That didn’t stop him. A week later he hitched to Atlanta, and there he found a recruiting sergeant who was glad to believe him. Two days later he stepped off a bus into the hottest weather he had ever experienced. “God damn,” he said. “Is this here Ko-rea?”
It was, in fact, Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia. The bus had brought him about one hundred miles. At the end of the first week, Andy and all the other boys had to write home. Andy wrote:
Dear Mamma and Daddy,
Well, I guess you no I have run off I have join the army. I like it alright so far the food is lots of it but mamma not as good as your cooking. There is lots of us boys here to go and fight in korea. I will try to send some of my money home when I get paid I hope I will not get kill. Well, that’s all right now I will right soon again
Your son,
Andy.
Andy never sent any money. He never wrote again. His father read the letter, snorted, crumpled it, and threw it into the fireplace. No fire was burning; Andy’s mother dug the letter out, unfolded it carefully, and put it in the family Bible. For nearly four years they would not know whether Andy was dead or alive.
At first Andy spent most of his money on booze. Then when he got to Korea, he learned from the other soldiers that there were women who would let you do damn near anything you wanted to them for the right amount of money. Andy’s drinking slacked off after that.
During his army career, Andy killed three men for sure and maybe another three. All but one of these were long-distance kills, unsatisfying to Andy. But that last one — man!
His outfit had been advancing on a hill, another goddamn hill, through mud the texture of glue. Air support had blasted the hell out of the place already, but there were still a few enemy riflemen dug in. Somehow on the way up Andy got separated from his group. He came quite suddenly upon a wounded Korean soldier.
He was a wizened little man, his face gray with pain. He had cast aside his weapon. His right hand was a splintered, bloody mess. He saw Andy approaching. He held his right hand away from the body, as though trying to keep the slow-dripping blood off his uniform. He held out his left hand and waved it at Andy, like a little kid going “bye-bye.” He jabbered something in his gook lingo.
Andy stood over him. He had heard stories about how these slants would booby-trap themselves. He wasn’t about to touch the bastard.
Curiously, Andy brought his M-1 to bear on the man’s left kneecap. The man’s eyes widened, he cried out, and, faster, he chattered some more.
Andy fired.
The leg buckled astonishingly, bent the wrong way. The knee was spurting ruin, the calf held to the thigh by only two thin strips of flesh and gristle. The little man howled.
Andy grinned and shot the other knee.
He worked his way inward, bit by bit: both legs, both arms. He was about to end the screaming with a shot between the gook’s eyes when the man simply died. Just like a gook, he thought. He fired the shot anyway.
That was the best one, the only one he got to see up close. In 1954 he was discharged. He walked through the front door of the house on Porter Street, dropped his duffel bag, and said, “Well, I’m home.”
His daddy cussed him out. His mama cried over him.
Andy got a job working in the cotton mill, came in drunk one night and picked a fight with his foreman, and got fired. He found a girl to run around with, got her pregnant, married her, and found another job, one that didn’t pay much but one that he liked better. He worked for a chicken processing plant. His job was to stand beside a conveyor chain that came by a foot over his head. Dangling from the chain, clamped to it by their feet, were the chickens. Andy used a sharp, curved knife to slit their throats so they would bleed and die before the belt dunked them into boiling water.
His daughter was born, then his son. Now he works long hours ankle-deep in chicken blood, and he figures he has the right to get drunk now and again. Sometimes, when he has enough money, he goes to the whorehouse south of town (one of Frye County’s big secrets), close to where Cherokee Creek joins Moccasin Creek to form the Little Cherokee River. Other times, when he’s broke but a little drunk, he goes there vainly hoping one of the girls will give him a free ride. When she won’t, he returns home to beat up his wife.
That has been his pattern for three years. Sometimes at night he dreams about the dying Korean. He wakes up with an erection.
It is 12:09. A long black car pulls up to the curb in front of Andy. It’s a real old car, he realizes through his alcoholic fog, at least twenty years old. It stops in the yellow pool of light under a street lamp. The passenger door opens. From inside the car a soft voice says, “I think we can help each other.”
