B008J4PNHE EBOK (34 page)

Hasbrouck had no industry to speak of, just the college with its tides of students, streaming in and streaming out. Hikers and climbers came for the mountains, but departed on Sunday afternoons. Whether a person was renting a couple of days of fresh air, or getting four years of college, ultimately, they were headed elsewhere. Meanwhile, Sam, Allie, and the dead Huguenots stayed on.

It was depressing, honestly, the boy’s sense that his town once was a
place to be—a place with an operating movie theater—as opposed to a place to leave, probably in favor of somewhere that did have a movie theater.

His father was like all the others: he came and went.

“Did you know that Booth is coming to my school, Tom?”

On the eve of his father’s presentation, Sam was at the Coffee Shop, staging Nukies on the steps of Tom Ritts’s ladder. Sam liked Tom because, in a way, he was the opposite of Booth; Booth made everything big, whereas Tom made everything small. Allie liked him, too, not least because his tolerant nature was catnip for her love of teasing.

“No, I didn’t. But that ought to be pretty decent,” said Tom. His upper body was in the lobby ceiling. He was changing the fittings on the ancient pipes above the counter area. These pipes—like the men’s room trough and the crumbling moldings, original to the theater—had recently started to drip cold water on people’s necks. “Your dad’s a real showman, Sam.” His voice was a tinny echo.

“Yeah.” Sam squared up a Nukie who had her hands lifted, palms outward in the universal gesture for
stop,
with a bloodshot eye bulging from each palm. The boy flicked her with an index finger. The creature plunged to the floor below. “Ahhhhhh!” said Sam under his breath.

“Did you say something?” asked Tom. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“So why do you like him?” asked Sam. “Booth, I mean.”

It felt natural to speak freely with Tom, who was so nonchalant that it was extremely difficult to imagine him possessing the wherewithal to lie about anything or even shade the truth. Maybe it was a matter of supreme self-confidence, or maybe it was simplicity, but Tom was entirely out in front. The threadbare ankles of the older man’s blue jeans were at Sam’s eye level.

“Why do I like your dad? That’s a heck of a question. But let me see,” said Tom.

A young man in a tattered army jacket with sunglasses propped in his dreadlocks approached the counter. “Hey, little brother, you got any cinnamon?”

Sam pointed to a short table in front of the roped-off stairs to the balcony. “Over there, Communist.”

The young man grunted and shuffled away.

There was the sound of metal tapping on metal in the ceiling. “You
know, more than anything, Booth keeps me on my toes. He makes it fun. I bet that’s a big part of how come your mom loves him so much, too.”

The appeal eluded Sam. “You like that?”

“Sure,” said Tom. “What’s not to like about feeling happy?”

Sam spotted the fallen Nukie on the floor and stamped on it. He ground his heel around, trying to pulverize the poor freak.

“When my son, your peer, Young Samuel here,” said the Booth of Sam’s mind, the full classroom arrayed before him, Gloria Wang-Petty in her seat in the left-hand corner of the front row, “was first handed to me by the nurse, he was enrobed in a kind of rough brown cloth, such as an extra will wear in a biblical production. He resembled a tiny leper. And he did not fuss, did not scream or cry. He just glared at me, fiercely glared.” There was a wave of laughter, laughter like monkeys screeching, but the Booth of Sam’s mind remained stern-faced. At last the laughter ceased. Booth cleared his throat. “It was,” he finished, “most disquieting,” and this sent them all roaring again. Gloria was in such a state that she was yanking on her bangs, hanging on to them for dear life.

Sam took away his foot. The Nukie was dusty, twisted slightly, but intact.

Allie passed by, carrying a couple of ceramic pitchers. “What’s the hold up?” she called to Tom. “You sure you know what you’re doing there, Ritts?”

There was a grunt from the ceiling. “Oh, I know what I’m doing up here. It’s called ‘Not getting paid to fix your plumbing.’ ”

Allie winked at her son. “Okay, Tom. You keep at it,” she said, and swept away with two fresh pitchers.

“Mom?” Sam called after her, and was instantly relieved that she didn’t hear him and turn back, because for some reason he knew that if she did, he would break down in tears and beg her to keep Booth from coming, and probably tell her about the woman in the museum, too, about Sandra.

Earlier that day, when Sam had stopped at home to drop off his backpack, the phone was ringing again. “Sammy? Is that you Sammy?”

