Fools Paradise (17 page)

Liz said with a kind of hard-edged sympathy, “He's not as smart as you are. And he has a shorter fuse.”

Daisy swallowed. “Okay.”

Liz nodded. “Go get 'em, tiger.” She strode off.

Wigged out, Daisy guzzled from her water bottle.

A second later she sprayed the deck with the mouthful. “Vodka! Aueugh! Dammit!” she yelled. “Vodka!”

Her shrieks brought Jack Yu over from the speaker towers. “What's the problem?”

She was too rattled to stay quiet. “Somebody put vodka in my water bottle!” she choked out, still gagging. “Faugh! Ugh!”

Jack Yu eyed her resignedly. “You want to file a harassment grievance?”

She threw a glare at the corner of the stage where the Mortons stood howling and high-fiving each other.

“No. I don't get mad. I get even.”

Jack glanced in the same direction. “Oo, that'll scare 'em,” he said. He shrugged and walked away.

She was on her own. Again.

Bobbyjay got out of the Opera House over an hour late. He hadn't heard of any seismic upheavals, so he had to assume Daisy got through her afternoon all right. But she'd been at work almost twelve hours now and, according to Jack Yu, whom Bobbyjay phoned as he hurried through the parking ramp to the Jeep, she would also work the show.

“Sure I need ya,” Jack told Bobbyjay. “I need every warm body I can get. I got a million followspots and enough fog for the Republican National Convention.”

So Daisy was still on the call.

When he got to the Arena, Jack sent him up the truss before he could find her. Once he was in his spot cage, however, he saw her on the deck, standing behind a followspot, with a roadie showing her the ropes.

Jack would keep her on deck manning a fog machine or a confetti cannon, not in the air, he told himself.
Not to worry.

“Why am I the one going up there?” Daisy said, wishing she didn't have to ask Bobbert. But there was no one else to ask. Liz Ryback was forty feet above the deck, clanking and swearing at something, and Daisy didn't know another soul within sight.

“Because I outrank you,” Bobbert said loftily. “It's a little something called seniority. I got assigned the followspot. You're lower than me,” he said with relish. “So I can bump you.”

Daisy sighed. More hassle.
Think of it as a shit sandwich,
Liz had said.
You eat one bite at a time.
“What do I do?”

“It's easy,” Bobbert said, grinning. “You go up this ladder.” He pointed. “You walk across the truss and climb down into that cage underneath it.” Forty feet up the monkey-ladder, the truss hung from the roof, and on the corner of the truss a metal cage dangled. A half-size followspot angled down out of the cage. Daisy gulped.

“You wear this harness.” Bobbert took the harness off and handed it to her. “Want me to show you how it goes on?”

“No!” She already knew she didn't want his hands anywhere near her.

He shrugged. “Okay. Be sure to snap this line onto the fall arrester before you go up. Snap to the truss before you get off the ladder. There's a safety line up there, you gotta snap to that as you walk along the truss.” Daisy realized he really meant it. She would be walking on top of a skimpy metal framework forty feet in the air. “Snap onto the cage while you're running the spot. Don't go anywhere without snapping on. It's a snap,” he said, and cackled. “Don't worry. I'll be on the ground, spottin' ya. Now I gotta get me a Coke.”

Daisy felt there was more to the job than this, but she knew she wouldn't get it from a Morton.

The audience was starting to fill the seats all around the stage. She noticed one of the road guys standing nearby.

Waiting until Bobbert had disappeared into the melee behind the speaker towers, she licked her lips, approached the roadie, and inhaled, willing her cleavage to pop up to the top of her overalls.

“Uh, hi! Gee,” she said, simpering and hating herself for it. “I've never run a truss spot before. Can you, like, coach me a little?”

The roadie looked up from his walkie talkie and did a double-take. “Why, sure thing, little lady.”

Ten minutes later she felt a lot better. The roadie didn't have time to take her up the truss to her own followspot, but he showed her stuff on a spare followspot until she felt like she could manage the steel and glass torpedo.

“D'y'all understand about using the safety line and harness, darlin'?” the roadie said as he helped her with unnecessary care out of the operator's seat.

“Snap onto the fall arrester while I'm climbing up,” she said, reciting Bobbert's instructions. “Snap onto the truss before I get off the ladder. Snap onto the safety line while I'm moving on the truss. Snap onto the cage while I'm running the spot.”

“That's right, sweetheart.” The roadie hesitated, then remarked, “Two martini lunch, huh? Y'all won't drink your dinner, will you? Yore too purty to splash yourself all over the stage.”

She ground her teeth. “I don't drink at work. One of the guys put vodka in my waterbottle and I spit it right out.”

The roadie nodded and chuckled. “Inventive little devils, ain't they?” He patted her on the behind and wandered off, his walkie talkie stuck to his ear.

Daisy made it to the foot of her monkey-ladder just as the stage left electrician came rushing up. “Get up there. We're testing all the spots in five minutes.”

He was gone before she could say, “Okay.”

She looked up. It was a long ladder. The sides were wire rope and the rungs were hard plastic with little ridges on them. Like that would help her sneakers hold on while she was swinging around with her butt hanging out. She took a deep breath and grabbed the sides of the ladder.

She nearly fell on her ass.

Thirty feet upstage, Bobby Morton Junior guffawed.

After five tries she was still struggling to mount the thing. Nearby audience members laughed and pointed and shouted advice.

Then Bobbert strolled up. “Whaddayou tryin' to do? I told ya I would spot ya.”

She glared at him and forced words between her teeth. “I don't know what that means.”

“It means I hold the bottom of the ladder. Don't forget your lanyard,” he said, gesturing.

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.”

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.