Creeps (20 page)

“Am I too late?”

“No, there's time.”

“Does everyone hate me?”

“Hate you! I think Kendrick might kiss you! Sharon and Mr. Rollie, too!”

“What about you, Wayne Pumphrey? Will you kiss me?”

Everything inside him goes to mush and his face burns and his legs turn to rubber and he forgets to breathe and Marjorie laughs and grabs his wrist and they start running towards the stage door.

“Stop!” Mr. Ricketts screams.

But just then the stage door opens and Mr. Rollie's standing there and he's the colour of bread, but upon seeing Marjorie the blood rushes back into his cheeks. “Miss Pope!”

Wayne and Marjorie stop in front of him. “Have you come back?” Mr. Rollie says.

“If you'll have me.”

Mr. Rollie's holding her suddenly and Marjorie's holding him back and Mr. Ricketts wants to know what in blazes is going on and then the audience applauds and the band starts in on their third and final number before the opening of the show.

Mr. Rollie lets Marjorie go. “We'll have to get Julie out of your pants.” Then to Wayne, “We have a situation.”

“I'd say,” Mr. Ricketts says.

“Situation?” says Wayne.

“Mr. Faulkner.”

“Les?”

“He tripped over Mr. Stool who was lying on the floor and he's twisted his knee and it's quite bad and I don't think he can go on.”

“No!”

“Yes. So I need you to fill in.”

“What?”

“I was all ready to call it off, but then I thought: who has sat in on every rehearsal and helped me rewrite sections of the script and knows everyone's lines? You, Mr. Pumphrey …
YOU!
”

“Me?” Wayne looks at Marjorie, then back at Mr. Rollie. “But you said I should join the band.”

“I made a mistake and I'm sorry and if there's anyone who deserves a chance it's you, Mr. Pumphrey.”

Wayne pauses. “What about Paul? Have you asked him?”

“Mr. Stool can't say the one line he
has
, Mr. Pumphrey. No, I've thought this through. There's no one but you.”

“But I can't. I'll mess it up.”

A flurry of cymbals coming from the stage area; trumpets loud enough to straighten Mr. Ricketts's back; a sound from the flutes that only a dog could hear; and a hand in his suddenly: longish, icicle-like fingers. Then her voice. Older-sounding. Like someone who's seen stuff. “You can do it, Wayne Pumphrey.”

He turns to her—to the fatherless girl with the worn sneakers and the funny hair and the strange mother—and believes that, so long as she's doing it with him, he might be able to do it too. Then he looks back at Mr. Rollie. Breathes in and holds it for ages and finally lets it out and says, “I'd like to use a script.”

Marjorie's hand is squeezing his now, and Mr. Rollie's jumping up and down and clapping, and Mr. Ricketts is saying, “Fall then, see if I care!”

They're running: Mr. Rollie up front and Marjorie and Wayne not far behind, through the stage door and into the wings and to the backstage as the drums taper off and the saxophones go quiet and Dean Dunn lets go of his whammy bar, making way, finally, for the clarinets, which sound awkward and self-conscious and a bit flat. Someone's playing the triangle. Jim Butt, Wayne guesses.

Everyone's gathered around Les. Kendrick's holding an ice pack against Les's knee and Julie's massaging Les's shoulders. Sharon's holding a Snickers wrapper and Paul is telling those who will listen that it wasn't his fault and why wasn't Les watching where he was going. Shane and Jason are giggling.

“You were lying in the middle of the floor!” Les shouts.

“You did it on purpose,” Julie says.

“Did not.”

“Trying to sabotage my performance!” goes Les.

Then Sharon screams, “Marjorie!”

Everyone looks. Some of the younger cast members hold their hands to their mouths.

A cymbal crashes. Dean Dunn does another lick. A crescendo amongst the woodwinds.

Julie's eyes are bulging in their sockets and Les's jaw is on his lap and Kendrick's smiling like a drunk.

“What is
she
doing here?” Julie says.

Mr. Rollie says, “Take off your pants, Miss Snow.”

“What?”

“You too, Mr. Faulkner. Mr. Pumphrey has graciously offered to fill in for you.”

The cast's communal gasp drowns out the crescendo in the music. Hands go to mouths; others reach out and grab shoulders. Sharon drops her Snickers wrapper and Paul seems to be fighting the
urge to lie down again; Les goes even paler; and Julie's eyes swell more than Les's knee has. Then Les is pushing the ice pack aside and telling everyone he can do the show after all and tries getting to his feet, but the pain's too much, so Kendrick lowers him back onto his chair. Les licks his palm and goes to run it through his show-ready hair, but his heart's not in it, so instead he looks at Mr. Rollie and says, “Fill in? Him? He'll ruin everything.”

Then the music's ending and the lights are going down and Mr. Rollie orders Kendrick to run out and tell Mrs. Cooper to play for a few more minutes and for the rest of the cast to find their places. Everyone reaches for personal props and adjusts costume bits and runs to entrance positions. Sharon's holding her stomach and Paul's saying something about not knowing his line. Then the music dies completely and the curtain starts to open but then Kendrick reappears and the music starts again and the curtain closes before too much of the set is revealed and a bedsheet is held up for Marjorie and Julie to change behind and Marjorie's costume pants are so short they look comical and Julie walks to her place like a mourner following a casket.

Les takes off his flannel shirt, sweater, parka, work gloves, and hard hat, handing them all over to Wayne. He refuses to give up the pants though and insists on Kendrick taking him somewhere where
he doesn't have to listen to all his excellent acting being butchered by Wayne Pumphrey.

Kendrick helps Les to his feet and half carries him away while Wayne gets into Les's clothes that are too big. Marjorie's there to roll up his shirtsleeves; Mr. Rollie adjusts the hard hat to fit Wayne's head; Jason's placing a script in his hands.

