Danny stood in the booth by himself with his heart in his ears. Through the port the house lights were still up, and the house was fuller than it had been all summer, fuller than he had ever seen it, and they were not all there for the picture. He could see it in the way they came in: slowly, looking up. Old men in seed caps craning their necks at the plaster sun. A woman in a church hat touching the arm of a seat in the twelfth row as if it were the shoulder of someone she knew. Couples pointing at the roped-off balcony. Some of them had brought pies.
At 9:58 he dimmed the house lights on the rheostat, slow, the way Ansel did it, a long breath out. At ten o'clock he started the left-hand machine and drew the curtain, and the gold folds parted on their motor, and the Universal globe turned on the screen, and he did not breathe again for what felt like twenty minutes.
He made five changeovers that night. He made every one of them clean. On the third, his hand shook so badly on the motor switch that he had to hold his own wrist, and he did it anyway. Nobody in the house knew he existed. That was the job.
When the credits rolled, and Huey Lewis sang "Back in Time," and the house lights came up, nobody left.
* * *
He came down the stairs past the thousands of names, and he heard it before he saw it: a sound like the ocean, if Kansas had an ocean, the sound of six or seven hundred people talking at once under a gold ceiling. The lobby was packed. The auditorium was packed, the main floor full from the first row to the back wall, people standing along the side aisles in flagrant violation of the fire code, and Lonnie Ebert the fire marshal standing among them in a Royals cap with his arms folded, apparently deciding not to notice.
Mrs. Dunning was on the stage in front of the closed curtain, at a card table with a microphone that Ansel had wired up from the old organ-lift amplifier, and a hand-lettered sign taped to the front of the table that said THE BOARD OF AISLES — ANNUAL MEETING — 1985. Ansel sat at the end of the table with the green ledger. The Lindahls were in the third row with a rhubarb pie on Mr. Lindahl's knees. Lupe was in the aisle with a clipboard, checking people's names against her list, and when she saw Danny she grinned so hard it looked like it hurt.
In the front row, on the left, sat sixteen people in a row like a jury, most of them over sixty, several of them in Hadley Chevrolet windbreakers. And on the aisle beside them, in a navy blazer with his cowboy hat on his knee, sat Royce Hadley.
He saw Danny. He nodded, pleasantly. Danny's stomach dropped through the floor.
Mrs. Dunning tapped the microphone.