Читать книгу Cue the Dead Guy - H. Mel Malton - Страница 6

MOTHER: You’ll meet with strangers on the path, take care / Be wary, but polite, and comb your hair.

-The Glass Flute, Scene ii

Jason’s eyes started flickering around the room. He’d lost sight of Amber, and he was panicking.

“Have you been engaged for long?” I said.

Jason looked at his watch. “Three and a half hours,” he said, then grinned. “And six minutes.” The smile perked up his face, lending it a kind of basset-hound sweetness. I’d never seen him smile before. He usually looked as if a timber wolf had just bitten his butt. The smile was the first warm moment we had shared.

I grinned back. “Congratulations,” I said. “You work fast.”

His face immediately soured. “We’ve been going out for three years,” he said. “Both of us getting this contract was a fluke, and it speeded things up, that’s all.”

“I was kidding,” I said, backtracking. Golly. Touchy. “Well, congratulations, Jason. Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”

“I’m working,” Jason said. “Setting up the rehearsal space for tomorrow.”

“Oh, relax. Take a minute to celebrate. You don’t get engaged every day. One drink isn’t going to hurt.” He thought about it, shrugged and followed me over to the bar.

Sam Ruttles, the theatre accountant, was in charge of the drinks. Short and bald, with a horrible taste for practical jokes, Sam was known as the Don Juan of Sikwan. Women were drawn to him like flies to a Vapona strip, for reasons which they thankfully kept to themselves. He was surrounded by his usual harem, which included Rico, who gave me the thumbs-up sign. That meant that Sam hadn’t recognized him, I supposed.

“Scotch on the rocks, please, Sam. And something for my friend Jason, here, who has just gotten engaged.”

“What would you want to get engaged for, Jase?” Sam said, grabbing a bottle of generic Liquor Control Board of Ontario mystery scotch. “Marriage takes all the fun out of it.” He handed me my drink—a quarter inch of pale yellow liquid with too much ice. Jason asked for a beer, which was wise, because Sam couldn’t be stingy with that.

“We’re engaged because we’re in love,” Jason said, simply. All Sam’s ladies said “Awww,” including Rico.

“Love’ll get you through the first month, tops,” Sam said. “I should know. Been married six times.”

“He’s the only guy I know who owns his own tux,” I said. We all looked at Sam. He was wearing it.

“What are you dressed as, Sam? The robber bridegroom?”

“No, Polly,” Sam said, “just a wicked bachelor.” He made a lunge at Rico, who swooped away, shrieking. I chuckled. Sam would just poo when he found out.

Jason took his beer and audio cables and melted away. I winked at Rico and moved off into the crowd. Listening to Jason talking about Amber had reminded me that I was very single, with no prospects on the horizon.

My last affair, back in the fall, had ended miserably. I had lived in the District of Kuskawa for almost four years, and all I had to show for it in the relationship department was a failed flirtation with one of Kuskawa’s finest, an Ontario Provincial Police officer called Mark Becker. We had been overcome by a roaring chemical attraction, which turned into one admittedly wonderful date, which turned into chaos after I offered him a post-coital joint. We hadn’t spoken much since, other than to exchange polite greetings in town.

One night of passion in the last forty-eight months. I think I had the right to be a little depressed.

“Why the long face?” It was Tobin Boone, the technical director, with whom I’d been working for the past four weeks in the shop downstairs. Nice guy. Very married.

“Oh, you know, Tobin. The kissy-face thing. Singlehood. Jason just got engaged.”

“Oh yeah, I’d heard that. Guy plays close to the chest, eh?” Tobin said. “But you, Polly? You don’t strike me as the marrying type.” He flashed his pearly-whites at me. Tobin was dressed up as a black-face minstrel, white gloves and all. He’s black to begin with, so it was okay.

“I’m not,” I said. “Maybe I should make more of an effort, though. I could take lessons from our fearless leader.” We both glanced over at Juliet, who was flirting madly with Jason. The young stage manager looked annoyed and defensive.

“She should know better than to hit on the kid,” Tobin said. “We’ll be dealing with a sexual harassment suit before you know it.”

“Why is he setting up the rehearsal space now?” I asked.

“He said he wanted to. I swear, I’ve never met a more obsessive SM in my life,” Tobin said. “Never quits.”

Jason was handsome in a petulant, underfed way. He had a flop of dark hair that fell romantically over his brow, and he was always flicking it back impatiently. I had vowed a week earlier to tie him down and hack it off with a pair of shop scissors. Tobin had promised to help.

In the theatre, there’s a long-standing tradition that all stage crew people wear black. The idea is that if you wear black, you can’t be easily seen onstage or in the wings as you go about your job. Most of the stage managers I’ve known have a wardrobe almost entirely made up of black stuff. Jason was no exception, but he took it to extremes. Every time I’d seen him, he was wearing the same trademark black leather vest, with multiple pockets for notebook, keys, pens and tiny flashlight, the tools of the trade. He wore black boots, black socks and black T-shirts. It was likely he wore black underwear as well. The vest clanked and jingled when he walked, and I would bet he wore it to bed. The vest was his authority, and without it, he’d be diminished.

