by Wendy Clinch
THIRTY-TWO
According to conventional wisdom, if you wanted to go to the movies in Vermont, you had to go to New Hampshire.
Although that may not have been entirely true, it wasn’t far off. There was a movie theater forty-five minutes away in Rutland, after all. But Stacey had gone there once and it was shabby and smelly and her feet kept getting stuck to the floor. The whole experience felt like movie night in prison. They might as well have tacked a bedsheet to the wall and made everybody sit on wooden benches. Rumor had it that there was a theater in Bennington (an hour away) and another in Springfield (an hour away in a different direction), but the odds of their being any better didn’t strike Stacey as all that great.
She hadn’t been a huge moviegoer when she’d lived in Boston, but it was nice to go sometimes and she missed it a little, especially since she didn’t have a television of her own and had to watch with the whole Ramsey family. Which wasn’t that bad or anything, they made her feel perfectly welcome and all, but still. So when Chip invited her to the movies, she didn’t quite know what to think. It turned out to be a Harper Stone film festival, which was an even bigger throwback to the old days before multiplexes and stadium seating. “Where is it?” she asked him, expecting the worst.
“Up in Woodstock,” he said, “at the town hall. They show movies on the weekends, since there’s nowhere else to go.”
Stacey brightened. “As a public service,” she said. She hadn’t yet made it up to Woodstock, but everyone said it was a lovely little classic Vermont village—nothing at all like this grim old has-been mill town where she’d found herself, a place that sidled up to Spruce Peak as if it were tugging on its coatsleeve, looking for a handout.
“I guess that’s the general idea,” Chip said. “There’s a lot of money in Woodstock. Permanent money and tourist money both. They’ve got a farmers’ market up there that’s never had a farmer anywhere near it, I’ll tell you that. All this imported stuff from Europe and places. Everything costs an arm and a leg.”
“You know how it is with some people. The more they spend the better they feel.” She was thinking of Brian.
“Tell me about it.” He was thinking of his parents.
* * *
They went up early and ate good burgers at a little place on the corner, and when that didn’t take up much time and there was still an hour or so before the movie started they walked the streets of the village. The sidewalks were busy and the stores were all open late, and the trees were lit with white lights that twinkled through thin branches. It felt to Stacey like the kind of moment where people in their situation might be walking arm in arm or hand in hand—but they didn’t, and that was all right, too.
Chip was correct: There was definitely money in Woodstock, big-time. The houses and storefronts were immaculate, for one thing. But there was more to it than that. It was as if the village fathers had long ago passed an ordinance that said you had to keep your place not just perfectly maintained—the paint fresh, the brickwork pointed, and the brass on every metal surface polished to a high sheen that glowed even in the faint light of those tiny twinkling Christmas bulbs—but that you actually had to strive for and achieve a certain measurable level of charm. How was that possible? What was it that caused a town like this to turn itself into something that Walt Disney might have billed as Vermontland?
Competition, Stacey figured. Competition and pride, if you kept in mind that pride was one of the seven deadly sins. The more they walked down the streets and lanes of Woodstock, the more she was sure of it. The library was a showplace. The covered bridge that spanned the river, lit with a pale white disk of a moon, looked like a painting Norman Rockwell had rejected for being too cute. The tourist places—a couple of inns and a handful of B and Bs and one little motel—were all lovely, but they paled in comparison to the places where regular people lived, at least in tiny ways. A wooden doorstep with scuffed paint. The hinge of a shutter that had somehow dripped a little rust. In other words, it looked like the people in this town who didn’t need to make their places gleam were spending more time and money on it than the people who did. It was pride and competition, all right. Pride and competition and out-of-town money.
She didn’t know what to expect from the movies at the town hall. Would it be the real thing, just a little village up here in the woods making its best effort to bring in a little bit of culture? Or might it go the other way, and be just a bunch of rich people from New York amusing themselves? She floated both of these ideas to Chip. He thought for a minute and then laughed. “You’ve got me,” he said. “My guess is it’s a bunch of rich people from New York, doing such a good job of pretending to be the real thing that we won’t be able to tell the difference.”
“Oh, great,” said Stacey.
“Or else a little of both, and we’ll have to figure out who’s on which side.”
“No problem,” she said.
There was a line of people waiting outside the town hall, and once they got inside there was hardly a seat left. Some folks seemed to have programs, just single sheets of paper folded in half the short way, but Stacey couldn’t manage to get her hands on one. She was curious, though. By the look of the technology, there was grant money somewhere behind this operation. She thought she’d like to see who was supporting it.
The room echoed with a murmur of hushed voices and a low rumble of boots on hardwood, all of which came to a stop when a tiny white-haired woman approached a podium alongside the screen. She was no taller than a fourth-grader, thin verging on disappearance, and dressed in an elevated version of the Vermont sweater-and-corduroy aesthetic.
Stacey leaned toward Chip. “Imported money.”
