King of Hearts

by Stevenson, Jennifer

  He took a temporary childish pleasure in dashing the orange sunglasses to the sidewalk and grinding them to pieces under the heel of his sneaker. Then he realized Nadine would probably see the mess when she left the restaurant. He couldn’t decide if she’d be hurt or not when she saw the smashed sunglasses.

  Considering how she’d waitressed it out back there, she’d probably laugh.

  Cursing under his breath, he stooped and picked up every shard of orange plastic he could find and put them in the nearest garbage can. And covered them up with a newspaper.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Halfway through the afternoon King Dave got a call from Corky sending him back to the Opera House, this time to set the stage for that fancy party. There was nobody on stage when he reported to the head carpenter. A one-guy job. Suited him fine. It’d take him an hour, tops. At seven the caterers would arrive with tablecloths and flowers and food and the rolling bar, but the contract said that a stagehand puts stuff on a stage.

  So he was all alone in the semi-gloom onstage. He took the pit elevator to the first storeroom and brought up long tables for food, round tables for cocktails, and stacks of chairs. The tables made a horrendous juddering noise as he dragged them into position, like slippage on a transmission, amplified. He brought in the downstage light bridge to twenty feet, lowered a teaser curtain to hide it from the house, and hung a few scoop lights over the buffet table. Later the caterers would put a big cake and ice sculptures and champagne fountains and rabbit food on toothpicks on the table under the light bridge.

  Right now, with no other guys around, the stage smelled forlorn. King Dave felt hollow inside.

  He checked his ground plan one more time, saw that everything was where it should be, and went to the piston room to snitch one of Norsky’s beers. After this bear of a day, he’d earned it.

  Bobbyjay’s voice came back to him as he stood over the crappy cardboard drawer that held Norsky’s stash. I thought you were too, like, Mister Athlete to drink like this. With a growl, King Dave grabbed a six pack of tallboys out of the drawer and made the trek from the piston room up to his personal hideaway, the one place in the Opera House where he felt safe.

  Years ago, FX had brought him here. It wasn’t babysitting. Ten-year-old King Dave, then merely Dave Flaherty, had made that crystal clear. Nobody babysat a Flaherty. He was to stay out of the way, but he had to be close enough to the stage to hear his old man bellow his name. The downstage light bridge was perfect.

  Now he took off his tee-shirt, knotted the bottom to make a bag, and stuffed his stolen beers into it. Slinging the lumpy bag over his shoulder, he climbed the ladder one-handed, straight up the wall.

  Twenty-four hours ago and a hundred and twenty feet up, he’d climbed that ladder after Nadine Fisher. He’d lied about looking up her dress. It had been too dark for that. But he’d tried. If Corky hadn’t called, he’d have had that dress off her. Every stitch.

  His knees went weak. He had to stop on the ladder and wait for the wave of lust to pass.

  Man, you’ve got it bad, Bobbyjay’s voice said in his head.

  At this moment it still puzzled him what had gone wrong. So he’d had to go to work. She’d had to wait. Big deal. That’s how life is in this business. She had to know that, working at Liz Otter’s.

  He thought around and around this as he clambered onto the light bridge and walked to his special spot above center stage.

  Okay, it was a little tacky of him to lock her in. But she was eager before that. She’d tried to tear his clothes off. She hadn’t even bitched when he came back for her an hour later.

  I was a mite cross.

  When he shut his eyes, he could still see her by candlelight, stretched out on that couch with her hair pouring golden over her shoulders.

  He shouldn’t shut his eyes up here. The light bridge was two feet wide, comfy for an eleven-year-old, but a bit narrow for a grown man with yard-across shoulders. He propped himself against an iron stanchion and cracked the first beer.

  No, she’d been more than a mite cross. Women, huh?

  That beer didn’t last long. He crushed the can, tucked it back in the tee-shirt bag, and opened another.

  In fact most of his problems were created by women. His mother hustled his own kid out of his sight. His ex-wife nailed him with spray paint and took pictures.

  And Nadine, six feet of luscious womanhood, made him nuts.

  She couldn’t be bullied. She couldn’t be bought. Somehow she’d resisted being seduced, though he would swear on a stack of bibles it had been a near thing. If only he had ignored her fussing about the condom. If he’d just kept his hands on her.

