Sometimes, when a cast is under-rehearsed, a kind of magic sets in. It’s born of adrenaline, mostly, a distillation of the actors’ perception of what their roles are supposed to be, without enough time for the director’s vision to have had a marked effect. It’s scattered, but inspired. The first run had this quality. It truly sparkled.
The actors kept to the script most of the time, and if a line was lost, Ruth filled in with a bit of improvised music. If there had been anybody in the audience, they wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. After the final moment, we all burst into a spontaneous chorus of self-congratulatory whoops and hollers, which felt wonderful.
“That was fantastic, you guys,” Ruth said. “You could take it on the road tomorrow.”
“We’re going to,” Meredith said, but with good humour.
Shane ran a hand through his hair and then looked at his palm.
“Brad, in that last bit, just before your dragon spurts fire, can you get the big guy’s head a little higher? I got a mouthful of smoke that time, and I swear a couple of sparks landed in my hair.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Brad said. “I think I pressed the button a little early.” The trigger for the dragon flashpot was in the head of the puppet, and it was up to Brad to fire it. I knew it was going to be a problem. Brad wasn’t terribly accurate when it came to cues.
“That’s one cue you have to be sure you don’t jump,” I said. “It’s distracting, eh?”
“Won’t happen again,” he said.
“Shane, don’t worry about the flashpots,” I said. “That stuff is designed to combust instantly. The sparks aren’t fire sparks, they’re glitter.”
“Tell that to my hairdresser,” he said.
“You’ll be wearing your hood,” I said. “All the costumes, drapes—the whole schmeer is treated with flame retardant.”
“My head isn’t,” Shane said.
“We won’t do the flashpots for the next run,” I said. “We’ll put them back in for the dress run tonight, okay?”
“Fine with me,” Shane said. “Thanks.”
“Scared of a little puff of smoke?” Meredith said.
“Frankly, Miss Equity Deputy, yes. Can’t you write a risk clause into my contract?”
The diversion to duty worked like a charm. Meredith seemed to give the suggestion serious consideration.
“I suppose we could,” she said. “I never thought of that. We should all have one of those. Who knows what could happen? I’ll have to check the Green Book.” She hurried away to get the Equity book from her purse.
“Thanks, Shane,” I said, the sarcasm as thick as butter.
“No problem,” he said, grinning. “It’ll keep her occupied.”
“Polly, the waist belt inside the serpent costume is a little snug,” Amber said. “Could you loosen it for me?”
Shane looked at her belly with a small, smug expression on his face. Of course. The measurements Amber’s agent had sent with her contract had been taken, presumably, before she was pregnant. Although I assumed, when she’d told me, that she was only a little way along in the gestational process—early enough for her to be legally able to terminate the pregnancy—there’s still an immediate thickening and tightening of the midriff. Amber caught Shane’s look and returned it with one of her own, a very private one that embarrassed me a bit. With Jason out of the way, it appeared that the two had sort of claimed one another. I wondered if the young actress would really go through with an abortion.
“Bring it over here and I’ll adjust it,” I said. “The buckles just need easing off a bit, probably.”
“Ruth, can we take a moment to go over the Axe Song?” Brad said to her. “It went a lot faster in that run than we rehearsed it.”
“That was your tempo, not mine,” Ruth said. “You trotted through that number like your pants were on fire.”
“I know,” Brad said. “Nervous. You were just keeping up, I guess.”
“Damn right. I tried to slow you down and ended up a couple of bars behind you. Here, let’s do it now.”
The second run after lunch, with the UV lights on and the overhead fluorescents off, was chaotic. Although there was enough daylight in the space to allow the actors to see each other, and they were performing hoodless, the added element of UV-activated puppets and props was disorienting.
“You get sort of hypnotized by them,” Amber said afterwards.
“Yeah, like you’re supposed to look at the puppets when you’re manipulating them, and when you look away, you can still see them,” Brad said.
“I wonder if working under UV light is dangerous,” Shane said, looking at Meredith. “Are we all going to get headaches and blurred vision?”
Meredith thought for a minute. “I didn’t have anything like that last time,” she said, “but I think we should watch out for it. With the pyrotechnics and the UV light, we may have to have a rider attached to our contracts, Polly.”
I glared at Shane, who winked at me. “You can take it up with Juliet after the run tonight, Meredith. You’re all covered under the Equity insurance policy—that should be enough, unless you’re talking about danger pay. I doubt she’ll go for it.”
“The Equity insurance, is that the thing that says you get, like $4,000 if you lose an arm, and $350 per eye, that sort of thing?” Amber said. “I thought that was sick when I saw it in my contract package.”
“It’s standard,” I said. “I guess they keep the settlements low so you won’t be maiming yourself on purpose to collect the cash.”
“Like, I’m really going to poke my eye out so I can pay my rent this month,” Amber said.
“Exactly.”
For the dinner break, the cast decided to hit the Burger Barn downtown.
“Take the van, so none of you gets lost,” I said, shifting instantly into mother-hen-mode. “We want to start the dress run dead on time.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Shane said.
“No, I’ve got to wire the flashpots and check the preset,” I said.
“You want us to pick you up anything?”