What the hell. Andy pushes away from the building and crosses over to the car. He rests an arm on the top and sticks his head in the open door. It smells new, leather and chrome and fresh oil. “Who are you?” he asks the dark silhouette behind the wheel.
“A friend. I can offer you a job, Mr. — ”
“McCory. I got a damn job.”
“This one’s better. All you have to do is push a few buttons, put a few things in their places. You can stay drunk most of the time if you want. As drunk as you are now, anyway.”
“Shit.”
“And later there may be other benefits. You can do things to people, if you wish. It’s better than chickens.”
Andy is inside the car, though he has no memory of having climbed in and shut the door. “Like the Korean?” he breathes.
“Better. Is it a deal?”
Andy teeters a moment, then says, “Hell, yeah. I’m your man.”
Then the odor of the new leather is just too much, too strong, and he gags. Before he knows it, he is sobbing, weeping, whooping like a little kid. Tears and snot run down his face. Somewhere inside a forlorn voice, his own, says you’ve done it now, you son-of-a-bitch. You’ve really done it now.
The driver pats his shoulder awkwardly. “There, there,” he says. “It only hurts for a little while. There, there.”
5
On the corner of Bridge and Oglethorpe — which is to say, directly off the southeast corner of the Square in downtown Gaither — is a building that, according to a mangled tin sign over the marquee, is the STATE THEAT E. At 12:21, the front door of this theater is open, the padlock and chain gone for the first time in over two years. Andy McCory is banging around in the dark, holding an inadequate flashlight. Out front, under the dark marquee, the tall stranger stands. “Got it,” Andy yells, referring to the switch box, and the lights come on. The marquee blazes, and the yellow light bulbs around its border begin to flash off and on in synch, setting up a crawl around the bare white field of the marquee itself. Many of the bulbs are burned out, and some are broken, but the crawl effect works.
“Good,” the man says. “Now try to find the things I told you about. They will probably be in the closet of the projection booth.”
Andy curses, but he stumps upstairs. The other man reaches into his breast pocket — like Brother Tate, he favors black, but his suit is new, a crisp jet color, and his tie is the same inky hue — and produces a deed. He does not unfold it, but tucks it back into place and pats it. It is the deed to the theater.
For thirty years the State Theatre showed all the latest movies to Gaither. It was, for most of that time, the only theater in town. In ‘48 a drive-in was built south of town, and it took some of the audience. Television took even more. But the real cause of the State’s demise was the decline of its owner, Mr. Elias Hesketh.
Hesketh opened the State in May of 1925. He was not a young man then, but he was not old, either. At forty-one, he felt just fine, thank you, and was tired of working for someone else. He used all his savings to build the State on the corner of the Square, where the Simmons Livery Stable had once stood until it burned in ‘22. The State was a success. By 1954, when Mr. Hesketh hit seventy, it had been through its ups and downs, but it had always provided him a decent living.
In that year, Mr. Hesketh employed a total of seven people: Venner Sosebee, the projectionist, ten years older than Hesketh (he had been the first and only projectionist at the State) but still a steady worker; Laurie Anderson and Minnie Willoughby, who took turns at the ticket window; Jamie Corrigan, Hannah Kraft, and Willie Boykin, who worked both as ushers and as concessionaires, dispensing orange drinks and popcorn; and Loftus Nable, who was black and who served as janitor.
In January of ‘54, during a hard sleet, Mr. Hesketh closed the theater early and went out to his car, parked in the employee lot behind the building. Just as he slipped his key into the lock of his ‘53 Buick, the mild stroke hit him. His right hand went heavy and dull, and his head filled with liquid pain. Still, he somehow managed to drive home, where he took four aspirin and went to bed for three days, and then came back to work, over the protests of his housekeeper. (Mr. Hesketh had been married back in the twenties, but his wife died of influenza before he even built the State.) He was not the same after that.
Loftus Nable was the first really to notice. Loftus did not like cleaning out the women’s room (both the men’s room and the women’s room, of course, were for whites only), even after the theater was closed and locked. He had a dread that some white woman would come across him there some time and scream rape. He always sang spirituals, very loudly, as he worked in the women’s room, and he kept the door carefully ajar.
