The room was full of people, all of a set piece with us—clean but in rough clothes. The women in starched dresses, the men in overalls. There were young people scattered here and there, all drinking Nesbitt’s orange pop. Glennis and Clair waved at somebody and went to sit at the tables while Knute and Louie went to stand near some men at the plank bar.
I knew nobody, but for the moment it didn’t matter. I was watching Louie.
He drank like he ate. A man in the back of the bar—also dressed in bib overalls, although he was wearing a tie with his work shirt—gave Louie and Knute each a tall, dark bottle of beer. Knute took a drink and put his down to speak to a man next to him but Louie stared straight ahead and simply upended the bottle and pushed it in to the back of his throat and drained it, licking the bottle opening dry with his tongue when it was empty.
He set it on the bar and the bartender brought him another one. He did the same. He kept doing this until I felt a tug at my sleeve and turned to see Harris.
“I hate a gooner that will steal a marble from a man...”
He looked some the worse for wear, being scuffed and dirty, and one suspender of his bib had come undone, but he was holding up a large cat’s-eye aggie shooter marble with pride. He dropped the marble in his pocket and moved to the bar to stand next to Louie.
I followed and was going to ask what had happened to the other boy when I saw him come into the room. He was in worse shape than Harris, seemed to be dragging a leg and favoring one arm and was bleeding slightly from the nose, but had about the same amount of dirt on him and moved to stand with some grown-ups and ignored us.
Harris looked up at the bartender and waited, and in a moment he handed us two orange pops. No money changed hands. I never saw any money for anything, beer or pop, pass over the bar and I thought it must be free but Harris corrected me later.
“It’s writ down. Clel’s got him a notebook in back and he writes everything down. I’d like to have half what’s on that notebook—you could own every marble in the world.”
We stood by the end of the bar, not far from Knute and Louie—who were talking horses and crops to the other men at the bar. Or at least Knute was. Louie was drinking beers whole just as fast as Clel the bartender could bring them.
“He’ll pee hisself later,” Harris said, noting that I was watching Louie. “Just comes in the top and goes out the bottom like a pipe...”
Presently three men separated themselves from the rest and without speaking or further ado mounted the platform, picked up the instruments—the smaller of the men hoisting the accordion with a short grunt—and began playing.
It was barely music—sounded more like cats fighting inside a steel drum—but it was very loud and had a steady rhythm, and soon couples were dancing.
Harris ignored the adults and kept watching the back door—or what I took to be the back door—with a steady intensity.
We had gone through our pop and been given new ones, and as soon as Clel handed us our pop he started walking down the bar aimed for that door.
“Come on.” Harris grabbed my arm. “We want to get good seats...”
It was not a back door but the door to a storeroom. I followed Harris in—blinded by more darkness yet—and could vaguely make out a room full of beer crates stacked around the sides. In the middle on a rickety wooden table was an old motion picture projector and on the wall a sheet had been hung.
Harris dragged me to the center of the room and pulled two beer crates up to sit on, directly to the side of the projector, then waited impatiently, holding his pop with both hands, while Clel and a dozen or so other young people came into the room.
In the dim light from the door, Clel went to a box of what seemed to be car batteries on the side of the room and hooked two wires to the terminals with alligator clips. The projector came on and its beam of light hit the sheet with a dazzling glare.
Clel worked in silence while we sat waiting, feeding film from the old reel through the projector with many clicks and jerks, hooking it to the take-up reel.
Then he hit a switch and the projector started up with a noise not unlike the old truck that had brought us to town and on the screen was a picture of Gene Autry riding and shooting.
It would be wrong to call what we were watching a movie. I had been to many films by that time and recognized that there were problems with this one. The credits and probably the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film were gone, lost over years of showing. The picture just jumped into the middle of the story with Gene riding Champ and shooting at somebody, and when the reel ran out—some thirty minutes later—he was still riding Champ and shooting at somebody. Though it was a talking film there was no sound equipment, so it remained silent and any idea of story line from dialogue was lost. The whole film was devoted to Gene riding Champion and shooting at something, with one scene where he played a guitar and sang and another where he jumped off a saloon roof onto Champion and rode away, either escaping some men in the saloon or trying to catch some other men who had run off.
Then the reel ended with the screen going flash white again.
“Damn.” Harris snorted. “I just hate it when it ends that way...”
As if on
