Shooting Star (15 page)

Authors: Cynthia Riggs

BOOK: Shooting Star

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The play, if possible, was a bigger hit than on opening night. The audience expected high camp and got it. The first scene was on the ship where George, as the Arctic explorer, had picked up Frankenstein from his ice floe. He had listened sympathetically to Frankenstein’s fantastic story, as told by Dearborn. As George had suspected, his uncle had fortified himself before going on stage. With every astonishingly well-articulated word, he puffed out fumes of semi-metabolized whiskey. George held his nose and instinctively backed away from the deathbed. The audience cheered, shrieked, whistled, clapped, and shouted out suggestions. Dearborn added a few extemporaneous lines, to which George replied with his own.

At the end of Act One, Scene One, George hustled backstage to the dressing room, dumped out his purchase from Shirley’s Hardware, opened the box with the realistic-looking pistol he’d bought and loaded it the way Jessie and Mary at the hardware store had shown him. Then he made his way to the prop table.

Nora Epstein, the stage manager, was still in the women’s dressing room, practicing her part as Justine, so the prop table was unguarded, as it had been for two nights.

George knew nothing about guns. He substituted his newly purchased gun for the stage gun, dropped the stage gun into a cardboard box that was under the table, and covered it with a moth-eaten woolen scarf.

He thought briefly about fingerprints, but since he had no gloves or even a handkerchief with him, he decided the hell with fingerprints. No one had seen him, he was quite sure.

He went back to the men’s dressing room and changed into his Henry Clerval costume. It occurred to him that Roderick, as the monster, would be strangling Henry Clerval. Him. So, George fished around in the costume box until he found a metal collar that must have been part of the Tin Man’s costume from some long ago production of
The Wizard of Oz
and wrapped it around his neck—just in case. He practiced his lines, stretching up his chin to minimize the odd metallic rattle from the tight collar and figured no one would notice.

The strangling scene went well. So well, that when the monster grabbed him around the throat, it was the monster who shrieked in pain, hopped on one foot holding both hands down at knee level and started after Henry Clerval for real, with a drawn-out growl. The stage darkened and the stagehands dragged off Clerval’s limp body with its dented tin collar. The body’s face had a broad smile.

The audience took up the cry of “Encore! Encore!” and stamped its collective feet until the floorboards shook.

George had a bit of trouble removing the dented collar, but at last he was freed of it. He could hardly wait until the final scene, when he, the explorer, would carry out the dying wish of Frankenstein, and shoot Roderick. Wouldn’t matter that his fingerprints were all over the weapon, he thought. They were supposed to be.

He watched from the wings as Act Two wound down. This was the act where the monster would strangle Becca, lying in her nuptial bed as the bride of Frankenstein. Would Roderick forget his strength? Would he be so angry with Aunt Becca that he would deliberately go too far? Would his hands be sore from strangling the tin collar of Henry Clerval? George watched with interest.

Roderick, as the monster, climbed through the hotel window into the bridal suite, and this time the entire window frame detached itself from the plywood wall, dropped onto the stage, and entangled itself around his feet. He stumbled and fell. Picked himself up, picked up the pieces of the frame, apparently
got splinters in his hands in the process, and, howling, flung the pieces into the audience, to the delight of all.

Becca, the bride, screamed, as she was supposed to, and Roderick growled his lines about the wedding night, reached into his coat pocket, plucked out the gun, and waved it around.

“No, no, you fool!” Becca screamed. “You’re not supposed to shoot me, you’re supposed to strangle me!”

Damn, said George to himself.
I’m
the one who’s supposed to shoot
Roderick.
Roderick’s not supposed to shoot Aunt Becca!

He nearly darted onto the scene, but the noise from the audience was deafening.

“You stupid oaf,” shrieked Becca. “Failure! Actor? Hah!”

Roderick shouted above the din, “This is all your fault, Aunt Becca! You’ll be sorry!” He bent his knees, held the gun the way he’d seen it done on television …

Cheers, whistles, catcalls!

… and aimed the gun at his own temple.

What on earth is he doing? George held his hands over his eyes and missed the action.

“Stop!” shrieked a voice from the wings.

Roderick turned his head toward the voice just as he pulled the trigger. There was a puff of smoke, a brilliant scarlet flash popped out of the gun, unwound itself into a six-by-nine-inch flag that said, in dense black letters, “BANG!!!!!!”

With that, the monster fled from the stage, leaving the bride un-strangled.

Becca sat up in the nuptial bed and cried out after him, “Can’t you do anything right?” Then, apparently recalling where she was, she peered out at the audience through myopic eyes and addressed the blur of faces in a high, wavery voice. “I’ve been strangled!” She placed her hands around her neck. “My throat! My poor throat!” She gasped, stuck out her pink tongue and crossed her eyes. “He’s killed me! I’m dead,” and she slumped back on the bed.

It was impossible to top the murder of Frankenstein’s bride, but the audience didn’t care. They were weak from laughter and hoarse from shouting, their hands smarted from applauding, their feet stung from stamping.

In the last act, when George, as the Arctic explorer, produced the gun, the same gun, the gun with which he was to shoot Roderick the monster, the audience shouted warnings to the monster. George tugged the limp flag out of the muzzle, held the gun in both hands, pointed it at Roderick, crouched in a coplike manner, pulled the trigger, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “KA-POW!”

The audience roared.

The play ended. There were three curtain calls, and the audience demanded a fourth. After the fifth curtain call, George, from the wings, started the cry of “Author! Author!” and every voice in the audience joined in. “Author! Author!”

Backstage, Dearborn slumped over the prop table, asleep with a half-finished plastic cup of Jack Daniel’s in front of him. The room trembled with the cries of “Author! Author!”

