The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (3 page)

Miss Curtwood actually giggled. Some of the people waiting to get popcorn stared. “You’re kidding,” she said, a little too loud.

“Actually,” said Mr. Carrigan, “I’m not.”

“You’re at least ten years older than I am.”

Mr. Carrigan smiled. “Perhaps twelve.”

“You’re an old pervert.” More people stared.

Mr. Carrigan was starting to turn red. “I think I’d better go see about preparing the projectors.”

Miss Curtwood sneered at him. “Nothing will change, you old creep.”

People in the lobby started to mumble to one another. Parents hurried their children past the popcorn and into the theater.

“Anything
can be changed,” said Mr. Carrigan.

“Not how I feel about you.”

“Even you could change.”

“Not a chance,” she said venomously.

“Something wrong, sweetheart?” It was the big man, her date, back from the bathroom. “Is this old square bothering you?”

“He owns the theater,” I squeaked. Both of them glanced down at me.

“Go inside and see if anyone needs help finding seats,” Mr. Carrigan said to me.

I looked from Miss Curtwood and the big man to Mr. Carrigan and back again.

“
Now.
I’ll talk with you after the show.” His voice was firm. I did as I was told. I noticed that Miss Curtwood and the man came into the auditorium about three minutes later. They took the stairs up to the balcony. The man was red-faced. Miss Curtwood had tight hold of his arm. The people downstairs pointed and whispered to each other.

I was glad when the lights went down, the curtains parted, and the previews of coming attractions began. But somehow I knew that when the double feature was over, I’d have a special mess to clean up by the big man’s seat. There was. The floor was sticky with Coke, and bits of popcorn were scattered all over. Along with all the rest of it, there was something strange, half-covered by the Necco wrapper. It was like a deflated balloon, five or six inches long, with something gooey inside. I didn’t want to touch it, so I used the candy wrapper to pick it up and put it in the trash. I also suspected I shouldn’t ask Mr. Carrigan about it, although I thought I saw him watching me as I looked at the thing. But he didn’t say anything.

After I’d finished cleaning up, Mr. Carrigan asked me to come to his office. He looked older. I’d never stopped to wonder before just how old he was. At that point in my life, I thought all adults were ancient. But now I realized Mr. Carrigan was at least as old as my father. He walked with a stoop I hadn’t noticed before. He moved slowly, as though he were in pain. He asked me if I wanted a Coca-Cola. I shook my head. He asked me to sit down. I took the metal folding chair. He sat down then too, on the other side of the desk, and looked at me for a long minute across the heaps of paper, splicing equipment, film canisters, and the cold, half-filled coffee cups.

“I really love her, you know.”

I looked back at him dumbly. Why was he telling me this?

“Miss Curtwood. Barbara. You know who I’m talking about.”

I nodded, but still said nothing.

“Do you think I’m not entirely rational about this all?”

I kept perfectly still.

Mr. Carrigan grimaced. “I know I’m not. It’s an obsession. I have no explanation for it. All I know is what I feel for Barbara is love that transcends easy explanation—or perhaps
any
explanation at all.” He put his elbows on the cluttered desk, laced his fingers, and set his chin in the cradle. “She’s not even what I want. Not really. I would prefer her to be shorter and more delicate. She’s not. I love red-headed women. Barbara is a blonde. She is far too—” Mr. Carrigan hesitated “—far too buxom. And there is more which is less apparent. Barbara wished to have no children. She told me this. I would like a family, but—” He closed his eyes. I wondered if he was going to cry. He didn’t, but he kept his eyes closed for a long time. “She is everything I should loathe, yet I find myself fatally attracted.”

Another minute went by. Two. I stirred restlessly on the hard metal seat.

Mr. Carrigan looked up. “Ah, Robby. I’m sorry I’m keeping you. I simply needed to talk, and you are my only friend.” He smiled. “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome,” I said automatically, not really understanding what I had done for him.

“I’m going to see Barbara on her birthday,” he said, still smiling. “She said so tonight.”

“I’m glad,” I managed to say, wondering if I should be crossing my fingers for him.

“Life is strange, isn’t it, Robby?” Mr. Carrigan stayed seated and motioned me toward the door. “If you wait long enough, you can change things the way you want. If you want things badly enough. If you’re willing to do what needs to be done.”

Later, I tried to remember back, listening in my memory to tell if his voice had sounded odd. It hadn’t, not as best I could recall. Mr. Carrigan had sounded cheerful, as happy as I’d ever heard him.

“She’s going to stay after the last show on her birthday. And then we will go to the Dew Drop Inn for a late supper. She told me so. When her—friend—tried to argue, she told him to shut up, that she knew her mind and this was what she wanted to do. I must admit it, I was amazed.” The smile spread across his face, the muscles visibly relaxing. He looked straight at me. “Thank you, Robby.”

“For what?” I said, a little bewildered.

“For seeing me like this. For being someone who saw my happiness and will remember it.”

I was
very
bewildered now.

“Good night, Robby. Please convey my best to your family.”

I knew I was dismissed and so I left, mumbling a still-confused good night.

All these years later, I’ve come to live in Los Angeles, and it’s where I’ll probably die. Southern California drew me away from my small town. It must have been the movies. I walk Hollywood Boulevard, ignore the sleaze, the tawdriness, and pretend I move among myths. I tread Sunset and sometimes stop to look inside the windows of the restaurants and the shops. I soak up the sun, even while realizing that the smog-refracted rays must surely be mutating my tissues into something other than the flesh I grew up in.

