Fools Paradise (28 page)

Toilet!
Daisy shut the empty dressing room door, flicked on the lights, and made for the potty.

And when she emerged, greatly relieved, there sat the red dufflebag on a table by the door.

She gnawed her lip.
Producer tries to fake out the office,
Bobbyjay had said.

She unzipped the dufflebag. “Holy shit.” Money. Dirty piles of money, rubberbanded together. Glancing quickly around the dressing room, she lifted the end of the ratty old couch and wedged the dufflebag under it. Then she slipped out and raced to find her department head.

“You what?” Anvilhead Arnie said as she tried to shout her secret discreetly. Arnie wasn't the quickest guy on the deck.

She spoke in shorter words. “Money. Bag full. Producer got it from the guard at the box office. He hid it in a dressing room.”

Arnie grunted. “Nobody 'sposed to go in the box office. Pavilion don't let anybody in there, 'specially not the producer, not until the payrolls are turned in.”

“Well, he did. I saw it,” she yelled. Standing on tiptoe so she could reach his ear, she said more quietly, “You want to see the money?”

Arnie stood taller. “Fuck. Wait here.” He fetched Scooby.

She told Scooby her story and led him to the dressing room.

When he saw what was in the bag, Scooby shooed her back to the electrics crew, saying, “Send some big guys back. Bobbyjay Morton and Dydie Grant. Tell 'em I want 'em. And don't say anything to anybody.”

That was all she heard about it for twelve hours.

The take-out took forever. She coiled cable for two hours, thanking Weasel in her heart for having trained her. The adrenaline rush of finding the moneybag crashed at last, badly this time, at the point when they were pushing racks of electrics to the trucks one at a time, where the roadies would take them and position them with finicky exactitude in the correct order, following instructions from the coked-up roadie in charge of loading.

Standing on the dock, balancing her end of an electrics truss on a cart and swaying with fatigue, Daisy tried to massage her aching shoulder with her free hand.

“Haw,” said a voice coming up behind her. “S'amatter, Ditso-relli? Can't handle the job?” Raybob Morton said to her, in the exact tones of his imbecile brother.

“Oh, grow up,” she muttered.

“'Samatter, Ditsy Daisy? Think you can take me? C'mon, put up your dukes! Put 'em up!” He dumped his load on the dock and bobbed playfully around her, jabbing the air.

“Who the fuck are you?” the roadie said to Raybob.

Raybob swelled. “I'm Bobby Morton.”

“No, you're not,” the roadie said. “I met him. He's twice your size.”

“We're both Bobby Morton,” Raybob said.

“They are,” Daisy said. “There's six of them.”

“Fuckin' house crew is crawling with Bobbies,” the roadie muttered. “Fuckin' House Bobbies. Joint's crawling with 'em.”

“Think you're better'n me, Ditsy Daisy? Haw!”

“I think you're a child,” Daisy said to him and handed her load to a roadie.

Bobbyjay had disappeared with Scooby hours ago. She staggered off to the musicians' buffet, which was now fair game to the crew since the band bus was long gone, and gobbled cold cuts until her vision wasn't blurry any more. Then she took her place in line for another load.

They packed the electrics trucks. They packed the sound trucks. The bigger guys got tapped to load the staging while shorties, oldsters, and obvious wimps like Daisy were told off to sit down somewhere for fifteen minutes. At nine in the morning Scooby came around to have her sign off on her timecard, and then they got up and loaded the musicians' instruments, wig-and-hair boxes, costume racks, fog pots, laser machines, and box after box after rolling box of coiled cable.

At eleven in the morning, to her bleary astonishment, she got paid. Cash.

“There's an extra hundred from me and Arnie in there. You done good, Killer,” Scooby said quietly.

She stuffed the cash into the top compartment of her overalls and buttoned the pocket shut. “Let me guess. Keep my mouth shut.” Her knees began to buckle under her.

He reached out as if to grab her by the shoulder and then, looking down the front of her overalls, he took his arm back. “Right.”

