If only she hadn’t visited her mother in Decatur last week. If only her mother hadn’t said, “You could have been married.”
Could have been. A change in tense, nothing more: last year her mother, in the same reproachful tone, had said, “You could get married. You’re a young girl.”
No, Mama, I’m not a young girl. I’m a woman. I’m almost thirty. And I don’t think I’ll ever get married.
Ann had come to Gaither in 1949, fresh from college, and had taught her first year in this room, the same room she had occupied for every year since. Sometimes she taught fourth grade, sometimes fifth. In 1953–54 it had been fifth, and that year she had taught Alan Kirby, a bright and likable boy of ten. He remembered her and often came by after school, still, to help her tidy the room. Ann liked Alan, and that morning, as she bought her poster board from Alan’s father, the widower, her mother’s words had come unbidden to mind. You could have been married. You could have had a child.
Well, spinster teachers were almost the rule in Gaither.
Ann blew her nose, tossed the tissues into the empty army-green wastepaper basket beside her desk, and told herself to get a grip. There were things she needed to get done. On the desk in front of her lay a sheet of paper on which she had been sketching her bulletin board, a “Welcome Back” message to this year’s fourth grade. She picked up her yellow pencil and started back to work, still sniffling, the oily odor of sweeping compound, the chalky scent of the board, the smell of school, strong in her nostrils.
She was a good, though untutored, artist, and her pencil drew in a playground with smiling children swinging, sliding, climbing on the monkey bars, tossing a ball. But however much Ann concentrated, she still felt desolate and empty, as if her upper chest were hollow. Above the scratch of her pencil point she heard the sounds of the empty building: creak of floorboards settling, flutter of a pearl-gray pigeon landing on the windowsill, faraway voices from kids on the playground, the crack of a bat against a ball.
She crumpled her first attempt, started another, and then abruptly pushed away from the desk and got up. The five rows of desks, thirty-five in all, looked back at her, tan and scarred and ink-stained. The fifth grade used ink pens in their cursive exercises, and each desk had a little round hole in the upper left corner to accommodate a tiny glass inkwell. Most of the desks bore the blots and dribbles of years of blue Sheaffer’s ink. Ann thought vaguely that she should have someone sand the desks down, begin afresh. She wandered to the window and looked out.
Three boys scrambled about on the playground, one shagging flies to the other two, who caught them bare-handed. The batter was Reese Donalds, a tough, poor kid whose father worked in the cotton mill. Alan Kirby and Jack Harwell were fielding. They moved in lazy, off-tempo strides. They looked bored. Behind first base, three bicycles lay on the grass, their front wheels turned up, the morning sun glinting on chrome and paint. At least, two of them were new enough to reflect the sun: Reese’s bike, undoubtedly of prewar vintage, had rusted handlebars and a slapdash coat or two of white house paint. But the ugly bicycle’s days of service were almost over. Next year Reese would be able to get a driver’s license. They grew up fast.
The sun coming through the window was warm and pleasant. Ann crossed her arms over her breasts and hugged her own shoulders. It would be nice to have someone behind her, she thought, holding her that way. She yawned, hearing her jaw crack, hearing behind her the settling sound of the building. She closed her eyes, seeing the blood-red insides of her eyelids. It would be nice, she thought, to have someone come up behind her and put his arms around her. She imagined herself standing at a window naked, the sun hot against her skin, touching with a feathery lightness her breasts and belly. She imagined John Kirby stealing up behind, quite silent —
Hands closed on her bare shoulders.
Her eyes opened.
She drew in breath for a scream —
And found herself alone.
Trembling, she turned away from the window and went back to her desk. Daydreaming yet. What would her mother say if she knew that her daughter was fantasizing about — about such things? What would the principal say? Teachers aren’t supposed to know about sex. Ann suspected that a good half of the female teachers at this school really didn’t, except in a sort of vague and theoretical way. She smiled ruefully. A girl could get herself fired. Woman, damn it. She reached for her bulletin-board sketch and her pencil.
