“Hiya, sweetheart.” It was the one with the hat who carried the bag. Marge slipped her cash drawer out of its place and locked it.
“Hi,” she said. She thought of him as Hat. Once when she had been really fucked up she had said, “Hi, Hat.” She had been so fucked up that night she had been shortchanging herself instead of the mooches. Or mushes.
Hat had just looked at her. “Oh,” he had said, “you like my hat?”
She followed Holy-o and the fellas into the darkened theater and they all went to Holy-o’s office to unlock Rowena and the candy-stand money. Holy-o kept Rowena and the candy money locked in his office until the fellas arrived. Until a year or so before, he had locked the candy complex up in the ladies’ room after the last film went on but ladies had started coming to the theater — things being what they were — and he had been compelled to leave the ladies’ room open.
Rowena stood with the candy till at her feet, pulling her green poncho about her shoulders as though she were cold. In fact, it was not at all cold in Holy-o’s office but it smelled strongly of the grass Rowena had been smoking.
“Hiya, sweetheart,” Hat said to Rowena.
Rowena was biting her lip, peering bemusedly through her square spectacles.
“Hiya,” she said and broke up. “Hiya, Hat.”
Rowena was really fucked up and, of course, Marge had told the story of what had happened the other night. Marge shook her head. Silly Rowena.
They spread the day’s gross on a sliding panel of Holy-o’s desk and the other fella counted it.
“What is this?” Hat asked Holy-o. “Everybody likes my hat.” Holy-o shook his head in disapproval. Hat put the money in his bag.
“It’s just a hat,” he said. “It’s my hat.”
“Right on,” Rowena said happily.
Hat looked up at Holy-o, blinked and stared at her. The smiling Rowena turned from the blank eyes of Hat to the stern gaze of Holy-o and back.
“Right on?” Hat asked. “What’s right on? What do you mean, right on?”
“I mean right on,” Rowena said. “Just right on.” Her smile grew wider though less merry. “I don’t mean anything.”
“Right on,” Hat sang in falsetto as he carried the bag from the office. The other fella went with him. “Right on.” He was mimicking Rowena.
“G’night, fellas,” Holy-o said.
“G’night, Holy-o.”
Holy-o was displeased.
“What are you,” he demanded of Rowena, “dumb? What are you, stupid?” He waved his arms about to disperse the odor of grass. “And looka this place.”
“It’s just smoke,” Rowena said.
“You’re gonna put your job in jeopardy,” Holy-o told her.
For the last minutes of the film, Marge and Rowena stood behind the last row of seats. On the screen, long-haired young people were smoking grass and eating each other out between tokes. The night’s house was mercifully well-behaved, silent except for its hoarse expirations and a certain rustle of cloth. When the lights came on, the girls re tired toward the door of Holy-o’s office; the mooches were filing up the middle aisle and the close presence of young women was sometimes difficult for them. Holy-o oversaw their going hence with his truncheon stuck in his breast pocket like a cigar.
When the room was clear, Holy-o checked out the ladies’ room to see that no mooches had secreted themselves there and Marge and Rowena locked themselves inside. Rowena went to the toilet and lit a joint.
“An awful lot of them are Chinese,” she said to Marge. “You notice that?”
The ethnic reference sounded a ghostly alarm from some dark place in the ruins of Marge’s progressive conditioning.
“Sure,” she said. “Chinese are just as horny as anybody else.”
Rowena was thoughtful as she handed Marge the joint.
“I think the Chinese are into a different thing. I think they dig the beauty of the bodies in a kind of aesthetic way.”
“I think they’re jerking off.”
“They could do both,” Rowena insisted. “I mean why should beauty be platonic? That’s a western hang-up. They don’t have the Judeo-Christian thing. You know?” Marge was going through her black plastic carry bag, checking the contents. It had been locked in Holy-o’s office with Rowena.
“Sure,” she said. “The Judeo-Christian thing.”
“Right,” Rowena said. “Where sex is pejorative.”
“I had a pack of cigarettes in here when I put this down,” Marge said. “I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Oh, shit,” Rowena said and gave Marge back her cigarettes.
“Ask,” Marge said. “Please.”
She took a comb from her bag and combed her hair, looking at herself in the mirror. Although she was only thirty, her dark hair was already streaked with gray. It looked good, she thought.
“It may happen,” she told Rowena, “that you’re short of money and you’re in there with the stand money and you might be tempted. I advise you never, never to take any of it. Because if you do it even once these people will make you sorry you did.”
Rowena regarded Marge with bewilderment.
“Just because I borrowed a cigarette.” She sighed. “People are so uptight. It’s weird.”
“Bear that in mind,” Marge said.
When they came out of the ladies’, they saw Holy-o and Stanley Projectionist going over the vacant rows of seats for lost articles. Stanley took the left side of the auditorium and Holy-o the right. Holy-o had opened his nightly pint of Christian Brothers brandy and was holding it by the neck between his thumb and forefinger as he patrolled the rotten carpet. He moved part of the way on his knees and the heels of his hands. His inspections were always very thorough and he was clever about finding things; in the past week he had found two wallets with some money in them and a strange pair of black gloves. Stanley Projectionist was not nearly as good at finding things and Marge felt that he would really just as soon leave the whole room salvage to Holy-o. But Holy-o insisted. Marge had heard Stanley say that there was nothing on the floor after closing time except burned bottle caps and semen.
“How come he drinks?” Rowena whispered as they watched Holy-o proceed along the carpet. “I thought he was a stuffier.”
Marge shrugged. “He’s an old-timer. They’re weird.”
There was nothing nice for Holy-o that night. He walked Stanley to the door and stood looking into the street with a worried expression. He was worried about the danger of Indian attack.
For several weeks there had been a thing between Indians and Samoans in the cities around the Bay and Holy-o was afraid that the Indians would get him one night. He had stopped going by the Third Base Bar on the way to his hotel and instead waited until two Samoans who worked as janitors at the Examiner drove around to pick him up.
While Holy-o waited for the other Samoans and Rowena waited for her boyfriend, Marge found herself waiting as well. They sat in the office under National Geographic pictures of American Samoa and photographs of Holy-o in his Coast Guard uniform. On the wall over the door, Holy-o had hung a portrait shot of a cheerful red-headed woman with an Elvis Presley haircut — it was a photo of Miss Dowd, who had been the Odeon’s cashier until the previous year. Miss Dowd had been murdered in her cage by a demented mooch and her picture held a dreadful fascination for Rowena.
“I wish I didn’t know about it,” she told Marge and Holy-o.
Holy-o closed his eyes. “Don’t even think about it.”
But Rowena continued to squint up at Miss Dowd’s rosy features.