B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  “Okay,” said Sam. “But wasn’t it ever a good time?”

  Booth conceded that maybe there were some good times, but not enough. “Shall I tell you about the week I spent in Surprise, Arizona, acting for Orson Welles?”

  Sam nodded eagerly: Orson Welles!

  “In 1975 I received a phone call,” Booth said. “The man on the other end of the line said, ‘Booth, there seems to be a gaping hole in my movie where you belong. Are you busy?’ And I said, ‘Just tell me where to go, Mr. Welles. I’ll be right there.’ I had no idea how he might have obtained my phone number, and he hadn’t even introduced himself, but from his voice I knew immediately who it was.” The famed director’s new picture had a part that “no one but Booth Dolan” could fill.

  The movie, Yorick, concerned a community theater company, Booth explained. When the mute, cringing old janitor who has cleaned the little theater for years passes away, he wills his skull to the company to be used as a prop. Although some think this is macabre, the company votes to observe the janitor’s wishes, and the skull is put to work as a decoration in a production of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Before long the skull begins to enigmatically prophesize to the various members of the theater group, and to wield an unpleasant influence over their lives. Welles wanted Booth to play a supporting role as a town selectman, a consummate bad actor who continually irritates everyone by begging for parts.

  Although Yorick was never released, Booth treasured the experience. “I never felt so valued, Samuel. Because I really felt that Orson loved me. I really did. And every take was an opportunity to justify that love. ‘Just do what you do, Booth,’ he’d say to me, ‘and if you need me, I will be just over there, relishing your performance.’ I can see him now, on his stool, smoking his cigar and grinning at me like a wolf. That grin—he made it seem as though there was something between just us two, something only we understood. And that is what it takes, you know, to be a truly great director. You have to be able to love everyone. Or maybe to be able to make them think you love them.”

  “Is there a difference?” asked Sam, the question forming before he fully comprehended it.

  “Yes, Sam. There is a difference,” said Booth. Sam’s father was quiet, staring at the empty space above the stage where there once was a screen. The red wall to his left cut his profile out of the darkness, silhouetting the long wiry hairs that protruded from his eyebrows and his beard. “I used to come here when I was your age, you know. Younger, even. By myself. Had the run of the place. I remember for a while I had the stupid idea that the people, the actors, were as big in real life as they appeared on the screen. I was very, very small.”

  There was another silence, and Sam could see that his father was sneering, as though disgusted. Sam wasn’t sure why. A child himself, he knew well that children believed all kinds of foolish things. Sam imagined sitting by himself in a movie theater, seas of empty seats all around him and the massive white screen before him, and the idea just felt wrong, dangerous, like playing in an empty house. “You went to the movies by yourself?”

  Booth sneezed. “Excuse me.” He ran his hand over his mouth and beard, flicked his fingers sharply into the empty air. “Anyway. Orson. I hope that someday someone loves you that much, Samuel. Loves you so much that you are inspired to transform yourself into whatever they wish you to be.”

  “Yeah.”

  Booth gave his son’s shoulder a terrific squeeze. “You have a few years yet.”

  “Hey, you know what’d be a good idea for your next movie? A guy discovers he can make himself into whatever people like. Like not just into other people but also into animals and objects—he’s a what’s-it. A shape-shifter. He can be anything.”

  The notion was barely out of his mouth before his father’s expression—a grimace—made him regret it. Really, Sam had only been thinking out loud.

  “And then what?” asked Booth.

  “Maybe he gets stuck as something other than himself. Like, a bear, or—” His mind was suddenly empty of every creature save the bear.

  Booth was staring at him with that grimace.

  “—a rock,” Sam finished, knowing it was stupid, that you couldn’t do anything dramatic with a rock. A rock couldn’t move or talk.

  “A rock.”

  “Dumb, right?”

  “No, no,” said Booth. His eyes widened, and he lightly shook his index finger. “We could watch the rock erode. We could film it for, oh, five or ten years, then speed up the film and watch it flake off a few bits. Wouldn’t that be thrilling?”

