No Tomorrow Read online

  NO

  TOMORROW

  Jake Hinkson

  NEW PULP PRESS

  Published by New Pulp Press, LLC, 926 Truman Avenue,

  Key West, Florida 33040, USA.

  No Tomorrow copyright © 2015 by Jake Hinkson. Electronic compilation/ paperback edition copyright © 2015 by New Pulp Press LLC. Cover design: Michael Kronenberg.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized ebook editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents. How the ebook displays on a given reader is beyond the publisher’s control.

  For information contact:

  [email protected]

  For

  Gin Armstrong

  "Meaningless! Meaningless!" saith the Preacher. "Everything is meaningless!"-

  .Ecclesiates 1:2

  “There is no road back. There’re no yesterdays.

  There’s no tomorrow. There’s only today.

  Everyday you live is a day before you die.

  Crashout (1952)

  NO

  TOMORROW

  Part One:

  The Woman From Hollywood

  Summer, 1947

  Chapter One

  “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.

  Heading 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.

  ~ ~ ~

  “The problem isn’t that you’re a woman,” the man at PRC had told me. “The problem is we don’t need another writer. Writers grow on palm trees out here. And, hell, most of our pictures write themselves, anyway.”

  “That’s bad news for me,” I said.

  His office was a cramped hole at the back of PRC Studios, just one door down from the men’s room, and his only window looked out on the side of another building five feet away. He leaned across his little desk and pushed back the writing samples I’d brought in.

  I didn’t reach for them. I just waited.

  He had a tanned face and crooked teeth. He was lucky to have the bad teeth because otherwise he was as plain as a paper sack. An all-points bulletin on him would just say: be on the lookout for a tanned studio flunky with crisscrossed incisors.

  He asked, “Where’re you from, Miss Dixon?”

  “Call me Billie,” I said.

  “Where’re you from originally, Billie?”

  “Texas.”

  “Thought I heard a little cactus in that accent. How long you been in LA?”

  “A few years.”

  “Move out here to break into the movies?”

  I smiled. “No. Nothing fancy like that. I just wanted to get away from my grandmother’s general store. Been refilling coffee cups over on Sunset for the last five years. Then last week my boss’s niece got canned from Lockheed, so he fired me and gave her my job.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “I decided to come down to the studios and look for work.”

  “You thought you could go from wiping counters to writing pictures just like that, huh?”

  “Why not? Based on what I’ve seen, I can write one as well as the next gal. Besides, I’m a natural born liar, and as near as I can tell writing for the pictures is all about giving pretty people interesting things to say. What God shorted me in looks, he compensated me for in gab.”

  He smiled slightly at that, but I could tell he was thinking.

  “You went to other studios before you came here?” he asked.

  “Hey, I’m not going to lie to you,” I said. “Sure I went to the big boys first. Who wouldn’t?”

  He nodded sadly. “Indeed. You talk your way into any meetings over at the big boys?”

  “I got a couple of meetings. Warner Brothers. Fox.”

  “But …”

  “Nothing panned out.”

  “Mm. I bet. So you came over to Poverty Row.”

  “Girl needs to eat.”

  He nodded and lit a cigarette. “Know anything about this part of town?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Poverty Row is Hollywood’s toilet,” he said. “We make six-reel pictures that have all the staying power of a roll of Scott Tissue. Every nickel and dime outfit up and down Gower Street follows pretty much the same business strategy. We shoot a picture for about twelve or fifteen grand, at the rate of about one a week, mostly as filler for double bills. This helps the theater owners convince their customers that they’re getting two pic
tures for the price of one, when what they’re really getting is a classy A-picture from the big studios followed by one of our B-grade pieces of shit.” He regarded his cigarette and said, “Here’s the thing, Billie. Like I said before, we don’t really need another Goddamn writer. What we need is a field man.”

  “What’s a field man do?” I asked.

