How High the Moon (6 page)

She pulled one dime out, like that’s all she could find, and put it in my hand. “Well, here. Now you can each get one. Go on now,” she said as Ralph’s taxi rounded the corner.

Charlie and me got two Orange Crushes from the vending machine butted up against The Pop Shop, and man oh man, did it taste good, all fruity and cold and fizzly on my tongue. I took a long swig and was about to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand like I always did, but stopped myself. “Did I just smear my lipstick from the bottle?” I asked Charlie. He shook his head.

“Hey, we should walk over to the theater and see what’s playing,” I said. Charlie glanced toward the direction of our houses, like he thought we should head back there instead, but then he followed me.

“The Starlight Theater,” I began, as we headed over toward Bloom Avenue, Mill Town’s main street. “Now, there’s a place with more magic than Houdini! It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside? Oh man! The walls were made to look like a castle, and there’s tall pillars with gold trim—probably
real
gold, too—clinging to them. And balcony boxes with red drapes. It has eleven hundred seats, wood ones with red velvet butt and back cushions.

“With all that splendor alone, the Starlight Theater would be special enough, but those fancy things aren’t nothing compared with the ceiling. I’ll tell you, Charlie, not even God Himself ever created a night sky as grand as the one in there.”

My stomach rumbled and I started thinking about the candy they sold at the Starlight, and how me and Charlie should have shared one pop, then bought candy with the other dime. I suppose it was thinking about candy, and walking with Charlie, that had
me suddenly singing the Good & Plenty jingle about Choo Choo Charlie. Whatever it was, it made Charlie perk right up. “You like music, or just Good and Plenty?” I asked.

“Both,” he said. “But music best.”

“Me, too. Do you sing?” I was hoping he’d say yes, because I needed someone to practice singing harmony with. But he said no. Shucks.

When we reached the Starlight, there was a movie poster in the
NOW PLAYING
slot, with two cartoon dogs sitting at a restaurant table slurping spaghetti noodles from one plate. “Hot dog, Charlie! Look at that!”

Charlie looked up, his empty pop bottle dangling from his pudgy hand. “Walt Dizzies’s Lady and the Tamp… Tramp”—leading me to believe that he did even less schoolwork than me.

“Wow, Charlie,” I said, “we gotta see this one!”

I shouted to a man walking down the street, “Hey mister, you got the time?” He scooted his jacket sleeve up to look at his watch and said, “Twelve fifty-seven.”

“That’s grown-ups for you, Charlie,” I said. “Always giving the time like that so you have to count up to the next tens, then picture the face of a clock to know what time it
really
is.” Which is exactly what I had to do. I grabbed Charlie’s arm. “Come on!” I told him. “Fast! Mr. Morgan comes around one o’clock.”

When we got to the alley, there was no sign of Mr. Morgan, but I knew it didn’t take us more than three minutes to cut between the theater and the dress shop, even if Charlie was running at about the same speed as Jolene Jackson jumped peppers.

I drained the last few drops of Orange Crush from my bottle and gave it a toss up into the dumpster, scattering the flies. I told Charlie to do the same. He couldn’t throw any better than he could read, though, so his bottle clanked against the metal side and crashed to the pavement. “I ain’t feeling so good,” he said, like he was trying to blame his toss on something besides his wimpy arm. “Must be from the pop.”

“Well, you guzzled it like a pig,” I told him as I sat down on one of the empty crates sitting beside the metal door that only Mr. Morgan and the delivery guys used. I turned another one on end so Charlie could sit down, too. “It’s just from the fizz,” I told him. “Burp and you’ll feel better.” Charlie didn’t know how to make himself burp, so I showed him how to swallow air and burp it back up. “Joey Jackson showed me that trick. He knows how to do all sorts of cool things.” I burped a big one. Charlie laughed, so I did it again, my loudest ever, and he laughed all the harder.

Charlie’s burps were about the size of a pimple, which made me laugh until I snorted, and pretty soon we were doing nothing but burping and cracking each other up. That’s when Mr. Morgan swung around the corner and started down the alley. “There he is,” I told Charlie. “Come on!”

