he went with Uncle Tam, but not Bromo, who stayed behind to feed the cat and look after the shop, to Knuckle, Kansas, the family farm where his mother, Uncle Tam and the rest of the Bapp siblings had grown up. He had stayed with his grandmother many times when he was still with his parents, and saw now that even when he was very young his mother and father had not wanted him. At the holiday gatherings his aunts Lutie and Banjie made much of him and his uncles squeezed out false promises to take him fishing or hunting or to a Rockies game. At some time during the dinner his grandmother would look around the table, wipe at her eyes and say, “If Viola knew what she was missing.”
“I’m sure she took it into consideration and regrets her decision, Mother,” said Uncle Ket, for the extended family had theories that Viola and Adam Dollar were living somewhere in Homer or Nome, or even raising foxes in the Aleutians. Over the years the family had advanced explanations for the long silence, all built on the supposition that the runaways were not dead: leprosy, amnesia, madness, kidnapping or retreat to a very remote place could explain why they had not been in touch. Bob clung to these scenarios. Only Bromo Redpoll said they were dead, and what did he know? He was not blood kin.
On the bus Orlando suddenly said, “Hey, you want to go to the movies?”
“Yeah, but I got to get my uncle’s prescription back to him. He’s waiting for these pills. He said he was in agony. He hurt his back lifting a box of plastic dolls. Plus his feet really hurt.”
“Bad! Where do you live?”
“Colfax. Way out on Colfax, out near Chambers Road. It’s like almost to Kansas.”
“Man, that’s way, way, way out there. Can we get there on the bus? Cool. We take the pills to your uncle and then we go. The theatre is on Colfax too. The Cliff Edge, Colfax and Xerxes. It’s behind a liquor store.”
“I thought you had to go back to your doctor.”
“Doctor? What do you mean?”
“What you told the drugstore lady. That you were going back to get your prescription signed.”
“Oh, that was just bullshit. I was just trying it on. That was straight from the Book of Never Happen. I found that prescription on the sidewalk. Let me see your uncle’s pills. Heh. Hydrocodone. No rush there, that’s just codeine and Tylenol. But we might as well take a couple. He’ll never miss them.” He shook out six pills, gave two to Bob, swallowed the others.
Bob Dollar put the pills in his jacket pocket. “O.K.,” he said, “what’s the movie?”
“Rat Women. It’s great. It’s like this weird black-and-white flick, all grainy. It’ll scare the shit out of you. It’s an old horror movie from the sixties. That’s all the Cliff Edge shows is horror and kinky stuff. Hey, don’t we get off here? To change buses?”
Up Colfax they went, sliding past the Satire Lounge, PS Greek Pizza, past John Elway’s Parts and Tammy’s Nails, Air Afrik, Dragon Express and The Bomb. There was a fistfight going on in front of the Space-Age Atomic Washeteria, and Bob told Orlando that Uncle Tam’s budgie had come from Jersey John’s Pet Shop and that they had a charge account at the Mad Dog and Pilgrim bookstore where Bob was allowed to charge two books a month. (Bob had gone often to the branch library until Uncle Tam forbade him, for he had trouble returning the books on time and the library fines mounted up.) Orlando did not seem impressed. Finally they were past Food 99 and the Brigadier Army Surplus and there was Uncle Tam’s shop, Used but Not Abused, and Bob felt a rush of embarrassment that it all looked so shabby and poor.
Uncle Tam was lying on the ratty sofa, drinking beer and watching television. He took the brown plastic container and shook out two large capsules, swallowed them with a mouthful of beer.
“So, you want to go to a movie?” he said. “Is it a good one? Maybe I’d come with you if my back wasn’t killing me.”
“You might not like it, sir,” said Orlando. “It’s an old horror film. Rat Women.”
“Well, no, that’s not my cup of tea. So I guess I’m not sorry.” (He had watched Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle thirty-seven times for the sake of the scene in the plastic factory, the red hose emerging with swollen bladders or pinching down into a string of shining plastic sausages.) He dug a dollar bill out of his pocket.
“Here, Bob, some money for popcorn. And a paper. Bring me a Post when you come back.”
Deducting fifty cents for the paper left fifty cents for popcorn and there was, Bob knew, no popcorn on earth for such a minuscule sum. But outside, Orlando, who had been watching, said, “I’ll treat. I asked you. Anyways, I can get all the money I want. My dad drinks and when he comes home soused after he’s asleep I get in his wallet and take a twenty or whatever and I got a kind of job thing.” (Later Bob learned that Orlando’s job thing was begging tourists for money on the Sixteenth Street Mall, a skill he had learned from a ragged man who lived comfortably in an expensive LoDo loft and who only plied the begging trade in evil weather, for it was then that pity moved passersby to dig deep. The best times were stormy afternoons before Christmas.)
The Cliff Edge was awful and the movie was awful and Bob Dollar enjoyed them both. In addition to the tickets, Orlando bought popcorn and quart containers of no-brand cola. The “theatre” was a converted storeroom behind the liquor store, the ramped floor made of bare, cheap plywood that boomed with each footstep. The wooden seats were not upholstered. The place smelled of urine and scorched vegetable oil. There were only fourteen people in the audience.
The film began with dozens of rats scurrying along a filthy waterfront street in an unidentified city. There were close-ups of rats eating garbage, rats crouching, groups of rats sleeping together in rat nests, close-ups of rats eating gristle and one lapping at a viscous substance that looked like decayed banana pudding. Then the rats scuttled around a corner and disappeared. The camera followed rather slowly. There were no rats around the corner, but eight or ten blond women leaning against a warehouse wall, voluptuous, heavily lipsticked, dressed in tight long dresses that sparkled with sequins. The women smoked and stared through dark glasses into the night. They wore shoes with sharp-pointed toes and unbelievably high heels. The camera moved closer and closer, gliding over satin haunches, shadowed cleavage, catching the wet shine of eyes and greased lips. It moved slowly down the back of the most buxom blond, her dress cut low enough to hint at the shadowy cleft of buttocks, down over the swelling rump, down the shining fabric tight over the thigh, down the full leg to the lower calf and, for a split second, there it was, hanging just below the satin hem of the dress, a muscular rat’s tail that twitched suddenly like a lewd wink.
“Gross!” said Bob Dollar, but he hadn’t seen anything yet. He hadn’t seen the rat women on the beach in their bikinis, enticing a lifeguard under their striped umbrella where they strangled him with their tails (until then coiled in the bikinis) and devoured him, tossing the bones into the surf He hadn’t seen the nameless city’s chief of police turn into a vampire and try to force the rat women to become his sex slaves. Nor had he yet seen Orlando, who had eaten the popcorn and swallowed the cola, matter-of-factly and noisily piss on the plywood floor without leaving his seat.
At the end of the film Orlando insisted they stay for the trailers of coming attractions, Blood Feast and Scum of the Earth. On the way out he pointed at a lurid poster for The Corpse Grinders (“In Blood-Curdling Color”) and said, “That’s a fucking great film,” and told him about the theatre in Kansas City where he had seen it. As the audience had
