Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

re-per-tor-y ci-ne-ma .”
    “Foreign movies?”
    “Foreign movies, and old movies that are supposed to be classics, and I kinda suspect, now and then, artsy dirty movies, which is what will make any actual money, if any actual money gets made. If they can square it with the churchies.”
    “Good luck on that . How long you figure they’ll be open?”
    “Well, I’ve done lots of talking with Todd. He comes in here for lunch and coffee while he frets over how they’re fixing it up. I know they’re undercapitalized. I’d guess that they probably have four months of mortgage payments for that place in the bank, but operating costs’re gonna get’em before then. Movies cost money, you know, even old ones and foreign ones. On the other hand there isn’t much to do in this town, and the nearest competing ‘repertory cinema’—Christ I can’t do that phony accent he puts on when he says that—is up in Toledo.” He stared up at the ceiling a second; Philbin usually seemed to find the God of Business Analysis in an old spot of water damage just above the cash register. “Figure, hmm, they’ll get some draw from Gist County, anyway—college kids from Vinville, at least the artsy ones and the students who need to suck up to their profs, and probably some people from Delos, Arthur, and Lincoln Bridge.
    “Plus one good thing, Mary’s picking the movies, and she’s smart enough to start off with some popular oldies. Just a weekend double feature till about Christmas, and then add a Wednesday-Thursday show if that goes. Anyway, this Friday night they open with Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon , which are good movies but you can see them on TV a couple times a year if you hop around the channels a little and you don’t mind big scenes getting interrupted with hemorrhoid commercials.”
    “Hunh. Friday is the football season opener and a home game,” I pointed out. “They’ll get all three Lights-burgers that wish they were artistic, plus their own students and friends from Vinville.”
    “ ’Fraid so. But, anyway, here’s the thought I have. For the few months they’ll be open, they will have a crowd getting out around ten thirty on weekend nights, when the only thing open in town is Pietro’s, which is on the other side of town, and the Dairy Queen, where the grill closes at nine. Michelson, that owns that Pongo’s Monkey Burger, has already told me he ain’t gonna change his hours. Now, if people coming out of the theater smell some burgers grilling and maybe some fresh pie baking . . . you see?”
    One reason why I liked talking to Philbin, he was always looking for some way that the drugstore could make money and grow. That kind of stuff was way more interesting than school crap that you talked about with teachers, or “say, fella, how’s your football team doin’?” that regular town people would try and make conversation with, and way-way- way more interesting than flying saucers and astrology and Nixon, like Mom and the super super ladies talked about.
    It was kind of funny—and a shame, though, since I did really like to hear about business and making money and stuff—that in the whole town, the guy who talked about business best was a doomed loser.
    Philbin thought real good about what might make money, or lose it, for anybody else’s business, but he managed to never quite see that his own shop was stuck behind the eight ball. If it had been anyone else’s he’d have laid it out, neat and clean as an isosceles triangle of pie on a plate with a sphere of ice cream beside it, but instead he was always trying to think of the magic formula to turn his dusty old dump of a drugstore into a gold mine. Somehow whenever he thought about his own place, he stopped seeing the FOR SALE signs and boarded-up stores around it, and failed to notice that he had empty seats at the height of his lunch rush.
    But I wasn’t going to point that out. I just said, “So you’d need someone on counter this