Daisy clenched her teeth and pulled on the tie line to bring down the fall arrester cable. She clipped in her lanyard. Bobbert moved to the bottom of the ladder. For a moment they faced each other, both holding onto the ladder. She didn’t like his grin one bit.
But at least now the ladder was less floppy. She found it relatively easy to climb. The fall arrester pulled at her lanyard uncomfortably as she climbed.
At the top of the ladder she looked out and saw the whole arena spread below her. Most of the audience members were in their seats. Followspots on the huge square truss were punching their light onto the stage and panning across the audience. Somewhere about twenty feet away, the stage manager’s voice yipped.
Headset, right. She had to get to the cage. Daisy found the truss safety line, snapped onto it, and moved gingerly out onto the truss. If she trusted Bobbert Morton one little bit she might have thought the fall arrester thing was more a guideline than a necessity.
But it was Bobbert. So she made sure she was snapped onto something, every single moment.
The struts of the truss were smooth aluminum. Her steel-toed sneaker treads seemed to grab them.
Don’t look down.
She crept at a crouch to the cage and snapped her lanyard to the truss. It was a mighty small cage. The truss followspot took up most of it, and there were scary-big gaps in the bars that made the sides of the cage.
How do I get inside?
Daisy leaned over the edge of the truss, snapped her lanyard to a likely-looking hunk of aluminum strut, and slid over the edge of the truss to put her feet on a handy crossbar.
Her shoes slid right off the crossbar.
Her weight shifted and she lost her grip on the truss above.
She pawed for the crossbar with her feet and it clanged. Then, with a chink! it fell away.
Like a squeezed hot dog in a school lunch bun, she felt herself slip right through the side of the cage and shoot feet-first toward the deck, forty feet below.
Her lanyard held.
She shrieked, jerking hard like a bungee jumper at the bottom of the bounce, as the body harness cut into her crotch. Her teeth snapped shut. Then she flipped over and hung head-down. Change rained out of her pockets.
Below her, the audience roared.
For a long moment she dangled without thinking, feeling shockwaves of outrageous pain from her crotch and getting used to the idea that she hadn’t plummeted to her death.
Then she realized the audience was applauding.
She dangled from the harness clip between her shoulder blades. Slowly, she started to spin. The audience swam around her in a lazy, nauseating circle. Spots of light on the deck winked at her, one after another, as she twirled. Daisy felt like hurling.
Down on the deck, Bobbert looked up at her with a white face.
Daisy opened her mouth and hurled. The vomit fell past her shoes and floated a long time before it spattered on Bobbert.
The audience made a huge sound.
All the deckhands onstage were pointing up. Some were shining flashlights at her.
Above her, the tinny voice of the stage manager came from the headset. “Don’t move! Hold still! We’re sending somebody for you!”
People in the audience started shouting advice.
Go for it!
That was so cool!
Just wait for help!
Do that again!
Hold still!
And over in a corner, on the far side of the speaker towers, Bobbert Morton was wiping his face and yukking with a couple of other guys.
The hell she would hold still. This totally sucks. She was not going to go down in Local history as that girl who hurled on Bobbert Morton and had to get rescued from her first-ever followspot job.
Moving slowly, she looked around ’til she located the cage, just a foot above her. Her arms and shoulders hurt like sin. She couldn’t remember using them, but she must have tried to grab something when she slid through the cage. She reached overhead and got hold of the bottom of the cage with one hand.
This was a joke. Never thought I’d regret cutting P.E. in high school.
The audience yelled louder.
When I get down from here, I know a Morton who’s gonna sing soprano for a month.
Clinging to the cage, she started to swing. I can do this. Just don’t look down. The audience roared again.
She swung back and forth until she could hook a foot over the bottom bar of the cage. Her hurt crotch screeched with pain. That was so unpleasant she had to pause again, letting her leg take some weight, and swear.
The audience started to slow clap.
Oh, fuck this.
