Fools Paradise

by Stevenson, Jennifer

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “What’s with Corky calling me out of the Opera House?” she said to Bobbyjay that afternoon as they met for a quick hot dog out of a roach coach behind the Pavillion, in between unloading The Piddlies’ electrics trucks and the hang-and-focus.

  Bobbyjay wiped mustard off his mouth with the back of his hand. “Bigger show than they expected. The producer tried to cheap out, only ordered sixteen guys, and thirty trucks showed up. We’ll probably get paid in cash tonight.”

  Daisy looked around the roach coach at the rest of the crew wolfing their lunch, calculating overtime plus meal penalties in her head. It made her feel like a real stagehand. “Wow. Lot of cash. Can they do that?”

  “They better. Scooby’s the steward. He knows what it means when the producer tries to fake out the office.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Means they’re running broke on the tour.” He eyed the rows and rows of empty tractor-trailers over his third hot dog. “They better sell out tonight.”

  “So, when we’re done here, we go back to the Opera House and finish whatever’s left of the day? When will that be?”

  “Friday sometime.”

  Daisy groaned. It was only Thursday afternoon and she ached already.

  She was focusing lights when her cell phone rang. She answered quietly so that her partner on deck wouldn’t hear.

  It was Wesley, sounding jubilant. “You’ll never guess what! Grandpa threw Tony out of the house again! He actually saw Tone slap you on the butt today and, boy, you should of heard the yelling. This time it’s for good! Woo hoo!”

  Daisy dogged down her parcan with her crescent wrench and signaled to the house man on deck to move her lift to the next row of electrics. “Groovy. Can he throw Tony out of the Opera House too? I have to work with him every day.”

  “At least they have rules over there about what you can do to people.”

  She rolled her eyes. Boy, was this kid in for a surprise when he made apprentice.

  “What time you coming home? Uh, Grandpa really wants to talk to you.”

  And you want to know what’s for supper.

  “No clue,” she said cheerfully. “I’m running the show and doing the take-out, and by then it’ll be tomorrow, so we have to head over to the Opera House and finish out the day. Just thaw some lasagne, okay, buddy? I have to go now,” she said and thumbed off the phone before the lighting designer could see it.

  God, I love work.

  They finished unloading the trucks. They hung the electrics. They focused the electrics. They put up the speaker towers. They put up the performance stage. They tested the fog pots and the lasers and the sound system and the audience trickled in and Daisy wore down past tired into a state of zombification. Around eight in the evening Bobbyjay brought her another bag of crappy little hot dogs just as she was mounting the monkey-ladder to her follow-spot, and he kissed her so hard that even her feet, numb inside her steel-toed sneakers, woke up and tingled.

  “Gonna make it?” he said, and she grinned at him. She sprang up the ladder, slithered into her truss-spot cage, snapped on her safety, hung her headset over her ear, and waited for her first cue, gobbling down hot dogs, squirreling away the wrappers in the pockets of her overalls, and watching Bobbyjay move around on stage, hunk-and-a-half, all hers, kinda.

  The music woke her up, anyway. At soundcheck she put in her earplugs and the noise still lifted the hairs on her arms. Two thousand more audience members arrived. The band came out, late of course, and rattled her fillings for three solid hours.

  As the audience was filing out and the first trucks pumped diesel fumes in the loading dock, Daisy had her first bad moment. Her department head had sent the electrics crew for a potty-and-smoke break while the carpenters cleared the deck. Rob the Snob Morton and his son Raybob were carpenters, so Daisy didn’t expect to see them lounging outside the restrooms, smoking.

  They saw her and smirked. She went cold.

  All she had to do was walk past them to the toilet.

  Her courage failed. Her bruises were livid from the fall Bobbert had arranged for her at the United Center.

  Wimp, she chanted to herself as she climbed the bleachers to the public part of the Pavilion. Wimp wimp wimp wimp wimp. There had to be another girl’s bathroom here.

  She forced her way through the exiting audience that jammed the corridor.

  Elbows jabbed her, and the din of voices came through her earplugs. Finally she fought free into an empty corner and realized she had come all the way to the front of house, across the crowded corridor from the box office.

  A big, big, very big guy with a shaved head and a too-tight sport coat stood with his back to the box office door. That’s where they’re keeping our money, she thought. I’m actually gonna see green tonight. Her pulse quickened.

  The crowd thinned. The producer, a ferret in a ponytail and Vegas-talk-show-host suit, stepped up to the big guy and spoke to him, sliding his hand into his coat. The big guy opened the door and leaned inside. The producer fidgeted, eyeing the departing crowd. The big guy handed the producer a red dufflebag with the band’s logo on it, shut the door, and resumed his guard pose.

  The producer walked quickly after the audience.

  Heart thudding and bladder bursting, Daisy followed him. He went straight down the bleachers and walked out on the main floor. Daisy followed, trying to look busy. He skirted the mess of platforming being disassembled and loaded onto a truck, and ducked into the area backstage, under the bleachers.

  Daisy hung back a moment. If he asks me what I’m doing, I can tell him I’m lost. Truth. She followed.

  She entered a narrow, dim, empty corridor. The producer came empty-handed out of a doorway in the corridor and brushed past her as if she were invisible. Then he was gone, onstage.

  The corridor was all doors. Which door was it?

  She put her ear to the first door. Hoots and murmurs came from inside, and the unmistakable smell of burning marijuana. Dressing room. She listened at each door until she came to a door where no sound came from inside. She opened it. Another dressing room, empty and dark. A toilet flushed next door.

  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 ta
ke 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.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  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.