Authors: Owen King
“You are currently living in the first movie of the double feature of your life. It’s fine, you’re happy enough, but probably some parts are hazy to you. That’s the nature of the first feature.
“However, the characters you play in your minds and in your games now are vital preparation for the wild implausibility of adult existence, which is the second feature. As adults, you will experience incredible adventures. Feats of derring-do will be required. You will labor beneath weighty responsibilities. There will be cunning puzzles to solve. Pirates may fire upon you. You should not be surprised to find yourself traveling by night, with scant provisions, along broken roads haunted by wayfarers of unreliable character. Hangers-on of the court may sow intrigue against you. Misfortune will not be a stranger to you; nor will duplicity. Nor will tragedy. There will doubtless be romantic entanglements, as well as many bawdy, humorous episodes.
“So. Make believe. It is important. Your second feature will start soon.”
■ ■ ■
A few seconds elapsed, and Booth’s words seemed to remain in the air, thrumming. Sam’s eyes darted around the room: Mrs. Quartermain,
blinking rapidly, worked her dentures and stroked her gingham collar; Helen Goolsby, having taken Booth’s place beneath the flag, had a cookie in her mouth that she was not chewing; in the front row, Gloria Wang-Petty was frozen, pinching one of her bangs; near the windows, in his aquarium, Todd, the class gerbil, huddled inside a paper tube, whiskers flicking.
Booth had ascended precariously to the scooped seat of a molded green chair. His right hand lay against his breastbone. His head was no more than an inch below the classroom’s paneled ceiling. He had not yet removed his overcoat.
“Miss—?” His hand shot free of his chest, and he pointed at Gloria Wang-Petty.
She jerked in her seat. “Me? I’m Gloria.”
“What is your aspiration, Gloria?” he asked.
“My aspiration?”
“That’s right. To what do you aspire? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I—I want to be a doctor.”
Her interlocutor hopped from the green chair down to the black-and-white-checkered floor with a hard-soled crack that shook the room. Booth swept to the corner, hefted the steel suitcases, and bore them to the worktable in front of the blackboard. The latches were unclipped and the lids were thrown back.
In each case, nestled in gray foam beds, were row upon row of flesh-colored tepees. “Come,” Booth said to Gloria.
The girl went to stand beside him. “What . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Pick a nose, my dear, any nose,” said Booth. “I’m sure there’s a doctor in here somewhere.”
■ ■ ■
Gloria settled on a discreet little bulb upturned minutely at the tip.
From his overcoat, Booth produced a tube of spirit gum to help secure the nose Gloria had chosen. The effect was arresting. The fake nose seemed to draw the girl’s other features—mouth, eyes, eyebrows, ears—closer together, and to render her somehow older and taller, more complete.
Booth selected a nose for himself, a repulsive purplish specimen, squashed and threaded with veins. He raised it for the class to see, and there was a smattering of “ew” and “ugh.”
With a couple of quick dabs of gum, he pressed the drunkard’s nose into place. Sam’s father turned away from the class, twisting his shoulders, stretching his neck, clearing his throat. He drew his spine upward and hunched, as if preparing to enter a low tunnel. At his sides, his hands clenched and then unclenched and stayed there, dangling in gorilla hooks.
Booth shuffled around again.
A wino, likely guided in from the street by a beat cop, presented himself to Dr. Wang-Petty:
“Doc. Doc, I don’t feel right. The pain. The pain, all over I got it. There’s blood falling down in front of my eyes.” Booth had contorted himself so incredibly that he was underneath Gloria’s line of vision. The boozer batted his eyelids pleadingly at her and clutched his hooked hands. “It’s like . . . like you’re on the other side of a red window from me, Doc.”
Dr. Wang-Petty, arms folded across her chest, was impassive. “I’m sorry, old man. You have a cancer.”
“Cancer?” Booth opened and closed his mouth several times.
“Certain death, I’m afraid. But I promise we will do everything we can to make you comfortable.” Gloria maintained her posture.
“Thank you.” The wino’s voice was full of tears. “Thank you, Doc!”
Booth burst from his crouch. He grasped Gloria’s hand, raised it, and threw them both forward into a grand bow.
There was a moment of silence—followed by an ovation.
Sam let out a breath.
■ ■ ■
They played until the bell rang.