“I’m withholding judgment.”
“My bet’s on the table. You know what I think.”
The tiny old woman climbed to the podium, took the microphone in both hands, and tipped it downward, aiming it toward her upturned face.
“I don’t know,” said Chip, shaking his head and narrowing his eyes. “I’m starting to settle on local. Local for a couple of generations anyhow.”
“No way.”
“Way. You’ll see.”
The old woman tapped on the microphone with one manicured nail, making a hard sound that startled everyone, including herself, into rapt attention.
Stacey looked around at the crowd, almost every face smiling up expectantly at the white-haired woman. She tilted her head toward Chip and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m having second thoughts,” she said.
“Too late.”
“How many generations does it take to make a local?”
The woman smiled, took a folded piece of paper from her pocket, and painstakingly flattened it on the surface before her.
“Around here?” Chip shrugged, and the white-haired woman at the podium began to speak. Her voice was low and large, doubly surprisingly for coming from such a small figure, and it had the most astonishing down-east accent imaginable. She sounded like a lobsterman. Chip gave Stacey the point of his elbow. “I’m thinking all the way back to the Mayflower,” he said.
* * *
It was a double feature: Murder Town, followed by Lights Out.
The Mayflower lady, whose name was Druscilla Peru and whose people had come south to Vermont from a saltwater farm on the coast of Maine a hundred years back, and whose inheritance had funded not the film series itself but a lobbying effort to persuade the NEA to back it over the long term, apologized for the similarity of the two pictures but said that these were all the library could get on such short notice. They had hoped to contrast one of Stone’s classic crime movies with something different—The Ne’er-Do-Wells, maybe, or Last Stand at Appomattox—but facts were facts and they’d just have to make do.
Stacey looked around the crowd as the lights went down, and figured that about half of the people in the town hall looked as if they had plenty of experience making do. The rest, not so much. So she guessed Chip had been right. It was a littl
e of both.
Murder Town, first on the double bill, was the movie that established all the great themes of Harper Stone’s work. The alienated outsider. The corrupt society that requires his heroism but ultimately rejects him. And the outcast dame who wins his icy heart, if only for a while.
But if Murder Town set the tone for his career, Lights Out was his bare-knuckled masterpiece. The hero, a certain Harry Smith—for every one of Stone’s characters shared the actor’s initials and the three doomlike beats of his name—was jut-jawed and narrow-eyed and independent as a hog on ice. He was a private investigator, fifty bucks a day plus expenses, and if he felt a shred of compassion for the industrialist whose empire was saved by his quick wits or for the blackmailer who plummeted down that famous elevator shaft, he wasn’t letting on. Likewise for the industrialist’s daughter, played by some starlet whose career arc had peaked here and then plummeted. Steer clear, baby. Harry Smith was just doing his job. There’d be time for romance after the credits rolled.
“Ooh, I love this one,” Chip said when the titles came up over an animated graphic of a yellow flashlight beam prowling the cut-paper streets of a city straight out of some German expressionist’s nightmare. Lurking criminals ducked into alleyways at its sudden and illuminating touch. Cats scattered from high fences. “It’s my dad’s fave, too.”
“I thought you said he liked Afraid of the Dark best.”
“Did I say that?”
“You did. That’s what you told Stone. That day on the mountain?”
Somebody shushed the two of them from behind.
“Wow, good memory,” Chip whispered. “I think you’re right. I think he did like Afraid of the Dark best. But that was pretty much a remake of this one, wasn’t it? Only with a bigger budget? And Anne Bancroft, I think?”
“Maybe your dad goes for Anne Bancroft.”
“You could be on to something.”
The flashlight beam passed down an alley, slipped through an open door, and then disappeared, the whole scene going black on black for a few seconds to the accompaniment of a screeching trumpet. A few more beats and the trumpet stuttered out and a bass picked up the rhythm. The light appeared again from behind the windows of an upstairs room. Two windows, each framing the silhouette of one man. The men leveling pistols at each other. The bass thumped, steady and urgent. The flashlight beam flicked from one man to another and back again, and at last the guns fired in a coordinated explosion that washed out the black city and lit the upturned faces of a hundred or more spellbound Vermonters seated row upon row in folding chairs. One last blast of horns. Then, Lights Out.
THIRTY-THREE
For certain people gathered in the town hall—the under-forty crowd, mainly, raised as they were on MTV—the movie was surprising talky and molasses-paced. How on earth Harper Stone ever got a reputation as a man of few words was anybody’s guess. It seemed to Stacey as if he were always explaining things: the plot, his motivations, the workings of a Ford Thunderbird Coupe or a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. There was no end to it.
