ShadowShow

by Brad Strickland

  Well, that was probably as good a name as State. That was what movies were, after all: shadows projected on a screen. John Kirby felt unreasonably cold and retreated behind his counter. He got out the stationery order book and selected a nice, clean, bold style for Mr. Athaniel B. Badon’s letterhead, Business Graphic 22. He wrote up the order and put it in an envelope.

  Should’ve sent this back with Peavey, he thought. Never mind, though. The second mail delivery and pickup of the day would be around three. Time enough to send it then.

  And despite Andy McCory’s indifference, John wrote up a receipt for the order. He thought he’d send Alan over with it if he showed up at the store that afternoon. Alan might like to go into the old theater himself and meet Mr. A. B. Badon, John thought.

  Yes, he’d let Alan do it.

  6

  For Andy McCory the world had filmed over. His movements seemed to him remote, faraway, done in slow motion like those of a deep-sea diver. Colors were subdued, as if he were seeing his surroundings through a very thin sheet of waxed paper. Occasionally his own movements startled him, when he caught sight of his arm or leg: it was as if someone else willed their motions.

  And yet he felt warm, happy. It was like the earliest stages of a good drunk, a stage past the buzz and into the ain’t-everybody great territory. Memory was going, too. Already he could not clearly recall the moment of his hiring the previous night. Already he had forgotten whether he had been home at all since then. He thought not. He had worked, oh, the dark man had made him work like a dog, cleaning up the theater, replacing burned-out bulbs, even re-pasting the wallpaper in three places where it had peeled loose; and in a couple of days he would be painting woodwork. He had worked on that theater harder, probably, than he had worked at anything else in his life.

  But he had a reward to look forward to.

  Andy grinned.

  And there was something else, too, a boon of the dark man: he wasn’t a bit tired. He felt as if he had gone away somewhere, deep inside his own head, and was resting there comfortably even now, even as he pushed open the door of the Advocate building.

  A young, black-haired woman sat behind a chest-high counter. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Andy’s hand fumbled in his jeans pocket, came out with a folded yellow paper. He thrust it toward her. “Put this in the newspaper.”

  The woman leaned forward to take it from him. Her eyes came sharply up to his, and her nose twitched. Her mouth turned down in disgust. But she took the paper and unfolded it. “This is an ad,” she said.

  “Put it in the newspaper.”

  “You need to take this to Miss Carver. Through the door behind you, all the way straight back to the last desk. That’s who you need to give it to.” She handed the paper back to Andy.

  For a second Andy literally saw red: visualized the black-haired woman torn to ribbons, pooled in her own juices. Something in the back of his head whispered, Not now. Not yet. He smiled, took the paper, and turned.

  The newsroom was long and narrow, with four desks in all. Two were occupied, one by a man diligently typing away on an old Underwood, and the one at the far end by a plump, matronly, gray-haired woman. From off to the left came the clash and clatter of a web press, and the air was scented with the thick smell of printer’s ink. Andy floated back to the woman.

  “Here,” he said as she looked up at him. “Put this in the newspaper.”

  The woman took the paper without grimacing — she had taken plenty of livestock ads from some pretty ripe hog farmers in her day — and opened it. She wore brown half spectacles thrust up in her hair. She lowered them to her nose, peered at the paper, and read aloud: “Help Wanted: Usher, Concessionaire, Tkt. Clerk. Apply ShadowShow Theater (the old State) Mon.-Fri. 4:00-6:00 P.M. Full-time or part-time wrk.” The woman pushed the specs back up, looked at Andy, and said, “We have to count the abbreviations as full words. The hyphenated ones count as two words each.”

  “All right,” Andy said.

  “How long is this to run?”

  “When can you start?”

  “It’ll go in Friday’s paper. Then it can run as long as you want it. There’s a special rate for three or more days.”

  “Keep it in all next week.”

  “All right.” She dropped her glasses back into place and counted words with the point of a pencil. “That’s a dollar-five a day, four days, that would be four-twenty. Less ten percent for running it more than three days, that would be minus forty-two. That comes to three dollars and seventy-eight cents.”

