“Suppose you’re gonna hire another pansy like Lester to stand at that door?”
Earl cracked a shell. “You ain’t so big yourself.”
“They’s bigger boys, but I’m tough as a cob.”
Earl tossed the nuts into his mouth, his mustache shifting as he chewed. “I threw you out pretty easy.”
“Let me in and see if you get it done twice.”
Earl raised his brows, chuckled. “All right.” He nodded. “Job’s yours if in five minutes’ time you get out whoever else snuck in with you.”
“Start the clock, mister.”
Earl grinned, showing gold-capped teeth. He stepped from the booth and held the door for Walt, who hastened past him and then Eloise, lost again in her paperback.
Once in the theater, Walt paused to steady himself. He slowed his breathing, watching the screen, where soldiers and ladies paraded in a formal dance, the fort’s hall bright and clean and full of music. All Walt had wanted to do tonight was see this movie and forget himself for a while. He hated his brother, always causing trouble, was afraid of him. Walt climbed the stairs and crouched in the aisle.
“This movie ain’t for shit,” he said into Lonnie’s ear.
Lonnie yawned. “Ain’t been following it.”
“Hep got his truck?”
“Think Hep walked somewhere?”
“Them firemen ought to be gone from that lounge,” Walt said. “Think we might find something in them cinders?”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know. Stuff? A radio or something?”
Philadelphia and the soldier kissed on a dark boardwalk, the din of the party behind them. Light from the screen flecked Lonnie’s eyes. He tipped the brim of Walt’s hat.
“Hep,” he called down the aisle. “We gots to go.”
The lounge’s sign was lightless. The girls and Calvin kept watch from the truck. Walt wore his new usher’s jacket, strolling the burnt and dripping shadows. Everything reeked of smoke, everything wet and black. In the middle of the rubble were a table and chairs, bright orange like poppies in a cave. Walt sat at the table expecting to feel a change, a secret breeze. But it was just a chair, damp in its seat, and he couldn’t figure why some things burned while others were spared.
In one corner, Hep and Lonnie were inspecting a heap that was once a jukebox. Hep raised a record, trying to read its label by the moonlight. Smoke grimed the night, the moon low and muzzy.
Walt clambered over bricks, joists, the remnants of an old mahogany bar. An icebox had fallen sideways. He tugged open its door to an acrid spill of alcohol. Picking through the refuse, he found an intact bottle of vodka, a bomb-shaped jug of berry liqueur.
Then Lonnie was calling from down by the lanes, where he and Hep struggled lifting a shelf fallen facedown. Walt hurried over, set aside the booze, and grabbed and pulled until the shelf stood upright. Hidden beneath were the wet shining spheres of bowling balls.
Hep lifted a ball. “What we gonna do with ’em?”
Lonnie held a ball swirled blue and white and melted flat on one side. He squinted, peering into its finger holes. “You hear about that girl from Selma?”
“The one that boy Elmer keeps talking up?” Hep asked. “The one what’s gonna be in the movies?”
“She singing up in the city?”
“At that pageant?”
“That’s tonight, ain’t it?”
“We ain’t goin’ to no goddamn pageant.”
“Hell no,” said Lonnie, sliding his fingers into the ball. “We goin’ to Selma.”
Lonnie and Walt rode in the truck bed with the bowling balls. The back roads were pocked, and the balls caromed against the sidewalls. Walt and Lonnie laughed, warding them off with their boot heels. Then Hep turned onto Old Saints Highway, and the balls settled into a languid clatter.
“Lonnie?” Walt said.
Lonnie sat beside him, the vodka in his lap, his eyes shut to the night. “Yep?”
“When we goin’ out west?”
Lonnie’s eyes didn’t open, but he uncapped the bottle. “Hell if I know.”
“You said we would when I got old enough. Said one of these times we’d hop a freight and get on out of here.”
Lonnie drank, saying nothing.
Walt glanced through the cab’s back window. Calvin lay sucking his fingers, asleep in his mama’s lap. “I ain’t a kid no more.”
Lonnie’s eyes opened. He wiped the bottle on his sleeve, handed it to Walt. “Won’t be no different out there, kid. Out west you ain’t got no people to look after you. I’ll fight to the bone for you. But not out there. Ain’t nobody to fight for you out there.”
Vodka burned down Walt’s throat. His eyes watered. “All I ever think about is hopping that freight.”
Lonnie took back the bottle. “Ever hear of an animal what chews off its leg to get free from a trap?” He set the bottle against his lips. “That’s what it’s like to try and leave this place. Just ask Hep if my word don’t rate.”
