This New and Poisonous Air (5 page)

 

In the lobby, May Avalon reclined, eyes buried in blue makeup, listening to the cheerful voices drifting from her record player. Her pale fingers played absently against the seam of her nylon pants.

“Something happened to my sister,” David said breathlessly, having run the length of the aisle and burst into the lobby.

With effort, May roused herself, white braids brushing the shoulders of her uniform blouse. “What did you
say?”

“Kitty, my sister,” he said. “She got up and walked away.”

May attempted a smile. “Kitty’s quite an old-fashioned named isn’t it? Maybe the movie didn’t agree with her. These sorts are for men. We have a woman’s story coming next week.”

He took off his baseball cap and folded the brim, trying in earnest to stay calm. “She didn’t leave, ma’am. She went through that door under the screen and now she’s locked in.”

Her smile became a colorless line. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am,” he said.

“It usually only happens if they’re alone,” she said.

“Happens?”

May lifted a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from the ticket console and put them carefully on her nose, studying David’s damp blond hair. “Do I know you? ” she said.

He shrugged. “You’ve been selling me tickets all my life. Me and Kitty.”

Taking off her glasses, she sighed. “That makes you no different than the rest of them, I suppose. But I can see you care about your sister. She must be a darling.”

“The rest of who, lady? What are you talking about? ”

“My name is May, dear,” she said. “It’s better if you call me by my name.”

He took a deep breath. “Look, May, my sister is locked behind the door under the screen. She
is
a . . . darling, I guess. But she’s sad tonight because of a stupid thing that happened with some guy. Something that shouldn’t bother her because so many people at school are just in love with her. I just need you to unlock the door so I can get her out
and take her home. Please. May.”

The old woman lifted the needle from the turning record, bringing silence to the lobby. “I can try,” she said, pulling a blue sweater from the back of her chair. “For you, because you remind me of someone I knew once. Another darling.”

David didn’t bother to ask what she meant and instead simply followed her into the cold auditorium, down the darkened aisle to the door. She put a key from the ring around her wrist into the lock and whispered, “The manager doesn’t like anyone going up here. We’ve had some problems.” The smell that wafted from the space beyond was intensely sweet, unlike anything David had ever experienced—perfume from another place. And as they ascended the wooden staircase behind the door, he whispered, “Is this where you keep all the movie candy or something?”

“No, dear,” May said. “We keep that in the basement. This area isn’t for storage.”

They arrived at a long empty room made of pinewood planks, and it took David a moment to realize that he was looking at a portion of the old vaudeville stage that his grandfather had told him about, complete with rusted footlights and a hinged trapdoor. Abandoned flats leaned against one wall—trees cut from plywood, the circle of a lover’s moon hung from a wire, and finally there was a wooden city, hastily painted yet still evocative—perhaps all part of some long-forgotten act. The city drew David’s attention. Walled and turreted like a medieval fortress, its streets and bridges made little sense, wandering until they eventually disappeared. People could get lost on streets like those, especially if they didn’t know their way. The city was empty—no painted version of Kitty there. He pulled his attention
away from it and pointed at the trapdoor that was wide enough to raise a small piano. “Could she have fallen down there? ” he asked.

“Was your sister the clumsy sort?” May asked, as she unwound a tattered rope from a hook and allowed the trapdoor to drop, revealing a dark pit, from which rose another potent blast of candied air. David knelt beside the hole and called his sister’s name, and when no one answered, he said, “We have to get some light. Maybe she can’t talk because she’s hurt.”

“She’s not,” May said.

He looked at her sharply.

“She isn’t down there, dear, and she isn’t coming back,” she continued. “I should have told you that before, but part of me just wanted to see you on this stage. They never come back. God knows I’ve looked for my own in here.”

“Your own?”

“Common,” she said, reaching out her long arms to David. In the light that seeped through the spaces between the wooden planks, May could have been any age—maybe a girl, looking into another boy’s eyes, years ago.