He was the kind of stage manager that we used to call a stage-mangler when I was in the touring biz—the officious kind who gave everybody folders at the first rehearsal, with schedules and contact sheets with everybody’s home phone number on them. He would read the company rules aloud and make sure everybody had a copy. He would call Equity coffee breaks in the middle of an important moment in a rehearsal, then get huffy if the actors said they wanted to continue to the end of a scene. He would be a pain—well, he already was. He had already been in my face downstairs in the shop, criticizing my work, which is why, as I said, we weren’t destined for lifelong friendship.

“That’s going to be too heavy for Amber,” he’d said, just as I put the finishing touches on the serpent puppet.

“There’s a waist-belt inside, Jason,” I’d said. “The weight’s carefully balanced.”

“If you have to rebuild it, don’t come crying to me,” he’d replied. His face told me that if the puppet turned out to be too much for the actress to manage, he would be secretly delighted. This power-tripping was not uncommon in young stage managers, but it was obnoxious nonetheless.

“I’d better go over and interrupt,” Tobin said, “before Juliet hauls him into her office for a private audition.”

As Tobin moved away, he squeezed my elbow. “Go downstairs,” he said. “The party’s better in the shop.”

Steamboat Theatre is housed in an old marina on the shores of Sikwan Bay, next to the falls. On the main level are the offices and lobby, the rehearsal space is upstairs in the attic, and downstairs, where the boats used to be, is the shop.

Steamboat doesn’t have a performance space. There’s no point, because Steamboat’s a touring company. Their performance spaces are wherever there’s an audience; school gymnasiums, libraries, community centres, whatever.

The workshop is a wonderful space, but cold. They never got around to boarding up the open water, so the paint-tables and storage racks surround a square pool where several boats would be moored if the place were still a marina. It’s great in the summer, but awful in winter. They have space-heaters, but there’s still frigid water in the middle of the room, no matter what you do.

In the spring, when the smelt are running, you can dip a net into the pool, scoop up a bunch of flashing silver fish and fry them up right there on the workshop hotplate. In the summer, you can stop what you’re doing, strip off and have a swim. In the winter, your fingers freeze. The only good thing about the workshop in winter is that the cold temperatures make the contact cement dry really, really fast. I had been working in the shop since early April, and in Kuskawa, you never discount the possibility of snow until mid-June. It was May 7, and there was still a little snow on the ground, in the shady places.

It was jeezly cold down there that May evening. You could see your breath. A bunch of people were standing in a circle at the bottom of the stairs, and they all glanced up furtively when I opened the shop door. That could only mean one thing. Something of an illegal nature was being passed around. Goody.

Closest to the stairs was Meredith Forbes, the Belleville-based actress hired to play the Mother and the Cat characters. She had toured The Glass Flute before, twice—a Steamboat Theatre veteran. She was a moody-looking woman in her late twenties with dark smudges under her eyes. She wore crimson lipstick and was aggressively muscular and fit. She probably jogged every morning. On tour, she’d inevitably be the first person up in the mornings, the one to hog the motel-room shower. Rooming with her would be awful. She probably went to bed at nine. She wore a cat-costume which I had seen hanging in the wardrobe room, and she didn’t look very pleased about it. It was too small for her, and made her look like a lion that has eaten too much zebra.

Next to Meredith was Bradley Hoskins, the Toronto actor playing the Woodsman and the Dragon, an older man whose presence in the cast was unusual. Touring kids’ theatre is normally considered “paying one’s dues,” something every young actor has to do. It’s not a job that’s readily accepted by the more mature members of the theatre community. Maybe Hoskins really needed the money. I’d heard he was recently divorced and had a kid. I didn’t know for sure, but the tour would probably be a stretch for him. The job isn’t just about acting. It’s about loading and unloading sets and costumes and performing a show twice a day with a half-hour lunch break. It’s about sharing a room with several other actors and sitting in a cramped van on the road when you’re not performing. It’s not easy, and Bradley was kind of pudgy.

I didn’t envy Jason. It would be his job to drive the van and keep the peace. The cast, it seemed to me, was a bit oddly-matched.

Ruth Glass was down there, too. Ruth is the lead singer for Shepherd’s Pie, a folk band that’s pretty hot right now. Her partner, Rose, was in Seattle with her dying brother, so the band decided to take a six-month break. Ruth, never one to sit around, took on the Steamboat gig to keep her mind off Rose’s absence. She was officially the music director, and we were all pretty excited about it. Her job would be to work with the actors on the musical numbers in the show and to record the show tapes. She’d probably end up doing a lot of voice coaching as well, seeing as Amber Thackeray likely couldn’t project her way out of a wet paper bag.