Then he's being guided to his place and his shoulder is squeezed and a voice that's Mr. Rollie's says, “You're a leader.”

Marjorie. Where's Marjorie?

An explosion in the music: everything struck or blown into or strummed with full force, and his lips and ears are tingling, and his heart's racing, and he can't breathe, and how'd he end up here anyway? Applause and whistling and stomping of feet that seems to go on forever and then the lights going down and then nothing. He's moving again, but it doesn't feel like
his
feet doing the walking; they're someone else's, pulling his strings, taking him to where he needs to be. Must be. Now he's still, and alone, and he thinks
We all are anyway,
and it's black and he can't see and he fumbles to open the script, find the page, but he drops it and it echoes and then the spotlight heats his face and it's like he's died and is heading towards the light, or rather the light's heading towards him, about to engulf him.
Bend down and pick up the script,
he thinks. Open it up and
read. Simple. But he can't move. Can't do anything but stare into the light. And it dawns on him then that mostly everything is out of our hands, so maybe it's just best to get out of the way.

It's the sound of laughter at the back of the gymnasium that brings Wayne back. That and Mr. Rollie whispering the opening line from his place in the wings, and Jim Butt dropping a drumstick, and the people in the front row whispering.
Pick up the script
, he thinks once more, but again he doesn't. Why would he need to when the words are in his head all of a sudden? He doesn't know if they're the right words, only that they're coming from somewhere and they
feel
like the right ones. Almost like how you know what someone's saying without them having spoken; you know by what their body does instead, their eyes, the way they hold their mouths or tuck a strand of hair behind their ear or walk away because that too is saying something.
So many words,
Wayne thinks,
when really, we hardly need them at all.

Then Marjorie's there and she's addressing the audience and her eyes are glossy and then the lights come up to full and Paul Stool enters from stage left and gives Wayne a hug, which gets a big laugh because the eight-year-old son is bigger than the thirty-year-old daddy. Then Marjorie's hugging Wayne too and kissing him (not in the script, the
kissing part) and she mistakenly knocks his hard hat off and it rolls into the wings, which makes the audience laugh again. The action moves to the kitchen and Wayne's character Clancy is telling his wife and son about the accident at the mine and how Roy from across the road is unaccounted for. Lights out and then Mrs. Cooper goes to the piano and the rest of the cast filter onstage for “The Mining Song,” which in Wayne's opinion sounds slightly off key. A scene at the mine then: men digging through rubble, and one in a union hall where angry workers demand safer working conditions. Paul Stool forgets his one line and stops blinking and Wayne has to say the words for him. Another song and Julie has a solo and she's not bad despite her slip showing. Then a funeral scene where Sharon (her character's name is Beverly) laments the loss of her husband, Roy. She's doing great until her wig falls off and the audience laughs through the rest of her monologue and into the next scene. Paul Stool trips and knocks over a vase of flowers sitting on the kitchen table in scene nine and then, inexplicably, says the line that he'd forgotten earlier and some in the audience chuckle; others whisper; someone unwraps candy.

Then Wayne and Marjorie are in heavy coats and they're standing on a street corner and Wayne's character Clancy says: “Spring's coming,” to which Marjorie's character Bonita replies: “Long way off
yet. Spring.” And suddenly Wayne can't remember what comes next, so he looks into the wings, but there's no one, so he tries listening for Mr. Rollie's prompt, but there's no voice. Marjorie's staring and he's wishing now he'd picked up that script and read from the page so he wouldn't be lost. He thinks there's nothing worse: being lost. It's in his mind to walk off stage, grab a copy of the play, and then come back out, but he's got no feet, legs, body, brain. He's hardly there—a breeze. Then Marjorie speaks and it occurs to him that he couldn't remember because he had no words to begin with. Her last lines are spoken directly to the audience and it's something about wishing she could keep Clancy with her all the time so she wouldn't have to worry, or hear about him the way she'd heard about Roy and why do bad things have to happen? “But time supplies the gauze,” Bonita says, “the bandages and eventually the cast.” Then her character turns to Wayne's character and they hold hands and walk off stage as the lights go down and the band starts its instrumental of “The Mining Song.”

Applause and the lights up to full and the cast in a jagged line and bowing at different times because, in all the chaos of the past few days, Mr. Rollie had neglected to rehearse a curtain call. Marjorie and Wayne are pushed to the front, so they grab hands and bow, and the audience gets to their feet. Then Mr. Rollie comes out, wiping beneath his glasses,
and saying how happy he is that everyone could make it out and, despite some pre-show hiccups, the performance couldn't have been better and he likes his odds in next week's drama festival, which makes the audience clap even louder.

Everyone leaves the stage, and in the wings there are hugs and handshakes and pats on the back and voices saying “Way to go, Wayne”; “Like you've been doing it all along”; “Better than Les.” Then Julie's standing there and she's fanning her dress and she says, “My slip was showing.”

“I bet everyone was too focused on your singing to notice,” Wayne says.

She pauses. “I was thinking that maybe I don't like this stuffas much as I thought.”

Wayne stays quiet.

“Most of the time I'm thinking about skirts and shoes.”

“Can't help thinking stuff.”

“I suppose.” She makes to go, but stops. “You did really good.”

“Thanks.”

“So did Marjorie. Can you tell her for me? I'd do it myself but I can't find her anywhere.”

Wayne nods.

Julie walks away.

“Reception's in room 214,” Mr. Rollie says. “But first you should go out and meet your adoring fans.”

The place clears out in minutes and Wayne gets back into his civilian clothes and walks onto the stage to have a look in the auditorium.

She's sitting in the fourth row from the front, her hands in her lap.

“There you are,” he says.

She looks up.

He goes to where she is. “There's a reception.”