  “Well, some of these little theaters out there in the ass end of nowhere can’t afford the big A-pictures. They only run the cheapest of the cheap stuff, sometimes years after it’s come out. We get our movies out to most of them through states’ rights distributors and exchanges, but some of these theaters are so small or so out of the way we have to dispatch someone out there to peddle the stuff by hand. That’s where the field man comes in. His job is to shovel the studio shit as far into the heartland as he can get it.”

  “You’re hiring for this job?”

  “Got an opening for the mid-South distribution agent. That would mean schlepping our wares out to hick towns in Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and trying to convince the local theater owner down there that he’s getting a deal on some fifty-minute masterpiece like Thundering Gunslingers. These hick exhibitors usually take what they can get. The hours are brutal, and the pay is insulting. I never had a dame do it before, but you got spunk and personality.” He looked at his watch. “And, hell, if I fill this position before noon I can go ahead and start drinking.”

  “Not exactly the job I had in mind when I walked in here.”

  He flashed me some bad teeth and laughed. “Hey, join the club. But if you want a job in the movie business, this is the one I can offer you.”

  ~ ~ ~

  My fancy Hollywood career.

  At least it used to be.

  That was before I got mixed up in this bad business in Arkansas. I can remember thinking that morning as I left Kansas City that my job – that my life, really – couldn’t get much worse. Looking back now, that makes me laugh. It really makes me laugh.

  Chapter Two

  The Midwest unravels into the Ozarks. Fields, which begin as green and as flat as pool tables, gradually rise on either side of the road before they give way to thickly wooded hills punctured by rocky outcroppings. The further I descended into the Ozarks, the more impulsively the roads wound through the trees, as if they were following the weavings of a drunk man. Twisted, half-assed paths clung to the side of piney highlands, and although I had a map on the seat next to me, I couldn’t look at it and drive at the same time for fear of hurtling over the edge of a fifty-foot ravine. By the time I hit Arkansas I was white-knuckling the steering wheel and cursing the whole damn business.

  I actually sighed with relief when I made one last turn around a bend and found myself unexpectedly in Stock’s Settlement. Spread across a green valley between two stubby mountains, the dirt road town hugged the Clear Water River on the west and climbed up a little hill to the east. In the center of the town square, a three story courthouse towered over the cluster of little shops and diners that surrounded it.

  I found the Eureka Theater at the end of Main Street. It was hard to miss. Though it had probably been built before the talkies took off, besides the courthouse it was still the nicest building I’d seen in town. It had a brown Beaux-Arts façade and a sign out front advertising air conditioning. Still, it was clearly in disrepair. The marquee looked as if it had been raided for aluminum at some point during the war and never quite replaced.

  I checked my hair and makeup, smoothed down my skirt, and got out of the car. As I walked up to the box office I saw a small handwritten sign that read:

  Our Air Conditioning Is Still Broke

  I walked past the box office and tried to peer through the glass portholes in the front doors. No lights appeared to be on in the place, although enough sunlight slipped through that I could tell it wasn’t abandoned or covered in dust. I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. I went back to the box office and saw that the theater had no show times listed.

  I walked around the side of the building and found a door propped open with a wedge of wood. Before I could step inside, a chicken walked out.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

  I leaned in the darkened door and called “Hello! Anybody here besides this chicken?”

  The sweltering theater could probably seat a hundred people on the floor and fifty in the balcony, but it lay fallow and smelled of live poultry and old cigars.

  Presently, the lobby door opened and a man walked out.

  He was a little fellow, hunchbacked and cockeyed, with a cigar protruding from a thicket of red whiskers.

  “Howdy,” he said in a rough squeak of a voice as he hobbled down the aisle.

  “Howdy. You the proprietor of this establishment?”

  “I reckon.”

  “I’m Billie Dixon.”

  “Billie?”

  “Yes sir.”

  He held out a knotty hand. “Claude Jeter.”

  We shook, and I said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jeter. I’m from the Producer’s Releasing Corporation, and I’m here to make you a deal on some fine motion pictures. I have a selection of films with me, and I have complete listings on our new and upcoming releases.”