Ronnie Messersmith put on a rightward-tilted nose with a bulge on the bridge and announced that he was the heavyweight champion of the world. Booth approached on his knees to beg in a squeaky child’s voice for his autograph. Liz Curbishley utilized a nose that was a perfect isosceles triangle in order to make herself a librarian. “Shhh,” she said, and no one said anything. Brian Byrne opted for a pockmarked nose, bristling with sharp white hairs, to become a police officer. “Nobody make a move,” he said, and though nobody dared, he cried, “By God, I mean it!”
Sam’s turn came right before the end of the period. He chose what he thought of as a wise nose. It was a long and narrow nose whose tiny nostrils seemed to imply a discerning taste in oxygen.
Once it was fixed on his face, he stalked back and forth in front of the classroom, hands locked at the base of his spine. “Raise the lights!” Mrs. Quartermain rushed to comply, flipping the switch for the overheads. “Bring that camera over here!” Mark Goolsby ran to the front of the room, wielding a rolled-up piece of paper for an eyepiece.
“We’re ready, Booth,” said Sam. “Now get up there and act.”
Booth bowed to the director. Then he reascended the green chair and recited the Gettysburg Address.
They drove to Massachusetts, to the Cape, and stayed in a beach house that belonged to someone who owed Booth a favor. Because it was too cold and blustery to go on the beach, they stayed inside, and Booth built huge, spitting fires that made Allie nervous and thrilled Sam. The marshmallows charred perfectly in seconds. Before bed, they read Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
. Though Booth was the best reader—adopting brogues for the characters, twisting his face into a crazed goggle when he inhabited the Jacobite revolutionary Alan Breck—he insisted they each take a turn. Outside, the breakers crashed against the nickel-colored slant of the April beach, all day, every day.
Over a fish-and-chips lunch at a diner a few miles inland, Booth mused aloud that perhaps it was time to take their son on a journey westward, “to the Land of Dangerous Lemons”—his father’s enigmatic nickname for California—so the boy could observe his father in action. Sam’s heart hiccupped, but he restrained himself to a tight downward nod at his basket of food. Under the table, Allie squeezed his knee.
Home again, one evening Booth took Sam to the multiplex in Kingston to see
Journey to Dragon Land: A Gnome Story,
a Claymation movie about a community of gnomes who wake one day to discover that a vulture has dropped a dragon egg through the thatched roof of their village hall.
In the first act of the movie, the baby dragon—a female, named Judy by the exceedingly British gnomes—is born, and they try to dress her like a gnome, but she eats the clothes and accidentally burns down one of their mushroom fields and also eats the carved wooden statue of
a famous gnome philosopher that presides over the village green. In the next act, when a diabolical wizard commanding a team of oversize winged white rats tries to kidnap the dragon for black magic, the story shifts from primarily comedic episodes to an adventure. Judy’s gnome friends whisk her across several different terrains, chased by the wizard and his flying rats, until they finally return her to her true dragon family and their pursuers are vanquished.
The movie was fabulously loopy, the simultaneously swollen and convulsive quality of the Claymation granting the whole undertaking an unfamiliar, giggly air; the gnomes with their twitchy features were comically apoplectic; Judy the dragon with her wobbly eyes was adorably stupid; and even the evil flying rats were too dense and squashed to be truly terrifying. At the end, when the dragon lord invited the gnomes to stay in Dragon Land, Sam felt so happy that it was almost embarrassing. “You’re a right grown-up dragon now, Judy love,” said Clive the Elder, patting the giant dragon’s forepaw, “but you know, to us lot here, you’ll always be the little one, Judy—and there’ll always be a biscuit for you.” Sam felt better when he noticed that in the seat to his right, his father was smiling broadly, his beard and eyes lit up in the reflection from the screen.
They came out on the curb and stood in the splash of red from the lit
THEATER
sign on the exterior wall of the cement cube of the theater. The parking lot lay before them, acres of cars and trucks, bodywork shining under the light stanchions. It was night and cold enough to see their breath.
“What do you think?” asked Booth. “Should we go home to your mother, or should we cast responsibility aside and go find a baby dragon to raise?”
“Home, probably,” said Sam, and Booth said he was right, certainly he was right, they mustn’t get carried away, but wasn’t that Judy a doll?