The road did not buckle or sway, the highway lines unfurling like ropes tethered to town. “I ain’t gonna live in no trap,” Walt said. “I’m gonna be gone.”
“Can’t run with but one leg, kid.”
Lonnie hooked his arm around Walt’s neck and pulled him to lie against his chest. Walt’s head rested over his brother’s heart, and he watched the dark fields pass, the bowling balls buzzing, tires humming over the pavement.
They trolled between rows of lightless homes, then the road opened onto the square. Three sides were shops with common walls and blond brick facades. Storefront windows gathered moonlight. In the center was a circle of flowers surrounding a copper statue of a soldier, weathered green and glowing like a spirit. They drove past it all and turned up a hill, parking at the crest, the Macy Funeral Home with its white stone belfry shining to the east.
Walt’s mind was clear but his legs were drunk. Lonnie unlatched the tailgate. He wiped a ball clean and walked to the middle of the road. They left Calvin sleeping in the cab, the girls and Hep stinking of berry liqueur.
The asphalt gleamed into the square. Lonnie rushed forward and heaved. The ball hopped, bounding higher, accruing velocity, and at the base of the hill slammed square into the passenger door of a long black Chevy.
The others laughed and howled. Walt worried, waiting for a light to turn on in the town.
“It’s yours, kid,” Lonnie said to Walt. “For your birthday. What you gonna call it?”
“Call what?”
“Your town. Ain’t no one here but us.”
“Where they at?”
“Up in the city.”
“The whole town?”
“Don’t take much for these yokels.”
Walt surveyed in all directions. “That girl must sing like an angel.”
“I heard she sang so pretty it made a man mess his pants,” Frances said. “Didn’t want to miss a note of her singing and just let loose right there in the hall.”
“Hep sings better than that girl,” Lonnie said. “Hep’s singing’ll make you weep.”
“Bet that man who shit his pants did some weeping.” Frances laughed.
Lonnie scowled. “What the hell you know about anything?”
“I know that girl’s goin’ off to California to be in the movies, and you and Hep ain’t never gonna leave that freight yard and ain’t never gonna be nothing.”
“Ain’t no girl,” Lonnie said. “Ain’t no freight yard. No Selma. No California. It’s all gone. No pageant, no city, no nothing. Ain’t nobody but us. We’s the only ones left in the whole goddamn world.” He glanced over at Walt. “It’s your world, brother,” he said. “Now what you gonna call it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Call it how you feel.”
Walt peered out over the hot empty land. “Fort Apache,” he finally said. “Let’s call it Fort Apache.”
Walt’s ball knocked a puff of brick grain from the First National Bank. Frances shoved her ball from between her legs, and it veered off into the ditch weeds. Hep threw with a hop and a high arm finish and broke the glass of a barber pole, and Georgette’s ball launched from a gutter to clang against the statue of the soldier.
In a lull between crashes, Walt sat in the truck beside Calvin, the boy asleep with a ball clutched to his chest, his eyes flitting beneath their lids. Walt couldn’t remember what he’d dreamt as a child. But he knew he could never go back to sleeping. Could never be a child again. His whole life now he’d be awake to feelings a child couldn’t know.
He covered the boy with his usher’s jacket, then pulled from his overalls the photo of Shirley Temple. Her smiling face was perfect. Perfectly asleep. Walt wished he’d never seen her as Philadelphia, kissing soldiers. He laid the photo beside Calvin’s cheek.
Sleep, child, he thought, and don’t never wake up.
Walt threw ball after ball, knocked the slats off a wooden bench, cracked veins in the market’s window, detonated a hubcap off the Chevy’s wheel. Glass shrapnel glinted on the sidewalks. Balls dotted the square like a town bombarded by cannon.
Soon the truck bed was empty. Without waking the boy, Lonnie eased the last ball from Calvin’s arms. It shone like black glass, a gold star etched around the finger holes.
“Hollywood special,” Lonnie said, offering it to Walt.
Walt sank his fingers through the star. He bolted forward and hurled, and shortly came the clatter of glass from the dress shop window in the rear of the square. Hep yawped like a cowboy. Lonnie tore down the hill, and Walt followed, howling, his arms swimming, and Lonnie was far ahead and plucked a ball from a gutter and heaved it through the barbershop’s door. Then the road flattened and Walt lost his feet and flopped into the flower beds at the base of the copper soldier.
