Private Screening Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stacy up at noon.”
    Carson lit a cigarette for his nerves.
    Empty, the stage was an enormous concrete bunker. Four levels of catwalk rose from each side; banks of lights and colored cloth backdrops hung from the ceiling; the crew hauled beat-up metal boxes from the loading dock, footsteps echoing on the dirty wooden floor. They worked steadily, laconically. When they were finished, the lights would be lowered and angled to make the backdrops look like multicolored silk and the stage a bubble suspended in the dark, and then Stacy would appear in a blaze of spotlights.
    â€œGolden Anniversary” Carson decided he would call the poem.
    This morning, he’d read the lines he could not finish:
    Each year I remember you
    Hair golden, free to live
    Waiting for the camera
    His golden life to give.…
    Carson closed his eyes.
    Capwell’s blood spurted into his hands, and then he was landing in Oakland. A newspaper said that it was June 2, 1970; Carson still could not remember the thirty-six hours before Capwell had died in his arms. He stared at his hands for blood.
    The cigarette had burned to a nub. Carson looked up, and saw that Jesus, one of the sound men, watched him.
    â€œYou have some kind of problem, man?”
    Jesus shrugged. “I was needing help with the sound.”
    Carson stubbed out the cigarette. “You want me to read your mind, Jesus, try moving your lips.”
    Sharp-eyed fucker. Opening a box, Carson stepped over the cords of the sound system as if they were trip wires and the amps could blow him to pieces. That the past bled into his present didn’t scare him so much as that he couldn’t control when it happened or remember why. And the part still missing in ’Nam had already cost him his kid.
    He began unloading the box.
    Beth’s two-month-old postcard was in the duffel bag next to the Mauser, addressed to him care of Damone. Cathy was all right, she had written, and she’d found work as a cashier. It was postmarked Columbia, South Carolina, but Beth gave him no return address. She didn’t want to see him again, she finished, and knew he had no money to help care for their daughter. That night Damone had slipped him ten bucks for a fifth of tequila.
    Patching in the amp, Carson felt its sudden electronic current as a revolver in his hand. It surprised him; for a moment he did not know whether to associate this with past or future. Then he thought of the postcard.
    Rising by instinct, he walked to the center of the stage.
    The body lay behind him on the floor. Calmly, he began to follow the plan.
    â€œWhere you going, Harry?”
    There was screaming; he did not even turn. “To pull more boxes off the truck.”
    They would catch him if he took the elevator. Moving toward the catwalk, he counted fifty feet.
    Three flights of metal stairs down, ten steps each, and Carson reached the entrance to the loading dock. His motorcycle was there. Less than thirty seconds’ time, he guessed. The adrenaline felt like a Dexedrine rush.
    Mentally, he jumped onto the motorcycle and escaped into the darkness.
    Hoisting another box, Carson took the elevator.
    Once onstage, he walked to his duffel bag. Next to it lay the newspaper Damone had lent him, open to an inside page. It was dated June second; like someone memorizing words, Carson scanned the headline “Lord to Question Parnell in Gay Rights Suit” as he lit his cigarette.
    3
    T ONY Lord felt the jury moving with him toward Colby Parnell.
    He stopped for an instant, the way an actor uses stillness to dramatize what will come. In that moment, he was conscious of the judge’s stare; the court reporter bent to his machine; his client’s tautness; the heightened interest of the press; the jury poised to make its judgment. Then he stepped forward.
    Parnell’s wool suit, club tie, and neatly shined shoes seemed intended to remind himself of who he was. He touched two fingers to the handkerchief