The second dot. Danny's foot found the douser pedal, and the picture leapt across from one machine to the other without a seam, and on the screen Marty McFly ran on through the night of November 12, 1955, and nobody in the house knew a thing.
Danny sat back on the film can. His heart was hammering.
"Ansel," he said. "How many of them are still in the phone book?"
* * *
It took him and Lupe four nights.
They sat at the desk in Mrs. Dunning's office after the last show, with the Book of Aisles open between them and every phone book Mrs. Dunning had kept since 1970 stacked on the floor—Merritt, Reno County, Hutchinson, Wichita, a 1977 Salina book nobody could explain—and a legal pad, and a pot of coffee from the concession stand that tasted like the inside of a radiator. Lupe had taken the news that she was a trustee of a movie palace with an expression of profound vindication, as if she had always suspected she was in charge of something and was relieved to have the paperwork. She had a system. She read the names aloud. Danny looked them up. If they found a number, it went on the pad. If they found a number and an obituary, Lupe drew a small black cross next to it, and they were both quiet for a second.
Two hundred and eleven names. One hundred and forty-four phone numbers.
They started calling on Thursday afternoon. They split the list. Lupe called from the office phone and Danny called from the pay phone in the lobby, with a coffee can of dimes from the concession till that Mrs. Dunning handed over without a word, and he stood at the pay phone by the Galaga cabinet with the attract mode blinking beside him, and he dialed, and every single time his mouth went dry and his hand shook and he thought he wouldn't be able to say anything at all.
"Hello?"
"Hi. My name is Danny Kowal. I'm an usher at the Sunflower Theatre. I'm calling because—I'm calling because you're in the book. The Book of Aisles. You made your year in—" he looked down, "—in 1957. And the trustees are meeting on Saturday, August seventeenth, after the last show, and they're going to vote on whether to sell it. And I just thought—I thought you'd want to know. That's all. I thought someone should tell you."
Most people didn't remember at first. Then they did. A man in Hutchinson who had ushered in 1938 started crying on the phone and couldn't stop, and his daughter took the receiver and asked Danny to call back in an hour, and he did. A woman in Wichita said she'd assumed the place had been torn down years ago and that her husband had proposed to her in the balcony during Roman Holiday and she would be there if she had to take the bus. Dr. Delacroix the dentist said, "Hell, son, I thought Cora was kidding about that." A man named Vance said he'd already promised his vote to Royce Hadley and hung up. Mrs. Olin, his third-grade teacher, said, "Daniel Kowal, I always knew you had a speaking voice in there somewhere," which made him so embarrassed he had to put the phone down on the little steel shelf for a second.