Fuck it, if the actor, whoever he was, was going to shoot him anyway, what was to be lost by putting his fist in the bastard’s face? The thought became the act: Ricky made a fist, swung and his knuckles connected with Wayne’s chin. The actor was slower than his screen image. He failed to dodge the blow, and Ricky took the opportunity to knock the gun out of Wayne’s hand. He then followed through with a barrage of punches to the body, just as he’d seen in the movies. It was a spectacular display.
The bigger man reeled backwards under the blows, and tripped, his spur catching in the dead boy’s hair. He lost his balance and fell in the dust, bested.
The bastard was down! Ricky felt a thrill he’d never tasted before; the exhilaration of physical triumph. My God! he’d brought down the greatest cowboy in the world. His critical faculties were overwhelmed by the victory.
The dust-storm suddenly thickened. Wayne was still on the floor, splattered with blood from a smashed nose and a broken lip. The sand was already obscuring him, a curtain drawn across the shame of his defeat.
‘Get up,’ Ricky demanded, trying to capitalise on the situation before the opportunity was lost entirely.
Wayne seemed to grin as the storm covered him.
‘Well boy,’ he leered, rubbing his chin, ‘we’ll make a man of you yet. . .’
Then his body was eroded by the driving dust, and momentarily something else was there in its place, a form Ricky could make no real sense of. A shape that was and was not Wayne, which deteriorated rapidly towards inhumanity.
The dust was already a furious bombardment, filling ears and eyes. Ricky stumbled away from the scene of the fight, choking, and miraculously he found a wall, a door, and before he could make sense of where he was the roaring storm had spat him out into the silence of the Movie Palace.
There, though he’d promised himself to butch it up since he’d grown a moustache, he gave a small cry that would not have shamed Fay Wray, and collapsed.
In the foyer Lindi Lee was telling Birdy why she didn’t like films very much.
‘I mean, Dean likes cowboy movies. I don’t really like any of that stuff. I guess I shouldn’t say that to you – ‘
‘No, that’s OK.’
‘ – But I mean you must really love movies, I guess. ‘Cause you work here.’
‘I like some movies. Not everything.’
‘Oh.’ She seemed surprised. A lot of things seemed to surprise her. ‘I like wild-life movies, you know.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘You know? Animals . . . and stuff.’
‘Yes . . .’ Birdy remembered her guess about Lindi Lee, that she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Got it in one.
‘I wonder what’s keeping them?’ said Lindi.
The lifetime Ricky had been living in the dust-storm had lasted no more than two minutes in real time. But then in the movies time was elastic.
I’ll go look,’ Birdy ventured.
‘He’s probably left without me,’ Lindi said again.
‘We’ll find out.’
Thanks.’
‘Don’t fret,’ said Birdy, lightly putting her hand on the girl’s thin arm as she passed. ‘I’m sure everything’s OK.’
She disappeared through the swing doors into the cinema, leaving Lindi Lee alone in the foyer. Lindi sighed. Dean wasn’t the first boy who’d run out on her, just because she wouldn’t produce the goods. Lindi had her own ideas about when and how
she’d go all the way with a boy; this wasn’t the time and Dean wasn’t the boy. He was too slick, too shifty, and his hair smelt of diesel oil. If he had run out on her, she wasn’t going to weep buckets over the loss. As her mother always said, there were plenty more fish in the sea.
She was staring at the poster for next week’s attraction when she heard a thump behind her, and there was a pie-bald rabbit, a fat, dozy sweetheart of a thing, sitting in the middle of the foyer staring up at her.
‘Hello,’ she said to the rabbit.
The rabbit licked itself adorably.
Lindi Lee loved animals; she loved True Life Adventure Movies in which creatures were filmed in their native habitat to tunes from Rossini, and scorpions did square-dances while mating, and every bear-cub was lovingly called a little scamp. She lapped up that stuff. But most of all she loved rabbits.