  Andy reached in his pocket and fumbled out a five. “Here.”

  The woman made change. He thrust it back in his pocket and turned away. The black-haired woman in the front didn’t even look at him. He ran his tongue over his teeth and thought of what he would do later.

  The Advocate was the last errand. Andy walked south on Oglethorpe, trudging along under an afternoon sun. Heaped clouds, piled fluffed and white on top but dark gray underneath, herded through the sky, occasionally obscuring the sunshine. Not many people were out — the banks in Gaither and some of the stores, furniture and appliance stores mainly, closed at noon on Wednesdays. Even so, the few people that Andy passed didn’t speak to him, and he did not even glance their way.

  He heard the voice before he even got to the Square, a saw rasp of a voice, grating, harsh, earnest. His face felt slack from the inside. Again he noticed that peculiar dullness in the air, the muted colors around him, the sensation that sounds were coming to him muffled through cotton.

  Except for the voice.

  It was a preacher man, he saw as he crossed Main. A preacher standing diagonally across Bridge Street from the theater, exhorting, sawing the air with his free hand, supporting a huge Bible with the other.

  Andy’s lungs felt as if the air he breathed were full of sharp, stinging grains of sand. His legs went heavy on him, so that picking up his foot, swinging it forward, putting it down, was an effort. He remembered Korea, the times when his boots caked twice their thickness in mud. It was like that.

  But there had not been this heat in his brain in Korea.

  The preacher man was a skinny old buzzard. His neck would snap —

  Later, the voice in Andy’s head promised. Later.

  Andy stopped at the corner, right across from the preacher. He narrowed his eyes, concentrated. Andy was convinced that if he looked hard and mean enough at anybody, he could make them look at him.

  Sure enough, the preacher turned his way, spittle flying, mouth gaping in the earnestness of his message. He broke off, his eyes going wide when he saw Andy. Andy grinned at him.

  The preacher’s chest heaved once, twice, before he resumed his rant: “The FOOL hath said in his heart-hah! That there IS no GOD-hah!”

  Andy laughed, turned, and walked across the street. The front door of the theater was ajar, and he almost ran headlong into a boy on the way out. “’Scuse me,” the kid said, and ducked away.

  Mr. Badon was in the little office at the head of the stair, just behind the projection booth. “You have finished?” he said, not even looking up as Andy appeared in the doorway.

  “I done everything.”

  “Good. You have money left?”

  Andy thrust his hand in his pocket. It came out with two twenties, some ones, and some silver. He held it out.

  “No, you keep it. It will be by way of salary, yes? For the work you did for me last night and today? And your regular salary will begin Monday. Tomorrow I will teach you how to run the projectors.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “Go home,” Mr. Badon said. “Your family will be worried about you.”

  Andy’s brain immediately began to calculate how much forty-odd dollars could buy him at the bootlegger’s.

  But Mr. Badon seemed to read the thought. “You will go home, Andy. You will turn the money over to your wife. You will tell her you have a good job now. And you will rest until tomorrow morning.”

 
; “All right,” Andy said, knowing somehow that he would do exactly what Mr. Badon had said.

  “And you will not hurt your wife. Not anymore.”

  “All right.”

  “At least, not until I tell you it is permissible.”

  “All right.”

  Badon turned back to the desk, where he was busy filling out a film order form. Andy hovered in the doorway, a feverish presence. Without looking up, Badon said, “There is something else?”

  “They was a boy comin’ out of the buildin’,” he said.

  Badon lifted a flimsy receipt form between two long fingers of his left hand, waved it in the air. The top part, punched in two places for binding, floated to and fro. “The boy came from the stationery man,” he said. “You did not wait for my receipt.”

  “You never told me to.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Are you gonna use him?”

  Badon put the receipt back on the desk. “Jealous already?”

  “I wanna know.”