  Sam flushed and looked away to hide his shame. “Maybe,” he said, speaking into the dark to his right.

  The door to the balcony creaked open. “Uh, guys? Is that you?” It was the Communist. “I gotta split in a sec.”

  “Yes, comrade!” Booth hopped up, and his seat slapped back. “Coming, coming! This young visionary was just regaling me with his notion for a cinematic masterwork!”

  His father was already at the top of the stairs, pushing out the door, before the boy had a chance to move from his seat. So Sam stayed there for a while, alone in the balcony, gazing out, envisioning a plain rock that was the size of a movie screen. It was boring, but he guessed he deserved it.

  ■ ■ ■

  Once Allie was discharged from the hospital, they whisked her directly to Journey to Dragon Land: A Gnome Story.

  Half-stoned, she screamed intermittently with laughter during the early passages of the film, as Judy the baby dragon lays waste to the gnomes’ ancestral lands. Once the story turned darker and the winged white rats arrived, Allie clutched Sam’s elbow and tucked her face against Booth’s shoulder. At the end, when the dragons and gnomes merge groups, she wept openly in her joy.

  Outside, Allie threw her arms around their necks, and they held her up.

  It was a weekend night, and the multiplex parking lot swung with headlights. Gasoline smells mixed with cigarette smells. Teenagers yelled and laughed. The three of them walked up and down one aisle after another, searching for their car. Allie hung between them as if she was gutshot, tufts of bloody cotton bursting from her nostrils. “I don’t even usually like cartoons, but that was so wonderful, all those magical clay people,” she said, and cried a little more, and laughed again. Over the top of her head, Sam and Booth exchanged bemused looks. Right then, astray in the parking lot of the multiplex, in recognition of their shared bafflement, the boy enjoyed a newfound sense of good fortune.

  When Booth was young, he had gone to movies alone. For Sam, it was different; they were together in the dark, he and his family.

  ■ ■ ■

  There were even a few dinners at the kitchen table. Sam’s parents held hands and sometimes stared at each other so fixedly that it made him nervous and he excused himself.

  He fell asleep listening to them listening to records downstairs. The echoing, indecipherable questions in his dreams ceased to bother him. Sam had decided that the reason he lacked the answers to the dream questions was because the questions were not intended for him. A new feeling carried Sam forward, a feeling that his normal life had commenced, with parents who were together more than they were apart. It wasn’t that he expected it to be all funny movies from here on out. But he was pleased.

  Gloria Wang-Petty gave her nose a sly tap when she passed him in the hall.

  Sam responded with a respectful nod. “Doctor.”

  6.

  Booth’s agent called on a Sunday afternoon. His father had been home for about three weeks, the longest continuous period that Sam could recollect.

  He heard Booth tell the man that he was savoring his time off. When the man replied, he did so at some length, and while he spoke, to demonstrate his boredom, Sam’s father made corpse faces at the boy, sticking his tongue out, rolling his eyes up, and so on.

  “Here is what you will do, Ivan,” said Booth eventually. “Reach down into those pants of yours and give your testicles a wonderful, strong squeeze! Have you got the
m? Superb! Now I need you to begin counting, and I need you to keep squeezing, and before you know it, it will be Tuesday and I will be there. And Ivan, in the meantime, you just keep squeezing and counting.”

  When Booth hung up, Allie, who also was listening nearby, made a comical sad face, frowning and using her index fingers to pull down the skin beneath her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” said Booth. “It’s work.”

  The job was a voice-over for a commercial advertising a line of pants with wide white decorative zippers on the outsides of the legs. “Future Trousers!” was what Booth called these pants. If everything went according to plan, he estimated that he could be home by Thursday. He told Sam that if he behaved, perhaps they could take young Thomas to see one of the new movies opening in Kingston.

  On Tuesday, while Booth waited for his taxi to the train station in Poughkeepsie, Sam stood in the mud room and eavesdropped on his parents, in conference on the other side of the door.

  “So you’ll be back next Thursday, then?”

  “No, madame. This Thursday. Four days hence.”

  “Really?”