Her blood rang in her ears, which helped drown out the audience, and she struggled until she had two feet over the bar. Some more embarrassing contortions got both her hands on the cage. Now she could climb inside, if she could figure out where the opening was. Feeling foolish, she monkeyed back and forth over the outside of the cage, stopped every foot or so by the shortness of her lanyard, with her heart in her mouth, until she found the opening she had slid through. It was a mighty small opening.
A moment later she had her head in the cage.
Very carefully, she wriggled her shoulders through the opening, then slowly pulled her hips through.
Pause. Breathe. Think.
Then she clambered down into the followspot operator’s seat.
The audience gave her another big hand.
She checked to make sure her lanyard was securely snapped onto a stout chunk of cage.
Somewhere below her the headset was dangling and yelping. She found the wire and pulled it up, put it on. “Number two followspot. Ready.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sixty feet away, cattycorner from her corner of the truss, Bobbyjay felt himself age a hundred years in a split-second. The whole truss trembled from the force of Daisy’s fall. He got belly-down on the truss and crawled toward her. The stage manager shrieked at him through the headset to hold still.
“Hang on, Daisy, I’m coming,” he huffed out with his last spare ounce of breath.
But he’d never make it in time, he saw.
Moving slowly, she climbed around on the outside of the cage. Bobbyjay didn’t waste breath shouting directions. The audience made the kind of noises you might expect. Apparently she realized she had fallen through a gap in the bottom. She found the gap and climbed inside. She held still, apparently thinking about God. Then she moved her lanyard, sat behind her spot, and put on her headset.
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Bobbyjay said.
The stage manager sounded ready to shit bricks. “Everybody back into position, please. Show’s over.”
Bobbyjay felt watery in his guts. He crawled back to his own followspot. The stage manager called the test. The band sent somebody out to check sound. The audience subsided to a dull rumble. ’Nother thirty minutes and we’ll start this fuckin’ show, Bobbyjay thought, hoping he wouldn’t shit his pants from residual fear. Cattycorner across the truss, Daisy sat behind her spot like a trouper. He stuck his thumb out to her, but she didn’t turn her head. He doubted she even knew he was there.
Then he glanced down stage left. At the foot of Daisy’s ladder his cousin stood with his Dad, laughing his ass off.
White lights flashed behind Bobbyjay’s eyes.
He unsnapped from the cage and climbed out, his hands shaking with fury.
“Number four, what the fuck are you doing?” his headset said. Bobbyjay let the headset yank itself free. He scampered across the truss and slid down the ladder to the deck.
He hit the deck with both feet. Twelve long strides took him to Daisy’s ladder. Without saying a word, he gripped his cousin by the shoulder.
“Haw—hey Bobbyjay—”
Bobbyjay hit him as hard as he could.
Bobbert flew across the stage and landed on his back.
“Get up. You stupid fuck,” Bobbyjay panted. “I’m gonna kill you.”
Bobbert lay on his back, staring up at him incredulously, fondling his chin.
“Hey!” his father said.
“Yo, Bobbyjay,” he heard Jack Yu say behind him.
“Get these guys off the stage,” one of the roadies said.
Bobbyjay pointed a shaking finger at Bobbert. “We will discuss this later.” He looked up. The audience was going nuts. “Shit.”
“Git back to work before I kill ya,” Jack Yu said in a not-unfriendly voice.
Bobbyjay swung around toward his ladder. He met his father’s eyes. There’s another fight I’ll have to face, he thought. But after the show.
“Okay, what happened up there?” Three and a half hours later the stage manager and Jack Yu, the job steward, stood on either side of Daisy, looking worried. The stage manager had a sandy mullet cut, a distressing two-day growth of beard, and a sheaf of forms on a clipboard. Jack Yu just had a glare.
“Um, I’ve never been up on one of these before. I guess I must have slipped,” Daisy said.
“Do you have any pain? Any limitation of movement in limbs or back or neck?” the stage manager said, consulting his clipboard.
“Don’t you know enough to check your footing before you put your weight on it?” the steward demanded.