A moment later she sprang up from her seat, overturning her chair. The scream she had suppressed at the window broke from her, thin and high, a nerve-shivering sound, long fingernails scraped across the blackboard.
The sketch was a picture of her, clearly a picture of her — but the Miss Lewis in the sketch was a dismembered, torn, naked obscenity.
She had no memory of making the drawing.
She screamed and screamed again.
4
Reese Donalds tossed the ball into the air, cocked his bat, and squinted as he gauged the swing. A woman’s scream tore his attention apart, and he missed the ball cleanly, the bat almost flying from his hands in his surprise. “Dod damn!” he said. “What was that?”
Jack and Alan, out past second base, had turned toward the school. “Sounds like — ” Jack started, but two more screams came quickly, cutting him off. The three boys looked at each other, their eyes round. Jack’s mouth fell open in an adenoidal way, and he punched his plastic-rimmed specs back into place.
“We oughta go see — ” Alan said.
“Come on, you sonsabitches.” Reese broke into a run. He shifted the bat one-handed so that his right hand choked up on it, holding it just above the tape, where it began to swell out. He was bigger and faster than the other two, and Alan, running behind him, thought that Reese, with his shaggy mane of unruly red hair, looked like a hump-shouldered caveman, an Alley Oop carrying his club. The school building was on a hill at the southwest corner of the playground, a concrete ramp leading up to it. Reese was at the top of the ramp when Alan and Jack reached the bottom.
But the door was locked, and that baffled him. He rattled it furiously as the other two boys came puffing up. “The hell can we get in?” Reese roared.
“Side door,” Alan said, and he set off to the right. But that door was locked, too. “Gimme a boost,” Alan said. Reese bent over and Jack helped Alan scramble up to the bigger boy’s shoulders.
“Fuck this,” grunted Reese, but he straightened almost as if Alan weren’t up there. The fanlight above the door was unlocked — it almost always was in the summer, when the boys needed to take a leak or to get a drink of water — and Alan pushed the transom open, then pulled himself through the opening. It was harder this year. He was bigger. He squirmed through, popped his shoulder turning around, and dropped to his feet. He pushed the door open for the other two.
Only when they stood inside the door, in the silent hallway, did the three look at each other with something like fear. “Where did it come from?” Jack asked. His new specs, with their clear plastic bottoms and their black tops, made his face owlish.
“Somewhere in the building.” Alan grinned, but his eyes were sick. “Who’s there?” he yelled, trying to make his voice deep. Flat echoes answered him.
“Check the rooms,” Reese said, slapping his bat into his cupped left hand. The sound was sharp and somehow a little wet, and the echoes came back paf-paf-paf.
But no one was in the principal’s office, the first-, second-, or third-grade classrooms. “Upstairs,” Jack said. He hung back, though, and Reese took the lead in climbing to the second floor.
Reese went to the left at the head of the stair, Jack and Alan to the right. The first room they checked was Miss Lewis’s — and there she was.
Alan knocked awkwardly on the doorjamb, a little pecking sound. Miss Lewis, who had been standing with her back to him, jumped and turned. “Oh, it’s you.” Her voice was strained and breathless. Her hair had come undone on the right side, and two blond tendrils curled aga
inst her cheek. Her skin glistened with sweat.
“Yes, ma’am,” Alan said, noting how her pink and gray blouse clung to her shoulders, how her breasts heaved beneath it as she breathed. “Is something the matter?”
“No, no.” Her blue eyes blinked. “It’s all right.”
Alan felt a looming presence behind him. Reese had come up. “We heered you scream,” he said.
“It was — ” she bit her lip. “Just a mouse, that’s all.”
Reese pushed in. “I’ll kill it.”
“It’s gone now, Reese. That’s all right.”
“Something’s burning,” Jack said, sniffing. Alan smelled it too, a thin, acrid scent of charred paper.
“It’s all right, boys,” Miss Lewis said, sounding more like herself. “Go on out now. You shouldn’t even be in the building.”
They were silent for a long moment before Alan answered for them all: “Okay.”
“Thanks for worrying about me,” she said, smiling in a tremulous way.
