didn't understand it. And when I did, or thought I did, I still couldn't believe it.
I got the chairs after some pretty chilly looks from the parson, and took them back and set them up. By that time I was so late on the route that a couple of hours more wouldn't make any difference, so I found a little engine trouble, and I'd just got it fixed when the show closed for the night. So I drove her home again.
She didn't hand me fifty cents that night. She said something about not having any change-I knew she had a five-pound sack full-and that she'd pay me some other time.
'I'll settle cheap,' I said, bracing myself. 'Tell me-I mean, can I ask you a question?'
'Certainly you may.'
'Were those chairs you got tonight-were they some you'd loaned to the church?'
'No. I thought I mentioned they were theirs.'
'You mean,' I said, 'you borrowed thirty chairs from a church for a picture show on Sunday night?' She frowned a little, then her face cleared. 'You mean they might have been using them? Oh, but I knew they wouldn't be. That church never has anything approaching a crowd on Sunday night.'
'Well,' I said, 'well, that makes everything just dandy.'
I found out later that her old man, her grandfather rather, had donated the sites for most of the churches in town, so I guess she felt like they owed her a few favors and they apparently felt the same way.
Jesus, what a hell of a way to collect! It was like asking to sleep with a man's wife because he owed you five dollars.
After that, after I really began to notice things, to do something besides set the film cans in the lobby and beat it, I saw her head for one jam after another. And instead of pointing my nose the other way, I'd jump in and try to give her a straight steer.
She had trouble spelled all over her. She'd always have it. And I knew it, and I didn't want it any different- then.
You don't buy a twenty-three-jewel watch and hope to turn it into an alarm clock. I didn't have any idea of ever changing her.
The funniest deal came up one night over some color film.
She was using Simplex projectors with nine hundred-watt Mazdas, and the way the stuff came out on the screen was pretty God- awful. Most of the time you could tell the men from the women characters but they all looked like they'd been brawling in a jelly closet.
'I'm going to make them give me a rebate on this,' she told me. 'I've never seen such a thing in my life!'
'You won't get any rebate,' I said. 'This print is brand new; that's the trouble with it. What little color stuff you've played in the past has been old and those Mazdas would shoot through it. But there's more and more color coming in, and you'll probably be getting a lot of new prints.'
'Oh?' she began to look a little sick. 'What should I do, Joe?'
'Get rid of the lamps and put in carbon arcs. They'll cut through anything.'
'Are they-pretty expensive?'
'Well, it's going to cost you something to convert, sure,' I said. 'But you should be able to squeeze around that. Talk it over with your power-and-light man here. Show him how the arcs will burn more juice and it's to his advantage for you to have them. If you handle it right you might be able to get him to put them in for you.'
She brightened up and said she'd try it.
Two weeks later she was still using lamps, and from what little I could get out of her I knew she'd keep right on using them as far as the manager of the power-and-light company was concerned.
Well, I picked a light night on the route, drove to beat hell for sixteen hours straight, and got back into Stoneville early the next morning. I brushed up a little bit and paid a call on the power company.
Not that I'd expected him to be, but the manager wasn't an imbecile or a boor or a grafter. He was just a pretty pleasant citizen who'd spent a lot of time learning his business. And he wasn't going to let anyone tell him where to get off, even if he had been trotting around town with his tail sticking out at a time when she had six dresses for every day in the week.
I don't know what I said to him. Nothing in particular, I guess. We sat around and talked for thirty minutes or so and went out and had coffee together, and that was all there was to it. Two days later the arcs went in.
I could tell you some more things along the same line, but there wouldn't be too much point to it. The time's better used, probably, in mentioning that she'd found out plenty about me. About all there was to find out.
Her mother was pretty feeble, and I used to inquire about her. So sooner or later, of course, she had to inquire about mine-about my folks. And that brought up the orphanage, and one thing led to another. At first I told her I'd picked up the projectionist trade when I was in the orphanage. But then I remembered telling her I'd skipped out of the joint when I was fourteen, and, rather than look like a liar, I told her the truth.
'Was the reform-the industrial school very bad, Joe?'
'I thought it was at the time,' I said. 'But after I saw a few-'
I told her about the jails.
I told her how it was when you really got down to the bottom of the pot, how you'd get seventy-two hours on vagrancy as soon as you hit a town, how they'd float you back on the road again before you could get a job or even a good meal in your belly.
'I'm never going to go back to stuff like that,' I said. 'They'll have to kill me first.'
'Or?' she said.
'Yeah,' I said. 'It'll be 'or' before they get me down again.'
I didn't have to tell her why I was sticking to what looked like a pretty cheap job, because I knew she knew. Maybe she didn't know any more about business and public relations than a two-year-old. But she could see an angle a mile off, particularly where it concerned me. Most of the time it was like we were looking out the same window.
There were around fifty customers on my route.
They bought product on everything from a two-day to a week's option. I mean it was their right to keep it for a week if they wanted to, which didn't mean that they always would. They just bought a long option to play safe.
Well, suppose they decided to keep it four days or less, then turned it back to me for pick-up. I take it on down the road a ways and give another house a run on it for half price. The house is able to make one more change on the week than it's been making and I pick up a ten spot or so.
I had to be careful. Bicycling film
I never let it get too bad.
Well, there's not a lot more to tell.
Stoneville wasn't important enough as a show town then for the union to bother with, and Elizabeth had a punk boy working in the booth. One of those sharp lads who has to think ten or fifteen minutes before he can decide which end of the match to strike.
His best trick was to get the reel in backward or out of sequence, but he had a lot of others. Missing changeovers. Forgetting to turn the sound on. Hitting the arcs before the film was rolling.
It was the last one that finally got me.
By this time I'd rearranged my route so that Stoneville was my last stop instead of the first one; and I'd stay there overnight before going back to the city-Sure, at a hotel. Where do you think?
Anyway, I was sitting in the house that night when I finally got just as much of that punk as I could take. He'd already run one reel backward. He'd missed two change-overs, and he'd turned the sound on full and forgot about it. That's more boners than a good projectionist will pull in a lifetime, but the punk wasn't through yet. Right after the second miss, he caught the film on fire.
If you've gone to many picture shows, particularly back in the early days of the business, you've seen it happen once or twice. The film will hit the screen like a still. Then it looks like someone is punching a live cigar butt through it from the back.
That's caused by not having the film rolling while the arcs are on. Because those arcs are just like a blast furnace, and nothing burns as easily or faster than film.