When I joined the circle, Bradley was just sparking up a joint. I immediately imagined Detective Constable Mark Becker coming down the stairs and arresting all of us. I tensed up. Meredith pointedly didn’t partake, which made me wonder why she was down there. Maybe she was afraid she’d miss something, or perhaps she was secretly in league with Becker. When Meredith passed the doob to me (at least she wasn’t afraid to touch the stuff), I took the sweet smoke into my lungs, held on and wiped Becker from my thoughts. Take that, Officer. We started talking about the play.

“It’s not a bad script,” Bradley said, “but I’m not looking forward to sweating through two shows a day wearing those hoods. How are we going to breathe?”

“Through your mouth, as usual,” Meredith said. “You’ll get used to it. And you’ll sweat off a couple of pounds per show, guaranteed.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bradley said, bristling.

“I mean that the Flute is demanding, physically, Brad,” Meredith said. “That’s all.”

“You don’t think I’m up to it, is that it?”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

These two would be a delight cooped up in a van together, I thought.

“Anyway, who cares about that stuff?” Brad went on. “We won’t be seen, anyway, right?”

“You’ll be in black from head to toe,” I said. “In the Flute, the actors are secondary to the puppets. You’ll get to take your hoods off for the bows at the end.”

“Guaranteed to bug Amber,” Meredith said. “She won’t like not being seen.”

“That’s not fair, Meredith,” Ruth said. “The kid’s enthusiastic as hell, and she doesn’t seem the type to worry about hood-hair.”

“You just wait,” Meredith said, darkly.

Tobin had joined us, and I wondered if anyone upstairs had noticed that the crowd in the lobby was getting thin. Everybody seemed to be in the “smoking room”.

“Thing I’m worried about is the lights,” Tobin said. “I’ve rigged up a new system that’s supposed to be easier to tour—lighter, more compact. But if more than one of the bulbs goes, we’re in trouble, ’cause I could only get two spares from Techtronics and they said they couldn’t get any more from the States until mid-June.”

“I’ve heard that UV lights are bad for you,” Brad said. “Like they’re radioactive or something.”

“Can you hit a high B-flat, Brad?” Ruth said. Shop talk, all of it. It bonded us.

There were footsteps on the stairs and Meredith, who was holding what was left of the joint, flicked it into the pool in the middle of the room. We all straightened up, just in case it was Juliet, who knew that people sometimes toked in the shop, but was known to throw tantrums if she caught them at it. It was dark down there. The lights were off, and we were all suddenly very quiet.

Down the stairs came two figures, Rico, or Ricki, I suppose, and a good-looking young man with short blonde hair and smooth, tanned skin, whose arm was around my friend’s shoulders. This must be Shane Pacey, I thought. The actor had been hired at the absolute last minute to play the lead character, Kevin, after Juliet’s first choice got a movie gig and backed out of his contract.

He was having a hard time with the stairs, and Rico was giggling like a school girl. Pacey was not wearing a costume. He had on a tight pair of jeans and a heartbreakingly lovely white wool sweater, which made his skin glow like a Mediterranean sunset in the dim light. He was as lovely as Amber was, but very male. I felt my mouth go dry, but it could have been the joint. Yay for Rico, I thought.

Neither of the men had seen the circle of dope-smokers. They thought they were alone. The blonde man suddenly stopped trying to stumble down the stairs. He straightened and pulled Rico towards him.

“That’s far enough, babe,” he said in a husky voice. Ruth Glass coughed, delicately, just before Pacey thrust his hand between Rico’s legs.

“Holy fuck!”

It all happened very fast. I was watching, not out of prurience, I swear, but grinning to myself, thinking that Rico had, you know, found someone he could have some fun with—God knows he doesn’t get much fun in Cedar Falls. I saw the lust on Shane Pacey’s face turn to utter disgust and horror. I saw that horror turn ugly in a fraction of a second, before it became something I hope I’ll never see again. He grabbed Rico by the shoulders and with all of his strength, threw him down the stairs towards the open pool of freezing water.

I stepped in the way, as did Tobin and Ruth, all at the same time. It was weird, all slow-motion arms and legs. I don’t know whose arm or leg hit my nose—it doesn’t matter, anyway. We ended up in a tangle at the bottom of the stairs, just inches from the black water. Pacey was screaming filth and scrambling down the stairs to get a second chance at Rico, and Tobin disentangled himself from the bodies to hold on to him. I was hugging Rico, and my face was inches from Rose’s, which was perched oddly on top of Rico’s shoulder.

“You’re bleeding on me,” Rose said to me.

“You fuckin’, fuckin’ faggot. Come on to me like a bitch in heat. Whaddya think, I’m a fuckin’ queer? You fuckin’ make me sick!” Pacey’s words washed over all of us in a stream of abuse. Rico’s eyes fluttered open.

“Polly, take me home, please,” he said in a small, frightened voice.