by Ed Kurtz
Not since their awful, awkward wedding night, at any rate.
Hot Springs, Arkansas was the place, a little rundown hotel on East Grand with a view of the Ouachita Mountains and a lukewarm bottle of cheap champagne resting in a dented metal bucket with no ice in it. They heard children stomping up and down the hallway all night and into the wee hours, unattended little shits Russ had called them, but Theodora didn’t agree or disagree since she was still hoarse from all the crying she’d done. It’ll be fine, he’d told her, perhaps a bit condescendingly, you don’t have to holler so goddamn much, it’s just a bit of fun, for crissakes. He couldn’t see why she was making such a big sorry deal out of the whole stupid affair and she couldn’t understand why her new husband would want to poke his ugly thing into her rear end in the first place, and they never did see eye-to-eye on the issue and not another word was ever spoken of it.
They had no children, she and Russ, and no intimacy or secrets between them, or love. Once in a rather great while, maybe twice a year, Theodora got it into her head to take him into her mouth, though she felt relatively certain that this, too, counted among the sins of Sodom. Pastor Shannon never said as much, not that detail specifically, but how was he supposed to? You didn’t talk about things like that, and that went double under the roof of God’s own house. She just knew, or at least strongly suspected, that she was doing something terribly, inevitably wrong, but the little wife figured it was better to burn in the lake of fire than to never again feel a kind touch from her own husband. Even if he did close his eyes and tip back his head every time, never once acknowledging who is was doing the filthy, shame-making deed down there.
And boy howdy would her ears burn the next few times she’d see the Good Reverend James Shannon, sure in her heart that he knew, that he could see it in her downcast eyes.
Life was funny. Took you places you’d never think it would, or could. Or should. Papas built dollhouses and mamas used them to instruct little girls about how life was supposed to function in God’s Jesus-green world. Theodora laughed a little just thinking about it.
“What’s so goddamn funny?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Christ, but you chap my hide sometimes, woman.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“A man tries to make a living,” he began, trailing off. It was a familiar enough sentiment to both of them; further elaboration was unnecessary.
Russ screwed the cap onto the bottle’s mouth and jammed it back in its place in the liquor cabinet. Ten years had crawled sluggishly by since Roosevelt overturned Volstead; before that Russ kept his hooch in the cellar. The day the Twenty-First Amendment swallowed up the Eighteenth, he’d hauled every bottle up by armloads from the dank cellar to the cabinet in the front room, carelessly emptying it of every bit of her mother’s china and replacing it all with whiskey and rye and gin and every other drop of the devil’s water he’d kept hidden since nineteen hundred and twenty. Theodora could not say where the china was now. She supposed it didn’t much matter, not really.
“I’ve still got paperwork needs doing,” Russ grumbled as the wiped the inside of the tumbler with his shirttail. “You go on back to bed now.”
Theodora knitted her brow and lingered for a moment, mindlessly worrying the fringe of her robe. Russ carefully returned the glass to its place in the cabinet and slowly turned his head to lay a dark, startlingly sober glare on her.
“Now, Theodora,” he said.
A faint, quivering smile tugged at the corners of her mouth and she swallowed noisily before turning on her heels and heading straight for the stairs. She climbed and felt the thin fabric of the robe cling wetly to her hot skin on the way up. Up to the lonely bedroom, to the pain that made her eyeballs ache whenever she shut them.
Now, Theodora.
“Yes, Russell,” she said out loud as she crawled back beneath the hot, damp bed sheet.
Russ spread the promotional materials out on the kitchen table like a fan. There was the pressbook and the glossy stills and half a dozen handbills that were miniaturized versions of the one-sheet now hanging in front of the Palace.
First International Tour!
Bold! Crucial!
2 Hours of White Hot Truth!
The words white and hot were designed to look as though they were aflame. It even promised an All-Star Hollywood Cast, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Who the hell was Jim S. Dawson, anyway? He sure as hell wasn’t Randolph Scott, that much was certain.
He took up the pressbook and absently flipped through it.
