Ghosts of the Wild West: Enlarged Edition Including Five Never-Before-Published Stories

The Haunted Kimo Theater

THE HAUNTED KIM0 THEATER any American immigrants arrived in this country with magnificent dreams, and Oreste Bachechi was one of them. He began his business career in a tent and some twenty years later built a flamboyant southwestern theater building in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He cleverly combined the fashionable art deco look of the day with that of an Indian pueblo. Unfortunately Bachechi died within a year afier achieving his dream, and he never saw the famous stars who would play there in later years. The theater was named "KiMo," a combination of two Indian words that mean "king of its kind." To go to a movie there was an event for families, and to be GHOSTS OF THE WILD WEST allowed to attend with friends was a coming of age experience for children. When Bobby Darnall begged his family to allow him to go with a group of friends from his school, he was only six and younger than the others. His parents were reluctant because the boy was sensitive and easily frightened during movies. Sometimes his father would see something scary coming up on the screen and quickly cover the child's face with his hand. Once an usher had seen Darnall grasp Bobby's jacket just as the child started to bolt when the villain seemed about to harm the heroine. But often, before they could stop him, Bobby would leap from his seat and dash into the aisle and out into the lobby. The KiMo Theater was enormous, seating seven hundred. It was easy for a child to get lost and become panic stricken in its dark recesses. And then there was the story actors sometimes told of meeting the ghost of a pioneer woman walking through the darkened theater after rehearsals. Those who had seen her said she was attired in a calico dress and old-fashioned bonnet, but the manager simply pooh-poohed it. To the children , stories like that added a certain delicious eeriness to the theater. Bobby loved westerns, and one day he saw a really old covered wagon for sale in front of a farm supply store. He began tugging on his father's arm, begging him to buy it. "What on earth would we do with it?" asked his dad. "It could be a playhouse for me," said Bobby. "I could spend the night out there." THE HAUNTED KIM0 THEATER Sometimes when Bobby stared over at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the past was so real to him it could all have been yesterday. "Why couldn't I have lived back then and been one of the early pioneers coming here?" he asked his dad. "Because we can't choose when we want to live, Bobby. You might not want to have lived back then, because we don't know whether any of the people in this wagon reached here alive," said his dad running his fingers thoughtfully across a dark reddish brown stain on the floor of the wagon. "Some of them could have been killed by Indians." "I think they got here," said Bobby. "I bet the pioneers who traveled in this wagon were good fighters and could beat off Indians. Let's get it, Dad." "Buy it! Where would we put an old covered wagon, Bobby?" "We could put it in our front pard." "In our front yard!" exclaimed his father. "Yes. I could use it for a playhouse. There's no tree for me to have a tree house like you had when you were a boy back east." "That's true," said his father, and he gave in as he often did and bought it. Bobby and his friends played cowboys and Indians in it. Sometimes he and other boys in he neighborhood didn't even want to come in when it began to get dark. "Can my friend Jerry and I spend the night out there?" he asked his mother. "I don't think that's such a good idea," she said. "What's the harm in it? Let him do it," protested his father. "I used to spend the night with some kids in GHOSTS OF THE WlLD WEST the neighborhood in my tree house." And so they did, spending many a night in the old wagon. Bobby dreamed he was the child of a family of pioneers and that they were headed west to Albuquerque . "They were nice folks. I...