Reese, as if not anxious to leave the scene of a potential kill, said, “Holler if the sonbi — if the rat comes back. I’ll kill it for you.”
“Go on, boys,” Miss Lewis said. They went.
“Shit,” Reese said in the stairwell. “Nothin’ but a rat.”
“My daddy said on Okinawa the Japs used to eat rats,” Jack volunteered.
Reese snorted. “They’s a crazy man lives in New Haven’ll eat roach bugs. But you gotta give him a quarter to get him to do it.”
Alan, bringing up the rear, said, “Miss Lewis had the trash can up on her desk.”
Jack looked back up at him, blinking through his specs. “Huh?”
“She’d put the trash can on her desk. I think she burned something in it. That’s what the smell was.”
Reese shook his red head in impatient negation. “Didn’t burn no rat.” At the bottom of the stairwell, he pushed open the heavy outside door. They stepped into the sunshine, and behind them the door swung to. “I kilt a rat once with a Co’cola bottle,” he said. “Sonbitch was two foot long.”
“Naw,” Jack said.
“Two foot long.”
“Countin’ the tail?”
“Shit, tail’s part of the rat, ain’t it?”
“Well,” Jack said as they headed back down the ramp toward the playground. Jack’s brown hair had been mowed short at the beginning of the summer. It was about an inch long all over now, bristling like a porcupine’s quills. Alan, bringing up the rear, noticed three angry red pimples on the nape of Jack’s neck. “How’d you kill it?” Jack asked.
“Ol sonbitchin rat’d been gettin in the kitchen. I stayed up one night with Pa’s four-ten.”
“I thought you said you killed it with a Coke bottle.”
“I did. Ol rat come out his hole, and the dod-damn gun locked up on me. I’d been adrinkin a Co’cola, and I thowed the bottle at the sonbitch. Knocked his brains right out his head. Kilt that fucker, man.” Reese paused to look back. “Kirby, what you doin’?”
Alan had stopped behind, at the foot of the ramp. He was looking up at the school, at Miss Lewis’s window. “Nothing.”
“Come on, you sonbitch.”
“You fart.”
Reese did fart, resoundingly, like an oboe in lowest register, and they all three laughed. They went back to their desultory game. Fifteen minutes later, they paused to watch Miss Lewis leave. She came out, locked the door behind her, and walked away, head down. They heard her Rambler start and drive away.
That was at 9:52. They played until after eleven, and every fifteen minutes or so Alan cast an uneasy look at the school building. It dozed in the sunshine, but to Alan something about the red-brick building just didn’t look right.
At eleven, Alan realized what looked out of place. Miss Lewis, always so tidy, had not remembered to close her windows. And this time of year, there was an afternoon thunderstorm as often as not.
Well, he could get Reese to boost him up and he’d run upstairs to close them himself.
Alan imagined the empty, echoing hallway.
He thought about the scent of burning paper.
He thought of himself alone in that room.
“Kirby!”
The ball thudded to the ground ten feet from him. He picked it up and threw it back to Reese. “Wake up, man!” the bigger boy yelled.
Alan thought about going into the empty school. But somehow he never got around to asking Reese for the boost.
5
The bell jangled him in just past noon. The store was fairly busy — four boys clustered around the comic-book racks, two middle-aged ladies browsed the poetry and inspirational section away at the back, and Walt Peavey, his purchases already bagged and in his hand, stood shooting the breeze with John. They looked up in some surprise. Andy McCory had never been in a bookshop in his life.
Skin and bones, John thought. Nothing but rawhide skin stretched tight over bones and liquor and meanness. What holds him together?
McCory shambled up to the counter. The stench of sweat and urine was strong on him, with the sweeter, ranker, yeasty stink of beer underneath it all. “I’m s’posed to give you this,” he said, thrusting a folded paper at John.
John took it, unfolded it, and read. “Yes,” he said. “We can do this. Take about three-four weeks, though. You want — ”
“Do what’s in the paper,” McCory said.