 

Our town doctor had once requested that Common Woolbrink sit for an examination so that he might learn the secrets of the boy’s agility. It was at this examination that May Avalon met the handsome young buck dancer, as she was acting as an assistant to the nurse, her braids then as dark as her eyes, and the red stripes of her uniform so bright they could have been woven from flame. She was an intelligent girl and knew when to smile. May and Common chatted while he sat on the doctor’s table, and afterward he invited her to the drugstore for a soda. At the chrome counter of the soda fountain, he told her the real secret to moving so fast—the one he’d never tell
any doctor—he drank a daily dose of vegetable juice infused with a cutting from a mysterious and nameless root, provided to him by a Chinaman in St. Louis. When May pressed him to show her the root, he finally relented, producing a piece of it, which he kept in his pocket as a kind of talisman. The sight of Common Woolbrink holding the shriveled, rust-colored knob with so much reverence was enough to make May choke on her soda. She put the glass carefully on the counter, folded her hands and said that his magic root was nothing but a regular piece of ginger, and she could make him a cake of it for Christmas if he liked and then he could dance even faster.

We don’t know the boy’s response because the soda jerk who’d recorded the conversation until that point moved away so as not to appear to be spying, but if Woolbrink acted in character, he probably made up a lie to cover his embarrassment. Roy Elkhart knew Common was a liar, just as our grandparents did. A boy so bombastic couldn’t always tell the truth. It soon became clear that May liked to hear Common’s lies almost as much as he liked to tell them. According to him, he’d traveled halfway around the world, performing in English taverns, German cabarets, and even the floating show houses of Venice. May knew that a boy too poor to buy a suit that fit hadn’t really traveled the world, but she stopped calling Common’s bluffs and simply learned to revel in the details of his imagination. We know little of their relationship’s progression, only that they were seen together when Common was in town and that May eventually wore his ring, a boyish bit of junk shop glamour in the form of an oversized diamond made of sugar that glittered madly in the sun.

In matters of love, the element least understood by outsiders often provides the glue, and there was, in fact, a final mystery to their story, a detail we could
only see dimly. Common Woolbrink once whispered a secret so awful in May’s ear that she didn’t speak to him for nearly three weeks, only returning after a succession of bouquets and promises that he would never tell such a lie again. Apparently he’d gone too far with one of his confabulations, confessing to have traveled beyond the fair stages of Europe. Dancing, he said, was good for more than mere entertainment, and if the right dancer moved backward in a certain way, he could open doors to another place where everything was backward. Smoke was sucked into chimneys. Men returned home before leaving for work. And food was spat onto plates. Everyone there got younger instead of older. When May herself talked to him there, for she existed in that world just as everyone had a double, her teeth were actually on the outside of her mouth. Kissing her, he said, was like kissing a bed of stones.

May began to watch Common for any sign that his habitual lying was an expression of some mental infirmity, but he never spoke of the backward place or anything like it again. He was courteous and jovial. The lies he told were sweet, not frightening, and when he kissed her, he acted as though he had no memory of their stony kisses in that other world. It was only as he lay on the steps of the Orpheum, red coat darkened with redder blood, that he spoke of it again. Our grandparents crowded around the pair, and the sky must have looked to Common like a dome supported by their curious faces, with May’s own hung closest, a beautiful child in mourning. At a safe distance, some of the stronger men held Roy Elkhart on the ground, and he howled for his hunting knife to be returned. People had to lean in close to hear Common say, “I left them open, May. Every single door is standing wide in there.”

“Don’t make things up,” she whispered. “There’s not
time for that.”

He grimaced, one hand fluttering to touch her wrist. “If I don’t shut them, no one will. People are going to fall.”

May forced herself not to scream. This wasn’t the ending she’d pictured. This wasn’t the way to end. When she looked at blond David Miller on that dimly lit stage, some sixty years after Common was buried, she couldn’t muster such control. She understood the clock-springs of love were more fragile than a young girl could have ever known. “You’re younger by a few years,” she whispered to David Miller, “but that’s what happens there isn’t it? You told me so. People age backward. I didn’t believe you. I thought you were lying. But you’re him.”

