Free The Kind One by Tom Epperson

friend of both of them. Mrs. Ames couldn’t bear to watch, she hid her face in her husband’s chest, while Dr. Ames looked grim but he never turned away.
    Darla told me she didn’t care what that poor coon had done, he didn’t deserve what had been done to him, at the very least he should have got a fair trial. And the whole town had just stood there and watched and nobody had said a thing, including her beloved Dr. Ames. And the people had brought out their own children to see the torture and killing of Beau Jack, and it was evil, purely evil, out there on the edge of town, evil in the leaves and evil in the sleet and evil in the headlights and the stark shadows and evil even in Darla, she had stood there with the rest and hadn’t said a word, it didn’t matter she was only thirteen she should have said
something.
    At church that Sunday, she looked around at everybody, and she’d seen many of them at the lynching and if they’d been a bunch of naked wailing witches leaping around a fire at midnight she would’ve had more respect for them, it just made her sick them singing hymns about going to heaven and acting like they were so godly and so good.
    She started having bad dreams about her and Beau Jack, although sometimes her eyes were open so they couldn’t be dreams: Beau Jack would be crouching in the bathtub as her father stood over him with a gun, Darla would be standing naked on the truck with the rope around her neck and the tires churning the mud and throwing it up into the headlights, she would be holding on to Beau Jack’s legs as Uncle Gideon beat him in the head with a hammer, and she and Beau Jack would be fleeing the hobo jungle, running away together into an eternal night.
    Elwood, Indiana had seemed like a haven to her at first, but now it seemed a dark place, full of ghosts and sorrow. It seemed like Nebraska all over again, a place she needed to leave.
    It was the Ameses’ habit every Sunday after church to go to the Totempole Grill for a fried chicken and waffles dinner. A few weeks after the lynching they were there when Darla overheard the waitress talking to a man at the next table; he said he was a traveling salesman for Morrill Meat and was just passing through. When he got up to leave, she excused herself, saying she needed to go to the restroom, but she followed the man outside. She asked him if he could give her a ride to the next town, and he looked her up and down and grinned and said you bet, hop in, and Darla never saw Elwood or the Ameses again.
    For the next several years she wandered around the middle part of the country, making it a rule never to return to a place once she’d left. By the time she was fourteen she looked twenty; she lived her life as an adult, and thought of herself as one too. She had little trouble getting a job as a waitress at one greasy spoon or another. Sometimes when she left a job she’d clean out the cash register on her way out; she said she’d steal a hot stove in those days. She got caught by the law once, but she slept with the sheriff and he let her go.
    She turned eighteen in Aurora, Illinois. One day she was at a picture show, watching
Hills of Peril,
a Buck Jones western. She was nearly the only person there. After the movie was over she started talking with the owner; the place was named the Dream Theater, and she asked him why it was called that. He told her it was because he thought “dream” was the most beautiful word in the English language.
    Darla started going to the theater at least once a week, and she found herself looking forward as much to seeing the owner as the picture. His name was Goldsborough Bruff. He was forty-eight. He got around on crutches, because one of his legs was missing just below the hip. He had dark wavy hair with gray streaks in it.
    One night he told her his ticket girl had just quit and did she want the job? And so Darla gave up waitressing and began working in the Dream Theater.
    It was an old drafty