One night in February Mr. Hesketh barged in, his face brown with layers of Esquire shoe polish, and insisted on joining in chorus after chorus of “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” After an hour of singing, he pressed a fifty-dollar bill into Nable’s hand and went out, forgetting to lock the door behind him. Nable locked up, went home and sat for a long time in the dark on the edge of the bed he shared with his wife, Mauveen. He listened to the regular breathing of his wife, to the puffs and hums of his three sleeping children, all sharing the bedroom just next door. Finally he shook Mauveen awake. “Hon,” he said, “I got to find me a new job. That white man done went crazy.”
Nable was only the first to go. That spring Hesketh fell into a pattern of ferociously reviewing the movies he showed. If something was in it that he didn’t like — and he didn’t like a great many things, Technicolor included — he simply yanked it and showed old Hopalong Cassidy westerns instead, of which he had a plentiful store.
Attendance fell. One by one Hesketh let his helpers go. Finally, as fall edged into a cold winter, he even released old Mr. Sosebee, the projectionist. Mr. Sosebee, who had never missed one day of work because of illness, promptly went home, caught pneumonia, and died.
By now, Hesketh showed only Hopalong Cassidy films, and rarely in any sensible fashion. The last reel might come first, or in the middle of one picture he might become bored and switch to another. All through the first part of December he showed movies to no one but himself. This culminated just before Christmas. He locked all the doors, turned on the projector, and watched nine hours of Hopalong Cassidy, in whatever haphazard order he could thread the machines, the first reel of one movie, a middle reel of another, part of a third, the end of the first, the middle of the first, part of a fourth, and so on. He wept as he stared at the screen, believing the confusion was not in the flickering black-and-white images up there, but in his brain. Hoppy would never get that screwed up.
Past midnight he stumbled out the front door of the theater, forgetting to close it. He stood on the corner, his bearings completely lost. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, under an overcast sky, and he was in his shirt sleeves. He wondered why it was so damn cold. It shouldn’t be this cold, not on the Fourth of July. He knew it was the Fourth because he could see colored fireworks strung up on every tree and telephone pole. And he couldn’t find his Buick.
In a daze he walked north along Oglethorpe Street, past the jewelry store, the Bon Ton dress shop, past Clement Studios, past the Bevan Brothers Shoe Store, past the Georgia Pharmacy, past the Belk’s. Then he turned west, along Main Street, and wandered all the way to the corner, to the Trust Bank. South then, past the dime store, the other jewelry store, down to the furniture store; and then east again, circumnavigating the Square. He wandered like this for almost an hour before a policeman found him and took him home.
This time his housekeeper called the doctor. By January the theater was closed. Along in February, Hesketh’s nearest relatives, some well-to-do cousins from Atlanta, had put him into an institution. The chain and padlock went on the door of the State, and its marquee went dark.
Hesketh is still alive on this August night in 1957, but he is not even aware of the fact. He sits staring at the asylum walls during the day, lies down when they lay him down, and stares at the ceiling all night. “Wonder what he’s looking at,” one nurse asks another idly. The second nurse shrugs.
How can they know that he watches insane, horrifying, disjointed Hopalong Cassidy movies in his head all the time now?
Andy McCory comes huffing down the stairs. He carries a cardboard box that bulges and is warped with damp. “Got it,” he says, lugging this out to the man in front of the theater.
“Good. I’ll sort these out. Did you find the other?”
“The pole thangamadoodle? Yeah, it’s up there.”
“Bring it.”
Andy curses, but he goes. The man rummages in the box, pulls out letters, tosses some back, puts others on the sidewalk. Andy comes back, lugging the proverbial ten-foot pole. It has a three-fingered claw at one end, a grip and handle at the other. “Excellent,” the man says.
He shows Andy how to lay the letters out in sequence, how to plan their arrangement. Then he shows him how to use the mechanical hand to pick them up, one letter at a time, and slide them into place on the marquee.
Andy is still drunk. He drops some letters, gets others askew, but finally a ten-letter word marches across the marquee.