Becca rushed into the room. “Darling, wake up!”

“Umpf,” said Dearborn.

“Author! Author!”

Becca shook him. “You have to go on stage and say something.”

“Nothin’ to say,” said Dearborn.

“They’ll tear the place down.”

“So what,” said Dearborn.

“Author! Author!” The howl from the audience was even more insistent.

Becca shook him again, and tried to pry him out of his chair. “They’re turning mean.” She looked around frantically. “Roderick! George! Do something!”

“Go find good ol’ Vicky,” mumbled Dearborn.

“We already tried,” screamed Becca. “No one answers the
phone at her house.” She turned to George. “Where is she?”

George, whose grin showed a set of fine teeth, shrugged.

“Roderick,
darling,”
she snarled.

“Don’t ‘darling’ me, you, you … phony!” Roderick shouted above the roar. “She’s reading her poetry at Island Java.”

“Get her!” screamed Becca. “Now! Hurry!”

Dearborn, eyes closed, snorted.

Becca grasped him by his hair and pulled him to a sitting position. “Get up, get up!” she hissed.

George had moved to one side, where he stood with arms folded, still grinning.

Becca turned on him. “Help me get him to his feet, George. He’s got to go on stage.”

“He won’t make it,” said George.

“He has to. He will.” Becca tugged on Dearborn’s—actually Frankenstein’s—coat collar.

“Author! Author!” came the rhythmic howl from the audience.

“Roderick!” screamed Becca. “Go! Get Mrs. Trumbull!”

Roderick, still in monster makeup, turned a leering, bloody face to her, thrust a finger in the air, and lurched off.

George stepped away from the wall he’d been leaning against. The wall trembled with the roar of the crowd. He stood behind Dearborn and, together with Becca, lifted him to his feet, turned him around, marched him toward the stage, and gave him a grand shove.

Miraculously, Dearborn straightened up, smoothed his mussed hair, and strode onto the stage, both hands high in the air. The stamping, clapping, and whistling stopped abruptly.

“Friends!” said Dearborn, in what sounded like a sober voice. “We have located the author.”

“Hooray!” someone shouted, and others took up the cry. “Hooray! Hooray!”

Dearborn continued to hold up his hands and waited a dramatic
moment. “Our author, Victoria Trumbull, is on her way to the theater as we speak.”

Backstage, Becca frowned. George laughed out loud.

Victoria, sitting in an armchair on the platform that served as a stage at Island Java, roughly two blocks from the theater, had opened her latest chapbook to a sestina entitled “Minerva’s Bird” that she was about to read. Coffeehouse patrons leaned forward at the crowded café tables to hear every word.

“A sestina has six six-line stanzas and a tercet,” Victoria explained.

Her enthralled audience nodded.

“The end words of the first stanzas …” Victoria never finished. She’d heard a stirring among the café tables and looked up to see Frankenstein’s monster shambling toward her, knocking tables over in his blind haste.

Victoria stood, and her book dropped onto the stage, followed by her lilac-wood walking stick. “Roderick! What’s the trouble now?”

“Author,” Roderick huffed, out of breath. “They demand author … they’re rioting … tearing apart the theater …”

The coffeehouse was silent.

Victoria bent down, holding an arm of her chair, and picked up her dropped book and her stick.

“Please, Mrs. Trumbull … they want the author … please come with me.”

Victoria looked around at the quiet, sober faces around her and back at the monster in front of her with his fangs, stitches, electrodes, and blood.

“Hurry, Mrs. Trumbull … my car …” Roderick gasped.

Victoria made a quick decision. “I’m taking a short break,” she told her audience. “I believe Jefferson Vanderhoop is here tonight?”

The coffeehouse faces looked around, and Jefferson Vanderhoop, standing by the coffee urn, raised his hand.

“Do you have some of your fishing poems with you?” Victoria called out.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“While I’m gone, I’d like you to read them. I hope the rest of you will welcome a new poet to our gathering.” Victoria started the applause, and the gathering politely joined in.

Roderick held out his arm. Victoria took it and stepped down from the platform. She marched between the tables, nodding first to one side, then the other, as her listeners stood respectfully. Roderick trailed behind her, limping and shuffling as rapidly as he could.

As Roderick closed the door of the coffeehouse, Victoria could hear a second round of polite applause for Jefferson Vanderhoop who was taking his place on the platform.

“Teddy’s father?” Roderick said.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t know he wrote poetry.”

“It’s quite good,” said Victoria. “Rough-hewn, but powerful. Not quite as polished as yours, of course.”

Roderick had driven the two blocks to the coffeehouse and parked his car in front of Island Java, engine still running. He helped Victoria into the passenger seat and handed her the lilac-wood stick.

“Thank you.”

Roderick plopped into the driver’s seat, and Victoria turned to him.

“What’s this all about, Roderick?”

He explained about the sold out theater, the scalpers, the gun that went “BANG!!!!!!” He described the five curtain calls and the cries of “Author! Author!”

“I refuse to acknowledge that I’ve had any part of the play as it’s being performed,” said Victoria, the wrinkles around her mouth forming straight horizontal and vertical lines.

Roderick told her the cheers and whistles were beginning to turn mean when he left to get her.

“I’m not surprised,” said Victoria.

“They’ll destroy Aunt Ruth’s theater.”

Victoria sighed and stared straight ahead. Roderick made a U-turn at the Black Dog Tavern and waited at Five Corners for a break in traffic.

While they waited, he pounded the steering wheel. “It’s all my fault, Mrs. Trumbull.”

Victoria turned and stared at him.