B008J4PNHE EBOK (43 page)

“They all have cell phone clips on their belts,” said Sam.

“What?”

“It’s something Tess said to me, that all the Tea Party people have cell-phone belt clips. A lot of them, anyhow. That it comes off as incredibly self-important. That’s what she said. I don’t know for sure. Tess said to watch one of their rallies and I’d see.”

“That’s very interesting.” Booth wiped at his beard. “Is Tess the young woman who keeps calling for you? Has she made any other observations I should know about?”

“She compared the president to a Segway.”

“That fits. Segways are wonderful and underrated, just like the president. I already appreciated this young woman’s taste in men, but now I’m really beginning to warm to her,” said Booth. “Where was I?”

Sam didn’t bother to correct his father on Tess’s actual, rather more lackluster assessment of both the Segway and the president. “You were on the Tea Party.”

“Oh, fuck them! Fuck them! It’s not about them. They think it’s about them, but it’s not about them.” His father produced a
what can you say?
raspberry. “You know, those kids over there, they’re just a few years older than Mina.”

Across the street, the girl with the bare feet had settled down on an egg crate to examine her T-shirt and, in what seemed to Sam a gesture of heartrending meticulousness, was smoothing it over her lap to study the image on the front.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “I was thinking that, too.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Would Sam believe that, on their first date, Booth and Allie saw a movie at that old theater? “Quite a bad movie, I’m afraid,” said his father. “But we had a lovely time.”

They were on the way to Booth’s last appointment of the morning. A car ahead of them was waiting for a break in traffic to make a left. For the sixty or so seconds that elapsed before they were moving again, one part of Sam’s mind gently conducted another part of his mind to a private cubicle and set out a three-ring binder. Inside the binder were head shots: jut-jawed Professor Gould; Plato, brooding and nibbling on a fountain pen; sleepy-eyed, fish-lipped Don Griese; Horsefeathers Law in his smart boater, grinning creepily; President Lincoln, speaking for the sanctity of the Union; page after page of different characters, and in the last sleeve, Sam’s living, breathing father, large and bearded and radiating self-satisfaction in a mustard-stained shirt.

The one part of Sam asked the other part, could he make an identification?

They were all familiar, but—no. The man in the passenger seat wasn’t anywhere in the book.

“Booth,” said Sam. “This isn’t—a put-on, right?”

“No,” said Booth. “No put-on.”

“You’re being you.”

“Such as I am.”

“What happened?”

His father shrugged. “I had an Awakening of sorts.” He made a floating gesture with his hand. “The details don’t matter.”

The phone shook in the cupholder. The car ahead of them turned. Sam ran his thumb lightly back and forth over his cheek and cocked his head at his father. Booth gazed forward studiously. The car behind them honked twice.

“Stay on this road,” said his father.

The final stop of Booth’s rounds was itself a final stop: Hasbrouck Horizons, a nonprofit hospice specializing in geriatric care.

While tossing around for rummage-sale items, a hospice administrator had discovered a projector in the basement. Word of the find had somehow made its way to Booth, owner of a small collection of reels (six of his own pictures—
Alamo II: Return to the Alamo: Daughters of Texas, Black Soul Riders, Fangs of Fury, Hellhole 3: Endless Hell, Rat Fiend!,
and
New Roman Empire
), and he had recently convened a regular Friday matinee.

In the facility’s sweltering, squeaking rec area, two tweed couches were angled to either side of a drop-down screen and spaced apart to make room for a half a dozen residents in wheelchairs. Gold streamers, remnants of a party, drooped across a plate-glass window. The window provided a view of a weedy hill sloping to the interstate toll kiosks below. The lights had been lowered, and the air smelled like pine cleaner.

On the right-hand couch, a tiny man in a gray housecoat was tipped over against the armrest—drool had collected in the gristle on his cheek and dried into a chalky wave—but many of the attendees appeared positively lambent at the sight of Booth. A nearly hairless woman in one of the wheelchairs, her shoulders and arms draped in tubes and translucent bags of fluids, implored Booth to get the show on the road. “Dolan, I lived all week for no other reason except to make sure that stupid werewolf movie wasn’t the last movie I ever saw. Plato, my bony ass.”

