Something wells up inside Alan. He feels as he used to feel in the year after his mother died. Then, at intervals, reading a book, playing tag, swinging on the playground, he would suddenly be seized with the knowledge that his mother was dead, gone, and he would sob uncontrollably. Once he did this in Miss Turner’s classroom. She hurried over, saying, “Alan, honey, what’s the matter?”
Lula Hartman, who was exactly Alan’s age, knew him better than the teacher did. With a terrible remote coolness, Lula had said, “Aw, he’s thinkin’ of his mama.” She had been right.
His eyes brim now, for no reason. The field of the binoculars comes to rest on the little slice of storefronts visible over the roof of the dime store, foreshortening them. Alan checks them one by one. The marquee. That is different. The theater marquee is lighted up, the yellow lights around its border chasing themselves as they blink on and off, giving a false sense of movement, even with a third of the bulbs dead. Alan follows for a second, feeling vertigo. He thinks the lights are like people: one row of six flares to life, then go out. They are the parents, living their moment, then dying. The next row, the children, catches fire, then goes dark; now the grandchildren and on and on around, around, eternally, meaningless.
Alan’s heart pounds, saying to him with absolute knowledge: “You’ll die, you’ll die, you’ll die. ...”
He trembles. Through the binoculars he has just read the one word on the marquee.
Alan pulls the sash down, slamming it hard enough to rattle the panes, dives into bed, cocoons himself in the sheet. After a moment he fumbles the coverlet up from the foot of the bed and pulls it, too, over his head. He cries in the dark, being two people, a frightened, weeping child and a boy at one remove from his own fear, hoping he can keep his voice low enough not to wake his father.
He cries, but could not say why: he cries in deep and unknown despair.
Even as he feels sure that he will sleep no more this night, the strident night insects strike up again, all at once. The night goes wild, riots with crickets and July-flies, katydids, even the thrum of frogs, the screech of an owl, voices raised in the dark; but to Alan the sounds do little to chase away the despair that has come with silence. They sound, to him, like laughter in a madhouse.
He closes his eyes, still seeing the one word burned in blood-red letters against the marquee. Though he can read the word, he cannot understand it, interpret it, say why it fills him with a fear he has never known.
Cool air drifts over him from the window, working on him like a sleeping potion or a magic spell. He falls asleep in an instant. Tomorrow he will not even be certain that he was truly awake, not until he notices his father’s binoculars lying discarded below the window.
Tonight, though, he sleeps and dreams terrible things.
And in dream after dream, in one form or another, he sees the word over and over, as though the glimpse through the binoculars has burned it on the inside of his eyelids.
SHADOWSHOW.
SHADOWSHOW.
SHADOWSHOW.
SHADOW
SHOW.
Three
1
Alan woke the next morning to kitchen sounds and smells. He slid from bed, the events of the night forgotten — until he saw the binoculars, on the floor under the window, standing upright on their objective lenses, like two dead soldiers (that was what his uncle Cal called empty beer bottles, left standing like that in lonely spots along county roads, dead soldiers) abandoned after a night of drinking.
Alan picked up the binoculars, held them while he remembered, and then replaced them in their case. After a moment’s hesitation, he looked out the window, down at the town, a toy Lionel-train town at this distance. Nothing there seemed different. Grabbing a fresh pair of underwear and a worn but clean pair of jeans, Alan went to bathe. He liked to fill the tub usually, and lie submerged, but this morning he ran a scant three inches of water, washed in that, and hastily toweled himself dry. He pulled on shorts and jeans, went back to his room for a T-shirt, and then found his father in the kitchen, eating scrambled eggs and toast and reading the Atlanta paper.
“Son,” John Kirby murmured.
Alan grunted. He got his own dishes, scooped the rest of the eggs from the black skillet into his plate, and with movements almost ceremonial poured himself a cup of coffee. Every morning as he performed the ritual, Alan thought back to one of his memories of his mother: a woman with pulled-back brown hair and laughing green eyes, giving him a sip of sweetened coffee with cream, then saying, “That’s enough. It’ll stunt your growth.”
He loved coffee with milk and sugar in it now, and somehow — he could not have said how — he even relished the little pang of heart the memory gave him every time he tasted it. “Anything in the paper?” Alan asked, sliding into place beside his dad.
John Kirby shook his head. “Wars and rumors of wars,” he said. “And the governor promises two and a half million dollars to build an atomic reactor at Georgia Tech.”
“Won’t help ’em beat Georgia, though,” Alan said through a mouthful of egg and toast.
His father, who had (briefly) attended the University of Georgia, and who at least pretended a partisanship in the immemorial rivalry between the two schools, chuckled. “Today’s Wednesday,” he said. “What will you be up to today?”
“Aw, nothing. You need me to help?”
“Probably not today, son. You okay for lunch?”
“I’ll make a sandwich.”
“You can go across to Betty’s.”
“I might.” But Alan did not plan to go over to his aunt’s, diagonally across the street from their house. His mother’s sister plied him with far too many semisuccessful experiments in baking and asked him entirely too many questions about the state of the Kirby household to make him at all comfortable. He finished his breakfast, collected his father’s plate and his own, and ran water to do the dishes.