The Burger Barn, originally a drive-in, had been a fixture in Sikwan since the fifties and had miraculously survived, in spite of a McDonald’s franchise opening a few doors down. Its dressed-up hotdogs all had bizarre dog-names. A Lucky Lassie had American cheese on it, and the Schnauzer came with sauerkraut and was served on a kaiser. The burgers, in various forms, were named after heavy machinery. It enjoyed a kind of cult-status in town, having achieved a degree of nostalgic cool that no big-corporation advertising budget could ever manufacture. The current owners, a Portuguese family who had immigrated to Canada in the early seventies, didn’t bother putting ads in the papers or on the radio. They just smiled happily, remembered their customers’ names, flipped burgers on an immaculate grill, hired high school students (who stayed on for years) and raked in the bucks. Why mess with a good thing?
I ordered a Bulldozer (double patty with fried onions) and some onion rings. Normally, I don’t eat fast food, but it had been a long day with no end in sight, and sometimes a good dose of saturated fat is just what you need.
“What happened to the health regimen?” I asked Meredith, as I gave her the van keys.
“Rules are made to be broken,” she said. “Just ask Juliet.”
“Point taken,” I said, and we exchanged a reasonably friendly smile. Things were looking up.
Ten minutes later, as I was carefully wrapping thread around an electric match, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Polly?” Becker said. “They said I’d find you up here. We have to talk.”
Thirty-One
MOTHER: When people get together in a group, they think as one / Join in, my son, but don’t forget there’s peril in the fun.
-The Glass Flute, Scene i
“We found another body,” Becker said.
“Oh, please. I’m not going to fall for that one again.”
“It’s not a snowmobiler, Polly. It’s a
young male, thin, with dark hair, dressed in black.”
“Oh, Lord. Jason?”
“We think so. His parents are on the way down. I thought you should know.”
“Where did you find him?” My heart was beating much too hard, and I lost my grip on the pyro squib I was building. It flipped out of my hand and skittered across the table, dumping pyro powder everywhere. I resolved not to light a cigarette until I’d washed my hands.
“Just where you’d expect to find him if he went into the river up here. The current’s pretty strong. He was wedged under a dock a couple of kilometres downstream. Got a call this morning.”
“Did you get my e-mail?”
“That’s why I’m here. You think he was blackmailing somebody? You said you could prove it.”
“He was collecting dirty laundry. Blackmail? I don’t know—maybe. You’re sure it’s Jason?” I said.
“No, not completely. The face is disfigured. But we’re sure enough to need to go over the details of last Sunday night again, and you said some weird things have happened around here since then.”
“Your timing is terrible,” I said. “We’ve been told that we’re supposed to do a show for the Kosovar families in Laingford tomorrow. We’ve been rehearsing like crazy today, and there’s a dress run in about half an hour. I don’t suppose you can wait until it’s over, can you? The cast is a little high-strung at the moment.”
“That depends on what you can tell me now, Polly.”
“And if I tell you the wrong thing, and you end up suspecting one of my cast members, you’ll take him or her in for questioning, and the show’s toast.”
“You’d want to continue doing a puppet play with a murderer?”
“Becker, I’ve thought Jason was dead since Monday. You guys didn’t. If someone tossed him into the workshop pool, and it’s one of us, then we’ve been rehearsing with a murderer for a week already. One more day isn’t going to make any difference.”
“I’ve heard that ‘the show must go on’, but this is ridiculous,” Becker said.
“Yup.”
“Look, you mentioned something about a death ten years ago in Laingford. What’s that about? If you want to make me go away, you have to give me something, Polly. Either that, or I’ll just shut this whole thing down right now, interview everybody very, very slowly and—I believe the expression is—it’s curtains for your play.”
“All I’m asking is for you to wait a few hours. If you have found Jason, then the news of his death is going to absolutely freak everybody out. They’re all convinced, like you were, that he just had a tantrum and skipped off to Toronto. Amber’s going to fall apart when she hears it.”
“She wasn’t too cut up about her boyfriend’s leaving,” Becker said. “I saw her and that blonde actor downtown yesterday, and they looked pretty chummy.”
“Having a fiancé walk out on you is one thing, having him croak is another,” I said.
“What if she helped him croak?” Becker said.
“Hardly. Amber Thackeray’s a little mouse.”
“Mice bite if they’re cornered,” Becker said.
“Look, I’ll make a deal with you, Becker,” I said. “The cast is due back any time now. We have a dress rehearsal of the show, and then we have to strike and load the set into the van, which will take us up to about ten o’clock. I have some stuff that might help you, or it might not, but I don’t have the brain-space to talk about it right now. I’ll meet you wherever you want at ten-thirty.”
“Maybe you could find the ‘brain-space’ if you came up to the Laingford station with me,” Becker said.
“That wouldn’t be productive and you know it,” I said. “You don’t know that my information has any value whatsoever, but I have a choice to be cooperative or not. I’ll be cooperative. But not right now.”
“You are one huge pain in the ass, Polly Deacon,” Becker said. “I’m trying to investigate a suspected homicide, and all you can think about is a stupid puppet play.”