“Good morning, Ms. Elstner. Glad to see you’re feeling well today. You know how I cherish your thoughtful, measured appraisals of the
cinema.” The projector was set on a stand behind the wheelchair section. While Sam shone a penlight, Booth threaded the reel into the spindle.

“And the one about the devil’s hole,” Ms. Elstner continued, “or whatever it was, that was even worse. I am feeling well. I think your terrible movies might be killing my cancer. If you don’t show something passable, I worry I may never get to die.”

Sam remained at the projector while his father tapped around to the front of the audience.

“Ms. Elstner,” Booth said, “let me reassure you. No one has ever survived to see all six of our features twice. The end is nigh, you have my word.”

The hairless woman shook some of her tubes to show what a low value she placed on Booth’s word. “If you can’t show us a good movie, you might at least show us one where there’s one woman who wears a bra.”

“I asked my grandniece about the styles these days, and she says it’s all down to the whims and preferences of one single rich lady in California who makes all the decisions,” said another elderly woman intriguingly. Gnarled hands folded in her lap, she sat on the couch by the sleeping man.

From the rear row of wheelchairs, a rumpled pile of a man—his spine was kinked like a garden hose—gave a sulky boo. Whether to the bra-wearing initiative or the rich lady in California who decided on the styles, Sam couldn’t be sure.

Before the pull-down screen—the sort that Sam associated with educational cartoons in elementary school—Booth leaned on his cane and addressed the terminal audience. “Today’s feature is titled
New Roman Empire
. It concerns the machinations of a sulfurous charlatan, the corrupt political interests who employ him, and the young freethinkers who threaten those corrupt political interests. As it happens—”

Ms. Elstner tapped a ring against her wheelchair for attention.

“Yes, my dear?”

“Why in the hell are you wearing a cape? You’re too old for dress-up, you know.”

“My daughter made it for me. She has a great interest in design. I think it looks wonderful. It makes me feel like a gentleman. It goes with my cane.”

“Gentleman.” Ms. Elstner laughed as though this were the funniest thing she had heard all day, which caused Sam to laugh, too. “What’s your cape made of, then?”

“I don’t know,” Booth huffed. “Wool, I think.”

“It’d be better if it was made of silk,” she said.

“Like fancy panties,” elaborated the lady who had mentioned the supreme fashion goddess of California.

Booth raised a finger. “False. It’s a fall-winter cape. That’s why it’s wool.”

“Then it should be velvet,” Ms. Elstner insisted.

“You are not the cape jurist, woman. There are all kinds of capes, and this cape is just the way it ought to be, because that’s how my daughter made it.”

“I didn’t say I was the authority on capes, Booth.” Ms. Elstner tucked her chin and glanced away as if injured. “It’s merely my opinion. You don’t have to like it. A true gentleman would allow a sickly woman to have her opinions.”

Booth leaned more heavily on his cane. “I questioned your expertise in the cape area. I never said anything about denying your right to an opinion, dear.”

She snapped back to face him and grinned. “Booth, you look like a Dracula that ate another Dracula!”

Sam, at his position at the rear of the room, behind the projector, broke out laughing again, along with several of the others. The rain must have stopped, because the antiseptic room seemed much brighter; a new diffuse light fell through the window and glimmered the leftover streamers. It was a show, obviously, an act. Booth was being a fool for them. He’s making their day, Sam thought, and felt—proud?

Hunched over his cane in a pose of exaggerated forbearance, Booth glowered at the floor while he waited for the mirth to cease. When it did, he said, “Have I mentioned, Ms. Elstner, how glad I am that you’ve not yet expired? Would anyone else like to insult me before I finish introducing the film? Maybe we should have a roast instead?”

The patient with the kinked spine piped up in a faint voice. “No more flirting. I am ready to see a picture now.”

Ms. Elstner told the man to hold his horses. She asked if that was Booth’s son at the projector. Booth allowed that it was. Ms. Elstner
opined that Sam was quite handsome and, luckily, seemed to have avoided the worst of the heavy gene.

“That’s it!” His father crossed the room, bounced his cane off the floor, caught it, and nimbly slipped it under his armpit. He bent and planted a smacking kiss on her papery cheek. “Peace?”