  He put another beer into a lengthy, delicious fantasy of how that might have gone.

  Even semi-warm, the beer soothed.

  I almost had her. There’s a way.

  Thing to do, he thought, cracking his fourth tallboy, would be to get her in bed, get her all confused and sticky, and take her out of the country. Down to Mexico or the Caymans. Then ditch her. It’d be a week before she could get back, soonest, and she’d be properly chastened by then.

  Only she would never fall for that now. Not since Bobbyjay’s blunder with the Goreville, Illinois telegram. She was too damned smart.

  He regretted again bringing the tart with the big hair into Liz Otter’s today. Nadine had waitressed it out and made him look like an asshole. And the guys had watched from all over the restaurant.

  Now they knew something was up. They’d be watching him around her.

  Just what he needed.

  Technically of course he was an asshole. If they knew he’d locked her into the piston room, not a man on the crew wouldn’t blame him. Of course she was furious. What had got into him?

  The next beer brought ill counsel. The entire put-in crew at the Auditorium now knew he was trapped in some kind of power struggle with this waitress. All she had to do to destroy him was talk. He would have to enlist help quick, before the guys chose sides for themselves. He didn’t dare picture Nadine enlisting them. That could get nasty.

  But no, she was more the goody-two-shoes type who would try to survive on high moral ground alone. King Dave ground his teeth—his jaw ached from grinding his teeth today—and he vowed again to make her sorry she ever messed with him.

  Trouble was, he couldn’t think how to get even with her. He’d tried everything short of murder. If she weren’t so damn hot, he could tell the guys she was a pathetic hick-chick, messing with him for the sake of the attention.

  Aw, hell, he wouldn’t say that. He wasn’t mean enough.

  He didn’t want to hurt her, god dammit, he wanted peace of mind. The can he held was empty. He slammed it down on the catwalk with a clang that sent cans skittering along the steel.

  Tsk. Can’t have cans raining onto the stage. He was too tipsy to climb down that ladder to gather them up.

  He solved the problem by chucking them into the pit.

  He lobbed the last can over the light bridge rail and lay back, one arm cradling the last beer and the other arm behind his head, staring up into the darkened fly loft. The waffled steel felt cool under his bare back. He remembered how he used to go to sleep up here when he was a kid, while his old man changed over the set. He always felt he could think more clearly up here. The world was more remote. Stuff made sense.

  Good advice from his ten-year-old self. He closed his eyes.

  The next day, when she came in to serve lunch, Nadine noticed a furtive but definitely hilarious note in the stagehands’ voices.

  “Hi, Rob,” she said to Bobbyjay’s uncle. “Y’all are sure in a good mood today.”

  “Tell her, Rob,” Anvilhead Arnie Baxter said.

  Rob the Snob Morton sniggered. “Know King Dave Flaherty?”

  Nadine rolled her eyes. “Never heard of him.” She poured coffee around the table.

  Now what? Had he brought his little friend with the tight pants to that room under the Opera House?

 
“He got wasted last night and fell off the downstage light bridge into a cake,” Ruffino said.

  Rob the Snob roared with laughter.

  Nadine’s heart clutched up. “Is he hurt?”

  Arnie said, “He was in the hospital last night. I guess he cracked a couple of ribs landing on the cake.”

  “A cake?” she repeated. “How high up is this light bridge?”

  “Twenty feet,” Rob the Snob said light-heartedly. “The table is three feet up, the cake’s two feet high—oh, yeah, it was some old broad’s lifetime award ceremony with this charity, we’re talking a major cake here. Anyway it broke his fall. A fifteen-foot fall.” Rob the Snob gave a rollicking laugh. Nadine wanted to pour coffee in his lap. “I guess being plastered helps.”

  “Yeah, you fall loose,” Arnie said. “Hardly hurts at all.”

  “Yeah, I’ve done that,” said Ruffino, and Nadine remembered that King Dave had once punched Ruffino in the head and got away with it.

  Lord, let him be okay. He deserved to have his thumbnails pulled out with red hot pincers, and heaven knew he’d earned the scorn being heaped on his head. But don’t let him be hurt.

