This face, so mock-manly, so uncompromising, personified a handful of lethal lies - about the glory of America's frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes. Ricky hated the face. His hands just itched to hit it.
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.
The rabbit took a couple of hops towards her. She knelt to stroke it. It was warm and its eyes were round and pink. It hopped past her up the stairs.
'Oh I don't think you should go up there,' she said.
For one thing it was dark at the top of the stairs. For another there was a sign that read 'Private. Staff only' on the wall. But the rabbit seemed determined, and the clever mite kept well ahead of her as she followed it up the stairs.
At the top it was pitch black, and the rabbit had gone.
Something else was sitting there in the rabbit's place, its eyes burning bright.
With Lindi Lee illusions could be simple. No need to seduce her into a complete fiction like the boy, this one was already dreaming. Easy meat.
'Hello,' Lindi Lee said, scared a little by the presence ahead of her. She looked into the dark, trying to sort out some outline, a hint of a face. But there was none. Not even a breath.
She took one step back down the stairs but it reached for her suddenly, and caught her before she toppled, silencing her quickly, intimately.
This one might not have much passion to steal, but it sensed another use here. The tender body was still budding: the orifices unused to invasions. It took Lindi up the few remaining stairs and sealed her away for future investigation.
'Ricky? Oh God, Ricky!'
Birdy knelt beside Ricky's body and shook him. At least he was still breathing, that was something, and though at first sight there seemed to be a great deal of blood, in fact the wound was merely a nick in his ear.
She shook him again, more roughly, but there was no response. After a frantic search she found his pulse: it was strong and regular. Obviously he'd been attacked by somebody, possibly Lindi Lee's absent boyfriend. In which case, where was he? Still in the John perhaps, armed and dangerous. There was no way she was going to be damn fool enough to step in there and have a look, she'd seen that routine too many times. Woman in Periclass="underline" standard stuff. The darkened room, the stalking beast. Well, instead of walking bang into that clichй she was going to do what she silently exhorted heroines to do time and again: defy her curiosity and call the cops.
Leaving Ricky where he lay, she walked up the aisle, and back into the foyer.
It was empty. Lindi Lee had either given up on her boyfriend altogether, or found somebody else on the street outside to take her home. Whichever, she'd closed the front door behind her as she left, leaving only a hint of Johnson's Baby Powder on the air behind her. OK, that certainly made things easier, Birdy thought, as she stepped into the Ticket Office to dial the cops. She was rather pleased to think that the girl had found the commonsense to give up on her lousy date.
She picked up the receiver, and immediately somebody spoke.
'Hello there,' said the voice, nasal and ingratiating, 'it's a little late at night to be using the phone, isn't it?'
It wasn't the operator, she was sure. She hadn't even punched a number. Besides, it sounded like Peter Loire.
'Who is this?'
'Don't you recognise me?'
'I want to speak to the police.'