She nodded. Her eyes drifted shut. She put her back against the sunlit wall of the Pavilion and slid down until her butt met the pavement. She slept.

At noon, Bobbyjay woke her up and took her into town in his Jeep. She said, “I wish I'd brought a clean tee-shirt,” and promptly fell back asleep.

When she woke again, Bobbyjay sat beside her, shoveling up eggs and pancakes from a white foam tray. “Want some?” he said around a mouthful. He put another loaded tray into her lap.

She popped it open. Scrambled eggs, a pile of pancakes, butter, syrup, toast, bacon, sausages. “I love you.”

“Aw, I'm just a fuckin' House Bobby,” he said, but he was blushing.

“Good grief, the roadie said that just a few hours ago.”

“A good nickname travels fast.” He swallowed pancakes. “Eat, and then we'll head back to the Opera House for the rest of our straight eight.”

Bobbyjay was aware of a hum at the Opera House when he and Daisy walked onstage Friday afternoon. Guys stopped talking when they came into view. Tony Ditorelli gave him a hate-filled glare complicated with smugness and contempt. Bobbyjay had that oh-so-familiar feeling that the gossip was aimed in his direction. Or his family's. He was too damned tired to care.

Just as he was beginning to feel paranoid, King Dave Flaherty walked up and high-fived him.

“Yo, buddy, what you doing away from the Galaxy?” Bobbyjay was relieved that somebody was speaking to his face and not behind his back.

King Dave hefted an equipment case. “Came over to bring Tanny my apprentices and borrow a 5K HMI light. Fuckin' Piddlies bumped guys out of house jobs, it was so bad. It's a Chinese fire drill all over town. You doin' okay?” He looked at Daisy with
whoa-baby
eyes and Bobbyjay found himself stepping in front of her, until he remembered that this was his oldest friend.

“Bobbyjay!” the head carpenter yelled from downstage.

King Dave glanced around the stage with a cynical smile. “Well, we'll talk later. Call me, bro,” he said and walked out.

Bobbyjay moseyed downstage, whacked with exhaustion. A bunch of guys were standing under the downstage light bridge, which had been brought down to thirty feet. “'Sup?”

“Fucker's stuck,” Tannyhill said. “I think the chain motor is shorting out. You still got that voltmeter in your roadbox?” The other guys parted to let Bobbyjay get closer. He felt them eyeballing him.

“Yo, Bobbyjay! I need your voltmeter,” came a shout from thirty feet up. Mikey Ray Ditorelli stood on the bridge, tinkering with the motor, making the bridge sway and jiggle with every yank of his wrench. “Okay, try it now!” he yelled. The bridge shuddered and started rising jerkily.

Daisy appeared at his elbow. Even without makeup, the circles under her eyes were as dark as football player's grease. “I'll get it.”

He turned to her gratefully. “Thanks. It's a black square box about yay big, little screen on it, some wires coming out of one end. It's in the top drawer of my roadcase.”

“Right.” She slipped away.

“Make it snappy,” the head carpenter called after her.

“Shit!” came Mikey Ray's cry from above.

Bobbyjay looked up.

The light bridge juddered and canted sharply stage right. Mikey Ray grabbed the rail. His wrench slid off the bridge and dove to the deck, a silver projectile angling down among the upturned stagehand faces. Mikey Ray lay half-on, half-off the catwalk, swearing, clutching the safety railing with both arms.

“Hold still!” the head carpenter yelled.

Aching in every limb, Bobbyjay shouldered past the guys and monkeyed up the arbor tracks on the stage right wall.

Tony caught up with her just as Daisy was about to enter the room where the guys kept their roadcases. “Wait.”

She wheeled quickly so he couldn't pinch. Her heart beat unpleasantly fast. Tony looked mean, nervous, and shifty-eyed.

“I have nothing to say to you,” she said, lifting her chin.

He put himself in front of the door. “Don't go in there.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Somebody jerking off over
Hustler
in there? I'm used to that.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you, too,” Tony said more normally. “And thanks for nothing.”