Walt watched Georgette run by, hair loose in her face. She chucked a ball off her thigh and through the bakery’s window. Hep climbed onto the hood of a Buick, slammed a ball against its roof. The post office windows were laced with wire and Frances tossed the same ball, again and again, until the glass folded like a frozen blanket.
Walt took his feet. A copper face, bearded and stern, glowered above him. The soldier did not carry a rifle, but instead an enormous book lay open in its hands. Lonnie called for Walt from inside the dress shop. Walt stared up into the soldier’s face. Beneath a short-billed cap its eyes blazed, transfixed on the book. Walt grabbed an unbending arm and lifted himself. But the pages were unreadable, weathered smooth and corroded. He ran his fingers over the cool metal, musing how someday this statue would be gone, and all these buildings and all these roads.
The square was momentarily still. Then Lonnie hollered his name again, and Walt dropped to the ground and raced across the road and the sidewalk of shattered glass.
Inside the dress shop, Lonnie was nude but for a white bonnet, strutting with a hand on his hip and Frances on his arm in a pink fringed dress. Hep skipped ahead of them, tossing panties as a flower girl would petals. Georgette swayed naked before a trifold mirror, slow-dancing. Then Frances was beside Walt, laughing, saying she needed a bridesmaid, pulling a dress over his head. Her laughter was warm but Walt didn’t laugh and off came his fedora.
She tossed it to Lonnie and stretched a wig over Walt’s skull. Lonnie ran with the fedora, chasing Georgette. She shrieked, pale breasts bobbing, then Frances’s face was in front of Walt’s saying, “You’re so beautiful, Walt,” and Walt didn’t want Georgette to wear his hat and ran after Lonnie through the racks of dresses.
Clothes smacked Walt’s shoulders and face. He ran desperate but couldn’t catch his brother, on through the back and toward the front washed in milky moonlight. Glass crunched beneath Walt’s boots and he suddenly felt light-headed, as if he might be sick. He bent at the waist, gasping.
When he stood again he faced the mirror. Walt saw himself in triplicate, in this wig blond and curled in a popular style. He regarded his dirty face in the faintly reflected light, his furrowed brow. He looked older, looked like a film star.
Then Hep stood behind him. He lifted off the wig, slapped the fedora onto Walt’s head. Light flashed in the back and Hep looked away. Walt looked, too, to see Lonnie running, yelping, twirling a burning dress above his head. Its hem threw sparks, the flames brighter with each turn. Walt turned again to his reflection, saw Hep gazing solemnly at him. Their eyes held each other in the mirror.
Hep slugged Walt’s shoulder. “Wanna ring the bell?”
They ran whooping across the square, past the soldier and the bank and the ruined Chevy. Climbing the hill, Walt shed the frock and hurled it into the weeds. He followed Hep through a ditch and the funeral home’s yard to stand beneath a dark window. Palms on the pane, Hep pushed and the window lifted.
“Give me a boost,” he said.
Walt clasped his fingers, and Hep stepped into them and climbed through the window.
Walt grabbed the sill, pulled himself up. He tumbled inside and into Hep, knocking him down. Hep groaned and then was on Walt, and they rose laughing, knocking aside folding chairs, shoving, tackling each other.
They found stairs leading up and took them. Hep grabbed Walt in a headlock, and Walt laughed, trying to keep his feet. Then came another flight of stairs, narrow and lightless. They climbed blindly, Walt clutching the back of Hep’s belt. Then Hep was saying
hold it, hold it.
After some fumbling, a door swung open, and sterling light flooded the stairwell.
They scampered into the belfry, an octagonal room open to the night. In the middle hung an enormous glowing bell, its metal reflecting the moonlight. Hep was sweating. His smile had vanished, his eyes searching Walt’s face as he unbuttoned his shirt.
Hep’s chest was wormed with scars. Drawn above the palpitations of his actual heart was a blue ink tattoo of a heart—not a cartoon heart, but an organ twisted and muscular, arteries jutting like snakes strangling a stone. He grasped Walt’s arm and lurched to the sill and Walt thought they might jump, was relieved when Hep stopped short.
“Ain’t it like a movie?” Hep said, softly.
They were eye level with the moon, brightly haloed. A silver lacquer lay over the town’s many roofs.
“Ever feel like your mind’s set funny?” Hep said. “Like ain’t a person in the world could understand you? I think I’m crazy. I really think I must be.” Walt watched Hep’s face, flushed in mercurial light. “Sometimes I wish I was in the movies,” he said. “Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.”