The new owner of the theater goes across the deserted street. He stands between the two dwarf crabapple trees at the southeast corner of the Square and admires the lighted marquee. Then he crosses back over to stand under it. “Good,” he says. “Now take these back and replace them.”
Andy gathers the mechanical hand and the box of letters and departs. Under the glare of the marquee, the tall man turns his gaze to the northwest. Diagonally across the Square, over the one-story bulk of the five-and-dime, in the distance beyond Moccasin Creek, Rainey Hill rises, a gigantic overturned rowboat in the night. Two streets circle it: Rainey Street, and higher up, Summit. Only a little of the hill is visible in the gap between the Confederate memorial and the higher building next to the dime store, and in this wedge only one or two dim lights, bathroom lights, burn. The man grins.
“Are you there?” he asks softly. “I think you are. I don’t know you, but I feel you. Will you try to stop me? No, I don’t think you will. Or if you do, I don’t think you will succeed. This miserable town is mine.”
His eyes narrow, and his face splits into the grin that frightened Deputy Presley earlier that night. “Wake up,” he says softly. Then he spins and walks through the front door of the theater, his theater.
All the crickets, all the cicadas, fall silent.
6
Alan Kirby gasps and sits up in bed. The sheet falls from his bare chest. He wonders what has wakened him. He shivers: with the window open, the night feels like fall, not summer. He becomes aware of the silence.
Alan slips from bed, pulls his sheet after him, drapes it around his shoulders as he used to do when he played Superman; but he is nearly fourteen now, and too old for such games. He wears the sheet only for warmth.
He goes to the window, looks out. The backyard falls away to a little cliff, and beyond the cliff is River Street. Beyond that is the creek; and beyond that is town. Alan draws a deep breath. The night feels cool, lonely. Summer is dying, and he is not sad to see it go; for a time comes, even during summer vacation, when a boy has exhausted all possibility and faces a boy’s worst enemy: boredom.
Su
mmer is played out. The baseball games have lost their savor, fishing is long, hot hours of nothing, the whole world is as dull as the dust-covered magnolia tree out in the backyard to the left, many of its once-shiny green leaves already dry and brown and piled beneath it. Its fruits, the exact size and shape to make them wonderful pretend hand grenades for backyard wars, lie scattered and ignored.
Alan frowns. Something about town is different. He wonders what it is. Fleetingly, he thinks of all the things this window has been. It has been a loophole in his castle wall, and the brick buildings and white frame houses of Gaither the tents of a futile besieging army. It has been the cockpit of a B-24 roaring in for thirty seconds over Tokyo, ready to drop molten death from the skies on the Bon Ton, the Confederate monument (really a cleverly concealed antiaircraft emplacement), and especially on the Gaither City Elementary School. But tonight it’s just a window, leaking premature fall into his room.
Alan pushes away and in the dark goes out into the hall. The bathroom is to his left, his father’s room — Alan’s mother died when Alan was eight — opposite his. But Alan turns to the right, to the next room along, also a bedroom, but used by his father as a sort of study. It contains two walls of books, a bureau, a desk, two chairs, and a radio. Without turning on the light, Alan opens the bottom drawer of the bureau and fumbles out a brown leather case that trails a broken strap. Straightening, Alan bumps a hanging picture with his elbow. It scrapes back and forth until he puts out his hand to steady it. In the dark he cannot see the face, his mother’s face, that looks out of the photograph, but he remembers it. The photo stilled, Alan hefts the heavy leather case and takes it back to his room.
Other kids’ fathers brought back rifles and sidearms from the war, or flags, or enemy helmets. His father brought back these binoculars, a powerful 10x50 instrument. He takes them from the case, rests his elbows on the windowsill, and begins to scan the town with them. A lone cricket strikes up, like a thumbnail rasped along the teeth of a comb, suddenly falls silent, and Alan shivers. That’s what he missed: night sounds, the frying of cicadas, the burr of crickets, the insistence of katydids. After a summer of nightly noise, the emptiness makes the world seem more than lonesome, makes it seem vast, vacant, dead.
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