His father looked up in surprise over the edge of his paper. “Well. You must want something pretty bad.”
Alan grinned. “Aw, Daddy.”
“I won’t say another word. Anytime you volunteer to wash dishes — ” His father shrugged and went back to the newspaper.
Alan, standing by the sink, studied his father for a moment. He was a slender man, not too tall, but just above middle height. His eyes were very pale brown, and his hair, looking thin in the morning sunlight, was auburn with a few glints of gray in it. He wore rimless spectacles and a habitual expression of preoccupation. A mild man, an observer would think, and one who probably worried too much.
The mild man looked up and caught Alan staring at him. The boy blushed, turned, and busied himself scrubbing and rinsing the dishes. “Better get a move on,” he said. “It’s nearly nine.”
“Is something wrong, son?”
For a second, just for a second, fear perched on Alan’s lips; but he shooed it away with a forced smile. “Aw, no. Just nothing much to do, is all.”
John Kirby pushed back from the table. “If you get too bored, come on down to the shop,” he said. “I reckon I can find some use for you. Take care, son.”
“You, too.”
His father left him alone in the kitchen. Alan rinsed the skillet, dried it carefully, and replaced it in the slide-out drawer beneath the Kelvinator oven. If his dad had done nothing else, he had impressed Alan early with a sense of order and neatness, and by now Alan was a willing slave to a pernickety habit of putting everything in its place.
He spent a few minutes reading the funny papers, but the house seemed too empty to him this morning, and, a little after nine, he went out, not bothering to lock the door — he could not remember his father ever having locked the door, and did not even know for sure whether a key for the front door lock even existed — and climbed on his bike. He would go down to town, not to the book and card shop on South Oglethorpe, but to the schoolyard. Somebody would be there, knocking a baseball around, maybe even tossing a football. Somebody always was.
2
Small towns change. You don’t notice it as much if you only pass through from time to time, but they do. Gaither changed from year to year and even from minute to minute — but then it had its unchanging traditions, too, for both good and bad, and because of the kind of place it was, it cherished both kinds.
Gaither was a town set in its ways, inhabited by people set in theirs. Things tended to happen because they had always happened; that was reason enough. So the Free Will Baptist Church, for example, always presented a Christmas pageant entitled From the Manger to the Cross, and every year some promising male high school senior (preferably one suffering least noticeably from acne) was cast in the role of Jesus as an adult. Casting was done carefully each year; still, being human, and having (perhaps) free will, the boys ensured that about once every decade the minister made a mistake.
Rube Bowen had been the mistake in 1912, though not in the actual production. He acted the part to perfection, everyone agreed; it was months later (on the anniversary, someone recalled at the time, of the sinking of the Titanic the year before) when the error occurred. Rube, thoroughly drunk on moonshine whiskey and astride a mule difficult enough to control even when her rider was sober, had plunged right through the window of Liberty Dry Goods, at that time the only true plate-glass window in town. Decently, Rube bled to death before people could talk too much.
Henry Converse was the mistake in 1925, the year of the flapper and the flivver, though his fall had nothing to do with either. Henry worked part-time for Mr. Melton, the grocer. His wrong was common enough, and involved only the pilfering of small amounts of cash from the till. But Mr. Melton was unforgiving, and Henry had to spend two years in prison for his theft of a grand total of one hundred two dollars and twelve cents. When people saw him swinging a blade on the county roads, they thought of how thrillingly he had cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” on the same cross that had crucified Rube.
The next problem Jesus did not arrive on schedule. It was 1942, a war year, before it happened again. That year Bobby Waltrip played the part. His badness did not come out right away; it was not until 1944 that the folks at home heard that he had been court-martialed, away in France or someplace, for cowardice in the face of the enemy. Bobby was dishonorably discharged a few years later, after spending some time in the stockade. He never came back to Gaither.
And then, of course, there was Paul Andrews, just a few years before, in ‘54. In the spring of ‘55, Paul had had to drop out of school and marry the girl he had gotten pregnant. Paul, too, had been particularly soulful as he admonished the daughters of Jerusalem to weep for themselves and their children....
But most of the Jesuses at Freewill had been good Jesuses, had grown up to marry good girls, work in the factories and stores of Gaither, and raise good families. John Kirby had been a Jesus, back in 1939, and he had turned out well, though somehow not quite as well as people had imagined he would. Of course he had married Mary Bolton, back when World War II had broken out, and Mary had given birth to Alan a respectable year and some months later; but when he returned from the war, John had not returned to college. Instead he seemed content to work for Mr. Bolton in the card and gift shop, gradually buying out his father-in-law’s interest in the store. He had become a Methodist, too.
But that, as everyone in town knew, had been the Bolton influence. When a Free Will member once chided John for abandoning the faith of his fathers, John had leaned across the counter and asked seriously, “Will, do you think the Methodist church will get me as far as heaven?”