“All right. That will be, let’s see, fifty-one-fifty, tax included. Does he want me to — ”
“Take it out of this.” Andy thrust two bills at John, a fifty and a twenty.
“All right.” John rang up the sale on the register and counted out eighteen dollars and fifty cents in change. “You pick this up or you want it delivered?”
“Just let him know when it’s here. I can tell him it’ll be ’bout four weeks, right?”
“Four weeks will do it.”
“From today.”
“Right. Here, I’ll write you a receipt.”
“He didn’t say nothing about no receipt.” McCory turned and shuffled out. One of the kids brought a handful of comic books, a Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, a Green Lantern, a Superman, and a Batman. John rang up the sale. The kids went out in a group, already bickering over who got to read what first. Walt Peavey stepped a little closer. “Better check them bills,” he said.
John raised his eyebrows. “Pardon?”
“Said you better check them bills. The ones McCory gave you. He never had seventy dollars at one time in his life, not as long as there was liquor to buy. Better make sure they’re all right.”
John shook his head, but he took out the fifty and the twenty. “Seem okay to me.”
Peavey put his package on the counter and took the fifty. He held it right up to his face, peering at it. Walt Peavey had been working for the post office for more than twenty years, and he prided himself on knowing a thing or two. “This one’s all right,” he said grudgingly. “Know how you can tell? Look for the little red and blue threads in the white parts. That and the lines in the engraving. They ought to be sharp, not blurry.” He handed the bill back to John. “What’s Andy McCory buyin’, anyhow, that costs that much?”
“Engraved stationery,” John said.
Peavey snorted. “That bastard — ” He remembered himself, looked around quickly, and saw that the two ladies had apparently not heard him. Nevertheless, he lowered his voice: “That bastard can’t hardly write his name. What’s he need stationery for?”
“Not for him,” John said. He showed Peavey the order, neatly typed:
Please supply 2,500 sheets of printed letterhead stationery, 5,000 second sheets, both 20 pound bond paper, and 2,500 printed envelopes, with the following:
Athaniel B. Badon, Owner and Manager
ShadowShow Theater
10 East Bridge Street
Gaither, Georgia
Walt handed the paper back. “I heard somebody’d bought the building. Who is this fellow Badon?
That how you say it?” Walt had pronounced the name “Bad-un.”
“Bay-don,” John corrected. “That’s how somebody said it today, anyhow. I don’t know who he is. Somebody new in town, I reckon.”
“Must be, to buy that place. Never make a go of it.”
“Think not?”
“Naw. Everybody’s got a television. Who goes to the show anymore, besides kids?”
“I don’t know. I miss not having a theater in town myself. Mary and I used to go a lot. Spent a lot of time up in that old balcony at the State.”
“Yeah, well. Kids today, they go to the drive-in. And if there’s anything good comes on, you can run over to Gainesville and see it.”
“Can until the lake fills up,” John said.
“Reckon they’re ever gonna start on the new bridge?” Lake Lanier, formed by the damming of the Chattahoochee, was filling, and on two sides it threatened to cut off Gaither altogether. The west side wasn’t so bad, there was no town that way for miles and miles anyhow, but off twenty miles to the east was Gainesville, a slightly bigger and busier town. A few folks liked to drive there to shop. “They ain’t even finished with the pilings, I hear,” Walt said.
“They’ll get around to it. Help you ladies?”
The two old women had made their choices. They bought a Norman Vincent Peale book, Stay Alive All Your Life, and, as if as an insurance measure, last year’s The Search for Bridey Murphy. Christian optimism and the possibility of bodily reincarnation. Trust in God, but don’t rule out the occult altogether. John gave them the change from a ten, and with their books packaged, they jangled out.
“Well,” Peavey said. “Guess I better get back to the P.O. Everybody there loafs when I leave ’em alone any amount of time. Come see us.”
“Come again, Walt,” John said.
Alone in the store for the first time in a couple of hours, John came from behind the counter and stood at the front door. Looking across the street to his left, he could see the theater and its marquee. He had an almost end-on view of the latter, however, and could not read the letters on it. He looked back down at the order in his hand. ShadowShow.
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