“No, no, and no,” Daisy lied. She hurt all over. But she knew it would be the kiss of death for her newborn stagehand career if she ended up in the emergency room on her second gig. Jack Yu didn’t seem to know who she was, anyway. That was a relief.
“Ditorelli?” he said, looking over the stage manager’s shoulder now. “You one of Marty Dit’s neph—I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” she said tiredly. “Try not to hold it against me, okay?”
The friendly roadie who had trained her on followspot came over and said, “You all right, darlin’?”
Daisy gave him her nicest smile. “I sure am.”
“She was drunk on the job,” Bobby Morton Junior snapped. He had her water bottle in his hand. From three feet away, it reeked of vodka.
“Hey!” Daisy said.
Bobby Junior tried to look stern and smirked instead.
Behind him, Bobbert hung around with a swollen jaw and Daisy’s vomit on his shirt.
The steward looked at her with deep disappointment. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t! Somebody put vodka in my water bottle, but I didn’t drink it. I spit it right out. You can smell Mr. Bigbritches over here if you want to be sure. I threw up on him.”
Bobbert looked alarmed. He edged behind his father.
The friendly roadie scratched his head. “Well, I got to admit, she did smell a bit like likker when I was showing her how to run the spot.”
Wounded, Daisy sent him a hot look. “Hey!”
“But—well—” He fished in his back pocket.
“You all right, Daze?” Bobbyjay’s voice said from behind her, and Daisy felt her stretched nerves relax. “I’m here,” he said, coming up beside her and laying a hand on her shoulder.
She threw him a grateful smile, careful not to make eye contact. If she met his eyes she might cry.
“I told ya,” Bobby Junior was saying to Jack Yu. “Drunk on the job. No wonder she fell off.”
“Would you be willing to submit to a breathalizer test?” the stage manager said, looking relieved.
No wonder, Daisy thought. His liability drops to zero if I’m not sober. “Sure.”
“Daze,” Bobbyjay muttered in her ear. “I dunno if you’d pass. You had it in your mouth, after all.”
“That was three hours ago. Quit hovering,” she said. She didn’t mean it.
“That’s an automatic suspension, plus this producer can keep you off any call in this venue or their shows forever,” Bobby Junior said smugly to Daisy.
“Well, that’s true I guess,” the treacherous friendly roadie said. “Only I was lookin’ around—”
The stage manager raised his voice. “If you sign a release admitting you were drunk, you get a seventy-five dollar bonus.”
“I am telling you, I was not drunk!” Daisy yelled.
“Only I found this on the deck under spot number two,” the roadie said, holding up a little metal bar. “So I don’t guess likker had much to do with it.” He held the bar out to the stage manager by one end. “Sniff.”
The mullet-headed guy with the clipboard sniffed. “What the fuck is that?”
The steward sniffed. Then he touched the bar. “Slick.”
“Greased,” the roadie said.
Bobbyjay turned around and his cousin Bobbert faded back behind Bobby Junior again.
“What?” Daisy squeaked.
“It’s a strut off the truss,” Bobbyjay said. His voice sounded dead. “It’s the crossbar you were supposed to put your foot on when you climbed down into the cage.”
“But what’s that smell?” the roadie said.
“Carmex,” the stage manager said. He felt in his shirt pocket and pulled out a tiny white jar. “This stuff.”
“Oh,” the steward said.
Daisy spotted movement behind her future father-in-law and saw Bobbert slinking away toward the loading dock.
Her fiancé reached for the crossbar. “The only way this could come off is if somebody undid four cheeseburgers and pulled it out and then retightened the clamps. And then,” he said, turning the bit of metal over, “he must have stuck it in place with gum or something. Otherwise it would have fallen out of the sky as soon as the truss went up.”
Daisy looked at Bobbyjay in awe. His eyes, fixed on his father, were terrible. She put her hand on his arm, leaning between them. “It’s okay, I lived.”
Jack Yu looked dark. “You want to file a grievance?” he said to her, this time not at all sarcastic.
Bobbyjay laid his hand on her back. “Go ahead,” he said in a hard voice.
“No thanks,” Daisy said to Jack. “Not on my my second gig,” she said to Bobbyjay.
