The Sweetwater Theater had been named in honor of the chain-store magnate who’d put it up back in ’33, white-haired, sombrero-wearing, six-gun-toting old Benjamin R. Sweetwater. The structure had been patterned along the lines of an adobe bunkhouse and in Ben Sweetwater’s heyday it had scheduled nothing but western double features starring Tim McCoy, Johnny Mack Brown, Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, and the like. Ben Sweetwater had been an incurable cowboy buff who’d made no secret of the fact that he’d built his theater to provide himself with a constant source of western shoot-’em-ups, and he’d been known to spend twelve-hour days in the Sweetwater’s projection booth, watching western feature couplings four and five times running. He’d dropped dead in late ’38 during the closing chase scene of Warriors of Sundown Canyon and with his sudden demise had begun the Sweetwater Theater’s long process of deterioration. The traditional solid-western bill of fare had been abandoned, the Sweetwater had ditched its weekly Bank Nite, it’d stopped passing out chinaware to its female patrons, Screeno had been canceled, and people had stayed away by the thousands. Willow remembered the Sweetwater well. He’d seen his alltime favorite motion picture there, just before he’d been shipped to Korea. He’d watched The Third Man in Saturday-afternoon solitude, and he’d walked out on the accompanying Charlie Chan film just to return to the sidewalk where he could associate with other human beings. The Sweetwater had been on the skids then, from there it had slid into X-rated slime, and now it was just a cut above a pigsty and not a very thick cut at that. A portly woman with hairy ears and a goiter punched out Willow’s six-dollar ticket, and a skinny, drooling man with a whiskey nose accepted it and grunted, “Have gool even.”
There was a mossy mausoleum scent about the Sweetwater, the kind that takes years to arrive and never goes away. The floor of the tiny lobby was cluttered with plastic soft-drink cups, the beige stucco walls were chipped, chocolate-smeared, and covered with four-letter-word graffiti, the candy showcase was barren, and the glass of the inoperative popcorn machine was clouded with grease. Willow watched a mammoth cockroach attempting to negotiate a pile of dusty popcorn and for just a moment he was reminded of Lawrence of Arabia, not knowing exactly why. He took a seat next to the south wall in the back row and he glanced around to take inventory of his fellow lechers, seeing precisely what he’d expected to see—seedy, yawning, rheumy-eyed older men, a few fidgeting, giggling kids, and a gaunt, long-haired character who studied Willow with a wistful smile and soulful, starving eyes. Then the houselights dimmed and Becky Johnson came home.
Willow had seen one X-rated moving picture in his life, a classic entitled Descent into Ecstasy in which an airplane pilot had bailed out of a burning Piper Cub to parachute into a swimming pool surrounded by a bevy of unclothed young damsels who’d hauled him out of the water, stripped him, and taken a great many liberties with his body. Willow had fallen asleep during the first reel. Becky Johnson Comes Home was technically better than Descent into Ecstasy—the sound was full and undistorted, the photography was excellent, but the plot was a beagle. Dog or not, when Gladys Hornsby appeared on the screen, Willow was dumbfounded. Gladys was dark-haired, not blonde; her eyes were brown, not smoky-blue; she was forty, not thirty; and Willow would never have recognized her if she hadn’t taken off her clothing. It developed that Becky Johnson was a middle-aging New York City school teacher who’d returned to her old crossroads home town to take the position of principal at Kelly’s Corners High School, and barely in the nick of time, because the big football game was just around the corner and Kelly’s Corners hadn’t beaten arch-rival Poplar Junction since the crucifixion of Christ. Poplar Junction was heavily favored but Becky Johnson hadn’t spent twenty years in the big city for nothing. Becky appraised the situation with a canny eye before driving over to the Poplar Junction pool hall, where she was seduced on a billiards table by the local hustler before she planked down five thousand dollars on Kelly’s Corners to win. Immediately prior to game time, Becky stepped into the Kelly’s Corners dressing room, waved the coaches into the hall, locked the door behind her, and engaged in a heart-to-heart with her teenage gladiators. Five minutes later the locker-room doors came off their hinges and a horde of slavering young beasts stormed onto the playing field to whomp the Mother Machree out of Poplar Junction, 88–0. So much for the preliminaries. The victorious Kelly’s Corners athletes dressed hurriedly to head for Becky Johnson’s house, there to savor the promised fruits of triumph. Whatever Becky Johnson may have been, she was no welsher, and she peeled to the skin to handle her winners on an individual basis, rewarding each fuzzy-cheeked hero with a dazzling assortment of sexual changeups that sent him reeling dazedly into the Kelly’s Corners night. The coup-de-grace was yet to come—Becky Johnson had saved the Kelly’s Corners quarterback for dessert because she’d had an eye on this kid from the beginning, and the things Becky didn’t do to the goggle-eyed youngster were unworthy of mention. So ended Becky Johnson Comes Home and Willow took note of the graphics, his throat gorged with sickness, his hands clenching the arms of his seat. He got up, went to the men’s room, vomited, and walked the two blocks to his automobile, remembering a better day when the whole damned world hadn’t been on the auction block, and when stag films had been shown in somebody’s basement, but only after newspapers had been taped to the windows.