ShadowShow

by Brad Strickland

  “Mr. McCory has a drinking problem.” Alan’s father closed his book. Behind his spectacles his eyes were serious, his voice soft but decisive. “He can’t always help himself.”

  “But he’s always so dirty.”

  “Not today. He was cleaned up considerable. I don’t know. This theater job might be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”

  Alan was rifling the stack of Atlanta papers. “Got any Sunday sections yet?”

  “In the back. Want to open them for me?”

  “Can I have one?”

  “If you’ll come down and stuff this evening.”

  “Deal.”

  The Sunday features of the Journal-Constitution — the magazine section, women’s pages, and most important of all, the funnies — came in on Saturday. That night the news sections would be dropped off, and someone — Alan this evening — would have to assemble the papers. Though the store was closed on Sundays, Alan’s father kept a coin machine in the lobby of the Dixie Hotel stocked, in case a guest should want a paper. Alan used his pocketknife to cut the string of the bundle and got out a comic section.

  He perched on the corner of the desk to read the adventures of Dick Tracy. He skipped Kitty Higgins, read Dennis the Menace, ignored Rex Morgan, read Moon Mullins and Li’l Abner — there was a feud going on between Mary Worth and Li’l Abner right now, with Al Capp taking off on “Mary Worm” and the Mary Worth artist parodying the antics of an alcoholic-looking cartoonist named “Hal Rapp.” Alan read Smilin’ Jack and Donald Duck, Beetle Bailey and Pogo, Steve Canyon, Snuffy Smith, Peanuts, the Phantom, Mark Trail, Little Orphan Annie, Buz Sawyer, and Nancy. When he had finished, he refolded the newsprint neatly and tucked it back into its bundle. But he laid aside that feature section, knowing it was destined for home use; his father wouldn’t want him to put a used set of comics back into a paper that was for sale.

  His father appeared in the doorway, pulling the bow out of his blue tie. “Ready to head for home, Son?”

  “Yeah. I rode my bike.”

  “All right. Did I tell you your aunt Betty’s cooking for us tonight?”

  Alan groaned.

  “Frank’s out of town,” his father continued. “It makes Betty feel useful to look after us. Just remember she’s being nice.”

  “All right. But I get tired of her telling me how to act.”

  John Kirby grinned. “Why do you think Frank’s out of town so much? Scoot out of here, now. I’ve got to lock up.”

  It was three o’clock. Gaither was a Saturday-morning town: the banks closed at noon, most stores at two or three. Already the Square looked deserted. As he headed for it, Alan passed the theater. A scaffold was up over the marquee, and the huge green tin letters of the State sign lay in scattered confusion on the sidewalk. Two men in white coveralls were installing a different, newer sign. So far it read SHADOWS.

  For some reason Alan shivered. Then he thought of taking Diane England to the movies, hunched his shoulders, and pedaled hard.

  2

  Ballew Jefferson drove himself home. Home, for him, was a white-columned house on Ransom Ridge, a big house clustered companionably in its protective copse of poplars, cedars, and oaks: a dignified house, two-storied, off-white with tan shutters and trim, a house with an attached garage and, in the back, a brick barbecue pit. It, like all the other houses on the Ridge, bespoke comfort and money. In fact, when it had been built in 1937, the house had cost thirty-five thousand five, easing out the next contender, the Garner house down the street, by a good two thousand dollars.

  The Jefferson house was a spacious house, an expensive house, a good house.

  An empty house.

  Mr. Jefferson, president and chief shareholder of the Trust Bank, parked his Lincoln, crushed out his Chesterfield, sighed, and climbed out of the car. Years settled around him, the twenty years (last June) that he had lived in the house, the years with Trudy and the years without her. Trudy Jefferson had died in the master bedroom in 1951, six years ago now: and her funeral was the last time, as far as Mr. Jefferson could recall, that the whole family had been together. Now there was one son in California, one in New York, and a married daughter in England. There were ten grandchildren now, three more than when Trudy had passed on. He had never seen two of them himself.

