Fools Paradise (18 page)

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.

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!”

“She could have been killed,” Bobbyjay said, remembering her scream, the way her ponytail slid through the bars of the cage as she lost her footing and plummetted to the limit of her lanyard. “Killed.”

“Everybody pays their dues,” his father said, getting that shiny-faced expression he got when he was cornered and he knew it and he wouldn't back down no matter how wrong he was. “Nothin' happened.”

“Nothing?” Bobbyjay lost it for the second time that night. “How fucking stupid are you?” he screamed at his father.

Silence descended on the bar.

Now I've done it.
As little as Bobbyjay liked being called stupid, his Dad liked it even less. There were eight, maybe ten Local guys listening nearby. Bobbyjay stood almost a head taller than his father.

So it took self-control, more than he had ever thought it would, to stand there and let Bobby Junior haul back a drunk's wobbling fist and punch him in the jaw.

It wasn't the lightest punch in the world. Bobbyjay tottered and sat down on the floor. The guys might even believe he'd been knocked down by it.