Mrs. Merwin told those who asked that she had been born in a country that no longer existed. Her parents were descended from nobility, but they had lost everything in the war, even their country. Whether what she said was true no one really knew, except perhaps Mr. Merwin, who’d brought her back from Europe as his war bride, but he was a gruff man who said little even to his kinsmen, a man who had no children of his own and little use for those who entered his theater.
Mr. Merwin was a projectionist, a man most comfortable in the hunched darkness of his profession. When the last ticket was sold, he left his wife to attend the concession stand, disappearing through the curtain next to the bathrooms and up the winding metal stairs. There was no balcony, so he sat alone up there, a wizard who brought forth nightly illusions with a weave of his hands as he threaded film through the projector and the movie sputtered to life. But Mr. Merwin seemed to cast a spell on everyone except himself. Perhaps as the source of that mirage, he knew too well that the bright worlds holding his audience transfixed were mere celluloid, easily bottled up in the gray canisters he exchanged in Asheville every Thursday morning. Mr. Merwin appeared immune to the spell his wife cast as well, as terse with her as he was to any child.
“I don’t know why she stays with that old grump,” my aunt said one Sunday. She, my mother, and my uncle lingered at the dinner table as I oiled the Browning in the front room and pretended not to listen. “He should have known better than marry a woman that much younger. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just up and left him.”
“Where would she go?” my uncle asked. “Her country doesn’t exist anymore.”
“So she says,” my mother said. “I have my doubts about that, about a lot of things she’s claimed. We know what that war did to Arthur Merwin. He’s got scars and a Purple Heart to prove it. Besides, he gives her enough money to buy those fancy clothes and French perfume.”
“That could be her money,” my aunt said, “and probably is. I’ve never known a Merwin that was more than one paycheck from the poorhouse.”
“Well, all I know,” said my mother with finality, “is that a woman who dresses like that is looking for trouble, and sooner or later she’ll find it. As a matter of fact, I hear she’s been finding it for a while now. I suspicion Arthur knows what’s going on too.”
At the time it was easy to believe my aunt’s and uncle’s sympathies were more admirable than my mother’s. Those nights as I sat in the darkened theater I sometimes glanced back at the beam of light aimed at the screen. I wondered if Mr. Merwin was watching not the movie but the audience, and that made me feel uneasy. But I could not be sure what he was doing up there, since the light was too bright to look at for more than a moment.
What I do know is that when I was fourteen, his wife was as beautiful as any of the screen goddesses I watched in his theater. On Friday or Saturday nights I sat a few rows behind the girls in my ninth-grade class, girls whose bodies grew more curved and mysterious daily. I anointed myself with my dead father’s Aqua Velva and it wafted over the rows between us like a promise that I too was growing up. What they were becoming, Mrs. Merwin, with her hourglass figure and low, throaty voice, already was.
I waited until the MGM lion roared and IN CINEMASCOPE appeared in five-foot-high letters. Only then did I leave my seat, make my way blindly up the inclining carpet toward the red-glowing exit sign. The lobby was empty now, just me and Mrs. Merwin.
“What will you have, Russell?” she’d ask as I inhaled an odor like a field of flowers, and it was as if the smell rose like vapors into my brain and made me groggy, for inevitably I’d forget what I’d planned to order. Once I finally stammered out a few words, Mrs. Merwin would hand me my drink and whatever I’d chosen to eat. As she leaned forward to place the money in the metal box, I could see the globes of her breasts, the dark V between them. Then I’d sit back down in the dark, dazed by the wide worlds projected on the screen, by the girls who sat with me in the dark, but most of all by Mrs. Merwin.
IT WAS A late December Thursday when I discovered Mrs. Merwin was also part of the gray valley outside the theater. I was out of school for Christmas, and my uncle Roy, Luke Callahan, and I were hunting. The older men had given me the stand closest to the dirt road, only yards from the dead end that marked the boundary between my uncle’s land and state game lands.
“Don’t shoot toward the road,” my uncle reminded me. “We’ll be back at eleven. If it starts raining we’ll meet you at the house.”
“Don’t let the haints get you, boy.” Luke Callahan smirked, and they disappeared into the deeper woods, only the sound of their footsteps crushing the leaves, then nothing.
The sun was nowhere to be seen. Fog swirled around the deer stand like a current, and the wood planks swayed and creaked as if I were on a raft. I waited for the sound of deer hooves, trying not to think about the old woman who’d lost her way in these woods years ago. She’d been found by my grandfather, days dead, her back against a tree trunk as if waiting for him. Some people claimed she still walked these woods.
The curtain of fog did not lift as I crouched in the stand, the rifle cradled in my lap. Only the closest trees were visible, and the woods remained silent, no squirrels rustling the leaves, no crow cawing from a treetop. I checked my watch. The hands had moved so little I raised my wrist to my ear. Everything — trees, sound, time — seemed lost in the fog.
Then I heard the crackling of leaves, close, maybe thirty yards away, and coming closer, and despite what my uncle had told me I raised my rifle toward the road, peered into the scope, my thumb on the safety, index finger on the trigger. I heard voices, one voice I knew — then silence. They had stopped walking, stopped talking. I waited, the rifle still pressed against my shoulder, still aimed.
“No, not here,” Mrs. Merwin said. “It’s too close to the road.” She stepped out of the fog, and into the crosshairs of my rifle, one strap of her dress pulled off her shoulder, lipstick smeared on her face. A man I did not know followed her, a half-empty whiskey bottle in his hand.
“Yeah, here,” the man said, grabbing her arm with his free hand, snatching the quilts from her and dropping them on the ground.
“No,” Mrs. Merwin said. “Please, Lance, not here.”
He yanked the dress strap lower with his free hand, a pale breast fully exposed now.
“No,” she said and pushed him away.
The man stepped closer and slapped her, the sound sharp as a rifle shot. The left side of Mrs. Merwin’s face flushed scarlet. I saw the imprint of his hand and my thumb released the safety.
“Leave her alone,” I said, the gun trembling in my hands.
They did not see me at first, and it must have seemed the voice of God speaking from above. Mrs. Merwin covered her bare breast with one hand, pulled the strap up with the other. The man stood absolutely still, his hand open as if to slap anyone else who came near.
Then they found me, the man seeing the rifle, Mrs. Merwin seeing my face, or so it seemed, for the man’s first words were “Put that rifle down, boy.” Mrs. Merwin said, “Hello, Russell,” as if I’d just stepped up to her ticket booth. I did not lower the rifle. I kept it pointed at them, the barrel wavering like a compass needle.
“Put that rifle down, boy,” the man repeated.
“You hit her again I’ll shoot you,” I said.
“It’s okay, Russell,” Mrs. Merwin said. “He didn’t hurt me. He’s my friend.”