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was thinking of nothing but this big boy . . . and my show. Because at some point it had become mine,
just as this earlier time with its party-line telephones and cheap gas had become mine. At that
moment I cared more about Of Mice and Men than I did about Lee Harvey Oswald.
But I cared even more about Mike.
I took his hand off his mouth. Put it on one huge thigh. Put my hands on his shoulders. Looked
into his eyes. “Listen to me,” I said. “Are you listening?”
“Yessir.”
“You are not going to fuck up. Say it.”
“I . . .”
“Say it.”
“I’m not going to fuck up.”
“What you’re going to do is amaze them. I promise you that, Mike.” Gripping his shoulders
tighter. It was like trying to sink my fingers into stones. He could have picked me up and broken me
over his knee, but he only sat there looking at me from a pair of eyes that were humble, hopeful, and
still rimmed with tears. “Do you hear me? I promise.”
4
The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the audience sat. George
and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The other men had been sent away, but they
wouldn’t be gone long; if the big, vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any
dignity, George would have to see to it himself.
“George? Where them guys goin?”
Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and was gripping it.
Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on her other side, Deke Simmons was staring
up at the stage with his mouth slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur
cropping grass in his north forty.
“Huntin. They’re goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie.”
Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor—what he was going to be, most likely, was a
salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father—but a great performance can lift all the actors in a
production, and that had happened tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved
even low levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face was Steinbeck’s George
Milton), had caught something from Mike. All at once, about halfway through Act I, he finally
seemed to realize what it meant to go rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he
had fallen into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his head, I
thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
“George!”
“Yeah?”
“Ain’t you gonna give me hell?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, George.” Smiling. The kind of smile that says Yeah, I know I’m a dope, but we both know
I can’t help it. Sitting down beside George on the imaginary riverbank. Taking off his own hat, tossing
it aside, rumpling his short blond hair. Imitating George’s voice. Mike had nailed this with eerie ease
in the very first rehearsal, with no help from me. “‘If I was alone, I could live so easy. I could get a job
and not have no more mess.’” Resuming his own voice . . . or Lennie’s, rather. “I can go away. I can go
right up in the hills and find a cave, if you don’t want me.”