  “That’s why he’s not here today,” she said. In her vanity she had supposed it was to avoid facing her.

  “And get this,” Rob the Snob said. “He was butt-naked. There was cake all over him. The old biddies had heart failure.”

  “I heard he only didn’t have a shirt on,” Arnie said.

  “I heard they were licking the frosting off him and he never even woke up,” Ruffino said.

  “Yeah, he’ll be mad about that,” Rob the Snob said and sniggered. The whole table howled.

  She couldn’t stand it. “Y’all are being uncharitable,” she said, thinking of the grievances she had against King Dave and how silently she bore them.

  “Wel-l-l, a guy like King Dave, see, he don’t get caught too often,” said Anvilhead Arnie.

  Arnie, she remembered, had been one of the guys who got suspended for peeing on a transformer vault at the Cadillac. King Dave had been one of those guys, too. But King Dave probably hadn’t got suspended.

  “You must really dislike him,” she said with dismay.

  Instantly, the guys were backing and filling.

  “Well, I dunno,” Arnie said.

  “No, no, I don’t dislike him,” Rob the Snob said, the rat.

  “He’s just kind of impetuous,” Ruffino said, as if getting punched in the head were an occupational hazard. Ruffino’s nose was bent. She supposed it was possible he got punched daily.

  “Boy, though,” Arnie said, “I’d love to be a fly on the wall when King Dave explains this one to the old man.”

  King Dave stood in the middle of the office, sweating, wishing he could sit down. His ribs ached like sin. He didn’t remember anything between falling asleep on the light bridge and waking up in the hospital with four cracked ribs. The old man had called him into the office to ream him a fresh one.

  “I’ve covered your ass a lot of times, boy,” yelled the president of the Local, “but this is it! This is over the top! You’ve fucked up so fucking bad this time, not even I can cover for you! You useless, miserable douchebag! You ninny! You stupid bastard, what did you think you were doing?” On and on and on.

  King Dave shifted on his sore feet. They said he fell on his ass into a cake. How come his feet hurt?

  The abuse rained down without end. “I can’t be your fucking nursemaid all your life! From now on you do your own enforcing!”

  “Wait a minute,” King Dave said, startled. “I don’t ask you to enforce for me.”

  “The fuck you don’t!” screamed his old man. “You’re too dumb to make it through school, I tell the nuns they got to graduate you. You do some stupid cut-up moronic dumb thing with that retard, Bobbyjay Morton, I haul the cops off your ass. You blow a call, a plum job I took away from some guy senior to you so’s my idiot son can woik, I have to explain it to management.”

  King Dave flushed. “Once. I blew a call once.”

  “You don’t ever blow a call! If you think you’re gonna miss, you phone in! Get somebody to cover for you!” The old man’s face was purple. King Dave thought he might burst a blood vessel.

  “I was seventeen, Dad. I’ve never blown one since.”

  “You blew it this time, boy,” FX said with relish. “Today you find out what it costs me to cover up for my stupid cut-up of a son. No sugar-coating it this time. No laughing it off, no wave of the hand, ‘Never mind, kid, I’ll see to it you always woik.’” He paused to wipe spittle off his chin. “Start worrying.”

  King Dave swallowed. There was a lot the old man could do to him. And Dad didn’t even know yet about Tammy and the pictures or King Dave locking Nadine in the piston room.

  FX saw him swallow and nodded slowly. “That’s right. Think about it. Everybody grows up sometime, kid.”

  Grinding his teeth, King Dave stared straight ahead. He’d expected a lecture. This time it was nasty. FX didn’t call him stupid very often. He knew King Dave really, really hated being called stupid.

  FX stood on tiptoe, reached across his desk, and knuckled his son on the noggin. “I’m gonna hafta suspend you for this. On the QT, ’cause you’re still my son. But don’t call in for woik for a month.”

  King Dave went cold. “You can’t do that.”

  “Hell I can’t. I let you get away with moider for years. Now this.” The old man sat behind his scarred desk. “I gotta tell the Opera House I done something about you, and I gotta write an apology to the old dames that you smashed the cake of.”

