PART TWO

1

Grofield put his shoulder against the door and pushed, and slowly it rolled back, and early April sunlight angled through to shine on the dusty wood floor of the stage. The door was wood, with X framing on both sides, and was eight feet high and eight feet wide. It was suspended from a track over the doorway by nine greasy little wheels, most of which squeaked as Grofield kept pushing, leaning his shoulder into the old wood and plodding steadily forward, opening the door against its sullen will.

It was three weeks now since he'd come back from Las Vegas, and the phone hadn't rung once with a job offer. He was really sorry Myers and the factory payroll had turned out to be no good; Mary was down in town now, working at the supermarket for eating money. They were supposed to open this damn theater for the summer season in two and a half months, and where the money was coming from Grofield had no idea.

It was a long eight feet, with the door resisting every inch of the way, but at last the eight-foot-square opening was completely cleared. Grofield kicked the wooden wedge under the end of the door to keep it from rolling closed again, and turned to look at his theater in sunlight.

It wasn't very much. The building had been a barn originally, for the first seventy years of its life or so, and at some point in the first decade after World War II someone had converted it into a summer theater, putting the stage in at this end, and raising the floor out there where the audience sat by putting in a series of platforms, so that the first four rows of seats were down on the original barn floor, the next four rows were on a platform two steps up from that, the next four rows two more steps up, and so on. There were twenty-four rows in all, ten seats across, with a center aisle. Two hundred forty seats. Three or four times, Grofield had actually seen them all full.

This was a hell of a part of the world for a summer theater, that was the problem. The only thing in Indiana big enough to find blindfolded is Indianapolis, and once you've found that there's nothing to do with it. And even if there were, Mead Grove was too far away from it to matter. There were no tourist areas nearby, no major cities, no university towns. The only potential customers were the residents of Mead Grove and the other half-dozen small towns in the area, and the farmers in between. Most of them weren't quite sure what a live theater was for, and doubted it was anything they wanted to know any more about. If it weren't for schoolteachers and doctors' wives, there wouldn't have been any audience at all.

The upshot was that the forgotten nut who'd converted the barn to a summer theater twenty years ago had promptly lost his shirt – and the barn. It had changed hands several times in the last two decades; had briefly been a barn again for a while; had been a movie theater even more briefly; had been a warehouse for a bicycle parts manufacturer, who had gone broke for reasons other than his ownership of this building; and had several times been a financially disastrous summer theater. And finally, three years ago, Alan Grofield had bought the building and twelve acres of land around it, including two small farmhouses, with most of the money he'd brought back from an island casino heist he'd worked with a guy named Parker. He'd bought the place outright, no mortgage, and told himself that from now on he'd have roots, he'd have a place where he belonged and where he could always come home to. He'd known in front that the summer theater would lose money, but it hadn't bothered him; summer theaters always lose money, particularly when run by actors, and most particularly when not placed along one of the coasts of the United States. But the theater wasn't supposed to be a living, it was supposed to be a way of life, and that was different. His living was working with men like Parker – and Dan Leach.

But not men like Myers.

And, in fact, nobody at all for a while now. He'd gotten into another job with Parker, an armored car thing, but it had gone badly and Grofield had come very close to a jail term. Since then, nothing much had happened. Two seasons of stock had drained away most of his savings, and now here he was less than three months from the third season and he just didn't have the money to put the thing together. Even if he stuck with revivals, meaning plays in the public domain that he didn't have to pay an author any performance fee on, there were still expenses; housing and feeding the cast for the summer, and even paying a couple of leads a small salary; publicity, meaning posters and newspaper ads; costumes and furniture rentals and props; and gas and electric and phone bills. The ticket sales weren't going to cover that. If worst came to worst he'd drop down into Kentucky or North Carolina for a week or two of writing paper, but he hated that kind of thing, and avoided it whenever he possibly could. Passing bum checks was no more illegal than knocking over armored cars, but there was a difference that he found important; a check passer is an actor, he uses an actor's talents and methods, but a heavy heister uses different talents entirely. It bothered Grofield to use his acting abilities that way, it seemed somehow degrading.

But now, looking at his theater in the bright light of the first warm sunny day of spring, Grofield made a bitter face and decided that if he didn't hear from anybody with work by the first of May, he'd have to do the check-writing bit for a few days or a week, in order to bankroll the coming season.

As it was, he was running as tight a ship as he could. Both farmhouses were rented out, and he and Mary were living in the theater, sleeping in a bedroom set laid out on a platform rolled into the wings, using the theater john, Mary cooking their meals on the double hotplate in the girls' dressing room down under the stage. By the middle of June, though, the tenants would have to be kicked out of the nearer farmhouse, the one just across the county road, so the cast would have a place to stay.

So he'd write paper, that's all. In a good week, working through two or three states, he could write fifteen or twenty thousand and have enough to last the summer. Sticking to revivals.

"Revivals," he said aloud. He was disgusted. He shook his head at the empty seats and turned away to go over to where the flats were stored against the rear wall on the side opposite where the door had been rolled back. The flats were in various sizes ranging from three feet wide and eight feet high to five feet wide and twelve feet high, and all were made of muslin attached to a simple frame of one-by-four pine boards. Water-base paint had been used to paint the scenery of last year's shows on the flats, and now they were stacked in no particular order, a jumble of fake walls and doors and windows in different colors and styles and periods.

Grofield began to carry the flats, one by one, over to the opening in the rear wall, and lowered them the six feet to the ground. When he'd moved about ten, he jumped to the ground, carried a flat around to the side of the building, leaned it against the wall, picked up the hose he'd already attached to the faucet out there, and began to hose the flat down.

What he was doing was removing the paint. Muslin is light, but paint is heavy. Any frail girl can carry an unpainted canvas flat, but with three or four coats of paint on it a strong man can barely lift the thing. Grofield, like most thrifty theater operators, removed last year's water-base paint every spring so he could use the old flats again. In addition to the hose, he also had a scrub brush and a ladder, so he could scrub the paint loose after the first hosing. The second hosing usually did the job, though sometimes he had to give a spot or two an extra treatment with the scrub brush and a third stream of water from the hose.

Grofield liked theater work, everything to do with the stage, even simple manual labor like this. He worked along in the bright sun, the soft spring air all around him, the water cold, the paint running down the flats in long streams, and after a while, despite his money troubles, he began to whistle.