Palisades Park (48 page)

But Toby was a good guy and a good grind man—she couldn’t bring herself to say no. “Sure, I’ll bring it by after I get dressed.”

“Thanks, boss.”

Still in her bathing suit, she headed down the midway to Cliff’s trailer. To save money Toni hadn’t purchased one of her own but used Cliff’s to change in during the day, then rented a cheap hotel room in whatever town they were in. Cliff had offered to share his trailer with her for the run of the show, but Toni held back from committing to cohabit with him—bad enough, the Catholic in her chided, that they were having premarital sex.

She slipped into his trailer, got into a pair of dungarees and a T-shirt, and was out in time to watch Cliff being launched out of his cannon, over four cars parked end to end, and into the cupped hand of his safety net.

Afterward, Toni came up and kissed him. “Ready for some lunch?”

“I’m hungry for something else,” Cliff said with a grin.

Toni laughed. “What, now?”

“Why not?”

“It’s the middle of the day, and your trailer’s not far off the midway,” she pointed out. “People passing by might hear us.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, still grinning, “they might.”

“You
do
like to take risks, don’t you?”

“Says the girl who jumps ninety feet into six feet of water.”

“Okay, fair point,” Toni said, feeling a little frisson of excitement despite herself. She smiled mischievously. “Just try not to be so … vocal.”

“
Me
try?
You
try!” He grabbed her hand and led her into the trailer, where they pulled down the blinds and started undressing. Toni stepped out of her jeans and slipped off her shirt. Though she’d done this many times before at night, standing there in her bra and panties in the middle of the afternoon, about to have a tryst with her boyfriend, it felt—different. And as Cliff moved close and kissed her, she suddenly knew why: she’d been here before, but on the other side of the trailer window, looking in.

But Toni was quick to remind herself that she wasn’t cheating on anyone, and as far as the rest of the analogy went, the idea that someone found her as
attractive
as her mother—

She kissed Cliff back, hard, and they fell onto his bunk.

*   *   *

After an especially dismal turnout for the evening performance, Toni wasn’t particularly surprised to find Scobey Moser striding toward her before she had even finished drying off. She slapped on a smile, but Moser looked sober as a judge—and she knew that she was in the docket.

“Toni,” he said heavily, draping an arm across her broad shoulders, “we’ve given it, what, three months for word of mouth to get out?”

Toni’s stomach churned. “Yes, sir, I know.”

“It’s not your talker’s fault, Toby turns a good tip, but … people just are not coming back for that evening show the way they did for Ella’s fire dive, and they’re sure not telling everybody back in town how great that carnival high diver was and how they should go out and see her for themselves.”

Toni nodded. He was right.

“The way I see it, you’ve got two problems. One’s your billing. People gravitate to carnival acts with big adjectives in the names—words like ‘Incredible,’ ‘Impossible,’ or ‘Amazing.’ ‘Terrific Toni’ sounds like a radio show about that perky girl next door. No grandiosity.”

“I see your point, Mr. Moser.”

“Second, you’re not upping the stakes for the audience. They watched Ella swan dive into five feet of water in the afternoon, then her talker says,
‘Be sure to come back tonight at seven when Ella lights herself on fire and dives into a tank of flames!’
Man, we couldn’t keep ’em away!
You
do a forward somersault at one o’clock, a piked somersault at three, and a backward somersault at seven. How does your bally man tease the crowd back?
‘Come back tonight at seven and watch Terrific Toni do basically the same thing’
? You need to top yourself, girl, that’s what builds a tip!”

“I know,” Toni said. “I’ve been thinking about varying my routine—”

“Maybe three dives a day was too much to start with,” Moser said. “Why don’t we scale back to two—one o’clock and seven—and see if you can come up with something that’ll be a real ass-kicker for an evening show.”

“But … if I do that, will I only get paid for two dives a day?”

“Honey,” Moser said, “I think you’re a talented gal and someday you may be a big star in this business … but you aren’t yet, and it’s costing me money. Two dives a day, take it or leave it.”

Toni definitely felt the chilly implications of “leave it.” “I’ll take it,” she said, “and I’ll come up with a better act, I promise.”

