"Good! On Monday I'll help you decode the message."
Most weekday afternoons at five, we listened together to Tom Mix on radio. At the end of each Tom Mix episode, the announcer read off a series of numbers which allowed those listeners who were lucky enough to have a decoder, to decipher the clue to the next day's episode. Joey had sent in ten cents and a box top from Ralston Cereal for a decoder for me.
"You know Tom Mix is dead, don't you?" Joey told me one day.
" But we just heard him on radio, talking to Jane and Jimmy!"
"They're all actors," he said. "Tom Mix, Jane, Jimmy, The Old Wrangler, all of them. Tom Mix died years ago. Car wreck. He was going about a hundred miles an hour."
"The police wouldn't have let him," I said. "They'd have arrested him."
"Not in Texas," Joey said. "There aren't many cars there, only horses. The roads are wide open."
Of course Joey was right. "I wish Tom Mix had stuck to horses," I said.
I was eight years old and thought grown-up movies were a bore. I much preferred "Dracula" and the other horror movies I used to see with Joey when we lived in the big red-brick house. Sometimes, of a Saturday, my aunt would shop at the Diamond Street Market downtown, and would take the two of us on the trolley with her and drop us off at the old Art Cinema while she shopped.
"What kind of movies are they?" she had asked Joey.
"Good ones," he had told her. "They develop a kid's imagination."
One day she completed her shopping earlier than usual, and the theater manager allowed her to come in to get us while the movie was still in progress. She found me hunched over almost double on my seat, my hands over my eyes. Joey was enrapt with what was unfolding on the screen. She looked up at the screen, and what she saw put an end to our Saturday trips to the old Art Cinema downtown.