  “Really and truly.”

  “Booth.”

  “Alison.”

  “This has been a good thing, hasn’t it?”

  “A very, very good thing. But listen, if you want a pair of Future Trousers, you don’t need to butter me up; you need only ask. I would deny you nothing.”

  She shushed him. “You know I haven’t asked you to change anything? This is all your decision, to come back, to stay. I was okay with how things were.”

  “I know! Dear me.”

  “I’m just saying that it would spoil it if you started making promises you didn’t keep again.”

  Booth gargled, and Allie told him not to gargle at her, mister, and he said, “I must ask you a question of the utmost importance,” and Sam’s mother said, “Uh-uh-uh,” in a smiling voice that at last drove the boy from earshot.

  The phone rang as Sam was climbing the stairs. He backed down the steps, swung himself around on the newel, and plucked the receiver from the cradle on the small table. “Now, hold on, baby, did you say you were going to be on the four-thirty-three train or the five-thirty-three?”

  Allie pushed her way inside, and Sam hung up on Sandra.

  “Who was that?” Allie’s gaze directed down; in her head, she was likely still with Booth. If she had looked up at Sam, it might not have been possible for him to lie.

  “No one,” said Sam, and ran up the stairs.

  ■ ■ ■

  From his bedroom window, he watched his father crossing the driveway to the idling taxi. The first steps were plodding, taken with his chin against his chest. Booth paused to shift his grip on the handles of his two suitcases. His next steps were brisker; the suitcases jumped eagerly in his hands, and his upper body levered forward, as though he were bulling his way through a crowd instead of just crossing empty pavement.

  Booth loaded his suitcases himself, went to the passenger-side door. Here, he gave a long, visible sigh. He rolled his neck around. Sam’s father dropped into the taxi—the chassis sank—and the car rolled out into the street, turned left.

  ■ ■ ■

  An abrupt hot flash woke hyacinths in flower beds throughout Has-brouck, dried out lawns, and forced open windows that had been shut since October.

  After school, Allie and Sam climbed the graveyard hill and the embankment to the splintered train tracks of the derelict Western New York Limited. The mossy trestles cut a corridor between oaks and beech and scrub brush. A mile or so along, they stopped beside the fenced-off area of the old depot. Sam slipped his fingers through the chain links and admired the bright mountains of junk in the field beyond. Among the piles of refuse stood a pair of small buildings with caved-in roofs: the depot and the stationmaster’s office, Allie said. Several rusting train cars sat here and there, the shadows at their open doors alive with circling insects.

  “Spooky,” said Sam, but Allie said, “Not really.”

  They started again and soon emerged from the woods at the side of a road.

  Most of the journey had passed in a kind of contrapuntal harmony. Sam talked about the movie he wanted to make: the story of his Nukies’ hopeless but dogged flight across the Wasteland. Booth’s accusation that Sam treated them too harshly had had an effect, and Sam conceived of the film as a kind of tribute to their perseverance. All he needed at this point—hint, hint—was a camera.

  Allie made noises in the right places while simultaneously following her own track, speculating about the pros and cons of the various colleges in the area. The idea of Booth’s taking a position in a film studies department had caught her imagination, and she had discovered a fair number of openings. It wasn’t, she said, as if he were a young man anymore. A routine might do him good, didn’t Sam think?

  “Sure,” he said.

  Sam thought constantly of telling her about the phone call and the museum, but he felt excused, dismally, by the certainty that there was no need. The way his father had paused beside the taxi; the great exhalation, the stretching of the neck. Allie believed Booth was returning in another two days. But he wasn’t; wasn’t coming back, wasn’t taking Sam and Tom to the movies, wasn’t going to take a position as a professor. The man was a liar.

  The boy felt sorry for his mother and embarrassed for the way she loved Booth. That made Sam hate his father, for how he showed that she could be weak.

