The Hanging Hill

9

Reginald Grimes lurked in the shadows at the back of the auditorium, watching the cast of Bats in Her Belfry take their curtain calls.

Near one of the exit alcoves, Grimes noticed a terrified usher. She was staring at him.

So Grimes glared at her.

She scurried away.

They always did.

The audience was on its feet now, giving Grimes’s staging of the beloved Broadway musical comedy a standing ovation. As the show’s director, Grimes did not attend every performance after opening night. But tomorrow he was scheduled to begin rehearsals for Curiosity Cat. A perfectionist, Grimes wanted to make certain Bats was in the best shape possible before he moved on to his next project.

It was not.

He would need to go backstage. Have a word with the cast.

Heads would roll. Well, at least one very pretty head.

As the audience continued to applaud and thunder “Bravo!,” Thurston Powell, the actor playing Dracula, came to center stage to twirl his cape and take his solo bow.

Grimes wondered once again how that must feel.

To savor the limelight. To bask in the glory of a triumphant performance. To soak up the love and adulation of a thousand total strangers.

Yes, there had been a time when Reginald Grimes had dreamed of being a world-renowned actor, but his physical deformity prevented it from ever becoming a reality. As a small child, barely two, he had been left alone in the orphanage laundry with a gas-powered wringer washer. He had, or so he had always been told by the nurse who witnessed the mangling of his left arm, been mesmerized by the machine’s rolling cylinders, engineered to squeeze the wash water out of soaked bedsheets. Little Reggie placed his fingertips into the rollers and the ravenous machine had done its job: it had pulled him forward like a limp rag, mashing and crushing his arm up to the elbow.

Forty years and several crude surgeries later, his left arm remained bent and locked at a severe angle. It looked as if it were frozen inside a permanent plaster cast without the need of a sling. Ever since he was a child, fearing the taunts of his classmates, Grimes had worn long-sleeved shirts and sweaters, even in the summer, hoping to forever hide the patchwork of quilted flesh grafted to his ruined arm.

Of course there was no way he could act in Shakespearean tragedies or Broadway comedies without the ability to move his left arm. No way could he become a movie star when the bare skin of his forearm resembled a mound of white cheese slices melted on top of each other.

“Bravo!”

The whole cast was onstage, standing in a line. They locked hands and took one last group bow. When they rose out of it, they beamed.

Grimes grinned.

He knew that at least one of those bright, shiny faces would soon be filled with tears.