“One more!” demanded Ms. Elstner, so Booth kissed her on the other cheek before returning to the screen.

Sam imagined performing the cane trick for Tess and impressing her so much that she stopped hating him. Maybe Booth could teach him. Or maybe, thought Sam, I’m lying on the floor of a sealed panic room, hallucinating this entire day.

“Other questions?” his father asked.

“Ah . . . Booth,” said the woman on the couch with the locked hands. “I think Irving has passed.”

The only sounds were of raspy breathing and the ticking drips of life-supporting fluids.

Irving, the man in the gray housecoat, sagged against the armrest. Behind the chunky lenses of his glasses, his wide-open eyes were unblinking. His pale lips, his white face, his small hands cupped at the knot of his housecoat had a desiccated appearance, like papier-mâché.

Sam felt a twinge of sadness, more for the moment than for the man. It had been a nice thing, to show a movie, and now this had happened. And Booth was doing so well, too.

“Should I go get someone?” Sam asked.

The crooked-backed man took a quavering sigh. “I don’t suppose there’ll be a picture now.”

“Irving.” Booth extended his cane and prodded Irving’s slipper. Irving didn’t move. Sam’s father leaned forward slightly, peering close at the man’s face.

Sam recalled how, at the funeral home, his father had stood coffinside in that exact position. Booth had appeared less sorrowful at his ex-wife’s death than perplexed. The coffin and the body were in the room when everyone left, but later, someone rolled Allie away to the bowels of the funeral home, to the furnace, where they placed her on a steel table and pushed her into a fire. Meanwhile, Sam returned to his sophomore year of college. Booth went wherever Booth went.

Maybe what was really bewildering was not the abruptness of a death
but the swift resumption of life. You came out from the dark, and the sun was so hideously bright, you feared you might go blind.

“Irving O’Dell,” said Booth, for the corpse in the gray robe belonged to none other than that prominent member of the
New Roman Empire
ensemble, originator of the role of Mr. Jones.

The whistle of the cane through the air was followed by the twang of wood against aluminum as he dealt a wicked blow to the frame of the couch. “Irving! Wake up!”

His voice—the Voice—caromed around the room. Several patients in wheelchairs bucked, and someone’s pole of bags and tubes crashed to the ground. There was a screech: “Oh-oh-oh!”

Irving blinked, yawned. He levered himself upright and clawed at his crusty jaw. He noticed Booth standing in front of him.

“What is it?” Irving asked. “Oh, criminy! Don’t tell me I slept through the movie?”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Once the film was rolling, Sam and Booth remained just long enough to see the medicine wagon come creaking over a rise, then left.

At Tom’s house, father and son separated. In addition to his other duties, the old man was teaching a Film Appreciation class at the community college, and because there was a session that night, he needed to spend some time looking over his teaching materials. He also intended to have a quiet word with Mina.

“When the hell did you get so industrious, Booth? You know this is all kind of weird, right?” Sam asked. “I want you to tell me about this Awakening.”

“Yes . . .” Booth shook his head and turned to open the car door. “Some other time. You’re welcome to sit in on my class if you like.”

“What’s the topic?”

“
E.T.
I find the central characterizations, the parallels, very interesting. The sad little boy from the shattered home. The sad little person from beyond the stars who has been stranded. They’re really in the same situation—brokenhearted in the same way. I want to highlight the way
Spielberg captures their bond. The magic, the flying bicycles and all of that, is simply an expression of the comfort they take from each other. Their friendship even brings E.T. back to life. It’s about friendship. On top of that very elegant metaphorical content, there’s a lot of excitement and adventure and cuteness, and that’s exceptional, too.” Booth threw his legs around and out of the passenger seat, hauled himself up. “And I’m sure, as usual, that I’ll weep copiously when E.T. dies.”

Sam scratched his head. He thought, This whole thing is literally making me scratch my head. He thought, I can’t believe how good Booth makes that ridiculous sci-fi-fantasy piece of shit sound.

Booth leaned down and poked his head through the open door. “There’s a rusted short sword on your floor.”

Sam said he knew, and his father said, “All right,” and shut the door. A second or two after that, the old man reopened the door. “Remember:
Quel Beau Parleur
! You’re going to like it.” He shut the door again.