Read This New and Poisonous Air for Free Online

said. “Now, go float away.”
    Poor Kitty went to the bathroom to wash, and we kept our distance from the scene. If David Miller was right about anything, it was that the ticket seller, May Avalon, would chain herself to the theater to save it. In a sense, she already had, manning her glass booth for nearly sixty years, a wooden woman on the prow of a sunken ship, submerged but unable to drown. With her white hair still in girlish braids, she pushed the button to dispense pink tickets without giving our faces so much as a single glance. Old songs drifted from her antique record player, music from the vaudeville age that conjured images of singing puppets, garish blackface and fluttering Chinese silk. We knew her history well enough—had heard it repeated by our parents and grandparents. If the theater was a body, May Avalon was not its heart but its liver, performing a hundred mysterious functions, and her despair was nearly as much a landmark as the Orpheum itself.
    May had lost her only love to the theater years ago—a towheaded buck dancer named Common Woolbrink who traveled the vaudeville circuit, performing on the flamelit
stages of small towns across the Midwest. Unlike his shabby costume, Woolbrink’s dancing was said to be a modern marvel. His colorless eyes recognized the world anew every time he looked out over an audience, and he danced with such vigor that he required an oak platform on which to perform for fear that he might break through the pinewood stage. If women watched him too long, they fainted. Men were driven to riot.
    What burned him into our town’s collective memory was not his dancing but his death—stabbed eleven times with a hunting knife on the steps of the Orpheum by a man named Roy Elkhart who said Woolbrink had lied at a game of cards. May Avalon, then just a girl, held the boy’s head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair like she was his mother, watching blood pool on the concrete. She undid the clasps of his red dancing shoes, and after they took his body away, sat holding them to her chest, not five feet from where she’d spend the rest of her life selling tickets. The Orpheum transitioned from vaudeville house to movie palace, and May remained. “Picture shows are safer than live acts,” one man was quoted as saying in The Monitor . “They can’t be pig-stuck—no matter how much we hate the act.”
    If Common Woolbrink’s death was the Orpheum’s first real tragedy, then Kitty Miller’s disappearance was to be its last. One week after she and her brother sat eating ice cream at Ray’s, she was gone, and David Miller, T-shirt torn and blood on his cheek, pulled the first piece of concrete from the crumbling steps, aiming it at the Orpheum. He threw his stone, not at the glass ticket booth, nor at the grand marquee that sprouted birds’ nests like untrimmed hair. Instead, he aimed at one of the Egyptian crocodile gods that flanked the theater’s entrance, using the smooth motion he’d learned from a summer of
practices, believing that at least those toothy, moon-eyed gods provided a face for the Orpheum’s mysteries. But we knew the sculptures were little more than monster masks, products of the 1923 renovation. If anyone was to blame for Kitty’s disappearance, it was not the gods but us—we who’d been losing control of our house of dreams for years.
    David was too young to know about the others, but what happened to Kitty had happened before. There’d been the black girl who’d come on the bus, no more than thirteen, carrying a backpack full of clothes with a doll tied to it. She looked like the kind of child who’d been hollowed out by life. When she went to the Orpheum, we assumed she intended to wash herself in its bathroom sink and then lose her worries in a movie for a while. May Avalon even gave her a free pass, something the old crone was loath to do for any of us. The girl left her backpack in a pool of soda, and we put the dirty thing in the