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“Don’t go to Arkansas,” the theater owner in Kansas City told me.
I was unloading canisters of a picture called Secrets of a Sorority Girl from the back of my car. I stood up straight and said, “What?”
The old man leaned through the backdoor of his theater and spit some tobacco in the general direction of a trash bin. “Didn’t you say you was headed down to the Ozarks?”
“Yeah, that’s my next stop.”
The old timer scratched his chin. “Well, you should steer clear of Arkansas. A girl all alone down there could get herself in trouble.”
I just smiled at that as he passed me the canisters of a Lash Lu Rue western called Ghost Town Renegades.
As I wedged them into the crowded back of the car, he asked, “You ever been down there?”
“No, this is my first trip.”
He shook his head. “Well, let me tell you, it’s a whole different world, Billie. It’s where the Midwest ends and the South begins, and that transition ain’t pretty.”
“I heard it was lovely country.”
“Ain’t the country I’m talking about. The further down into the Ozarks you go, the more peculiar the people get. You’ll be okay as long as you’re in Missouri, but you watch yourself once you get to Arkansas. They ain’t got proper dispositions down there.”
“Aw, c’mon. The Ozarks are the Ozarks, right?”
He looked at me like I’d spit on the Missouri state flag. “Them hillbillies in Arkansas are meaner than a mess of snakes. Had a uncle went down there in 1913. Ain’t heard from him since.”
I laughed at that, and he allowed himself a little smile.
I said, “Dick Powell is from Arkansas.”
“Is that a fact?”
“I think so. Seems like I read it in a movie magazine, anyway. He and Alan Ladd both are from there, I think.”
“Well, the Ozarks ain’t populated by a bunch of movie stars. You just remember that.”
“All right,” I assured him. “I’ll be careful.”
We shook hands, and I climbed into the company car. It was a ‘41 Mercury station wagon, with scratched wooden doors and my suitcase crammed into the back between heaps of film canisters. As I pulled out of the alley, I gave him a wave.
As I headed south, I didn’t worry about the old timer’s warning. Although I had been PRC’s mid-South distribution agent for only a few weeks, I’d already figured out that one hick town was about as bad as all the others. As I slipped out of the city and back into the open country, I cursed myself again for taking the job in the first place.
All things considered, I thought, maybe I should have stuck with the writing. |