Mr. Morgan’s eyes got buggy when he got up close enough to see me good. “What you got on your face there, Teaspoon?” he asked. I explained as quickly as I could, because I wanted to get to the important question. Mr. Morgan didn’t let me, though. Not until he told me that respectable little girls didn’t paint their faces. I reminded him that I wasn’t respectable anyway. Mr. Morgan looked at Charlie then, wincing, like he thought maybe the orange on Charlie’s lips might be lipstick, so I set him straight on that one.

Mr. Morgan didn’t look too happy when I asked him if me and Charlie could sneak in to see the Disney cartoon. And I knew why. He told me once that I couldn’t tell a soul that he let me in for free, because if Mrs. Bloom ever found out, he’d get the ax.

“It’s okay, Mr. Morgan,” I said. “Charlie’s the only person I’ve ever, ever told. Cross my heart. But Charlie’s not going to tell a soul because he doesn’t talk. I’m not kidding. You can’t get a word out of him for nothing. Watch…” I turned to Charlie. “Say something, Charlie.”

“What do you want me to say?” Charlie asked, like he didn’t have a brain in his round, scabby head. I jabbed him in the gut with my volcano-cracked elbow, and he grunted.

“Mr. Morgan,” I said, “Charlie’s dad is in jail, and his ma is in heaven. Now he’s living with Mrs. Fry, his great-grandma. And although she’s real nice, it can’t be much fun living with an old lady who doesn’t do nothing but sew and knit and turn channels on her TV looking for a love story.

“Look at him once, Mr. Morgan. Ain’t he the most pathetic thing you ever saw in your life, with his head all gouged up like that and not a friend in the world but me, and I’m not even his friend? This is a good movie for kids, not like that
East of Eden
or
Giant
you said you’d never have let me watch if you’d seen them first. Charlie’s never going to get to see a movie at the Starlight unless he gets snuck in, same as me. Ain’t that a shame? And he’s only eight years old, so he’s got to wait four whole years before he’s old enough to get in without an adult. Who knows if he’ll even be here by then. His dad could get springed from the clink and come get him, or his grandma might get cured of her rheumatoid and ask for him back… you never know. I’ve only got to wait two more years, though, so if it’s that you don’t want to let
two
kids in for free because you think that’s doubling the chances of getting the ax, then let Charlie go in my place and I’ll wait for him out here.”

Charlie looked horrified when I said that, like he thought I meant it, even though the truth of the matter was, if Mr. Morgan was only going to let one of us inside, then it was going to be me.

Mr. Morgan sighed. “Just this one time,” he said. “And you two be quiet in there, or I’ll have your hides—right after Mrs. Bloom has mine.” Then he slipped inside to see if the coast was clear.

The second Mr. Morgan disappeared, Charlie turned to me. “I don’t feel good again,” he said. And for sure, he didn’t look good. His face was as pale as popcorn despite of the spatters of butter-colored freckles. I told him to burp again and he’d feel better, but did he listen?

“What if we get caught?” Charlie said. “Then all three of us are gonna be in big trouble.”

“Nobody is even in the building yet, Charlie, and we’ll be watching from the catwalk. Nobody goes up there but for Mr. Morgan
when a light needs changing. I’ve been doing this forever and I’ve never gotten caught. I don’t plan to, either.”

“But we told Grandma G that we were just walking down the street. We said we’d be right back.”

“She won’t even know how long you’ve been gone,” I said. “She’s always asking Teddy for the right time because that grandfather clock of hers keeps losing it. According to that old thing, it will probably look like we’ve only been gone for ten minutes.”

Luckily, Charlie didn’t have time to think up more reasons why he should be a worrywart, because Mr. Morgan opened the door. He didn’t say anything. He just poked his head out, looked up and down the alley, then nodded when he saw that the coast was clear.

Charlie almost fell over when he got inside because the place was midnight-dark and there was a stack of candy boxes lined up just inside the door. I steadied him while Mr. Morgan clicked a switch to give us at least enough light to see where we were going.

Once Charlie’s eyes adjusted, his Orange Crush mouth opened and his eyes were sparkling so bright they would have made mine water if I’d had a cold and they were dripping to begin with. I gave him the
shush
sign, even though who would have blamed him if he’d shouted out
Wow!
at the top of his lungs, right then and there.

“Look up there, Charlie,” I whispered, pointing to the sky above the top edges of the castle and stretching high above our heads. The ceiling was forty-five feet high. Cobalt-blue, and dark even when lit with thousands of twinkling lightbulb stars.