  Badon shook his head. “He is just a boy. He was a little afraid to come in here, I think. A big empty building, and dark, so dark. No windows in a cinema. But he came, and he found the stair, and he found me, and we had a nice little talk. He likes movies, that boy. I gave him some passes. But I did not hire him.”

  Andy nodded. He stood for a moment longer, licked his lips. “There’s a black-headed woman at the newspaper,” he began.

  “All right,” Badon said, his tones flat and nasal, in imitation of Andy’s voice.

  Andy blinked.

  In his own voice, Badon said, “I’m not joking. I agreed. You can go now. And don’t think about the woman at the newspaper anymore. She will be available for you when it is time. And you will know when it is time.”

  Without another word, Andy turned away.

  “Oh,” Badon said from his desk. “One moment. There is one other thing you can do before you go.”

  Andy returned. “What?”

  Badon held up a fat envelope. “Tongue out.” When Andy obeyed, Badon slipped the envelope flap across his tongue.

  “Ow,” Andy said. The paper had cut him.

  Badon smiled at him. He tucked the moistened flap shut, pressed it down. He stood and gave the envelope to Andy. “Drop this in the mail. It’s stamped already. Before you go, put your tongue out again.”

  Andy did. He felt and tasted blood on it.

  Badon moved close, put cold hands on Andy’s cheeks, squeezed hard, pressed his mouth to Andy’s.

  For a gagging moment Andy thought he would vomit. The other had taken Andy’s tongue into his own mouth, and it was cold, it was foul —

  Andy felt him begin to suck.

  Four

  1

  Alan kept the movie passes on the table beside his bed, using them to mark his place in the library book on dinosaurs he had been reading. On Saturday morning he woke up later than usual, reached for the book — Roy Chapman Andrews on a day he could devote entirely to reading was his idea of heaven — and saw the six tickets, salmon pink, overstamped “Complimentary” in purple. For some reason they made him uneasy, and when he slipped out of bed, carrying his book to the kitchen with him, he left the passes behind.

  His father had already left for the shop. Alan had a quick breakfast of cornflakes and orange juice, washed his bowl and glass, and wandered into the living room. He switched on the Philco for company, sprawled on the sofa, and began to read about the Gobi Desert and the remains of protoceratops.

  It was after nine, and when the TV warmed up, “Howdy Doody” was on. Alan glanced around once, in time to see Clarabell the Clown give Chief Thunderthud a faceful of seltzer, and then he went back to his book. He read through “Gumby,” “Fury,” “Captain Gallant” (automatically saying “yech” when, during the ketchup commercial, Fuzzy said he liked the stuff on his scrambled eggs), and into “True Story” before he turned the last page, closed the book, got off the couch, and switched off the TV.

  He prowled back to the kitchen, put together two bologna sandwiches and ate them with a glass of milk. Again he cleaned up after himself. He went outside through the back door and, for want of anything better to do, climbed the chinaberry tree in the backyard. The inedible berries were ripe and rank, golden wrinkled balls the size of marbles that smelled like spoiled apples. Alan didn’t like them at this stage, or later, when they dropped off the tree and popped beneath his feet like bugs, though early in the summer, when they were hard green spheres, the berries made perfect ammo for a slingshot.

  Alan braced himself fifteen feet from the ground, his back against the trunk, his legs straddling a sturdy horizontal branch. It was warm, eighty or thereabouts, and fair. Looking to his right, Alan could see the house tops on River Street below, and beyond them Moccasin Creek and the town. Things moved slowly in Gaither on a Saturday morning, but they moved. Farmers came into town then, with their families packed tight in the cabs and beds of ancient pickups, the boys in overalls like their fathers’, the girls as often as not in dresses carefully made from flour sacks. On impulse, Alan decided to go to town. The library in the basement of the courthouse was open until two, and maybe he could find another Roy Chapman Andrews book to read. He banged the kitchen door open, got the book, went out the front door, and mounted his red Schwinn.

  He went the back way, turning off Bridge Street at Tower, crossing Main, and then pulling into the parking lot behind the courthouse. He parked the Schwinn on the grass beside the basement entrance — no one would steal it, not in Gaither — and went down and into the library.