The contractor leaned out of the ceiling. Grease spotted his face and the blond of his receding crew cut. He wore a gap-toothed smile. “Hey, buddy, what’s with the long face? Why don’t you grab a wrench and get up here? I could use an extra hand tightening this gasket.”

When his alarm rang at seven o’clock, the boy opened his eyes to stare up at the model P-51 Mustang that dangled from the ceiling. He wished it would strafe him where he lay. A couple of minutes passed fruitlessly—the fighter twisted lightly on its wire—and Sam threw his feet over the bed, planting them down on the cold wood.

His father was in the kitchen. Booth, predictably, had arrived under the cover of darkness.

Arrayed in a pair of voluminous black pajamas, he was frying bacon in a skillet and whistling the annoying little ditty he always whistled. Allie was at the table in her blue bathrobe, smiling and tapping her foot. Between them Sam sensed a casual, happy collusion, as if they had just won a game of doubles tennis.

He paused in the entryway, petting the doorframe. His sleep had been unsettled, rattled by dreams of thunderous, indistinct questions. “I can’t understand you,” he remembered yelling over and over, walking in the house, on the street, in the Huguenot graveyard. The questions kept coming, though—maybe from the sky, maybe from the earth, he couldn’t tell, they seemed to be all around. The inflection told him that they were questions, but the words were bottomless and insensible.

“What’s going on?” he asked his parents.

“Breakfast,” said Allie. She blew him a kiss.

“A delicious repast to fortify the young scholar!”

At the stove, his father executed a shovel-and-flip with the skillet; strips of bacon tumbled through the air. Several landed in the pan, and several others on the floor, where they exploded into brown shrapnel on the tile. Allie dropped her forehead to the table with a knock and whooped.

Booth set the skillet back on the burner and performed a mincing dance on the tips of his toes before executing a courtly bow, rolling out his right hand. “Madam. I give you:
bacon
.”

Sam slid away from the doorframe.

“Oh, stay, dear! Samuel, stay! There’s more than enough!” cried Booth after him. “The floor bacon can be mine!”

“Never mind,” said the boy, retreating. “I’m not hungry.”

The phone began to ring. “Oh, Christ,” said Allie, “it’s probably that breather again.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

A few minutes later, on the porch, Sam informed his mother that it was probably time for him to wait at the foot of their driveway for the bus by himself. He said it almost exactly that way: “You know, I think it’s probably time I waited by myself, Mom.” The gesture wasn’t intended petulantly, wasn’t intended toward Allie at all. It just seemed, in the face of that afternoon’s hopeless appointment, like it was time for him to stand by himself. Sam actually felt brave.

“You’re probably right,” said Allie, and stuck his lunch money, two dollars rolled in a tube, into the chest pocket of his spring jacket. She hugged him tightly, her long hair brushing over his eyes, and let go. The screen door groaned shut, and the front door followed with a click.

He was immediately sorry, wanting another moment with her. Tears stung his eyes and his nose. He felt stupid for being so upset. The wind blew through his coat. It was gray. The road bent past the Huguenot graveyard. From inside, he heard the muffled sound of his mother’s record player coming alive with the light, tumbling intro to a Scott Joplin rag. “There it is, Zelda,” came Booth’s approving voice carrying clearly outside, “there’s the one I like.”

Sam closed his eyes and stepped.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Because Career Day Presentations always took place at final period, he had the rest of the day to brood on his fate.

At lunch Sam disconsolately spooned gravy onto a Nukie he had never liked. “Noooo,” he whispered, “whywhywhywhy!” The Nukie had the lower body of a worm and the upper body of a nerd.

Mark Goolsby, a sallow, blinking boy, sat across the cafeteria table, eating his cheese sandwich. “That Nukie’s really suffering, isn’t he?” observed Goolsby.

The two boys were not friends but occasional project partners, both decent, reserved students. A connection based on their fathers—Mark’s the check-fraud ex-con, Sam’s Booth—had not resolved, but Sam thought there might be something there.

“He had it coming.” Sam spooned more gravy onto the figure, which
from the worm up happened to bear a likeness to Mark Goolsby—glasses, short-sleeve button-down, tight haircut. Goolsby’s mother, a homeopath (whatever that was), was the afternoon’s other presenter.