  Jeter squinted at me behind his cigar and said, “Fine motion pictures? You new at this, ma’am?”

  I lied to him with a smile. “No sir. I’ve been at it for a few years now.”

  “Well, unless PRC changed hands, I can’t figure that their pictures got no better.”

  The darkened theater was hot as all hell, but Jeter stood there sucking on his cigar and squinting at me like he didn’t notice.

  “Well, at any rate,” I said, “we got some new ones.”

  The old man lowered himself gradually into a theater seat and said, “Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know as I need any more pictures no how.”

  Staying by the open door in the hope that a breeze would come along and cool me, I asked, “Why is that, Mr. Jeter?”

  “You’n call me Claude,” he said. For the first time he pulled the cigar out of his mouth. He blew off a half inch of ash, then stuck the cigar back into the center of his whiskers. “I’m thinking of shutting her on down.”

  “Folks around here don’t like going to the pictures anymore?”

  Claude said, “Well, no, it ain’t that. I got a whole mess of problems. With the war over, a lot folks around here is out of work and ain’t got the dime to spare on a movie ticket. Them that got the dime and a car drive on down to the Star Light Theater in Black Bear where they can see Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman movies. Of course, now that the Goddamn air conditioner is broke and I ain’t got the money to get it fixed, I don’t even got no cold air to offer. And truth be told, the customers like the air more than most of the pictures.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe if I gave you one of our newest pic – ”

  “None of that matters, though. Because none of that is my number one problem.”

  “What’s your number one problem?”

  “My number one problem is the man of God who lives across the river there and runs the biggest church around has decided that motion pictures is the spawn of the devil.”

  “He’s come out against you?”

  “Well, sure, me and my portal to perdition.” Claude laced his fingers together on his belly and pushed his legs into the aisle. “He means to put me out of bidness, and I reckon he’s gonna do it, too. People around here think he’s a regular Ozark Moses. A portion of them, anyways. A portion of them will do any damn thing he tells them. And if’n he tells not to go to the pictures, they stay away.”

  “Have you tried talking to him?”

  Without moving his head, Claude puffed on his cigar. “I ain’t about to go over there and talk at him and have him tell me I’m going to hell. I’d just as soon close down as do that.”

  The chicken walked up to the door and regarded me suspiciously.

  “Hey,” Claude said to me, “make way ther
e for Franklin Roostervelt. He likes to come in and hunt for bugs.”

  I let the chicken, rooster, or whatever the hell it was come inside. I said, “Have you tried paying this preacher?”

  “Pay him for what?”

  I shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the motion picture industry that some moral crusader got paid to go away. Maybe he’s waiting for you to make him an offer.”

  Claude watched Franklin Roostervelt peck at the floor.

  “Never thought to offer him a deal,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “Might not. I ain’t got a lot to offer. Maybe I could cut him in on a share under the table.”

  “He might like the extra income.”

  “He might at that.”

  I had a thought. “Say,” I said moving into the theater, “how about I go over and talk to him?”

  He perked up at that suggestion. “That’d be awful white of you, Billie.”

  “And in return, how about we make a deal on some movies?”

  He settled back in his seat. “Oh.”

  “What? You need new pictures. I got new pictures. You take a couple off my hands, sign a deal for a couple more, and I’ll go over there and talk to this preacher. You’re back in business by tonight. Save up, get that air conditioning fixed. This place will be hopping like Grauman’s Chinese Theater in no time.”

  Claude pulled out his cigar and blew off some ash. “Just not another Buster Crabbe western, for God’s sake. I can’t sit through another one of those. How about Bob Steele? You got any Bob Steele? I like him. He’s got mean eyes.”

  “Yeah, I think I got some Bob Steele pictures. It’s a deal then?”

  “First you go talk to the preacher.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “The church, of course. Go across the river and up the hill.”

  I leaned over and we shook, and I was about to leave, but Claude said, “Just you watch how you talk to him, though.”