  It was a dark warren of rooms, all the windows high, thin horizontal rectangles. Mrs. Poston, behind the desk, accepted the book, checked the date, replaced the card in its pocket, and put the volume on a cart to be shelved. “Do you have any more of those?” Alan whispered. Mrs. Poston, of all the librarians, was the one who held silence the most golden.

  “Dinosaur books? I think so.”

  “No, I mean books by Roy Chapman Andrews,” Alan said.

  “I don’t know, offhand. Check the card catalog.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The catalog was housed in an enormous old wooden case, with file drawers crammed to bursting with cards. Sometimes you almost had to force a knife in to press them apart and look at titles. Alan found that there were two more books by Andrews, Ends of the Earth and The New Conquest of Central Asia. He memorized the call numbers and set forth into the Dewey jungle.

  He met disappointment. Neither book was in; possibly neither even existed any longer, since the Frye County Library catalog was seldom purged. He contented himself with a dusty volume called The Life of a Fossil Hunter. Taking it to the desk, he got in line behind a girl about his age. “Hey, Alan,” she said as Mrs. Poston stamped — ka-chink! — her books.

  “Hey, Diane,” Alan returned. He filled in the book card and surrendered the volume to Mrs. Poston.

  Diane England had gathered her three books against her chest. She walked out with Alan. “What you readin’?” she asked.

  “Dinosaur books,” Alan said.

  “Daddy says dinosaurs aren’t real,” Diane told him. Somehow that didn’t surprise Alan much: Diane’s father worked in the New Haven mill and held strong opinions about other things as well. Mr. England also had grave doubts about nuclear power, the Republican Party, and the roundness of the earth. “He says if dinosaurs are real, then God can’t be real, so dinosaurs aren’t real.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Will your daddy let you go to the show?” she asked.

  “The new one? I guess.”

  “I don’t know if he'lllet me go or not.” Diane tossed her dark hair. “Shoo, it’s hot.” She stood on the sidewalk at the top of the steps, looking down at her penny loafers. “I never have seen a picture show, not since I was real little.”

  “I got some tickets,” Alan blurted. “You can go with me. If your daddy doesn’t mind, I mean.”

  Diane blush
ed. “Just you an’ me?”

  “Well, we could get a bunch up to go. Or we could just go together.”

  “All right,” she said softly. “If Daddy will let me. I got to scoot. Daddy’s in the barbershop waitin’ to get a haircut. When will we go?”

  “Soon as the theater opens and somethin’ good comes on,” Alan said.

  “Will you call me?”

  “Okay.”

  Diane bit her lip, turned away. Alan watched her, the swing of her pale blue skirt, and felt his heart trip-hammering away in his chest. He had just made a date — a date with a girl. True, the girl was only Diane England, the tomboy who played soldier with the bloodthirstiest of them and who was an ace pitcher in scratch baseball games (so good, in fact, that even Reese Donalds called her “sonbitch,” his highest accolade). Still, Diane was looking less and less tomboyish these days.

  Alan slipped the dinosaur book into his saddlebag, hopped on his bike, and rode off toward the Square. He went down Gaines Street to Bridge, down Bridge to Oglethorpe, and rested the bike against the front of his father’s store. The bell overhead jangled as he came in. “Closing time,” he said, grinning.

  His dad, ensconced in his high chair behind the counter, with a paperback open on his bent knees, looked up with a smile. “Near about,” he said. “What have you been up to?”

  “Not much. Finished my library book and got another one. I told Diane England I’d let her use one of my passes when the show opens.”

  His father looked at him for a long time. “Really? That was nice of you.”

  Alan found his chest somehow tight. “Well, I have six passes.”

  “You can use them next week, I hear,” John Kirby said. “Mr. McCory came in to buy a paper for Mr. Badon. He says the theater will open Monday night.”

  Alan made a face. “Mr. McCory smells bad.”

  “Son.”

  “Well, he does.”