"Ansel," he said.
Ansel didn't turn around for a long time. When he did, he looked at the book in Danny's lap, and at Danny's face, and he nodded slowly, as if a reel he had been expecting had finally arrived on the bus from the film exchange.
"I wondered when you'd get there," he said.
* * *
"He was sixteen," Ansel said. "Same as you. Big kid. Played football. His daddy sold farm implements out of a lot on Highway 50, before it was a Chevy lot. Royce wanted the job because his girl worked the candy counter. And he was good at it, if you want the truth. He had the voice. People did what he said."
It had been a Saturday in August of 1960, a double feature, Psycho and something with Audie Murphy. The house was full. And a boy came in, fourteen years old, small for his age, by himself, with his own money, and sat down in the twelfth row center of the main floor.
"Walter Greer," Ansel said. "His daddy worked the railroad. Most colored folks in Merritt, back then, they sat in the balcony. Not because there was a sign. There wasn't ever a sign here. Cora wouldn't have it. But they sat up there because it was easier, because some folks downstairs made it hard if they didn't, and every other theater in Kansas had a sign or might as well have. And that night some folks downstairs, two men from the Elks, they went out to the lobby and complained to the usher on the aisle. And the usher on the aisle was Royce."
Royce had gone down the aisle in the dark. He had taken Walter Greer by the collar of his shirt and pulled him up out of his seat and walked him up the aisle on his toes, and when the boy tried to say he'd paid, Royce had told him, loud enough for half the house to hear, where boys like him sat in this town.
"And Cora came out of the office," Ansel said. "She was sixty-six. Five foot one. She walked right up to them in the lobby and told Royce to let go of that boy. And Royce, he didn't. He turned around with his hand still on Walter's collar, and he said—screamed, really, he was sixteen and scared and showing off—he said, 'I'll show you who runs this place!' To her. To Cora Lindqvist, in her own lobby."
"What did she do?"
"She said, 'Nobody runs this place, Royce. Everybody keeps it. And you're done keeping it.' She fired him. Right there. Took his jacket off his back in the lobby. Three weeks shy of his year." Ansel looked at the photograph on the wall. "Then she walked Walter Greer back down to the twelfth row and sat down beside him and watched the rest of Psycho with him. She hated Psycho. Said Hitchcock was a cruel little man. She sat through it anyway."