The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen Read Online Free Page B

started. I forgot about everything else until the movie was done. When the jet pilots—Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and the others—were strafing the giant spider, the Russians could have dropped their H-bombs and I wouldn’t have noticed.
    The lights came up and the crowd seemed happy enough. I know I was. The people drifted out and I lost track of the big man and his leather jacket. Miss Curtwood was one of the last to get up and leave.
    She saw me and came across the row. “Where is Mr. Carrigan’s office?”
    “Back down the hall past the women’s restroom, just before the door for the supply room.” I pointed.
    “This is very important,” said Miss Curtwood. “Tell Mr. Carrigan to come to the office in twenty minutes. No more, no less. Do you understand?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Do you or don’t you?” Her voice was hard. Her blue eyes looked like chips of ice.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Then go and tell him.”
    I found Mr. Carrigan out in the lobby holding the door for the last of the patrons. I said to him what Miss Curtwood had told me to say.
    “I see,” said Mr. Carrigan. Then he told me to go home.
    “But what about the cleaning?” I said.
    “Tomorrow will be soon enough.”
    “But the pop,” I said, “will be all hardened on the floor.”
    “The floor,” said Mr. Carrigan, “needs a good mopping anyway.”
    “But—”
    “Go,” said Mr. Carrigan firmly.
    I left, but something made me wait just down the block. I watched from the shadows between dim streetlights as Mr. Carrigan locked the lobby doors. The marquee light blinked off. Then the lights in the lobby. Another minute passed. A second.
    I heard something that sounded like gunshots, five of them. Somehow I knew they were shots, even though they were muffled, sounding nothing like what I’d heard in westerns and cops-and-robbers movies.
    For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Then I went down to the alley and felt my way through the trashcans and stacked empty boxes to the Ramona’s rear emergency exit. As usual, the latch hadn’t completely caught and so I slipped in. Past the heavy drapes, the inside of the auditorium was completely dark. I walked up the aisle, somehow sure I should make no noise. At the top of the inclined floor, I looked down the corridor and saw light spilling from Mr. Carrigan’s office.
    I called his name. No one answered.
    “Mr. Carrigan?” I said again.
    This time a figure stepped from the office into the light. It was him. “What are you doing here, Robby?”
    “I heard something weird. It sounded like shots.”
    Mr. Carrigan looked very pale. The skin of his face was drawn tight across the bones. “They were shots, Robby.”
    “What happened?” I said. “Do you need some help?”
    “No,” he answered. “I need no help at all, but thank you anyway.” He smiled in a funny sort of way.
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Go home,” he said. He looked suddenly tired. “Go home and call the sheriff and tell him to come down here to the theater right away. Can you do that?”
    “Yes,” I said without hesitation.
    “Will you do that?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s good. That’s very good.” He started to turn back through the pooled light and into the office again, but hesitated. “Robby, remember what I’ve said so many times about how you can change things for the better?”
    “Yes,” I said again.
    “Well, you can. Remember that.” And then he was gone.
    I stared at the wedge of light for a few seconds and then walked back toward the rear of the theater. I didn’t go outside. Instead, I just sat behind the screen, there on the dirty wooden floor, thinking about the larger-than-life figures I’d seen dance above me so many times.
    After ten or fifteen minutes, I heard another shot. This time it was louder, but I guess that’s because I was inside the theater.
    I slowly walked back up the aisle. Once I’d reached the corridor, I turned toward the light. I looked inside. Then I