The elevator scene, on the other hand, did not disappoint. To begin with, the angles were flat-out dizzying. The camera flicked up toward the gaping doorway on the top floor, down toward the filthy black roof of the cab, and over the edge to the dizzying drop below, exactly the way a panicked person would. Wobbling and shimmying. Pure cinematic vertigo. It made you feel as if you were right there in the shaft, hanging on to those greasy cables and breathing hard and clinging for your life. The editing was something special, too. This was where those long, lazy shots that drove the younger members of the audience crazy during the rest of the movie paid off. A single shot could last for half a minute, a minute, maybe more. The camera bobbed and swayed and tracked and never lost focus while Harper Stone and the soulless extortionist—Joseph Cotton, in a last-minute return to form after the years he’d wasted guesting on The Rockford Files and Fantasy Island—duked it out. Each endless shot was like a bad dream from which no escape was possible, and when it finally cut away things only got worse.
The whole crowd held its breath, although by now everybody on the planet knew that Harper Stone would come out smiling in the end. (Not smiling, really. The expression fixed on his face would be more in the line of a grimace. Still, whatever you called it, it was better than what was going to become of poor old Joseph Cotton.) The movie ended only a minute or two after Stone lost his grip and Cotton took his long and twisting fall, as if everybody involved in the making of it knew that it had nowhere to go from there but down. The critics said that Stone’s career should have ended there, too, right there on that unforgettable high point. But who in the world ever took that kind of advice?
When the lights came up and the applause died down—that was the power of an old picture like this one, it could still draw an audience to its feet just on general principles—Druscilla Peru approached the microphone again. But instead of thanking everyone for coming, talking up next week’s movie, and advising one and all to drive safely going home on these treacherous roads, she held up her index finger like a schoolmarm and said that she had a wonderful surprise for everyone. The crowd murmured, boots shifted on the hard floor, and without further ado she introduced an individual who had sat in the back all this time, admiring the movie from a certain very personal point of view and swelling with a little bit of unexpected pride when the crowd burst into applause at the end.
Manny Seville. She called him Manfred, the way his name read in the credits. Manfred R. Seville, technical director on the movie they’d just seen. Up from New York for a few days and generous enough to share his insights on the making of Lights Out with this roomful of poor unsophisticated country people. He rose to his feet amid a spontaneous roar of applause, and came to the podium beaming in spite of himself.
The first question came from an old-timer in khakis, a plaid shirt, and a fly-fishing vest, a self-professed film buff retired up here from New York, whose chief objective was to show off every single thing he knew or thought he knew about movies. He stood up, cleared his throat, and spoke in a high, wavering voice, starting with film grain and shutter speeds and low-light shooting, concluding eight or ten minutes later with his personal readings of the major films of Sergei Eisenstein. At no point along the way did he give any indication of what his question might have been, or even trouble himself to suggest that he actually might have one. Manny thanked him for his insights, calling him a shrewd observer of filmmaking technique, and the old man sat back down satisfied.
The next question was about Harper Stone. In fact, all of the remaining questions were about Harper Stone.
How well did Manny know him?
Very well indeed. They’d come up through the ranks side by side. They’d been kids together on the Warner’s lot, for Christ’s sake—if you could say “for Christ’s sake” in a nice place like this.
What about the real Harper Stone? What was he like?
He was a cast-iron sonofabitch, if they’d pardon his French. Hah hah hah. No, really, he was a gentleman. A true gentleman of the old school. No kidding. An absolute sweetheart.
Did Manny have an inside scoop on his death?
No. They’d been up here in the mountains working on a commercial, but they hadn’t had all that much to do with each other. Hadn’t even seen each other off the set.
Where did Harper Stone get that tattoo on his forearm? The one you could see just for a second or two during the elevator scene? Frankly, he didn’t know. He didn’t even remember that the guy had had a tattoo, come to that. Maybe … oh, never mind.
Maybe what?
Maybe if the librarian hadn’t made off with the reels they could take another look at the film and he’d remember, but it was too late. What did it look like?
A heart, an anchor, chains.
Not a kitty in a sailor hat? Hah hah hah. Not Woody Woodpecker with a cigar? Was she positive?
No. It was a heart and an anchor, with chains wrapped around them. And it was the
re on the screen for just a second. Just a flash.
He scratched his head and said maybe it was makeup. Maybe since Stone was such a stickler about getting into his characters, he’d had somebody in the makeup department paint the thing on his arm just for that one shot.
Stacey didn’t think that sounded likely, but she thanked him and let it go.
* * *
“Pretty sharp eye there, Stacey.” Chip whacked the ice scraper against his pantleg, tossed it behind the driver’s seat, and slid back inside the Wrangler.
“The thing is,” she said as he slammed the door, “I’ve seen that tattoo before.” She rubbed the inside of the windshield with the back of her glove, sending down a little shower of ice crystals. They were going to have to sit in the car for a while and let it warm up before it was safe to move, especially given the pitch darkness of the roads between Woodstock and home. “And not just on Harper Stone, either. I’m sure of it.”
Chip blew on his window and rubbed at it with his forearm. “Where?”
“On Mr. Wonderful, over at the Slippery Slope.”