As for the old Gem Theater, I can’t remember whether it had one of those things above its doors or not—probably not—and it wouldn’t have had sound by 1922, either. But my dad and Edith and Lyman must have had some fun there just the same, with the lights in the auditorium darkened and the heads on the screen flickering bigger than any human head could be, and then before they were ready for it, that guy with the pencil moustache was tying the little blond to the railroad tracks, or strapping her down good to a buzz saw, and she was looking Help me right at Lyman chewing his popcorn and right at my dad and Edith holding hands on Edith’s lap, and all over that pretty lipstick mouth she had that big scream screaming “Help.” Some things were simpler then.
But it was late in the summer, after one of those two or three nights in town at the picture show and after a dish of ice cream at Lexton’s Confectionery, that what started right, ended wrong, and it stopped whatever else might have happened later. They were in the car going south towards home. Lyman was asleep in the back seat with his head shoved up against the side. When they got to the corner where they had to turn east to come the mile off the highway to the Goodnoughs’, they woke Lyman up and Edith asked him if he would walk the rest of the way, not quite home, she told him, but wait for her before he got home so they could go into the house together.
“For a favor to me,” she said. “Will you?”
“Don’t forget John,” he said.
“Yes. For him too. What’s wrong, though?”
“Nothing,” Lyman said. “What if Pa finds out?”
“He won’t. Here, you can take my coat to lie on in the grass.”
“But what if he does?”
“I don’t know. Will you do it?”
Lyman got out of the car then and spoke in through the window to Edith, so close that his breath moved her hair. “Don’t forget to pick me up,” he said.
“We won’t. And thank you, Lyman. But don’t you want my coat?”
“No. Lay on it yourself.”
“Don’t say that. Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“What’s wrong, though? Something is.”
“It better not take very long,” Lyman said. “That’s all I know.”
Then he turned to walk alongside the road in the dark, away from the car. My dad and Edith drove a mile or two farther south on the highway and then turned west into the sandhills.
“He’s tired all the time,” Edith said. “Did you see him back there? He’s going to have a stiff neck tomorrow.”
“Lyman’s all right,” my dad said. “He needs to get out more. Needs a girl himself to go riding with. Even if she has to eat as much ice cream as you do. Chocolate and nuts all over it, like she wasn’t never going to have another chance at it. Just howdy, mister, and forget the napkins; I ain’t got time to be fancy.”
“Oh, be quiet, you,” Edith said. “I only had one dish of it.”
“Yeah, just a little old triple decker.”
“But I like ice cream. And it was strawberries, not nuts.”
“Good. I’ll have Lexton bring you a gallon of both next time. Make him stack them on top his head like a trained monkey. He’s got that nice flat bald spot, just right for juggling things on it.”
“He doesn’t either. And it’s not flat like you say it is— it’s ridged.”
“Why, it is too. Flat as a pancake. It’s where his ma hit him with the shovel.”
“She didn’t do any such thing.”
“Well, she did. Banged on the head with a shovel. ‘Now behave yourself,’ she said, ‘and quit picking them britches, or I’ll bang you again.’”
“I’ll bang you on the head with a shovel,” Edith said, “if you don’t be quiet. Now hush, and see if you can keep this car out of the ditch.”
“I’m just trying to get you some ice cream, Edith. I don’t want you to go home hungry.”
“I’m sick of ice cream. And I don’t want to go home yet.”
“Good,” my dad said. “I don’t either.”
“But I can’t imagine any of this for him,” Edith said. “Can you?”
“Who? Bernie Lexton?”
“No. Lyman. I think I’m the only woman he’s ever talked to. Besides mother, I mean.”
“Poor bugger.”