  He sounded really put out. King Dave knew that FX would rather work fifty hours back-to-back than write a letter. For somebody who called his own son stupid, it was pretty laughable.

  Not that King Dave was laughing. It hurt him to breathe.

  The old man shuffled papers on the desk, ignoring him, and he guessed it was time to go.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nadine worked out her day, troubled by the image of King Dave falling off one of those contraptions in the Opera House. In her mind’s eye, he rolled off the downstage light bridge, whatever that was, and plummeted to the stage. She shuddered.

  She tried to tell herself she felt concern for his immortal soul. The man seemed to be descending rapidly toward the abyss. But what about those cracked ribs? A man with a body like that was proud of his strength. He might try to go to work. Nothing was more likely. He could hurt himself worse.

  She gnawed her lower lip so much that Weasel Rooney, noted connoisseur of waitresses, asked her at the supper rush who she’d been kissing to get the fat lip.

  She laid the back of her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. “Let me see...oh, goodness, there’s been so many, it’s hard to recall.” Her eyes opened. “Well, it certainly wasn’t you, Weasel. Want a danish to go?”

  Bobbyjay and Anvilhead Arnie Baxter laughed, and Weasel accepted the pastry. As they paid and left, she stopped Bobbyjay with a finger on his arm. “Bobbyjay, I’m worried about your friend. Does he have the sense to take it easy with those ribs?”

  Bobbyjay looked at her warily. “Probably not.”

  “I can picture him lifting too much and hurting himself.”

  After a long look, Bobbyjay said, “Don’t worry.” He lowered his voice. “He’s suspended for a month. Unofficial.”

  Nadine was shocked. “Suspended?”

  “Can’t work. FX laid him off for wrecking that cake.”

  She blinked. “Can he do that?”

  Bobbyjay laughed mirthlessly. “He could order King Dave to jump off a bridge. Only he already done that.”

  Nadine’s heart bled for King Dave. As much as she had suffered at his hands, she felt he had paid enough.

  “What’s he going to do with himself for a whole month?”

  “Sit around. Party. Maybe go fishing or, uh,” Bobbyjay said, eyeing her, “see some girl.”

  “He mustn’t drink when he’s
on pain medication,” Nadine said. “Where’s he likely to be tonight?”

  Bobbyjay watched her.

  A growing urgency to see King Dave and make sure he was okay forced her to say, “Talk. I’ll just ask one of the other guys. Rob the Snob or someone.” Someone who didn’t like King Dave. And the secret about King Dave’s suspension might slip out of her.

  She waited to see if Bobbyjay knew blackmail when he saw it.

  Bobbyjay gave her another of those long, slow looks that got him a reputation for dumb in the Local. “He’ll be at the Hole in the Wall on Canal Street, under the tracks, near Randolph.”

  “Thanks, Bobbyjay,” she gushed. “I just want to check on him. See that he’s taking his medication. I mean, it’s not really my business. But I’m concerned.” That was it. She’d often said that, back in Goreville. “He probably doesn’t get sick very often.” Bobbyjay’s dumb look seemed to drag more tumbled words out of her. “Guys don’t. They do silly things when they’re not careful. I won’t tell him you told me. Uh, d-don’t you have to go back to work?”

  Bobbyjay nodded and left. Nadine sank back against a booth, limp with relief and confusion.

  And at nine o’clock, off shift, she consulted her map of Chicago and struck out on foot, across the length and breadth of the Loop, heading for the corner of Randolph and Canal.

  She wasn’t sure why she had to see King Dave. She already knew he still had all his limbs. His father was punishing him in the worst way you could punish a stagehand, not letting him work. Probably gave him a good scold, too. Her scold wouldn’t count.

  She lengthened her stride.

  On her way past the Opera House she made a rare sighting: Fuckdaluck Eddie crossing the street with a Burger King bag in his hand, headed for the stage door. She thought of that beat-up cardboard drawer in the sub-basement piston room. Dirty socks. Uncashed paychecks. And the silver-framed photograph of three button-eyed, round-headed children, just enough like him to betray them as Eddie’s grandkids without disfiguring them.

  That made her think of King Dave’s little boy. Her heart still ached for him, for the wonder and disbelief in his voice when he saw his father standing in the doorway.