The door that would lead us up to the catwalk was across from the lobby. Not the front lobby, with its dangling chandelier as big as a Volkswagen Beetle, but the lobby where the bathrooms and two concession stands were lined up. That meant that we didn’t have a wall to hide us, and had to crouch down between the first and second rows of seats and wait while Mr. Morgan hurried up the stairs. When he got to the top of the third tier of seats and slipped inside the projector room, I grabbed Charlie’s arm and ran
him fast past rows of seats, showing him how to crawl on hands and feet like a monkey over the swirly carpet.

Up, up, up the steps we went, past the balcony seats that sat behind a wrought-iron guardrail, getting to our feet only when we reached what Mr. Morgan called the nosebleed seats.

The door was open when we got there, and we slipped inside. “Crouch down, Charlie,” I said, “so if anybody comes into the theater, they don’t spot us through the windows.” The windows in the projector room had no glass, because the projector gave off far more heat than the sun coming through a row of school windows and if the room was closed up, Mr. Zimmerman, the tall skinny guy who ran the projector, would have cooked like a french fry.

Mr. Morgan unlocked the attic door and was about to scoot us up when Charlie moved to the front window and hooked his fingers on the ledge. I went to stand by Charlie and together we peeked out into the dimly lit theater. “This place was built way back in 1928 by some big film company,” I told Charlie. “But they sold it to some other theater outfit, who messed with it and almost ruined it. So Mrs. Bloom bought it after her rich husband croaked, and she fixed it up just how it was when it was first built.

“See those gold light things hanging along the walls? Mr. Morgan said they’re the originals. Mrs. Bloom found them in the basement and had them shined up like new and hung back up.

“She brought back the old ways, too. And at every movie, the show starts with the emcee, Randolph Carter, wearing one of those tuxedo suits, stepping onto the stage under a spotlight with a microphone in his hand, announcing what we’re about to see. The crowd claps, and then that red velvet curtain with the gold tasseled fringe at the wavy bottom rises up so we can see the screen.”

I looked at Charlie to see if he was impressed. He was, so to dazzle him a little more, I told him, “This place cost a whopping six hundred thousand dollars when it was built back in ’28. That’s five zeros, if you don’t know, which is a whole lot.”

Mr. Morgan checked his watch, gave a little sigh, then leaned over and whispered, “Watch this, Charlie.” I grinned because I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t wait to see Charlie’s face when it happened.

Mr. Morgan opened the door to the electricity room—the one I figured would make Teddy as happy as electricity school itself if he saw it, with all those switches and fuse boxes—and stepped inside. There was a flick of a switch and light spilled out of the three giant domes over the balcony seats. Charlie uttered an “Ooooo,” and I grinned, because I knew the magic was just beginning. Another click woke up the lights at the floorboards, and their beams raced up walls the color of beach sand.

And then it happened. Mr. Morgan flicked the switch and brought the cobalt sky to life. “Wowwwwww,” Charlie whispered, his head tipped back. His mouth stayed open but no sound could even get out when Mr. Morgan flipped another switch and lit the stars.

“Ain’t that something, Charlie?” I said in a hush. “Mr. Morgan doesn’t know how many stars are in that sky, but there’s got to be a billion.”

“There’s gotta be,” Charlie whispered back.

We stood there quiet for a few seconds, watching the stars twinkle. Me thinking about how nobody in their right mind could blame Ma for wanting to give up her piano bar playing and becoming a movie star once she saw the inside of the Starlight.

I pointed at the blue behind the top of the castle walls. “Look there, Charlie. Don’t those treetops look real? They aren’t though. They’re just painted ones.”

Suddenly you could hear the faint giggles of girls in the distance, and Mr. Morgan opened the attic door in a rush, then pulled us to it by our jackets. “You tell Charlie the rules,” he whispered as he gave our backs a shove.

“Ow,” Charlie said when the heavy metal door shut behind us with a click, probably clipping his heels. And then, “Uh-oh,” when
he found himself standing with his toes and nose butted up against the black metal steps that went straight up like a ladder. “What’s this?”

“It’s the steps to the attic,” I said, my voice hushed as I grabbed the railing and climbed up a couple of rungs. “Hurry now, or we’ll get caught.” I went up a few more steps then cranked my head around to see if Charlie was following.

He wasn’t.