But not men like Myers.
And, in fact, nobody at all for a while now. He'd gotten into another job with Parker, an armored car thing, but it had gone badly and Grofield had come very close to a jail term. Since then, nothing much had happened. Two seasons of stock had drained away most of his savings, and now here he was less than three months from the third season and he just didn't have the money to put the thing together. Even if he stuck with revivals, meaning plays in the public domain that he didn't have to pay an author any performance fee on, there were still expenses; housing and feeding the cast for the summer, and even paying a couple of leads a small salary; publicity, meaning posters and newspaper ads; costumes and furniture rentals and props; and gas and electric and phone bills. The ticket sales weren't going to cover that. If worst came to worst he'd drop down into Kentucky or North Carolina for a week or two of writing paper, but he hated that kind of thing, and avoided it whenever he possibly could. Passing bum checks was no more illegal than knocking over armored cars, but there was a difference that he found important; a check passer is an actor, he uses an actor's talents and methods, but a heavy heister uses different talents entirely. It bothered Grofield to use his acting abilities that way, it seemed somehow degrading.
But now, looking at his theater in the bright light of the first warm sunny day of spring, Grofield made a bitter face and decided that if he didn't hear from anybody with work by the first of May, he'd have to do the check-writing bit for a few days or a week, in order to bankroll the coming season.
As it was, he was running as tight a ship as he could. Both farmhouses were rented out, and he and Mary were living in the theater, sleeping in a bedroom set laid out on a platform rolled into the wings, using the theater john, Mary cooking their meals on the double hotplate in the girls' dressing room down under the stage. By the middle of June, though, the tenants would have to be kicked out of the nearer farmhouse, the one just across the county road, so the cast would have a place to stay.
So he'd write paper, that's all. In a good week, working through two or three states, he could write fifteen or twenty thousand and have enough to last the summer. Sticking to revivals.
'Revivals,' he said aloud. He was disgusted. He shook his head at the empty seats and turned away to go over to where the flats were stored against the rear wall on the side opposite where the door had been rolled back. The flats were in various sizes ranging from three feet wide and eight feet high to five feet wide and twelve feet high, and all were made of muslin attached to a simple frame of one-by-four pine boards. Water-base paint had been used to paint the scenery of last year's shows on the flats, and now they were stacked in no particular order, a jumble of fake walls and doors and windows in different colors and styles and periods.
Grofield began to carry the flats, one by one, over to the opening in the rear wall, and lowered them the six feet to the ground. When he'd moved about ten, he jumped to the ground, carried a flat around to the side of the building, leaned it against the wall, picked up the hose he'd already attached to the faucet out there, and began to hose the flat down.
What he was doing was removing the paint. Muslin is light, but paint is heavy. Any frail girl can carry an unpainted canvas flat, but with three or four coats of paint on it a strong man can barely lift the thing. Grofield, like most thrifty theater operators, removed last year's water-base paint every spring so he could use the old flats again. In addition to the hose, he also had a scrub brush and a ladder, so he could scrub the paint loose after the first hosing. The second hosing usually did the job, though sometimes he had to give a spot or two an extra treatment with the scrub brush and a third stream of water from the hose.
Grofield liked theater work, everything to do with the stage, even simple manual labor like this. He worked along in the bright sun, the soft spring air all around him, the water cold, the paint running down the flats in long streams, and after a while, despite his money troubles, he began to whistle.
2
The car that turned off the blacktop county road into the gravel parking lot beside the theater was a bronze Plymouth with Texas plates. Grofield stood on the ladder with the scrub brush in one hand and the hose in the other and looked at it.
He'd been working an hour now. Seven gray-white flats were lined up along the side wall of the barn, drying; he was working now on the eighth. The ground all around him ran with colors, reds and yellows and whites and blues and greens, all different shades, running together and making new colors, a bright kaleidoscope of color spread out on the ground in colored water, running and flowing every which way through the tough new spring blades of grass. Grofield, too, was varicolored, in his work pants and sneakers and T-shirt, wet and colorful. He stood leaning on the ladder, elbows resting on the top rung, scrub brush in his right hand, hose dribbling in his left, and watched the car angle across the parking lot toward him and finally come to a stop. He waited for the driver to get out and ask directions; what else would this be?
It was Dan Leach. He got out from behind the wheel and called, 'Hello, Grofield, what are you doing?'
'Washing flats,' Grofield said. 'You got good news for me?'
'Could be,' Dan said. 'Come on down off the ladder, lemme show you something.'
Grofield got down off the ladder. 'What I want to know is, do you have a job for me. Better than that Myers thing, I mean. Did you ever find him?'
'I'll tell you all about it.' Dan looked around. 'How private are we here?'
'Nobody can hear us.'
'What about seeing us?'
Grofield nodded at the farmhouse across the county road. 'There's people home over there.'
'You know any place private?'
Grofield looked at him. 'What for?'
'I wanna show you something. Come on, let's take a ride.'
Grofield looked at his wet hands, down at his wet clothes, back at the flats. 'Is this something real, Dan? What's the big secret?'
'I don't want to open the trunk where anybody else can see us,' Dan said. 'You know me, Grofield, I don't make jokes.'
'That's right,' Grofield said. 'My clothes are a mess, you know. You want me in the car, or should I go change?'
