Pulling back a never-used stage wing curtain looking for an extension cord, Ballard Metz found a stack of bibles.
He stopped cold, then laughed.
When he was a kid, and in trouble for something, he’d deny the accusation saying “I swear on a stack of bibles.”
The Gwyland Theater had been a street corner COGIC for twelve years before Ballard bought it with a small car accident settlement and restored it to the Gwyland Theater.
It wasn’t in a theater neighborhood unless you counted gas station dope arguments as theater, and Ballard’s small productions were rousing failures.
The Gwyland showed Rocky Horror at midnight Saturdays, and Sunday matinees of The Wiz, those were marginally profitable, but he didn’t want a cult movie house. He bought the theater to do theater.
They were doing American Buffalo in front of seven people, Ballard playing Don, Mason Heidger playing Bobby, when a man approached after the show.
Ballard remembered the socket straining handshake.
He remembered many of the portrayals of the devil in American theater and cinema.
Jack Durant wasn’t the devil, really, but the devil, as they say, had been in a detail Ballard had overlooked.
Ballard gave up his search for the extension cord, deciding instead to walk the four blocks through the alley to the hardware store and buy a new one.
Jack Durant, in a way, was paying for it.
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