Flickers on film. Imperfections. Long blotches, short blobs. Cleve spelled it out. W…I…N…
* * *
Cleve opened the door of the projection room so softly Jamie Winters didn’t hear him. Winters was glaring out at the film on the screen, and there was a strange, happy look on his face. The look of a saint seeing a new miracle.
“Enjoying yourself, Jamie boy?”
Jamie Winters shook himself and turned and smiled uneasily.
Cleve locked the door. He gave a little soft lecture: “It’s been a long time. I haven’t slept well many nights. Three years, Jamie. And tonight you had nothing to do so you ran off some film so you could gloat over it. Gloat over Diana and think how clever you were. Maybe it was fun to see me suffer too; you knew how much I liked her. Have you come here often in the past three years to gloat over her, Jamie?” he asked softly.
Winters laughed good-naturedly.
Cleve said, “She didn’t love you, did she? You were her photographer. So to even things up, you began photographing her badly. It fits in. Her last two films were poor. She looked tired. It wasn’t her fault; you did things with your camera. So Diana threatened to tell on you. You would’ve been blackballed at every studio. You couldn’t have her love, and she threatened your career, so what did you do, Jamie Winters? You killed her.”
“This is a poor idea of a joke,” said Winters, hardening.
Cleve went on, “Diana looked at the camera when she died. She looked at you. We never thought of that. In a theater you always feel as if she were looking at the audience, not the man behind the camera. She died. You took a picture of her dying. Then, later, you invited me to a party, fed me the bait, with those film clips showing Denim in a suspicious light. I fell for it. You destroyed all the other film that put Denim in a good position. Juke Davis found out what you were doing. He worked with film all the time, he knew you were juggling clips. You wanted to frame Denim because there had to be a fall guy and you’d be clear. Juke questioned you, you stabbed him. You stole and destroyed the few extra clips Juke had discovered. Juke couldn’t talk over the phone, but he shoved his hand in the printing light of the developing machine and printed your name W-I-N-T-E-R-S in black splotches as the film moved. He happened to be printing the negative of Diana’s last film that night! And you began running it off to me ten minutes ago, thinking it was only a damaged film!”
Jamie Winters moved quickly, like a cat. He ripped open the projector and tore the film out in one vicious animal movement.
Cleve hit him. He pulled way back and blasted loose.
The case was really over now. But he wasn’t happy or glad or anything but blind red angry, flooded with hot fury.
All he could think of now while he hit the face of Winters again and again and again, holding him tight with one hand, beating him over and over with the other, all he could think of was—
A stone in the yard of the cemetery just over the wall from the studio; a stone sweating blue rain over her bronzed name. All he could say in a hoarse, choked whisper was:
“Is it cold out there tonight, Diana; is it cold, little girl?”
And Cleve hit him again and again and again!
The Town Where No One Got Off
Crossing the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn’t belong, no person who hasn’t roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.
I spoke of this to a fellow passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago–Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.
“True,” he said. “People get off in Chicago; everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don’t live there go there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to look at it? You? Me? No! I don’t know anyone, got no business there, it’s no health resort, so why bother?”
“Wouldn’t it be a fascinating change,” I said, “some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don’t know a soul and go there for the hell of it?”
“You’d be bored stiff.”
“I’m not bored thinking of it!” I peered out the window. “What’s the next town coming up on this line?”
“Rampart Junction.”
I smiled. “Sounds good. I might get off there.”
“You’re a liar and a fool. What you want? Adventure? Romance? Go ahead. Jump off the train. Ten seconds later you’ll call yourself an idiot, grab a taxi, and race us to the next town.”
“Maybe.”
I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by, flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.
“But I don’t think so,” I heard myself say.