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couldn’t, so you guys threw in with them. I—”
    “Look who’s talking,” he said. “Well?”
    “I can’t pay it,” I said. “Goddamnit, you know I can’t.”
    “Get up in the booth, then, and stay there. All but twenty-four hours of the week.”
    “I can’t do that, either.”
    He grinned, nodded, and walked off. I had to follow him out to his car.
    “You’re going to pull the house?”
    “You know I am, Joe.”
    “After all I’ve done for union labor in this town, you’re going to—going to—” I couldn’t go on. The look on his face stopped me.
    “Why, you chiseling son of a bitch,” he said softly. “You got the nerve to talk about what you’ve done for union labor. You get them to practically put you up a new house for nothing, and—”
    “I paid scale all the way through the job.”
    “Sure you did. With coupon books. And the coupons weren’t even good for full admissions; just a ten-cent discount. The boys put in an eight-hour day for you, and got out and sold tickets at night. That’s what it amounted to. They built you a new house and then kept it packed for you.”
    “They all got their money. I didn’t hear any of them kicking about it.”
    “Okay, Joe,” he said. “It’s none of my business, anyway. But this other is. You’re off the fair list starting tomorrow.”
    Maybe you don’t know what it means to have a house struck in a town like ours. It means you settle fast or go broke. There’d be spotters from every local watching out front. Any time a union man or a member of his family bought a ticket, it would mean a twenty-five-buck fine for him. Consequently, in a place where everyone knows everyone else, there wouldn’t be any bought.
    “All right,” I said. “But I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, Blair.”
    “As many as you like, Joe.”
    “When did your men take out cards in the bricklayers’ union?”
    “Huh?” He blinked. “What do you mean?”
    “I’m talking about the job your boys did in the house over at Fairfield last week.”
    “Oh, that!” He forced a laugh. “Why that wasn’t a bricklayer’s job. All it amounted to was putting a few bricks under the projectors. Leveling them up. They had to make a longer shot, see, and—”
    “It was brick work, wasn’t it?”
    “But the bricklayers couldn’t have done it. The operators had to!”
    “Then you should have had bystanders in from the bricklayers,” I said. “You know what I think, Blair? I think the bricklayers are going to file a complaint against you with the state federation. I think that brick work at Fairfield is going to have to be torn out and done over by the proper local.”
    He stopped grinning, and his face fell a little. “You get around, don’t you, Joe?”
    “More than you’d think,” I said. “More than you do, apparently. Did you know that the projectionists at View Point installed over fifty seats in the house there?”
    “Sure I know about it,” he snapped. “There wasn’t enough carpenters to do the job so the projectionists finished it up.”
    “Why didn’t the carpenters work overtime?”
    “Because the chairs had to be in for the night show!”
    “I get you,” I said. “Rules are rules until they start pinching you. Then you throw them out the window.”
    He stood at the side of his car, thinking, bobbling the cigar around in his mouth. The bricklayers and carpenters are our two biggest locals; they’re usually the biggest locals in any district. If they took a notion to—and Blair knew they would after I got through needling ’em—they could make him wish he’d never been born.
    “Okay, Joe,” he said, finally. “Maybe I was a little hasty.”
    “I thought you’d see it my way,” I said. “No hard feelings?”
    “All kinds of ’em.” He looked down at my hand and shook his head. “I’m not through with you, Joe. Someday I’m going to hang one on you that you can’t squirm out of.”

7
    O ur house, our residence, sits