“This here,” the roadie drawled, “is fuckage, darlin’. Somebody tried to hurt you.”
“Probably not,” she said.
“We’ll see when we get the truss down.”
“I can have it lowered in ten minutes,” Jack Yu said, looking from Bobbyjay to Bobby Junior.
Daisy noticed a shiny sore on Bobby Junior’s upper lip. “Let’s not,” she begged.
“I’ll see you in the bar,” Bobby Junior said to his son after a molten-hot silence.
Cold as ice, Bobbyjay said, “See you there.”
“Can we please not have a pissing contest on the clock?” Jack said. “I got trucks to load.” Everybody melted away. Daisy followed Bobbyjay out to the dock and humped boxes on automatic until two in the morning.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As the last forty-five-foot tractor-trailer pulled into line behind its brothers, Bobbyjay collected Daisy and her toolbag from where she sat drooping on the loading dock ramp. “C’mon, Liz Ryback is gonna drive you home. We’ll come back for your car tomorrow night.”
With her hair down in her eyes and grease on her cheek, she looked about sixteen years old. She seemed totally beat. “Aren’t you taking me home?”
“Gotta bat cleanup,” he said shortly.
“But, Bobbyjay, I don’t want you to get—”
“Here she is, Liz,” he said brusquely. “Get her home before she passes out.”
“I thought we’d throw some beers and jog around Soldier Field first,” Liz said, but she slid an arm under Daisy’s shoulder and got the kid moving.
“’Night, Bobbyjay,” Daisy said, sounding forlorn.
“’Night, Daze.” He leaned over and pecked her on the cheek. “Get some sleep. I’ll pick you up at seven for the Opera House in the morning.” At that Daisy’s eyes rolled, and he felt compelled to kiss her again, this time on the lips. “You’re beautiful when you’re too tired to talk,” he whispered.
That got a smile out of her. “You jerk. See you tomorrow.” She staggered off toward Liz’s car
under her own power.
“You hittin’ the bar now?” Jack Yu said at his elbow.
“I thought you were through with all that,” Bobbyjay said, annoyed.
“I wouldn’t miss this for a million dollars,” Jack said,
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
The bar was chuck full. It was a nasty little tavern on the edge of an area that the yuppies were stealing from the ghetto, so they got regulars from both communities, plus local crew and roadies from the Arena. Drunk dope dealers and drunk yuppies and drunk stagehands stood around the TV.
His father was right in the middle.
“I don’t care what fuckin’ Jack Yu says, you done good, kid,” Bobby Junior was telling Bobbert, who was three years from beer-legal.
“Showed the bitch where she can swing it and where she can’t, huh,” Bobbert said, sounding drunk.
Bobbyjay revised his original intention of messing up his cousin’s face. The kid was loaded, and a head shorter than he was.
“At least you remember your name,” Bobby Junior said.
“Didja see her puke all over me?”
Jack Yu put his elbows on the bar and the crew around the Mortons went quiet.
Bobbyjay stepped into a space that opened up between Jack and his family.
“Well?” his father said belligerently. “You got anything to say for yourself, traitor?”
Bobbyjay looked at the faces nearby. Every word of this conversation would be all over town before morning. “She could have been killed.”
“She had a harness on. She was fine.”
“Don’t you think,” Bobbyjay said carefully, “some targets are too small to bother with?”
“What?” Bobby Junior said, and his tone said that Bobbyjay had hit a nerve. “We all get it when we’re new. Thinks she’s somebody ’cause she’s Marty Dit’s granddaughter. Stealin’ our jobs. Why shouldn’t she get it like we all got it when we was new?”
The less Bobbyjay said, the more his father blustered. He would have to do something dumb to keep Dad from confessing. Bobbyjay had never felt less like playing the clown. His head felt full of twenty-four-hour sludge and rage. “She could have been killed.”
“Hey, her fuckin’ cousin duct-taped Bobbert up and stuffed him in his own road case! And Bobbert’s a real apprentice!”
Fools Paradise Page 13
