"I want to tell you all something," he said, "that I've never told anybody in this town except my wife. And I want to tell it with Royce sitting right there, because I think it's time."
And he told it. The twelfth row. Psycho. The two men from the Elks. The hand on his collar and his toes scraping the carpet up the aisle, and the words Royce Hadley had used about where boys like him sat in this town. And a little woman, five foot one, walking out of the office.
"Royce told her he'd show her who runs this place," Walter Greer said. "I remember his exact words because I heard them again last month, from about twenty people who were standing in line for the seven-thirty, when he said them to this young man." He looked at Danny on the stage. "Same words. Twenty-five years. He never did make his year. Cora took his jacket off his back right there in the lobby, and then she sat with me through the rest of that picture, and she hated that picture." A ripple went through the house that was not quite a laugh. "I was going to vote yes on Monday. I'm a careful man and I can do arithmetic, same as Hazel. I'd made up my mind. And then a sixteen-year-old boy got up there and told seven hundred people he froze." He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie. "I froze, too, in 1960. And I've been careful ever since. I'm done being careful about this. I'm voting no tonight, and I'm voting no on Monday, and I'll pledge five hundred dollars to the roof, and I'd like to see what the rest of you have got."
He sat down.
Royce Hadley stood up. His face had gone a dull brick red from the collar up, and for a moment, just a moment, Danny saw the sixteen-year-old in him, big and scared and showing off. He opened his mouth. He looked at the front row, at his sixteen votes in their Chevrolet windbreakers, and three of them were looking at the floor, and Cecil Moore from the feed store had already taken his windbreaker off and folded it in his lap.
"This is a circus," Royce said. "This is a—you people don't—" He stopped. He picked up his hat. He looked once at the stage, at the book, at Danny, and Danny looked back at him and did not look away, and did not freeze, and did not say anything at all, because there was nothing that needed saying.
Royce Hadley walked up the center aisle of the Sunflower Theatre, past the twelfth row, and out through the lobby, and nobody stopped him and nobody followed him, and the doors swung shut behind him on their brass hinges with a sound like a reel coming to the end.
The vote was two hundred and seventy-nine to twelve.
* * *
Afterward, nobody went home. The Lindahls cut the rhubarb pie into a hundred slivers on the card table. Dr. Delacroix stood on a seat and started taking pledges for the roof on the back of a coming-attractions flyer, and when he ran out of room Lupe handed him the clipboard, and when that was full she started writing on napkins. Harold Fenske's grandson said the hardware store would donate the lumber. A roofer named Cappellini who'd made his year in 1975 said he'd do the labor at cost if somebody fed his crew. Mrs. Olin, who was eighty-one, organized a bulb drive on the spot: twenty-five dollars to sponsor one of the eleven hundred and forty bulbs on the marquee, your name in a book at the box office, and the second R in BACK was spoken for in under a minute.