“Puerile stuff,” Russ groused.
Secrets of a Happy and Healthy Young Adulthood, the header on page five practically screamed at him. Page six introduced the esteemed Dr. Elliot Freeman (On Stage! In Person! The Famous Hygiene Expert!) whose photograph naturally did not appear since the good doctor changed appearance from one region to the next. For the Palace’s purposes, it was Mountain Home native Peter Chappell who was to don the lab coat of authority and spout the memorized speech probably conceived by the head man himself. Then would come the business of selling Dr. Freeman’s critically important book, from which Russ was not to see a single red cent, per the conditions of his contract. His take on the box office wasn’t exactly spectacular, either, but these were hard times. Anymore Russ could only hope to see half-decent receipts from women’s pictures since half his male audience was on the other side of the world killing Germans and Japs and getting killed in return. And even the women didn’t come as often as they used to. There just weren’t the resources, not when everything was rationed and their meagre incomes from whatever lunch counter or secretarial desk went to groceries and light bills first. No, the Palace needed something different, something really different, to coax his friends and neighbours out to the picture show again. Something new. Something maybe a bit dangerous.
The Outlaw sure as hell didn’t do the trick, Jane Russell’s criminal cleavage notwithstanding.
But then came the loud, fast-talking little man from Wilmington, Ohio with the pomaded hair parted in dead centre and the smart bowtie big enough to touch his chin. You gotta tell ’em to sell ’em, Cavanaugh, he barked, which was how he always spoke—a bark—which made perfect sense to Russ once he learned the excitable fellow’s handle: Barker Davis.
He’d just come down for the afternoon from Mountain Home in a shiny black coupe with a stack of pressbooks and a picture to sell—going town to town, he said; a roadshow, he said. Maybe folks in Litchfield didn’t see the advantage in spending their well-pinched pennies on whatever melodramas or hackneyed jungle adventure shows Russ had been projecting on the Palace’s screen (Barker Davis intimated), but by Christ, give them something they haven’t ever seen before, and damnit, do it with a guarantee they can’t turn down, sell it to them hard, Cavanaugh, and you’ll flip your goddamn wig when you see the receipts, pardon my Latin.
Russ Cavanaugh was dubious then, worried about the noisy proclamations on the pressbook cover, and he hadn’t even seen the one-sheet yet, but more than that he was uncomfortable with the way this boisterous little stranger seemed to waltz right in like he owned the joint. Telling Russ how to run his business. Discussing his questionable little medicine show as though it was already a done deal, the ink dry on the papers. But then, of course, the ink did dry, and fast. Theodora’s tsking over the subject matter of Davis’s film probably had as much to do with it as anything—the only thing worse than a complete stranger telling him what to do with his own movie house was goddamn Theodora doing it. I don’t know, Russell; it seems a bit sordid, Russell; Reverend Shannon won’t like it, Russell. Russ couldn’t sign fast enough after that round of henpecking hell.
So it was a done deal. A week’s limited engagement, three shows a day at Litchfield’s own Palace Theater: Women and Hi-School Girls Only at 2, Men and Hi-School Boys Only at 7, and the mildly precarious
desegregated nine o’clock show for anyone with the half-dollar price of admission (up from thirty-five cents that past March). Tomorrow’s two o’clock show was the first run, and although Russ had been assured that Davis’ team would be beating the proverbial bushes for a gross that would knock him on his rear-end, he did not feel so sure looking over the loud materials on the table before him.
Bold! Shocking!
Vitally Important!
See the Truth & Learn the Facts
a picture you will never forget
Emblazoned across the middle of the handbill like a too-tight belt was the question: Are the boys and girls of today JUST PLAIN BAD?
“Who cares?” Russ asked back. “So long as they’re paying.”
