by Owen King
“What is this about Mina pepper-spraying two people?” his father asked.
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Booth. It’s what happened. She went on a rampage.”
“Did they deserve it?”
In the hush of the car and the odd peace of the moment, Sam could summon a degree of sympathy for his sister’s actions. While the vagrant’s intentions might not have been violent, the guy had a large knife, and it was a second’s decision. As for the attack on his roommate, although Mina obviously overreacted to a minor annoyance, if you did happen to be in possession of a canister of pepper spray, Sam could see how it might be hard to resist using it on Wesley. “Maybe. But she’s on the edge of something, you know? And Sandra nearly burned down their apartment. The whole thing’s a mess.”
Booth grunted in an authoritative way. “I’ll fix it,” he said.
“What?” Sam laughed. “Mina? You’ll fix Mina?”
“The situation,” said his father.
“Okay. How?”
Booth admitted that he wasn’t sure yet. Something about the set of his lips and the quiet, half-there quality of his voice caused Sam to withhold a further expression of disbelief; it wasn’t like his father to be so contained.
They were downtown again.
“Where the Coffee Shop was, Samuel,” Booth directed. “That’s our next stop.”
■ ■ ■
Before they left the studio, Christine had given Booth a couple of bulging plastic sacks. The contents—clothing—were intended for a group, Booth said, of “less fortunate local children.” But when they pulled up across the street from the structure that once housed the Hasbrouck Nickelodeon, what Sam saw were some street people loitering under the eave.
Subsequent to its incarnation as the Coffee Shop, the theater building initially passed into the town’s hands. The details had never been clear to Sam, but his rough sense was that once Allie gave up the café, Booth defaulted somehow, or was forced to surrender it for unpaid taxes, something like that. The town used it as a warehouse for the VFD and other local entities, then eventually sold it. For a short while after that, it was a restaurant, and later, it was totally abandoned for a few years. Now it was once again a café.
While the marquee had vanished, the building otherwise appeared relatively unchanged: glass double doors, the brick facade with cement rectangles for eyes where poster frames once hung. The only thing missing was Allie, her hair tied up in a purple bandanna, poking her head out the door to remind the smokers to pick up after themselves. “Hey, scuzzy,” she’d say if she caught a person walking away from a butt on the sidewalk, “you forgot something.”
What was more troubling, Sam wondered, how a place disappeared, or how it stayed the same? A veteran of the Great War returns to the buried trenches of the Eastern Front where his comrades died and stands in a field in the sun, while grass licks at his belt buckle, and it is fantastic for him to imagine the smoke and the mud and the thundering nights. Nevertheless: regrowth is a stage of the natural cycle. Everything flesh and bone is eventually fertilizer; we know this.
How are you supposed to be old in a place that knew you when you were young? It was disorienting, like shooting a film out of sequence, the end at the beginning or the beginning at the end.
A wooden placard on a hook clacked in the wind. The placard bore the name of the building’s latest iteration: SMOKE ME DRINK ME. It was a hookah bar as well as a café.
Many of the bedraggled youths—tank tops, holey shorts, sandals—who clustered around the door were visibly unwashed to such a degree that they appeared singed. One girl strummed a guitar with a splintered casing. Another member of the group, a boy in checkered pajama pants, was stretching in slow motion and making circular motions with his hands, as if assessing the strength of unseen barriers. A few were smoking cigarettes. Present as well were several large, grinning, and collarless dogs that circulated among the company, nosing hands and sniffing pavement.
Booth promised that he would be only a moment. Sam watched his father walk across the street—the old man still led with his shoulders, but it was obvious that the huge body exerted a drag. His cane worked like an oar, appearing to pull him forward.
A lanky girl with chopsticks protruding from her nest of dreadlocks hooted and clapped and jumped up and down. She was barefoot. Some of the others clapped, too. Sam’s father bowed slightly to the group and conducted a flourish with his cane and approached another young woman. Tattooed across this young woman’s face was a spiderweb, which made her features appear soldered together, yet she was startlingly pretty. Her hair was free and auburn-colored, and there was an intimation of mischief in the little smile she wore in the middle of her checkerboard face. She threw her arms around Booth.
