I’m getting nervous.”
“Here,” he said, pressing a crumpled dollar bill into her sweaty hand. “Go get a Coke or something. I’ll just be a minute.”
He had barely finished speaking before the crowd reabsorbed him. She tightened her fist around the dollar. Someone behind her, a woman, began to complain loudly about the lack of moral turpitude on the part of Mr. Cavanaugh for exhibiting “this trash,” as she called it. Margie wrinkled her nose, wishing she could give the busybody what for, to tell her nobody forced her to come get a ticket, for crying out loud. She let her mind drift into a daydream in which she did just that when a big, bearded face appeared in her line of sight and called out: “Margie Shannon?”
Mr. Mixon, she saw with no little terror, was coming right for her. He shouldered his way through the throng, taking his hat off as he came and twisting his face into an expression that was part shock and part fatherly concern.
Peter Mixon sometimes played the battered old piano in her father’s church on days when Mrs. Penney felt unwell, which was more and more common these days. Their eyes locked, she and Mr. Mixon, and Margie thought of a joke she’d heard about Baptists running into one another at a tavern, or something like that. Except, the way the joke went, the Baptists acted as though they didn’t know each other. In this nightmare version happening to her now, the other party was racing toward her like a monster in a horror picture.
She smiled and made a break for it, feeling for all the world like a criminal on the run from the law. She ducked and she turned this way and that, worming her way through the crowd until she reached a dead end at
the long glass window that stretched across the front of the lobby. There was another dozen people on the sidewalk outside, and Margie wondered if they’d come for the picture, too—and then she saw the picket signs, and she saw awful old Mrs. Hutchins, and she saw her own father emerging from the procession, his mouth stretched wide in song.
“Oh, no,” she squeaked.
The supply room was cold, which was odd considering the lack of ventilation and the erstwhile crippling heat. Still, he felt a chill enough to raise goose pimples on his flesh, though none rose. It crept up his back and gripped him by the back of the neck. His ears burned from it. Stranger still, when he took up the faux spectacles—part of the costume—the metal frames he fully expected to sting with their own inherent coldness were, conversely, perfectly warm.
This nonplussed the young man. But of course, today everything did, ever since . . .
“Fix your tie,” she said.
He pulled his eyebrows together into a downward point and studied the brown necktie dangling from his throat. He wondered what was wrong with it. As if reading his thoughts, she said, “It’s all crooked, you dolt. And the knot’s all wrong. It’s almost time, so fix it.”