  Jefferson sighed again, cocked a critical eye at the gutters — it was getting to be time to have them looked after — and unlocked the side door. Cooking smells reached him from the kitchen. He pulled his tie loose, shucked off his jacket, and hung both in his study closet, an indulgence Trudy, when alive, would never have permitted him.

  He followed the aroma of food to the kitchen. A slender woman stood at the stove there, her back to him. “I’m home,” Jefferson said softly, so as not to startle her.

  “Supper will be ready at five,” said Mollie Avery, not looking around.

  Jefferson went to the refrigerator, opened it, got a glass from the cabinet beside it, and poured himself a long drink of ice water. “What am I having?” he asked Mollie.

  “The little birds,” Mollie said. “I’m cookin’ both of ’em. What you don’t eat you can heat up tomorrow after church.”

  “I can finish off two Rock Cornish hens,” he said, drinking the water. He rinsed the glass and left it in the sink. “You look tired.”

  “Yes, sir. Ludie’s down with a cold, and I helped her clean up. She’s gone now.”

  “Did she change the sheets?”

  “I did. Ludie’s back was hurtin’ her some.”

  “Good, good. Any calls?”

  “No, sir. Mail’s on the hall table.”

  Jefferson meandered out of the kitchen and into the front hall. The mail was a small stack: advertising circulars, gas bill, a reminder from his dentist. The last envelope had only his name on it, no address, stamp, or postmark. He dropped the rest of the mail back on the hall table and restlessly went back to the kitchen. “How’d this get here?” he asked, holding up the envelope.

  Mollie glanced up, her brown eyes liquid as always. “Oh. A man brought that by, about ten o’clock. He said it was for you. An ugly man.”

  Jefferson opened the envelope. The only thing inside was a salmon-colored theater ticket stamped “Complimentary.” He grunted, dropped the ticket back into the envelope, and tossed the envelope onto the table. “What do you mean, an ugly man?”

  Mollie bit her lip. “A white man,” she said. “He looked ugly at me, like he — like he was thinkin’ bad about me. He come in a long old black car. He grinned at me.”

  Jefferson shook his head in dismissal. “Some kind of advertising, I guess.” He leaned against the refrigerator, a tired, paunchy man just the high side of sixty, and rubbed his bald spot reflectively. “Do you like it here, Mollie?” he asked at length.

  “Yes, sir,” Mollie said, keeping her downcast gaze on the potatoes she was peeling.

  “I don’t mean here, in this house,” Jefferson continued. “I mean in Gaither, the town. Do you like it in Gaither?”

  “It’s my home,” she said simply. “I never lived anyplace else.”

  Jefferson ran his palm from his forehead down over his face to his chin. “It’s like an oven in here. It’s going to get bad, Mollie.”

  “Cooler evenin’s will be comin’ on, sir.”

  “Not that. Not that. Do you know what the Civil Rights Bill is, Mollie?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, it’s going to pass in Congress, and it’s going to make a lot of trouble for your people.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They’ll be wanting colored children to go to school with white children. It’s going to get real ugly.”

  Mollie began to dice the potatoes into cubes. She did not respond.

  “I treat you all right, don’t I, Mollie?” Jefferson asked.

  “Yes, sir.” The potato cubes fell into a pot of water one at a time. The knife cutting them made crisp sounds, each punctuated by a plop of water. Mollie was trembling a
little.

  Jefferson moved over to the sink. He saw her in profile now, high forehead, tip-tilted nose, clean chin, long neck. “You could almost pass for a white woman,” he whispered.

  Mollie smiled tightly, showing no teeth. “Not me, sir. Not with my hair. Not the way I talk and act.”

  “You’ll eat with me tonight,” Jefferson said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then after — ”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. The knife slipped, raising a half-moon of skin on the base of her left thumb. She sliced the last potato wedge in two and ran cold water over the wound. The water dripped away stringy with red blood. After a half minute or so the bleeding stopped. Mollie turned off the water.

  Jefferson reached to her. His fingernail traced the side of her neck, making her shiver.

  “Please, sir,” she said. “I’ve got to cook.”

  “It’s going to get bad,” Jefferson said, as if to himself.

  “Yes, sir,” Mollie said.