They conversed for a minute or two, and he handed her the plastic bags. He bellowed something to the entire group, exhorting them, and jabbed his stick in the air. The young woman with the tattoo began to share out long-sleeved T-shirts and windbreakers taken from the bags.
Unable to hear the words, Sam put his own subtitles to the scene: Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and set your gaze upon the eighth wonder: Booth Dolan as a Human Being! Wonder at his sensitivity! Marvel at his responsiveness! Entirely stomach cancer–free!
The phone rattled in the cupholder again. He felt an urge to answer it. In their brief time together, Tess had demonstrated a gift for observation. Maybe she could explain what had possessed his father.
■ ■ ■
They were homeless, the “local children” who hung around outside the hookah bar–cum–café; or near homeless, squatting or splitting one-bedroom apartments four and five ways. Without doubt, there were drugs involved and probably a certain amount of petty crime, Booth said. College towns tended to draw such periphery youths. Shut out of secondary education by poverty, they were nevertheless attracted to its freedom and opportunity and romance, so they coalesced around campus hangouts.
Hasbrouck had taken a particular dislike to its bunch, his father claimed, having returned to Sam’s rental car and settled back into the passenger seat. The letters section of the weekly newspaper was a catalog of grievances against them, about the way they cluttered the street, and how their collection of stray dogs frightened pedestrians, and what they portended for the future, shiftless, stinking addicts destined to gobble at the public trough and leech from the public goodwill.
“And it’s really over-the-top, in my opinion.” As he related this information, Booth gradually became more exercised, but here he leveled off. “Because you know, they’re not any different than the young men and women with whom I made New Roman Empire. They’re not shiftless. They’re disenfranchised. They’re searching. They’re waiting for their lives to start. For the lights to go down, the curtains to open, and the world to come up and the excitement to begin. They’re underfed and uninspired, that’s all. I don’t know why people can’t recognize that.”
“Sure,” said Sam, who thought he understood something about the disillusionment of the young. He’d made a movie about it.
“I got to know a few of them, became friendly with them, and now I try to make a little time whenever I can, speak with them, encourage them, hand around a few dollars. With summer over and the cooler months coming on, I thought it was time to bring them some half-decent warm clothes. I mean, look at that girl, running around on the sidewalk in her bare feet!” He threw a hand in the direction of the dreadlocked girl.
A picture of Mina came to Sam’s mind. There couldn’t have been more than two or three years between her and the barefoot girl, if that.
“That child doesn’t need to pay more taxes, she needs our support! She needs some damned shoes, for God’s sake!” Booth thumped his cane on the floor of the car. “It offends me, Samuel, how many so-called adults in this country reflexively think the worst of the young. These Tea Party people, for instance. They think everyone else is as greedy and fearful as they are, when it’s the exact op
posite. Whatever happened to optimism? Whatever happened to generosity? Never mind generosity, whatever happened to decency? Whatever happened to curiosity? Engage with the future of your species, you cranky old shits!” He thumped the cane again.
“They all have cell phone clips on their belts,” said Sam.
“What?”
“It’s something Tess said to me, that all the Tea Party people have cell-phone belt clips. A lot of them, anyhow. That it comes off as incredibly self-important. That’s what she said. I don’t know for sure. Tess said to watch one of their rallies and I’d see.”
“That’s very interesting.” Booth wiped at his beard. “Is Tess the young woman who keeps calling for you? Has she made any other observations I should know about?”
“She compared the president to a Segway.”
“That fits. Segways are wonderful and underrated, just like the president. I already appreciated this young woman’s taste in men, but now I’m really beginning to warm to her,” said Booth. “Where was I?”
Sam didn’t bother to correct his father on Tess’s actual, rather more lackluster assessment of both the Segway and the president. “You were on the Tea Party.”