Will Landers, many of whose dry-cleaning customers were Methodists, had stammered, “Well, John, of course it’ll get you to heaven...”
John straightened up. “That’s where I plan to get off.”
The retort went around town, as things do in a small town (Will even told it on himself), and after people chuckled, they looked at each other and said, kind of sadly, “John Kirby could have made something of himself.”
John sometimes thought the same thing. He was thinking something like this on the warm August morning as he parked his car, a postwar (but barely) Studebaker sedan, in the alley behind the Dixie Hotel and climbed out, a maroon money pouch thick with paper and heavy with silver in his left hand. He let himself in the shop through the back way. In the tiny office, he tied his bow tie, squinting into a rectangular mirror. He had six bow ties, one blue, two red, one black, one brown, and one green, and they stayed in the office. Each day he wore one. Today it was the red one with white polka dots.
He considered himself in uniform when the tie was tied, and he went through into the shop itself. He opened the front door, picked up a twine-bound stack of Atlanta papers from the stoop, and flipped the cardboard sign from CLOSED to OPEN. Back at the counter, he used his pocketknife to cut the twine. He put the stack of newspapers in its place, beside the three-times-a-week Gaither Advocate. This was Wednesday; a new Advocate would be in sometime after noon to replace the three or four Monday papers still in the stack.
John checked his stock. Stationery items and sundries looked all right. The magazine rack was in good shape, though the Time magazine stack was low. Next to it the two racks of comic books were, as usual, in jumbled condition. He spent a little time putting the garish titles back in order — many younger customers preferred to leaf through them at the racks rather than buy them — slipping the DC comics into place, hardly glancing at Superman or Batman, putting the Disney comics, the Uncle Scrooges and Donald Ducks, in order, winding up with the less-approved Harveys, Little Audrey, Baby Huey, Casper. That chore done, John straightened and glanced around the store.
The shelves were in good shape: the general-interest paperbacks, the mystery section, where Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr companionably shared space, the adventure/war/western shelf, the miscellaneous shelf. And at the back of the store, in floor to-ceiling shelves, his pride: the real books, the hardcovers. A Hemingway or a Faulkner might rest there for weeks before a sale; an inspirational book would go more quickly. But Kirby never returned them unsold to the wholesaler, these books, and somehow they all seemed to find homes eventually.
A bell suspended over the front door jangled. John turned, smiled at his first customer of the day. “Morning, Miz Lewis,” he said to a young woman in a pink and gray blouse and gray summer skirt. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, I hope so.” Her voice was comically querulous, belied by the good humor in her blue eyes, by the little laugh lines at their corners. “I need to put up a bulletin board at school, and I need some kind of background paper.”
“I have some poster board,” John said. “Starting a little early, aren’t you?”
“A little,” Ann Lewis said. “I’m bored, I guess.”
John grinned. “I think my boy feels the same way.”
“Well, it’s the end of summer. It’s time to start thinking of school.”
“I suppose so.” John held up a flexible rectangle of poster board, shook distant thundery sounds from it. “Will this be all right?”
“That’ll do fine. I guess I’d better have about a dozen.”
John counted out a dozen sheets of the heavy paper, rang up $2.48 on the cash register, and made two cents change for two ones and a half from his own pocket. When the teacher had left, her purchase awkwardly under her arm, he filled the register till from the money pouch he had brought in from his house. The bell jangled again, and from then until noon John was too busy to think much about Alan. He did, however, hear from Mr. Howell Grady that the old State Theatre had a new owner, a fellow from out of town. A fellow named Nathaniel Baydon or something like that. John didn’t give it much thought. When he p
aused to think at all, in fact, for some reason his mind kept straying back to the blue eyes and blond hair of his first customer of the day, and once or twice he even wondered what she was doing, there all alone in the school building.
3
She was weeping.
Ann Lewis sat alone at her desk in the Gaither Elementary School, called herself six different kinds of idiot, and cried nonetheless. Why not? she thought to herself. I’m more at home here than in my rooms. Why the hell can’t I cry here if I feel like it?
She reached for another tissue, from a packet of Kleenex that a student had brought to school the year before, a little packet glued in the back of a Little Golden Book featuring Little Lulu and her magic tricks. She blew her nose, looked around her at the empty schoolroom, and wept again.
The elementary school had gone up in 1928, a three-story red-brick building with high plaster ceilings supporting mushroom-shaped black sprinklers and hanging light fixtures that looked like smoothly iced upside-down layer cakes. The floors were oak, oiled and darkened by years and years of sweeping compound. The windows opened in a complicated way, the top sash pulling down and inward as simultaneously the lower sash raised and tilted out. All three windows in Miss Lewis’s room were open, spilling sun into the room.
Across the top of the blackboard the cursive alphabet ran, from Aa to &. The bulletin board had been covered with four pieces of white poster board, but they were still blank. Ann Lewis sat in the straight chair behind her desk, three tissues crumpled in her hand, and cried silently. She felt old. She was rushing toward the new school year like a train approaching a long tunnel, and she feared the dark.
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