In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [94]
Flick finally reached up and snapped on the switch of the monster color TV set that hung high over the bar mirror. It seemed to warm up instantly. A thundering herd of posse riders roared across the screen. Mister Clean appeared briefly, and disappeared. Again the posse thundered, this time in the opposite direction, their guns roaring above the booming polka. Obviously conversation was out of the question, or at least it had become somewhat hazardous.
There is something about TV sets in bars that makes even sane people look at them. I sipped what seemed to be at least my thirtieth beer of the afternoon, staring upward at a moonfaced cowboy strumming a guitar. Behind him I could see old familiar country that I knew like the back of my hand. Those Hollywood back lots were as familiar as my own backyard, when I was a kid.
Flick finished his bottle-checking, armed himself with a clean bar rag, and stood briefly looking up at another posse, this time roaring directly at us, the puffs of their guns, their square jaws, the flying hoofs blending well with the eternal jukebox. We both watched for a long moment.
“I seen it.”
“So have I. If I remember correctly, Flick, that fat guy on the left is going to get shot. He.…”
Just as I said it, the fat guy spun into the air, dying spectacularly as cowboy extras always do, clutching at the clouds, slipping into the sagebrush, milking his scene as far as he could under union rules.
“Yep. I seen it.”
Flick turned back from the set with the air of a man adding a period at the end of a sentence.
I, however, continued to stare at the set. It seemed one of those eerie coincidences that happen once in a while, and that cause ladies who wear tennis shoes to believe in ESP, flying saucers, and swamis. I was not sure whether I should bring it up, else Flick suspect that I had had at least one beer too many. I could see he was the kind of bartender who did not serve drunks, but probably tossed them by the scruff of their neck out into the gale.
“Flick, I have seen that picture, too.”
“Yep. I seen it,” Flick said.
“You know, I have a feeling that I saw it with you.”
He looked back up at the set again for a long moment, as though to check his memory. The posse thundered down a ravine, diagonally this time, from left to right. Finally he said reflectively:
“By God, I think you’re right. It played with Rhythm on the Prairie, with Dick Foran. And they had Bob Steele, in person.”
We both disappeared briefly into our own dream world, eventually broken by Flick, who said:
“That was the day Schwartz threw up in the drinking fountain in the lobby.”
“Correct! That’s right.”
We returned to the posse for a bit, and finally I had to ask a question that was on my mind ever since the first gunshot.
“Flick, did Doppler ever show his face around here again?” He turned back to me, his expression as grim as any of those hard-faced men riding in that eternal posse, pursuing endless Badguys through the wilds of MGM Land.
“Doppler?”
His voice snapped like Ken Maynard biting out the name of a sheep rustler.
“He wouldn’t dare show up around here. They’d string him up in a minute.”
XXX LEOPOLD DOPPLER AND THE GREAT ORPHEUM GRAVY BOAT RIOT
Five thousand years from now, when future archaeologists are picking and scraping among the shards and the midden heaps, attempting to put together the mosaic of the rich, full life led by twentieth-century man, they will come across many a mystery that is impenetrable even to those who lived through it. A cracked fragment of a Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine Shake-Up Mug, a Shirley Temple Cream Pitcher, a heavily corroded Tom Mix Lucky Horse-Shoe Nail Ring, an incomplete set of Gilbert Roland/Pola Negri/Thomas Meighan Movie Star Sterling Silver Teaspoons with Embossed Autographs will undoubtedly be key items in files marked:
INEXPLICABLE ABORTIVE RELIGIOUS OBJECTS FOUND IN GREAT NUMBERS, YET WITH NO SEEMING DIRECT CONNECTION WITH THE GREATER PHILOSOPHICAL CURRENTS OF THE TIME
But we will know, won’t we?
Not long ago,