  3

  Diane England was uncomfortable in the barbershop. It was a place of men, redolent of the tonic they put on their hair, raucous with their laughter, littered with the clippings that fell from the barber’s shears. She sat in a chair, aluminum frame covered with torn green vinyl, behind the coatrack and tried to read her book, Johnny Tremain, one they were supposed to read in school this year. Across the checkerboard green-and-white tile floor from her, her father sat in the window seat while Mr. Ivey clipped his hair. A radio, tuned to an Atlanta Crackers baseball game, droned on behind them.

  “Goin’ to take that youngun to the picture show?” Mr. Ivey asked, winking at her over the top of his glasses. Diane, surprised, held her breath. She had been thinking about the new theater.

  “What new picture show?” Duane England asked. His eyes were closed, and his craggy, big-featured face reminded Diane more than usual of a beardless Abe Lincoln. The Emancipator’s preoccupied, thin face looked out from his frame in every schoolroom in the county (often enough, to be sure, meeting the gaze of Robert E. Lee on the opposite wall). England stirred a little beneath the white apron spread over him. “I ain’t heard nothin’ about it.”

  “Sure,” Mr. Ivey said, his scissors and comb busy. “Old State’s been sold. Gonna open up next week, I hear.”

  “Picture shows. Foolishness,” said England.

  “Reckon you’re right,” Mr. Ivey said. He sighed. “Hey, laud.”

  “Somethin’ for folks to throw their money away on.”

  “Bend your head forward for me. There we go. I don’t know, Duane. Me an’ Shug used to go to the State pretty often. I liked westerns.”

  “Some of ’em’s okay, I guess,” England muttered into his chest, and Diane’s heart lifted. “Gene Autry’s a pretty good man.”

  “They made I’d Climb the Highest Mountain up the road a piece,” Mr. Ivey said.

  “I know about it. That was the one about a Methodist preacher.”

  “Um-hmm. Let me get those sideburns for you.” Mr. Ivey turned around and began to work up a lather in his soap cup. “You see that one?”

  “Oh, yeah. Me and Helen went.” England opened his eyes and tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward Diane. “She was a little bitty ol' thing. Ol' Hesketh wanted to charge us a quarter to let her in. I told him they weren’t no sense in that. She gonna set on her mama’s lap anyhow. He let her in for nothin’.”

  Mr. Ivey began to brush creamy lather onto the sides of England’s head. “Lotta these little ol gals oughta be able to get into the show for nothin’ then,” he said. “Way they set around on their boyfriends’ laps.”

  England laughed. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  “Hold right still now,” said Mr. Ivey, opening his straight razor. He stropped it and scraped off the lather.

  The chair next to Mr. Ivey’s was vacant, and the one next to that was occupied by a thin, pale, redheaded man in khaki pants and a blue chambray workshirt. His barber, the rotund Mr. Reynolds, had not spoken to him during his entire haircut, but had performed the service silently, the corners of his thin-lipped mouth turned down as if in disapproval. Mr. Reynolds swept the cloth off him now, brushed him down with talcum, and said, “That’ll be a dollar.”

  The man unfolded himself from the chair, reached into his pocket, and produced a single. Mr. Reynolds took it by the edge, as if he thought it might be dirty. “Come again, Andy,” he said, but his voice was not inviting.

  Andy looked at Diane. She felt crawly all at once, as if ants were creeping over her skin. The man grinned. His newly pomaded coppery hair swept up from his forehead. “Everybody in town oughta come to the picture show,” he said. Then he turned and walked out.

  “That Andy McCory?” Mr. England asked.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Reynolds said shortly, ringing open the cash register and tucking the dollar inside.

  “His daddy’s sho' down on him,” Mr. England observed.

  Mr. Ivey had toweled off the excess lather and was working some high-smelling pink lotion into Diane’s father’s hair. “Shoot, I guess everybody in town’s kind of down on him. Way he treats his wife and babies.” The barber shook his head and sighed, “Hey, laud,” again.

  Mr. Reynolds busied himself with a whisk broom, sweeping stray wisps of red hair from the seat and back of his barber’s chair. “Told me he had to get a haircut. His new boss said he had to get a haircut.” Reynolds snorted. “Andy McCory ain’t been in a barbershop since he was a youngun. Cut his hair himself with scissors. Too cheap to spend the dollar.”