“It’s not stupid,” I said. “It’s my job, and I don’t get them very often, Officer. Anyway, you don’t know it was a homicide. Earlier this week, you thought it was an accident, if it was a death at all. I’m the one who’s been overreacting every time something strange happens around here, and my boss doesn’t like it. If this dress rehearsal is canned because the cops suddenly decide that it wasn’t my imagination after all, Juliet’s going to think I was pestering you and playing Nancy Drew instead of working for her.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?”
“Yes, but I’d rather she didn’t have it confirmed. Come on, Becker. Be nice.”
“Only if you tell me about the death in Laingford. Then I’ll go away and check it out and meet you back here at ten-thirty. And if you tell Morrison that I made a deal with you, I’ll deny it and then come search your place for drugs with a pack of German Shepherds.”
“I hate it when you do that tough cop stuff. It doesn’t suit you. Besides, you can’t just burst in and search someone’s house, Becker. It’s unconstitutional.”
“I can certainly search your place if I have reason to believe you have illegal substances in your possession.”
“I gave it up, Becker.”
He knew perfectly well I wasn’t telling the truth on that one, but I couldn’t help noticing the tiny flash of pleased surprise that skittered across his face when I said it. It was gone in a moment. “Look me in the eye and say that,” he said.
“Okay, never mind. But I have a note from my doctor,” I said.
“Your shrink, maybe,” he said. “Now talk.”
I heard the van arrive—the low, crunching rumble of the van’s sliding side door open and shut. They were back with my ’Dozer burger and onion rings, and I still had the flashpots to prepare before the run.
“Okay, okay. Briefly, a drama teacher at Laingford High, I don’t know his name, died about ten years ago. I don’t have a firmer date than that. There was something funny about it that they didn’t tell the students, and afterwards they called it ‘The Incident.’ No charges were ever laid.” I wasn’t going to tell him about Shane having been questioned. At least not at that point. He could find that out for himself.
“What does this have to do with Jason McMaster?” Becker asked. The actors were coming up the stairs.
“Jason was one of his students.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t know, Becker. Someone tampered with a puppet yesterday and left a photo behind that sort of connected the two.”
“A photo? You’ve lost me.”
“Look, I’ll tell you later. We’ve got a dress rehearsal to do, and you promised you’d go away if I gave you something. That’s all I know about the teacher’s death, but if you can find out the details, then maybe some of the other stuff will make some sense.”
Becker was, understandably, looking exasperated. He was in plainclothes for some reason (he was one snappy dresser) and assumed the classic Gentleman’s Quarterly “perplexed model frowns at camera” pose. It was very annoying. I felt the urge to reach out a hand and smooth the frown lines away, which would have been entirely inappropriate, especially as my hands were covered in pyro powder and I’d have left a smudge. I’d been talking intensely with him for some minutes, and even though there was nothing left between us except some messy history, his one-on-one closeness made me feel decidedly warm.
The actors boiled into the room, laughing and goofing around. The Burger Barn will do that to people—turn them into giddy teenagers. It was nice to see them getting along so well. The Mother-hen microchip in my brain clucked approvingly. I didn’t want Becker to ruin it.
“Hey Polly,” Shane said. “They’re naming a new hot dog after Amber’s puppy—the Portia Portion.” The puppy was, as usual, snuggled in Amber’s arms like a teddy bear. It wore a smug expression and was licking its incredibly cute chops.
“They took a picture and everything,” Amber said.
<
br /> “I’ll see you at ten-thirty,” Becker said and left quickly. I let out a small sigh of relief, and on the in-breath caught the mouth-watering aroma of my ’Dozer burger, which Shane plopped down onto the table. They’d all taken their food to go and were busy unwrapping burgers and onion rings.
“Who was your friend?” Meredith asked. As usual, Becker had been unrecognizable out of uniform.
“An old buddy of mine,” I said. It’s a weird power that cops and priests and people who wear uniforms have. They enjoy a kind of double-personality, so that even people who know them quite well when they’re suited up, think they’re meeting someone new when they’re in civvies. I first noticed this phenomenon at a charity ball in Laingford. I’d been engaged in a long conversation with an elegantly-dressed woman at the bar, feeling I knew her from somewhere, but not having the temerity to ask that goofy question: “Haven’t we met before?” Turns out she was the checkout clerk at the Sav-Mor, where I’ve done my grocery shopping for the past three years. Without the orange polyester romper-thing they make them wear, she was a different person. Go figure.
I let my ’Dozer get cold and finished rigging the flashpots. By the time I got around to eating, we were at the ten-minute call, and our ‘ “est audience” was settling down for the show.
The “calls” for a show are one of those stage management things that non-theatre people don’t understand, and amateur companies don’t take seriously, which is why little-theatre productions almost never start on time.
The idea is this: It’s stage management’s responsibility to make sure the show goes up, or starts precisely at the time appointed. To make this happen, you give calls to your actors and crew, and to your audience. In a big theatre, you do this by using the intercom system. Traditionally, the calls begin at the half-hour. “Half-hour, please,” the stage manager or assistant says to the actors and technicians. Everybody involved with the performance of the show is expected to be in the theatre at least by the half-hour call.
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