Butcher's Moon

The Internal Revenue man made an impatient gesture. “That isn’t an answer,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Grofield said. “Almost always.”

“You must have a source of income,” the Internal Revenue man said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Grofield said. “In fact, I’d say it’s imperative.”

The office had its door at the moment; Grofield’s wife, Mary, opened it and said, “Phone, Alan.”

Grofield glanced at the phone on his desk. It was an illegal extension from the box-office phone, which he’d put in himself to avoid the monthly charges. “Right,” he said.

“At the house,” she said.

“Oh.”

Since the house phone was also an illegal extension from the box office, meaning that even if Mary had answered at the house he could still pick up this one and have his conversation here, her phrase suggested the caller was somebody he’d want to talk to in private. He stood up, therefore, giving the Internal Revenue man a bright smile and saying, “You will excuse me, won’t you?”

“We’ll want to see your books again,” the Internal Revenue man said, showing bad temper.

“God knows I don’t,” Grofield said, and left the office. Mary walked with him, and as he passed the head of the aisle he looked down toward the stage to where two actors in bathing suits were attacking a set with hammers. Frowning, he stopped and said, “What are they taking it down for?”

“They’re putting it up,” Mary said.

“Oh.”

The two of them walked outside, and Grofield stood for a moment on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs, looking out over the wooded hills of Mead Grove, Indiana. The only sign of human habitation in this direction was the gravel parking lot. The formerly gravel parking lot, lately turning to mud. “We need more gravel,” Grofield said.

”We need more everything,” Mary said. “That was Parker on the phone.”

“Ho ho,” Grofield said. “Maybe he has more gravel.”

“That would be a blessing,” Mary said. She’d played three consecutive landladies in three consecutive rustic comedies recently and hadn’t yet gotten rid of the speech habits.

Grofield trotted down the steps and went around the side of the barn toward the farmhouse. The words MEAD GROVE THEATER were stretched in giant white letters along the side of the barn facing the county road. There was no traffic at the moment to see it.

Sometime in the late forties some unremembered genius had first decided to convert this old barn to a summer theater, tucked away here in this remote corner of Indiana. He’d put in a stage at one end, and had arranged seating for an audience on a series of platforms, with the first four rows of seats on the original barn floor, the next four on a platform two steps up, the next four two more steps up, and so on, until he had twenty-four rows of ten seats each, with a center aisle. Two hundred forty seats, and rarely had anybody seen them all full at once.

The problem was, this was not the best place in America for a summer theater. Mead Grove was no big city; in fact, there is no big city in Indiana, with the doubtful exception of Indianapolis, and Mead Grove was in any event too far away from Indianapolis to take advantage of it. There was no college in or near Mead Grove, no well-known tourist attraction nearby, no reason at all for outsiders to come into the area and discover the existence of its local summer theater.

Which left, as potential customers, the citizens of Mead Grove and the other half-dozen towns in the general vicinity, plus the people on the farms in between. Most of them were a little baffled by the need for a live theater anyway, in a world with TV, and doubted it could show them anything they wanted to see. If it weren’t for schoolteachers and the wives of doctors, there wouldn’t have been any audience at all.

The original converter of the barn to a theater had only lasted a season or two before going broke and leaving the area and his debts behind. For the next twenty years the barn/theater had had a checkered and not very successful career; had been a barn again for a little while, had been a movie house for even less of a while, had been a warehouse full of bicycle parts, and had several times been a financially disastrous summer theater.

It had been nothing at all five years ago, when Alan Grofield had come upon the place. He’d been flush at the moment, from a casino robbery he’d done with Parker, and he’d bought the place outright, full cash, for the barn and twelve acres and two small farmhouses on the other side of the road. His theater was now in its fifth season, was beginning to get a small reputation in the theater world, and had never made a dime.

Well, that was all right. Summer theaters always lose money, particularly when an actor starts them and performs as producer, but Grofield had never expected the Mead Grove Theater to support him. He supported it, and had known from the beginning that he would.

The point was, acting wasn’t his living, it was his life. His living was elsewhere, with people like Parker. And it had been a long time since he’d done anything about making a living, not since a supermarket robbery last year outside St. Louis, so he moved across the empty county road at a half-trot, hoping this phone call meant a big easy score that would take the minimum time for the maximum return. Fred Allworth could take over his own parts while he was gone, and Jack . . . His mind full of casting changes, Grofield trotted up the stoop and into the house, full as usual of the racket of resident actors. He went into what had at one time been the dining room but was now his and Mary’s bedroom, and sat down on the bed to take the call.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.” Parker’s voice, as usual, had the tonal variety of a lead pencil.

“Sorry I took so long,” Grofield said. “I was in the theater, with a tax man.”

“Mary told me.”

“The tax man,” Grofield repeated. “What I’m saying is, I’m hoping you’re calling with good news.”

“You remember that time we were together in Tyler?”