Summary

In ‘April 30, 1984, 4:45 am,’ Horace has just narrowly escaped the students in the parking lot and parked at the Crosstown theater. He believes he is speaking to a woman named Veronica, who says “people have lost manners and politeness. They abide by no rules. Beasts is what they have become. Beasts” (209). Horace imagines Veronica as a bison: “picture it drinking tea, its lionlike, snakelike tail switching from one side of its wide haunches to another, lazily” (209).

Horace worked at the theater the summer before his senior year of high school. Most of the theater is outside, aside from the box office and a costume barn. Philip Quincy Cross, the last male of the white Cross line, built the Owen Oliver Cross Memorial Outdoor Theater due to North Carolina’s tradition of outdoor theaters, “and to use as its main fare a play, by him...