“Attagirl!” He slapped her on the back and walked away smiling. But all Toni could think about was that her income had just shrunk from two-fifty a week to one-fifty, with the same expenses. She had gone from not making a dime to being in the hole every week. Even if she ate every meal at the cook shack, ordering the seventy-five-cent pork chops for dinner, she would run out of money before she ran out of appetite.

Five minutes later she went up to Cliff before he got shot out of his cannon and asked, “Is that offer of sharing a trailer still open?”

“Hell yes.”

She kissed him and said, “Let me just get my clothes from my motel in town, and starting tonight, you’ve got yourself a roommate.”

The next morning she and Cliff went to the cook shack—a big tent with two long tables running down the middle, the air sizzling with the smell of bacon, ham, eggs, and sausage—and as they stood in line to order Toni overheard a man behind her say, “If that son of a bitch Toby ever shows his face again, you can bet I’ll—”

She turned around and asked, “Did you say … Toby? Gilcrist?”

“You bet I did,” the man said. “SOB borrowed a double sawbuck from me yesterday and this morning his car’s gone—he’s skipped.”

Noting the pallor in Toni’s cheeks, Cliff said, “You didn’t…?”

She nodded. “Fifty bucks.” There were almost tears in her eyes. That fifty could’ve paid half of Arlan’s salary, or food for her for a week, or …

“Never loan money to a carny, hon,” Cliff said. “I’m sorry. Bastard.”

No one at Palisades would ever have done something like this, Toni thought, suddenly and exquisitely homesick. She shook her head sadly.

“He’s not a bastard,” she said. “Just a rat. Deserting a sinking ship.”

*   *   *

Long after spring arrived and the need for a winter oasis melted away, Eddie’s Polynesia continued to thrive—so much so that his waitress, Sharon, had her hands full waiting on the bar’s twelve tables. Eddie placed classified ads in the
Bergen Record
and
Newark Star-Ledger
for a “Hostess/waitress for Hawaiian/South Seas restaurant-bar. Apply Eddie’s Polynesia on the Palisades, 1120 Palisade Avenue, Fort Lee, N.J. Phone: Fort Lee 8-0070.”

Within the week he received six letters and three phone calls from women inquiring about the position. All of them had previous work experience and good references, and he determined to interview each one before making a decision; but one applicant, even on her résumé, stood out.

Her name was Lehua Concepción and her first place of employment was listed as “Dole Pineapple Cannery, Honolulu, T.H.” She had a number of waitressing positions to her credit, a few in Manhattan and the most recent being “Hawaiian Room, Teterboro Country Club, Teterboro, N.J.”

What Eddie saw when she walked through the door was an attractive woman in her late thirties, wearing a cream-colored dress that accented her café au lait skin and jet-black hair. She had a wide, warm, open face, as had so many of the Hawaiians he had met in Honolulu.

Eddie stood, extending a hand.
“Aloha
. I’m Eddie Stopka.”

“Lehua Concepción. Pleased to meet you.” She had that distinctive “local” accent Eddie had heard in Hawai
‘
i—a distillation of linguistic influences from Hawaiian to English, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese.

As she took a seat, Eddie asked curiously, “‘Concepción’ is hardly a Hawaiian name, is it?”

She shook her head. “My late husband was Puerto Rican—came to Hawai
‘
i in 1915. We met, married, but he thought we could do better on the mainland. So we moved here, twenty years ago—first New York City, then New Jersey—where we raised two
keiki,
children.”

“How old are your …
keiki
?” He hoped he’d pronounced that right.

“Mary is eighteen, Virginia is sixteen.”

“Virginia Concepción,” Eddie said. “That’s a lot to live up to.”

Lehua laughed. “It was her father’s idea, not mine. Maybe that’s why she prefers to be called Ginny, ’ey?”

He smiled. “So it says here you worked as a … ‘waitress/musician’ at the Hawaiian Room? What’s a waitress/musician?”

“I played ukulele and sang with a Hawaiian band there. When they decided to move back to the islands, I stayed on as a waitress.”

“Why?”

“My children have visited Hawai
‘
i, but they’ve never known a home other than New Jersey. They’re so settled here, I can’t bring myself to uproot them just because I miss my ‘
ohana
—my family.”

Eddie was impressed by her openness and her obvious strength—a widow raising two girls on her own.