“Oh, fuck them! Fuck them! It’s not about them. They think it’s about them, but it’s not about them.” His father produced a what can you say? raspberry. “You know, those kids over there, they’re just a few years older than Mina.”
Across the street, the girl with the bare feet had settled down on an egg crate to examine her T-shirt and, in what seemed to Sam a gesture of heartrending meticulousness, was smoothing it over her lap to study the image on the front.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I was thinking that, too.”
■ ■ ■
Would Sam believe that, on their first date, Booth and Allie saw a movie at that old theater? “Quite a bad movie, I’m afraid,” said his father. “But we had a lovely time.”
They were on the way to Booth’s last appointment of the morning. A car ahead of them was waiting for a break in traffic to make a left. For the sixty or so seconds that elapsed before they were moving again, one part of Sam’s mind gently conducted another part of his mind to a private cubicle and set out a three-ring binder. Inside the binder were head shots: jut-jawed Professor Gould; Plato, brooding and nibbling on a fountain pen; sleepy-eyed, fish-lipped Don Griese; Horsefeathers Law in his smart boater, grinning creepily; President Lincoln, speaking for the sanctity of the Union; page after page of different characters, and in the last sleeve, Sam’s living, breathing father, large and bearded and radiating self-satisfaction in a mustard-stained shirt.
The one part of Sam asked the other part, could he make an identification?
They were all familiar, but—no. The man in the passenger seat wasn’t anywhere in the book.
“Booth,” said Sam. “This isn’t—a put-on, right?”
“No,” said Booth. “No put-on.”
“You’re being you.”
“Such as I am.”
“What happened?”
His father shrugged. “I had an Awakening of sorts.” He made a floating gesture with his hand. “The details don’t matter.”
The phone shook in the cupholder. The car ahead of them turned. Sam ran his thumb lightly back and forth over his cheek and cocked his head at his father. Booth gazed forward studiously. The car behind them honked twice.
“Stay on this road,” said his father.
5.
The final stop of Booth’s rounds was itself a final stop: Hasbrouck Horizons, a nonprofit hospice specializing in geriatric care.
While tossing around for rummage-sale items, a hospice administrator had discovered a projector in the basement. Word of the find had somehow made its way to Booth, owner of a small collection of reels (six of his own pictures—Alamo II: Return to the Alamo: Daughters of Texas, Black Soul Riders, Fangs of Fury, Hellhole 3: Endless Hell, Rat Fiend!, and New Roman Empire), and he had recently convened a regular Friday matinee.
In the facility’s sweltering, squeaking rec area, two tweed couches were angled to either side of a drop-down screen and spaced apart to make room for a half a dozen residents in wheelchairs. Gold streamers, remnants of a party, drooped across a plate-glass window. The window provided a view of a weedy hill sloping to the interstate toll kiosks below. The lights had been lowered, and the air smelled like pine cleaner.
On the right-hand couch, a tiny man in a gray housecoat was tipped over against the armrest—drool had collected in the gristle on his cheek and dried into a chalky wave—but many of the attendees appeared positively lambent at the sight of Booth. A nearly hairless woman in one of the wheelchairs, her shoulders and arms draped in tubes and translucent bags of fluids, implored Booth to get the show on the road. “Dolan, I lived all week for no other reason except to make sure that stupid werewolf movie wasn’t the last movie I ever saw. Plato, my bony ass.”
“Good morning, Ms. Elstner. Glad to see you’re feeling well today. You know how I cherish your thoughtful, measured appraisals of the cinema.” The projector was set on a stand behind the wheelchair section. While Sam shone a penlight, Booth threaded the reel into the spindle.
“And the one about the devil’s hole,” Ms. Elstner continued, “or whatever it was, that was even worse. I am feeling well. I think your terrible movies might be killing my cancer. If you don’t show something passable, I worry I may never get to die.”
Sam remained at the projector while his father tapped around to the front of the audience.