Daisy sighed. She was so tired, her lungs hurt. “Tony, it's not like you didn't know better. Goomba threw you out for the exact same thing five years ago.” He didn't argue with her, which was good because she was too tired to think what else to say to a dumb jerk who would get himself into the same trouble twice and then ask what for. “Get out of my way.”

“Don't. I'm telling you.”

She glanced at the door behind him and then at his trembling hands. Tony wasn't mad. He was scared. “What did you do?”

Remembering that he'd roadcased Bobbyjay's obnoxious cousin, who had promptly turned around and boobytrapped the truss spot cage she had to use, she narrowed her eyes. “Did you do something to that thingy Mikey Ray is working on? You are so gonna be in the shit.”

Tony didn't say anything. He had a very familiar look. In a minute he would grab her tit or her face or something.

Then she knew. “It's Bobbyjay. You set him up!”

She turned slightly so her knee could catch him at the right angle. Tony flinched.

“You did, didn't you?” She pushed his arm angrily, shoving him hard against the door. Her voice rose. “You did something in that room so he would get hurt.” Blind rage filled her. Adrenaline gave her cold strength. She shoved with both hands. “What did you do?”

Tony grabbed her by the arms while she clawed at him. “Stop. Just don't do it. Don't.”

“Let go of me!” she screamed and, though there was nobody around to hear her, Tony let go. She aimed her knee at his crotch, but he pushed her away, leaping out of range.

They stood panting and glaring at each other in front of the door.

“I'm just—” Tony began, but she made a sharp gesture with one hand. He shut up.

“Look at me, Tony.” He did. She felt her rage shoot from her eyes like a red hot steel arrow. “Am I afraid of you?”

“No.”

“Have I ever been afraid of you?”

“Fuck you!”

Her voice shook. “I'm going in there. And I'm getting Bobbyjay's black box thingy for him. So whatever you've done to get him in trouble, it'll happen to me.”

Tony looked down at her feet for some reason. He made a sound in his throat.
It's near the ground,
she thought.
Thanks for the hint.

“Think hard, Tony. How bad do you want to have to leave town, like, in the next fifteen minutes? Because if I get hurt on some boobytrap of yours,
Goomba will kill you.”
She said those four words with relish.

Why hadn't she thought of this before? Throw herself in front of a train and blame Tony.

“If you knew your place, this would never have happened,” Tony said.

She smiled. “If you knew yours, you would still have a rent-free roof over your head. Now get out of my way.”

Tony's face darkened. He stepped aside. “Think you're so fucking smart. Goomba's little fucking princess.” There was more, but she wasn't listening. She opened the door and walked cautiously up to Bobbyjay's monster roadcase.

No wires next to it or around it.

No big pail of smelt or hot tar poised over it.

Carefully she swung open the roadcase's heavy doors. They were lined with shallow shelves full of power tools. The voltmeter-deely was in the top drawer, Bobbyjay had said.

With her hand on the top drawer, she remembered Tony looking at her feet, and she looked down.

The drawer, packed with two hundred pounds of stage weights, slid uncontrollably out of the box. The weights showered down on her head and the back of her neck.

She was unconscious before she hit the floor.

Thirty feet up, Bobbyjay swung off the arbor tracks and leaned out, reaching for the wire cable holding up the light bridge.

“You okay, Mikey Ray?”

“Groovy,” Mikey Ray squeezed out. “The fuck is the matter with this thing?”

From where Bobbyjay hung, one foot on the arbor tracks and one dangling in space, he could barely see Mikey Ray around a forty-foot-tall fake tree and the tangle of slackened cable at the end of the bridge. Mikey Ray lay full-length on the slanting deck of the bridge, his arms wrapped tight around the rail pipe, his sneakers pawing for purchase on the slick waffle-steel deck.

“Hold tight.” The low end of the bridge dangled nearest Bobbyjay. “I think it's hung up on something.” He examined the slack wire ropes, then the fake tree. “It's this piece. Gimme a minute.”