“I think the best part was when they dressed her up as a gnome,” Sam found himself confessing fearlessly.
“Me, too,” said Booth. “Me, too.”
They played rummy with Tom Ritts another night. Allie, losing badly, was aggressive in her attempts to coerce him. “It would set a poor example for my son, Tom, if you were to go out now and leave me, a woman and a mother, holding all these points. I don’t know if I’d be able to look at you the same way.”
“Do not let Allie manipulate you, Tom,” said Booth. “She is a succubus.”
“Bicker all you want, you two, but I take my orders from the cards.” It was Tom’s turn, and he was hunched over in study of his hand.
“What’s a succubus?” asked Sam.
Allie reached across the table and gave Sam’s hair a tussle. “A succubus is a woman who believes that her very good friend would never go out and make her feel like a weak, terrible failure in front of her young, impressionable son and leave her to cry her eyes out.”
“Your mother is behaving badly, Samuel. She is tormenting Tom. She has been possessed by a wicked, greedy, kibitzing spirit. The worst thing we can do is pay attention to her.” Booth stretched over to grab the back of Sam’s chair and yank it away from his mother’s reach.
Tom took a sip from his longneck and continued to contemplate his cards. “You know, people who say they don’t care for the taste of beer—I can’t understand that.”
Sam banged the table with his fist. “Play!”
His godfather discarded a ten of spades.
Sam snatched it up, laid down an 8-9-10 run, a group of three kings, and discarded, victorious.
“Little shit,” said Allie.
“The product of my own loins,” said Booth.
“Nice play, buddy,” said Tom.
■ ■ ■
Allie had a long-standing appointment to have her deviated septum repaired, requiring an overnight stay at the hospital. Booth called Sam in sick to school, and they filled in for her at the café.
Throughout the morning and afternoon, Booth accepted all challengers in backgammon. To torment the student Communists, he referred to these matches as Show Trials.
In the late afternoon Booth stuck one of his vanquished opponents behind the counter and told Sam he wanted to have an amble around the theater section of the building. He paced the nearly empty floor for a minute or two, picking up bits of trash, before giving up with a sigh and letting the mess spill. The auditorium smelled like a gigantic marker tip; when the student Communists weren’t drinking coffee, they were making posters.
Sam asked what it used to be like. His father said, “Oh, nothing special.
Typical movie theater. Just a big closet with a screen,” but it was obvious that the state of the place disappointed him.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said.
“Eh.” Booth stuck his hands in his pockets and used a foot to sweep his little pile of garbage toward a wall. “May I make an observation?”
“Sure.”
“You have a very severe directing style, Samuel. I’ve seen the hell you give those plastic people of yours,” said Booth.
“They can take it,” said Sam.
“Yes, but you see, they’re not real. I think you will find that real people don’t like to take a lot of shit.”
“Maybe,” said Sam.
“No. Definitely,” said Booth.
His father’s probing made Sam self-conscious and vaguely annoyed. He knew how to play with his toys. His memory of the museum day recurred for the first time in several days; Sandra had criticized him about his toys, too, saying he seemed too old for them. Sam didn’t like to think about that and quickly shoved it back into its hole. To be here, with his father, in the forsaken little church where so many movies once played, was too special.
“Do you ever use your real nose in the movies?” asked Sam. It had struck him that maybe his father was saving his actual nose for something special.
Booth had come to the middle of the auditorium, where he stood, a hand resting on the back of one of the scattered remaining seats, and gazed up at the darkened balcony. There the rows of seats were all intact but draped in darkness. He didn’t seem to have heard.
“Hey, Booth,” said Sam. “Dad.”
“Never!” His father strode over.
“Why not?”
“Too dangerous—” Booth broke off and sneezed a cigarette butt into his palm. He grimaced and handed it to Sam.
“Oh, dear—” Booth sneezed again, and the cap of a red marker shot from his nostril this time. A third sneeze produced half of a broken Popsicle stick; a fourth brought a gunk-caked dime, and finally, Booth coughed out a crumpled flyer printed with the Soviet hammer and sickle.
After this, Sam’s father wheezed a bit and shook his head. “See? Allergies.” He chuckled. “Really, though, I must always have a fake nose. It lets me—it lets me not be me. When I use my real nose, I’m merely Booth Dolan, husband, father. And who would pay to see him?”