“Ms. Elstner,” Booth said, “let me reassure you. No one has ever survived to see all six of our features twice. The end is nigh, you have my word.”
The hairless woman shook some of her tubes to show what a low value she placed on Booth’s word. “If you can’t show us a good movie, you might at least show us one where there’s one woman who wears a bra.”
“I asked my grandniece about the styles these days, and she says it’s all down to the whims and preferences of one single rich lady in California who makes all the decisions,” said another elderly woman intriguingly. Gnarled hands folded in her lap, she sat on the couch by the sleeping man.
From the rear row of wheelchairs, a rumpled pile of a man—his spine was kinked like a garden hose—gave a sulky boo. Whether to the bra-wearing initiative or the rich lady in California who decided on the styles, Sam couldn’t be sure.
Before the pull-down screen—the sort that Sam associated with educational cartoons in elementary school—Booth leaned on his cane and addressed the terminal audience. “Today’s feature is titled New Roman Empire. It concerns the machinations of a sulfurous charlatan, the corrupt political interests who employ him, and the young freethinkers who threaten those corrupt political interests. As it happens—”
Ms. Elstner tapped a ring against her wheelchair for attention.
“Yes, my dear?”
“Why in the hell are you wearing a cape? You’re too old for dress-up, you know.”
“My daughter made it for me. She has a great interest in design. I think it looks wonderful. It makes me feel like a gentleman. It goes with my cane.”
“Gentleman.” Ms. Elstner laughed as though this were the funniest thing she had heard all day, which caused Sam to laugh, too. “What’s your cape made of, then?”
“I don’t know,” Booth huffed. “Wool, I think.”
“It’d be better if it was made of silk,” she said.
“Like fancy panties,” elaborated the lady who had mentioned the supreme fashion goddess of California.
Booth raised a finger. “False. It’s a fall-winter cape. That’s why it’s wool.”
“Then it should be velvet,” Ms. Elstner insisted.
“You are not the cape jurist, woman. There are all kinds of capes, and this cape is just the way it ought to be, because that’s how my daughter made it.”
“I didn’t say I was the authority on capes, Booth.” Ms. Elstner tucked her chin and glanced away as if injured
. “It’s merely my opinion. You don’t have to like it. A true gentleman would allow a sickly woman to have her opinions.”
Booth leaned more heavily on his cane. “I questioned your expertise in the cape area. I never said anything about denying your right to an opinion, dear.”
She snapped back to face him and grinned. “Booth, you look like a Dracula that ate another Dracula!”
Sam, at his position at the rear of the room, behind the projector, broke out laughing again, along with several of the others. The rain must have stopped, because the antiseptic room seemed much brighter; a new diffuse light fell through the window and glimmered the leftover streamers. It was a show, obviously, an act. Booth was being a fool for them. He’s making their day, Sam thought, and felt—proud?
Hunched over his cane in a pose of exaggerated forbearance, Booth glowered at the floor while he waited for the mirth to cease. When it did, he said, “Have I mentioned, Ms. Elstner, how glad I am that you’ve not yet expired? Would anyone else like to insult me before I finish introducing the film? Maybe we should have a roast instead?”
The patient with the kinked spine piped up in a faint voice. “No more flirting. I am ready to see a picture now.”
Ms. Elstner told the man to hold his horses. She asked if that was Booth’s son at the projector. Booth allowed that it was. Ms. Elstner opined that Sam was quite handsome and, luckily, seemed to have avoided the worst of the heavy gene.
“That’s it!” His father crossed the room, bounced his cane off the floor, caught it, and nimbly slipped it under his armpit. He bent and planted a smacking kiss on her papery cheek. “Peace?”
“One more!” demanded Ms. Elstner, so Booth kissed her on the other cheek before returning to the screen.
Sam imagined performing the cane trick for Tess and impressing her so much that she stopped hating him. Maybe Booth could teach him. Or maybe, thought Sam, I’m lying on the floor of a sealed panic room, hallucinating this entire day.