“Mrs. Concepción, how would you like a job here, as a … ‘hostess/musician’? You’d greet customers, take up the slack for my waitress when the place is full, and a few days a week you could sing some island melodies. What do you say?”

She liked that just fine, and she started as soon as Eddie could obtain a sarong for her in a size ten.

Around this time, in July, Jack Stopka, done with basic training in Fort Dix, was sent cross country by rail to California, where he boarded the U.S. Military Ship Transport USS
General M. C. Meigs,
bound for Yokohama, Japan, and then on to Pusan, Korea. Once he was stationed in Korea he sent Eddie a mordantly funny letter about the eighteen-day Pacific crossing:

Remembering your letters about your passage aboard the
Lurline,
I sat back and waited expectantly for a moonlit Pacific voyage through idyllic blue seas. There were eight hundred Army troops aboard the
Meigs,
crammed in tiered bunks four feet high. The air belowdecks smelled like the inside of somebody’s underwear, the seas bucked like a bronco, and almost everybody got seasick. They either threw up or they crapped themselves. It was a relief to be chosen for guard duty on one of the upper decks—it was windy, rainy, and cold, but at least there was no smell, probably since officers were quartered on the upper decks and we all know their shit don’t stink …

At least Jack seemed to be coping with things with his usual humor. And the war news was somewhat encouraging: in late June the Soviet delegate to the United Nations had proposed a truce in Korea, and on July 10, peace talks with North Korea began in Kaesong. Perhaps, Eddie thought, this whole thing would be over before Jack ever saw any action.

*   *   *

“I think I’ve got the solution to both our problems,” Cliff announced excitedly one night as he and Toni lay in bed. In a few days the show was making the jump to Omaha, Nebraska—the biggest city they’d played so far. “It’s sure-fire, and it’ll make a name for both of us.”

“Do tell,” Toni said, just drifting off to sleep.

“Scobey won’t let me fly over Ferris wheels or other rides ’cause he’s afraid of liability, accidentally hitting a passenger, right? So what if I fly over an attraction that doesn’t
have
any passengers?”

“Like what?” Toni asked. “Even the sideshow has people inside.”

Cliff grinned and said, “Like you.”

She sat bolt upright in bed.
“What?”

“Picture this: When we get to Omaha, I set up my cannon in front of some bleachers, like always. But then, about a hundred feet in front of that,
you
set up your tower and tank. On the far side of that, I set up my safety net. Showtime comes, you climb up your tower, wave to the crowd, then the talker says,
‘For the first time anywhere, two daredevils cross paths in the sky!’
—and BOOM!, I shoot out of the cannon, over your head, and into the net. You do your dive, I climb out of the net, we take our bows together. The world’s first high diver–human cannonball team! It’s a natural.”

She gaped. “Are you nuts? What if you hit
me
? So
ends
the world’s first high diver–human cannonball team!”

“Nah. You see how high I shoot out of that cannon—I’ll miss you by a mile,” he said calmly. “But the crowd won’t know that, and they’ll be on the edge of their seats! It’ll be a sensation. Here, I’ll show you.”

He jumped out of bed, ran to the trailer’s little dining table, and handed her some papers. They were filled with diagrams, parabolas, and equations like
x(t)
=
v
x
(0)
t
and
y(t)
=
y
(0)
+
v
y
(0)
t
−
_gt
2
.

“This is calculus,” she said, surprised.

“Sure. I worked it all out mathematically. If I set the firing angle of the cannon at forty-eight degrees, with two hundred pounds of air per square foot, I’ll reach a zenith of one hundred feet high—ten feet higher than your diving tower—and two hundred feet in distance.”

Toni, though still skeptical, was impressed by the forethought he had put into this. “What happens if you go off course and hit one of the guy wires? How could we even rehearse this without risking our necks?”

“We rehearse it with a weighted dummy we shoot over the tower. We can do a few practice tries here tomorrow morning—easy enough to move my cannon over to your setup. In Omaha we’ll set up the net and I’ll take a few solo passes over the tower. If I clear that okay, you go up, stand there, and I’ll fly over you. If, after that, for
any
reason you don’t feel comfortable with it, we’ll forget the whole thing. But I think it can work, and work big!