No one ever sees me, but I realize that must be because they are akin to the figures moving on the flickering screen and I am the audience. But I am not only the audience, I control the projector. And, like Mr. Carrigan, I am the cutter.

Miss Curtwood’s birthday was Friday, the first night of
Tarantula
. The crowd was large, but I didn’t notice. I was just impatient to see everyone seated so that I could take my place in the far back row of the theater and watch the magic wand of the projector beam inscribe pictures on the screen.

I did see Miss Curtwood come down the sidewalk to the Ramona. I knew a ticket was waiting in her name at the box office. She was by herself.

Her friend, the big man in the leather jacket, arrived ten minutes later, just before the previews started. He sat on the other side of the theater from Miss Curtwood. I noticed. I saw Mr. Carrigan paying attention to that too.

Then
Tarantula
started. I forgot about everything else until the movie was done. When the jet pilots—Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and the others—were strafing the giant spider, the Russians could have dropped their H-bombs and I wouldn’t have noticed.

The lights came up and the crowd seemed happy enough. I know I was. The people drifted out and I lost track of the big man and his leather jacket. Miss Curtwood was one of the last to get up and leave.

She saw me and came across the row. “Where is Mr. Carrigan’s office?”

“Back down the hall past the women’s restroom, just before the door for the supply room.” I pointed.

“This is very important,” said Miss Curtwood. “Tell Mr. Carrigan to come to the office in twenty minutes. No more, no less. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you or don’t you?” Her voice was hard. Her blue eyes looked like chips of ice.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then go and tell him.”

I found Mr. Carrigan out in the lobby holding the door for the last of the patrons. I said to him what Miss Curtwood had told me to say.

“I see,” said Mr. Carrigan. Then he told me to go home.

“But what about the cleaning?” I said.

“Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

“But the pop,” I said, “will be all hardened on the floor.”

“The floor,” said Mr. Carrigan, “needs a good mopping anyway.”

“But—”

“Go,” said Mr. Carrigan firmly.

I left, but something made me wait just down the block. I watched from the shadows between dim streetlights as Mr. Carrigan locked the lobby doors. The marquee light blinked off. Then the lights in the lobby. Another minute passed. A second.

I heard something that sounded like gunshots, five of them. Somehow I knew they were shots, even though they were muffled, sounding nothing like what I’d heard in westerns and cops-and-robbers movies.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Then I went down to the alley and felt my way through the trashcans and stacked empty boxes to the Ramona’s rear emergency exit. As usual, the latch hadn’t completely caught and so I slipped in. Past the heavy drapes, the inside of the auditorium was completely dark. I walked up the aisle, somehow sure I should make no noise. At the top of the inclined floor, I looked down the corridor and saw light spilling from Mr. Carrigan’s office.

I called his name. No one answered.

“Mr. Carrigan?” I said again.

This time a figure stepped from the office into the light. It was him. “What are you doing here, Robby?”

“I heard something weird. It sounded like shots.”

Mr. Carrigan looked very pale. The skin of his face was drawn tight across the bones. “They were shots, Robby.”

“What happened?” I said. “Do you need some help?”

“No,” he answered. “I need no help at all, but thank you anyway.” He smiled in a funny sort of way.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go home,” he said. He looked suddenly tired. “Go home and call the sheriff and tell him to come down here to the theater right away. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation.

“Will
you do that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.” He started to turn back through the pooled light and into the office again, but hesitated. “Robby, remember what I’ve said so many times about how you can change things for the better?”

“Yes,” I said again.

“Well, you can. Remember that.” And then he was gone.

I stared at the wedge of light for a few seconds and then walked back toward the rear of the theater. I didn’t go outside. Instead, I just sat behind the screen, there on the dirty wooden floor, thinking about the larger-than-life figures I’d seen dance above me so many times.

After ten or fifteen minutes, I heard another shot. This time it was louder, but I guess that’s because I was inside the theater.

I slowly walked back up the aisle. Once I’d reached the corridor, I turned toward the light. I looked inside. Then I went out to the lobby and put a nickel in the pay phone and called the sheriff. I didn’t want to phone him from Mr. Carrigan’s office.

My parents didn’t want me to hear what was decided in the coroner’s report, but that didn’t matter because it was all over town. And besides, I’d seen it, and even at ten, I could figure some of it out.

Miss Curtwood had gone to Mr. Carrigan’s office as she’d said she would, but she had been joined by the big man with the leather jacket. They had taken everything off, the jacket, her dress, everything. They had lain down on the desk together, after shoving all the things lying on it to the floor.

When Mr. Carrigan came into his office, they were both there to moan and laugh at him.

If Mr. Carrigan had laughed too, there was no way of telling. But the sheriff did know Mr. Carrigan had taken a .45 revolver out of a desk drawer and fired five times. Some minutes later, he had pulled the trigger a sixth time, this time with the muzzle tight against his right eye.

That was just before I’d phoned.

What I knew, and what none of the other kids at school knew, not even the sheriff ’s bratty daughter, was that most people in town didn’t know everything that must have been in the coroner’s report originally.

I remembered everything in detail, like a picture on the screen. I didn’t know what it all meant, most of it, until long after. But the images were sharp and clear, waiting for my eventual knowledge.

The first thing I saw when I poked my head through the light outside the office doorway was the big man and Mr. Carrigan, each of them lying in blood with parts of their heads gone. But what I really remember was Miss Curtwood.

Now I know truly how much she had become as Mr. Carrigan really wanted her. Her hair was no longer blonde. It was wet and red. She was not a buxom woman any longer. Nor was she tall. Mr. Carrigan had carefully arranged her legs, but you couldn’t ignore the sections that had been removed.