Boot heels clicked on the cafeteria linoleum. An angular shadow fell across the table. Gloria Wang-Petty leaned over to tear a handful of napkins from the dispenser in the middle of the boys’ table. “We’re all out at my table,” she explained.

“Cool,” said Mark.

“Mark, did you tell your mother about my nut allergy?” asked Gloria.

“’Course,” said Mark.

Mrs. Goolsby was bringing cookies. As far as Sam was concerned, in relation to whatever it was that Booth was planning, this added insult to injury. Cookies were stacking the deck.

“Thanks, Conwict!” Gloria poked Mark in the shoulder. (For involved reasons related to a raucous viewing of a BBC version of
Great Expectations
in the previous year’s Advanced English class, and the thick accents employed by some of the actors, Mark’s nickname was no longer the Convict’s Son, but just Conwict.)

“Anything to be of service,” said Goolsby, who (wisely, in Sam’s view) had given up actively protesting his nickname and switched to a program of faintly snide remarks.

She turned to Sam. “Hey, Sam.”

“Hey, Gloria.”

“I’m excited about your dad. I was thinking, and you know, I’ve never met an actor!”

Sam nodded.

Gloria hesitated. “There’s a—” She was looking in the direction of Sam’s mashed potatoes. The Nukie’s nerd head protruded slightly, like a pink pebble.

“It’s a guy,” said Sam, who knew he ought to be embarrassed but was too depressed.

“Oh,” said Gloria, and shrugged before managing to drum up another smile for him. “Thanks again.”

When the bell rang, Sam picked up his Nukie and stuck it in his mouth. He walked to class imagining himself walking to class—being filmed, that is, by a camera on rails, gliding alongside him, because that
was how he felt, as though he were being sucked effortlessly forward by gravity, his path preordained—while alternately gnawing and sucking on plastic.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Mark’s mother was first. As the cookies circulated, Ms. Goolsby held up a leafing twig. “Would you believe that there’s more healing power in this sprig of lilac than in one whole bottle of heart pills?” She waved the twig. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” She waved the twig some more.

Behind her and to the right, a step or two from the door, Booth Dolan sat beneath the flag and stared at the floor. He had not removed his herringbone overcoat, and by his knees were two oblong steel suitcases. Booth looked like a man waiting for a bus.

Several minutes passed. Mark’s mother extolled the powers of native flora. The kids sipped and crunched. At her desk, Mrs. Quartermain uncrossed and recrossed her legs every few seconds.

Sam gazed at his father gazing at the floor and, as he did so, made a mental list of what he felt he absolutely knew about the man who was half responsible for his creation: his father loved Mountain Dew, spicy mustard, Muenster cheese, all-you-can-eat buffets, the novels of Irwin Shaw, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, the music of Mose Allison, hotel freebies, Spanish wine, and German beer; above all other men, Booth admired Orson Welles; he disdained “fascists, bosses, bankers, Teamsters, and critics”; he had “come around, grudgingly,” to FM radio; he was large and he was loud; and when he was home, Allie was happier.

These things were, for the most part, alien artifacts to Sam. He could do little more than helplessly bang them together. The last was one of the few he could comprehend, but he couldn’t explain it. His father was a knot, and he was knotted to him.

There was also the trip to the museum and the madwoman in the fur hat. Something had happened then, was happening still, and in the meantime, Sam felt that he had failed everyone. He was sorry. He wanted to be better.

The older man glanced up without raising his head, peering from under the flourish of his dark, unkempt eyebrows, and met his son’s gaze. Booth winked.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“My name is Booth Dolan. I am a storyteller and a thespian. A thespian is an actor. I make believe on a professional basis. I pretend to be people who I am not. You are children. You make believe as a matter of course. I presume that each of you is competent at making believe on at least a semi-professional level. That is as it should be.

“Are any of you familiar with the concept of the double feature? No? A double feature is a showing of two movies back to back. The double feature was the staple of the drive-in movie theater. A single ticket provided you an entire night’s entertainment.

“But the second movie of the double feature was always better than the first movie. They saved it for later, when it was good and dark, when the images on the screen could be seen with the greatest clarity. Because that was the one you really wanted to see. The first movie was just the warm-up. The double feature often began while there was still some light, and it could be hard to make out everything happening on the screen—it could be hazy. Everything was perfect for the second movie, though. The second movie had all the exciting stuff: the scares and the surprises and the parts that you’d remember and want to discuss later.