His mind then flashed on little Nancy Campbell, she of the bottled blonde hair and obscenely dimpled chipmunk cheeks, and how quickly her grandparents shunted her away last winter when her formerly table-flat stomach began to suspiciously distend. As far as Russ knew, no one asked whether she was bad or not, at least not aloud. No one talked about Nancy Campbell at all—she was a phantom, a forgotten spectre of an ugly moment that only happened in bigger towns and cities, but not Litchfield, never here. Russ wondered if he shouldn’t resurrect that ugly moment, speak the girl’s name aloud and recall her sinful predicament in the name of social betterment and moral fortitude and fat coffers. Remember Nancy Campbell? Your daughter could be next!
Anxiety was always the best sales pitch, he knew. It had worked for the churches since time immemorial, after all—why not the Palace, too?
Russ grinned, stood up to locate a pencil from the cup on the counter just below the massive black phone on the wall. He took the dull stub back to the table and made a note on the margin of the handbill: Nancy Campbell.
You gotta tell ’em to sell ’em, Cavanaugh.
Shrewd fellow, that Barker Davis. Obnoxious as all hell and a Yankee to boot (damn him) but a shrewd businessman who was priming the pump for the Palace to finally escape its slump.
To hell with Jane goddamn Russell, Russ thought. If tits don’t pack them in, fear will.
They’re all out to getcha: the Jerries and the Japs, the Devil his own self and, now, even the nice young man next door. He’s got the Serpent in his trousers fixing to slither into the Garden when the angels aren’t looking—Christ this is good; he made more notes in the margin—and you had best learn the facts, every mother’s son of you, lest it happen to you.
“Fear,” he said aloud as the flat lead nub scratched away, filling up what little white space remained on the handbill’s edges. “That’s the thing. That’s the thing.”
Russ chuckled a little and failed to notice the bruise-purple horizon on the other side of the kitchen window, inspiring a pair of chattering birds and signalling the start of a new day. He was still too enraptured with thoughts of his neighbour’s lucrative terror.
Chapter Three
Pain shocked Jojo’s brain and he snapped awake in his chair as the smouldering end of his cigarette dropped from his freshly burned fingers.
“Shit,” he rasped. The single syllable kicked up the gummy saliva in his mouth. He didn’t much care for the taste.
Jojo turned in the chair and extended his leg to stomp on the butt, grinding it into the rug and into extinction. One more black pock mark hardly mattered. The rug was riddled with them like a long-forgotten World War I minefield. No one ever complained. Nobody ever came back there apart from him and the rare visit from Mr. Hibbs.
He leaned back in the chair, which creaked while he groaned. From the inside pocket of his coat he withdrew his little flask, from which he took a quick shot that he swished around in his mouth before swallowing. He made a face and groaned some more. His temples throbbed and the small of his back felt like it was making a tight fist he couldn’t unclench.
“Shit,” he said again. Once more with feeling, he thought.
Sucking on the rapidly developing blisters on his index and middle fingers, Jojo reached for the package of Old Golds on the desk and stuck one in his mouth. He knew he’d used his last match—he just wanted to lip the thing for a while. And while he lipped the cigarette from one corner of his mouth and kissed his blisters with the other, Jojo turned the knob on the white Coronado radio and closed his eyes. Al Dexter was warbling across the airwaves, a familiar tune to Jojo Walker.
Lay that pistol down, babe, lay that pistol down. Pistol packin’ mama, lay that pistol down.
The tune was familiar, but so was the sentiment. He’d known a few pistol packin’ mamas in his own time, too, his late bride among them. Good old steady Beth, looking like Irene Dunne at the tail-end of a weeklong bender, her wiry chalk-white arm trembling with a Mossberg Brownie gawping at the end of it. Just a tiny little thing, even in such a small, delicate hand, but Jojo didn’t make a Federal case out of it. She who holds the .22 makes the rules, he figured, and the rule was shut up and don’t move. So he was silent and still, and he watched as she screamed and the tears ran down and her nose bubbled with snot and she said things like, Now you know I ain’t prejudiced but for God’s sake, George, a Negro girl? As if the stepping out in and of itself was not enough. He’d had to go and twist the knife, too.