  Mr. Ivey tilted his head back as he carefully combed Mr. England’s hair into place. “Well, be good for him to get cleaned up a little.”

  “Make him look better, anyhow,” Mr. Reynolds said, climbing into his own chair and folding his hands over his substantial belly.

  “Feel better, too.” Mr. Ivey applied brush and talc, removed the apron, brushed again. “Ain’t that right?”

  Mr. England rose from the chair. Like McCory, he wore a blue work-shirt, but like all of the mill hands, he also wore a pair of blue pin-striped overalls. “I reckon,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a fat change purse, worn black with age and use, fished a crumpled dollar out, and gave it to Mr. Ivey. “Well, come see us.”

  “You come back.”

  Diane gathered up her books. As she walked beside her father to the Square, where the battered old family Chevy was parked, she said, “Daddy, I remember that picture show.”

  Her father, walking preoccupied beside her, gave her a sideways glance. “What?”

  “That one about the Methodist preacher. It had this little boy in it that got drowned.”

  “Yeah, I reckon it did,” Mr. England said.

  “Did you and Mama use to go to many picture shows?”

  “Some,” he said.

  “But I never went to any but that one,” she murmured. “Daddy — do you reckon I could go when the show opens again?”

  Her father drew in a long breath. “Sugar, it costs money.” They had reached the car, parked in front of the Trust Bank. Mr. England opened her door, and she slid in, the three library books clutched to her chest.

  When her father got behind the wheel, Diane said, “Daddy, what if some kids were going, and a boy wanted to take me?”

  “You’re too little to think about that,” he said, putting his key into the ignition.

  “Alan Kirby says he’d like to take me sometime,” she said.

  Her father gave her a keen look, more like Abe Lincoln’s than ever, she thought. “John Kirby’s boy?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s in my grade at school.”

  Mr. England looked down, and Diane had the feeling that things were being balanced and weighed. “John Kirby’s a good man,” he said at last. “I reckon it wouldn’t do no harm. But John or me, one will have to drive you and pick you up. I won’t have you goin’ out if there’s an older boy drivin’ a car. So it has to be just you and Alan.”

  "
Thank you, Daddy."

  Her father grunted, started the car, and pulled out. They had to go around three sides of the nearly deserted Square before they were heading back north toward New Haven; at the southeast corner, she noticed some men picking big green tin letters up off the sidewalk. Above them, on the white front of the theater building, a brand-new sign proclaimed SHADOWSHOW in letters two feet high and red as blood.

  4

  Five-thirty, and he had been walking the floor since four. Three long strides: turn at the front door: three strides back. She stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, hands holding on just above the elbows. The kids already sat at the table behind her, unusually quiet, big-eyed. Daddy had never been drunk like this before.

  “Andy,” she pleaded.

  He ignored her, continued his senseless pacing, back and forth, back and forth. He opened the door once, scowled out at the copper-colored street, bathed in the light of a low sun, and closed the door behind him.

  “Come and eat,” she said.

  “Ain’t hungry.”

  She bit her lower lip. Andy looked better, no doubt about that: clean, combed, kempt. True, he was still too thin, too hectic in his movements, and there was something in his eye, at once dull and cunning, that she distrusted, that she had never before seen there, even on those occasions when he was working himself up to hit her. Still, he looked better, younger somehow.

  “Pork chops,” she said, tempting him.

  “Ain’t hungry. When does it get dark?”

  “Sun ain’t even down, Andy.”

  “Well, hell, when does it go down?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, a helpless gesture. “I don’t know, Andy. Seven o’clock.”

  He finally came to rest, sinking on the shabby couch. At night Little Lee slept there; by day it was the newest piece of furniture in this dingy room. Andy, when he was home and sober, sometimes slept there of an afternoon, the old floor-model radio’s worn speaker buzzing threateningly beneath the words or the music issuing from it. Now he just sat on the edge, the springs groaning beneath him. Andy ran both hands through his newly trimmed red hair. “I’m goin’ out tonight,” he said, his voice flat, brooking no disagreement.