  On the opposite side of the road, several burly men—their blue T-shirts identified them as members of the Hasbrouck VFD—lugged boxes and furniture from a house with peeling siding. An orange line had been spray-painted across the lawn to mark off a perimeter. The firemen were hauling the contents of the house a couple hundred yards down the road to deposit them at a wide gravel turn-around. A velvety green couch had already arrived at the turnaround, and one fireman was lying on it and smoking a pipe, as if the whole outdoors were his living room.

  “What’s going on over there?” Sam asked.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re going to use it for practice. Burn it down.” Allie put her hand up to the back of his head, twisted a lock of his hair with her index finger. Sam instinctively sidestepped away from her.

  But for some minutes they stayed there watching, lingering at the edge of the trees in the hope that there might be some action. Meanwhile, the firemen went in and out.

  Allie eventually pointed out the obvious. “I don’t think they’re going to do it right now.”

  They hardly talked on the way home. When Sam did speak up, as they were crunching down the embankment to the graveyard, it was to ask his mother whether she would watch a movie of a rock turning into a diamond.

  Allie said, “Maybe if it isn’t in real time,” and he said, “No duh.”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Is there something wrong, kiddo?”

  Sam shook his head, kept walking.

  Back on the street, in sight of home, she put her arm over his shoulders, and he let it stay. “If Booth were here more, you guys could do all kinds of things. Not just the movies, you know? All kinds of things.”

  Sam said but he liked the movies.

  ■ ■ ■

  On Wednesday—the day prior to Booth’s scheduled return—Mark Goolsby invited Sam to dinner.

  His parents, Mark explained, were worried that he didn’t have any friends. He didn’t mean to presume on Sam’s goodwill; he recognized that they were more “study buddies” than friends. “And I know your dad is kind of famous, and my dad is a criminal, but it would mean a lot to my mom.” Although Goolsby presented this with a whimsical flail of his hands, Sam wasn’t fooled.

  “Look, my dad is the biggest asshole,” said Sam.

  “Sorry,” said Goolsby.

  “So. What’s the menu?” asked Sam.

  Dinner was grilled salmon on the Goolsbys’ deck. As the sun was setting and the grill was warming, Mark’s mom, Helen, showed them around her already blooming
herb garden, which was so expansive that it had lanes and little arrow-shaped signs, like a village. She had them pick mint for the lemonade. Mark’s dad, Rod, the ex-con, brought out a Frisbee and they flipped it around. The Frisbee was silver, and when it caught the light, it left a shimmering wake across Sam’s vision. “Nice snag,” said Rod as Sam went skipping up onto a tree trunk to pick the disc out of the air. “Easy,” said Sam, and casually flicked the Frisbee back across the lawn, and tripped, and fell down for a laugh. When the food was served, Rod let Sam and Mark split a beer. Mark told a funny story about Mrs. Quartermain pleading to get a student to take care of Todd the gerbil for the summer: “She says, ‘He’s already got his own toys!’ Like this is a huge selling point. And it’s like, yeah, he does have his own toys, but they’re just toilet-paper tubes and Ping Pong balls, you know? It’s not like Todd needs a bicycle or something.” Helen apologized to Sam for not having a television. “No, no,” said Sam, “this is great,” and if that was an exaggeration, it was nonetheless perfect, the four of them, sitting around the table, eating dinner outside in the summer evening.

  In the distance, above the trees, a black corkscrew of smoke twisted up and up, like a fissure in the sky. Sam guessed that the firemen were burning down the empty house. He told the others.

  Mark’s dad said he’d heard of fire departments doing such things. “What I always wonder is, who gets to set the match? They must have to draw straws or something.”

  “Oh, that’d be awesome,” said Mark. “I’d love to burn down a house.”

  Rod chuckled. “It would be kind of neat, right?”

  “Boys,” said Helen.

  There was a moment of silence, and Sam realized that she—that they—were waiting for him to say something, probably that he’d be eager to light a house on fire, too. But he had been thinking of the sad stream of possessions, the boxes, the couch, the things that once belonged to someone. He wondered how it was that an entire life could end up like that, on the street, and the rest set on fire. Had they died, the people who lived there? If they hadn’t died, did it make them feel like they had, to know that their home was being burned?