David started to say he didn’t know what she was talking about, but it was already too late. May was pulling him close. “We’ll go through the door ourselves,” she said. “I can be young again too, away from this place. I won’t mind about your teeth. I promise I won’t.” And then she drew close to him, searching for some reassurance that he was who she wanted him to be—her beautiful liar without his red suit.

David Miller ran down the wooden staircase and burst through the black door. He would call his parents, and they would call the police, and all of them would call for Kitty until they’d lost their breath. They would question May, trying to understand the things she’d said that night, but the old woman would give them no straight answers, feigning confusion and turning up the volume on her record player. And as the days went by without any sign of Kitty, David Miller would come to believe that if he wanted his sister back, he’d have to take matters in hand.

When he finally pulled a piece of loose concrete from the steps outside the Orpheum and threw it at one of the upright crocodiles that flanked the entrance, only a
few of us were there to see. He threw a second stone that shattered the glass poster case, and more of us came spilling from stores and houses to watch the boy. A few of us tried to stop him at first but only halfheartedly, knowing what had to be done. We no longer wanted to be the sort of thing that could not act. The kind of body that deserves a funeral every night.

It took our strongest backs to do the initial work, breaking down the Orpheum’s glass doors, ripping the ornaments from the marquee, but by the end, even the weakest among us were able to get some of the work done, smashing the windows of the ticket booth and causing pink tickets to spiral onto the ground, destroying the concession stand, scattering popcorn and bright candy. We broke the decorative mirrors, pulled down the plastic vines, and threw May Avalon’s record player against the pipe organ. But it was David Miller, T-shirt streaked and chest heaving, who actually found the old ticket seller, cowering on her knees in a row of empty seats. He pulled May to her feet and looked into her frightened face, covered with the same gray dust that churned in the air. “Now you tell me,” he said, voice breaking. “You tell me, you old witch, without any of your crazy talk, where my sister is. You know, don’t you? You’ve known all along.”

Before she could answer, one of us struck her in the shoulder with a metal pipe, and as she was falling, another drove a piece of molding against her temple. If we were giving a confession, perhaps we would say we did this to test the flesh of the Orpheum against the flesh of the woman. Or maybe we would tell the truth, that we’d always hated May Avalon for knowing things we didn’t. David watched her fall, then stood over her sprawled and unmoving body. He seemed to hesitate as she groped feebly with one hand to touch his shoe, not a dancing shoe at all, and finally
with all his strength, David Miller kicked the old woman in the stomach. She didn’t make a sound, and we had to look away from the terrible expression on her face.

Our razing of the Orpheum made the news as far away as Chicago, and when they saw pictures of what we’d done, they thought the whole town had lost its mind. Mob rule, they called it. Psychologists were interviewed and said our actions could very well be the product of the modern nihilism fed by the movies themselves. No outsider could understand our motivations though, nor could they know that after we’d finished our job, when many of us had been hauled off to bleach-smelling cots in the nearby jail, we shared a dream.

In the dream, we saw Kitty Miller injured and dragging her body, hand over fist, down a country road outside of town. A flat moon hung in the sky, nothing but a stage prop, and the trees at the sides of the road were the sketches of an untrained artist. Kitty was no longer just a girl. Her pretty cheeks were made of brick and mortar, her eyes as white as screens. Even her once lush hair looked more like the old birds’ nests that sprouted from beneath the Orpheum’s marquee.

In the distance stood a walled city, hastily painted, and on the shining streets of that city were the missing—Lon Stellmacher and the girl who came on the bus and the young man who wanted to be in the movies. There were so many more whom we didn’t know, those who’d come before our time. And at the very head of the crowd was a blond boy dressed in a top hat and red tuxedo jacket, too tight around the shoulders. His face was a lamp, his eyebrows arched and white. He watched our girl approach and seemed to appraise us. We, who could no longer dress ourselves in the chilly air of our Orpheum, who could only watch as he gathered Kitty Miller in his arms. Common
Woolbrink gave us a final warning glance before turning on his heel and pulling shut the tall wooden gate of the city, leaving us to darkness. Knowing that this, after all, was what we’d wanted.