Drinkin’ beer in a cabaret, was I havin’ fun! Until one night she caught me right, and now I’m on the run. . . .
His foot tapped under the desk until he became aware of it and stopped. The electric fan hummed. Outside, a car horn sounded. Probably a guest honking for the bellboy, whoever it was that took Charles’ place at that ungodly hour of the morning. Jojo wasn’t very familiar with the day-shift crew.
He felt like a vampire, like Bela Lugosi repulsed by the sober, revealing sunlight that invaded his small private space through any chink in his Venetian window armour it could find. Under ideal circumstances, he would have been asleep on the cot by now, stripped down to his shorts with his green wool blanket draped half on him and half off. Instead he languished in his desk chair, an unlit and unlightable cigarette dangling from his lips, the heat in the room indicating temperatures rising to deep south of heaven. The goddamn fan just wasn’t going to fix itself, not when he could feel the sweat running in streams down his sides from the endless springs in his armpits. So he took another hit from the flask, switched off the Coronado and crammed his hat back on his head to head out for cooler pastures.
The rest of the song followed him, inside his head, through the lobby and past the roughneck in the cashier’s cage, all the way out onto the sweltering street. Jojo boiled in his damp, rumpled suit, but he was already out and going so grinned and bore it, hold the grin.
He walked toward the Starlight, though he did not plan on going there specifically. Time was he’d spend the day in the Palace, and after about fifteen minutes had melted by, the theatre’s familiar edifice and stark white marquee came shimmering into view.
Barker Davis Presents . . .
Jojo had nearly forgotten all about that.
He squinted against the glare of the marquee and turned onto Franklin, away from the theatre, in a beeline for the drugstore with a mortar and pestle on the left side of its shingle and an ice cream cone on the right. In the middle, tall gold-painted capital letters spelled out finn’s. The place was nearly vacant—too early for the bobbysoxers and too late for the white-haired crowd who lingered over coffee when they went to collect their sundries. Jojo flinched a little at the tiny brass bell that jingled above him when he opened the door. Sleeplessness, he decided. Made him jumpy.
Before the counter, all but one of the five red padded stools stood unused. The fifth from the front sank beneath the weight of an enormous man with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and sweat roiling from his vast pink face. The fat man was pouring Coca-Cola down his gullet as though his life depended on it, and when he noticed Jojo his wet, fraught face moulded itself into a panting smile.
“Hi-de-ho, Jojo!” he c
alled out in a wet, fraught sort of way. “What d’ya know?”
“Not much more than I ever did, Finn.”
Finn patted the stool beside him.
“Get off them stompers and have a visit,” he said.
Always with the hep talk, Finn. Jojo reckoned he picked it up from the kids who made his joint their second home during the summer—the active duties and share crops, he called them. The kids laughed at him and the adults found it crass, but Jojo liked the guy. He was an okay bird, a buddy from way back. And he was one of the very elite few who hadn’t turned their backs on him when the soup hit the fan. When some of his own colleagues at the station were still calling him darkie-lover to his face, Finn just shrugged and said, “Y’ain’t nothing but a man, Jojo.”
At the time, Jojo figured it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him.
Jojo squatted over a stool and sat down with a sigh. Finn snapped his fingers at the jerk behind the counter, who looked up with lazy, heavily-lidded eyes beneath a jauntily cocked paper hat.
“Get Mr. Walker a soda, would ya?”
“Thanks,” Jojo said.
“Or would ya rather an egg cream? D’ya know what that is? Stu here, he’s been up north. Tell him about your egg cream, Stu.”
Stu lifted one eyebrow and sucked in a deep breath, but Jojo waved a hand to cut him off.
“Soda’s fine, Stu.”
Stu yanked a clean glass from beneath the counter and filled it to the top at the fountain. Finn squeezed Jojo’s shoulder with his massive hand.
“The simple things, am I right?”
“Sure, Finn.”
“That’s what them goddamn Germans don’t get, you ask me. It’s about the simple things. Hell, even them Yankee fucks don’t get that. Pardon my language, Stu.”