He straightened, flexed his arms, worked his shoulders, slapped himself on the belly, and turned and smiled warmly at me. “You did con me, you son of a bitch. You know that, don’t you?”
“Two birds with one stone. The Take Five situation is legitimate.”
“I know. I checked with Lysa. Tell you what, you bring her to the lab in Burbank in about two weeks, and I’ll show you a sequence that will knock your ass right off. That lady in there, let me tell you, that lady in there is giving one hell of a performance. She’s hard to handle, but she’s a classic talent. Bergman, with a whiff of Taylor. When they are very very good in bed, it shows on the screen. It shimmers under all the lines they say. You see it in the backs of their eyes.”
“The Hatcher girl and her boyfriend were both killed.”
“Do you realize how much you’re boring me?”
“There could be some very real trouble about that, if anybody knows she starred in one of your dirty tapes, Peter.”
“Screw her and screw this town. We’ll be out of here by lunch. We’ve only got one of the big location rigs left. And what we do, we have to do it right the first time.”
He sat back on the bed.
“What you can do, you can do me a favor by being out there real bright and early. We’re down to five balloons and we’re short on ground crew to handle them. I’ve got that Tyler sequence to shoot, where the balloon comes wobbling down with him stretched out dead in the basket, and all frosty from being so high he froze to death. Mercer invented some kind of crystal stuff he can spray him with. I wanted to have the other balloons settling down too, like the way animals gather around a wounded member of the herd, but you can’t control the damned things that way, so the way we work it tomorrow, we have them take off from a close formation and then later I splice it in to run backward, so it will look like they are coming in, gathering from far off. I wanted it to be a big scene, but with only five balloons left, what can you do? I think I can work in some of the stuff when we had thirty of them taking off, and some bits of that could be run backward too. Will you be out there to help out? Listen, I would really really appreciate it, McGee.”
What was there to say? There was no way to tell him what he was, even had I been entirely certain. I had the feeling that neither my vision of him nor his image of himself was particularly close to reality.
I said yes and went up the stairs to my overpriced room. Choice was still open. I could get up in a couple of hours and take off for Des Moines. Or I could go out there in the morning and help out and see what was happening.
I had as much as I was ever going to get out of Peter Kesner. I was personally convinced that Dez had taken Curley along and taken care of that little matter for Kesner, as a favor. Bravado. Help out your friends. It would probably be enough to satisfy Ron Esterland. He had performed the filial duty. Time to head home.
Yet on the very edge of sleep I realized that I was going out there in the morning on the slender chance that I could get some sort of confirmation out of Desmin Grizzel. It was a narrow chance and a big risk to try to trick him into some sort of partial confirmation. He might well want to throw me to the sea gulls, off some inconceivable cliff in the flatness of Iowa.
And also, of course, there was the slender chance I might get to ride in the gondola again, and that would give me a chance to find out if the second ride could possibly be as elegant and hypnotic as the first, moving in that sweet silence across the scents, the folds, the textures of the soft green April country.
Seventeen
WITH THE oncoming sunrise a broad gold band along the eastern horizon, the area was coming awake. There was a smell of coffee, truck engines starting, balloonists breaking out the bags, baskets, tanks, spreading the big colorful envelopes downwind, ready for inflation. I was pressed into service on number five as a member of the ground crew, taking the place of a member of that team who had broken his hand landing the previous day. He had a cast and a sling, and he trotted along a half step behind me, telling me over and over everything I was supposed to do. He was very fussy, and he had a high nervous voice.
“The envelope bag has to be stowed on board, stowed in the basket. Fold it up. No, not like that. Open it up again. Bring in the sides and fold them flat onto the bottom. Start on that side, and fold the whole thing over. Now fold it again. See. Now put it in the basket. Not underfoot. Shove it behind that brace. Right there. Now we have to check the connecting pins and rings. And then the sparker. And then the safety line. If you always check everything twice or three times, Mr. McGee, you will not have those accidents which arise out of carelessness.”
The sun appeared and the balloon colors turned vivid as the warmth struck us. Kesner, in feverish energy, was moving camera positions back and forth with orders over his portable horn. Linda and Tyler, fresh from makeup, were sitting on folding chairs, waiting.
“Blow them up! Blow them up, you people!” Kesner brayed.
“He means inflate,” said my interpreter. “Put those gloves back on. And fasten the buckle on your helmet, please.”
They positioned me out beyond the crown of the balloon, holding a line that was fastened to it, with instructions to counter any movement during inflation if it should show a tendency to roll in any side wind. Rolling would entangle the cables at the mouth and damage the burners.
By the time the sun was up above the horizon, all five balloons were upright, fully inflated, swaying in the morning breeze, estimated at five knots, coming out of the northwest. Number five was vertically striped in broad alternating segments of crimson and light blue.
I was put to work picking up the tools and equipment used during inflation, along with the inflator, and stowing them in the box in the big rugged pickup used by this team. It became clear to me that I was not going to get another ride. They were all waiting for the take-off signal. The tether rope had been untied from the pickup truck bumper. Linda came over and vaulted briskly into the basket. The pilot was a lean man with a deeply grooved face, an outdoor squint. He looked like a cowboy in a cigarette ad. One of the team was on one side of the basket, holding the rim, and I was on the other. Every time the pilot gave the blast handle a twitch, I could feel the sense of life and lift in the basket long seconds later.
The balloons were in a pentagon formation, about a hundred and fifty feet apart. Kesner decided he did not like that. He had one walked to the middle of the area and ordered enough deflation so it would look tired and flabby. He had the other four walked in closer, so that the flabby one was in the middle of the hollow square.
The breeze was freshening slightly, and at that point a caravan of perhaps twenty pickups and vans came roaring down the road. The lead pickup turned directly into the big field, smashing aside the barricade of two-by-fours. They came closer, spread out, came to spinning, skidding stops, and fifty or so young men came piling out. They wore jeans and T-shirts, and they carried tire irons, ball bats, and short lengths of two-by-four. They came toward us in a dead, silent run; and there was no mistaking the dedication and the intent. There was going to be no measured appraisal of guilt or innocence. We were all-balloonists and grips, cameramen and drivers, script girls and lighting experts-going to take a physical beating that would maim and might even kill. This was a mob. They had whipped themselves up. The fact that they looked young, clean-cut, and middle-American did not alter their deadliness.
In the silence of their rush toward us, I heard the prolonged ripping, roaring sound of the burners on one of the balloons. Everyone seemed to realize at the same moment that this was the best chance of escape.
“Peter!” Linda screamed. “Peter! Here!” He came on a wild scrambling run, and as she began the long continuous blast of heat into the bag, he dived over the wicker rim, hitting the pilot with his shoulder. The pilot bent forward over the rim, and Peter snatched his ankles and fumbled him out. I swarmed over the rim as it began to lift. The other ground crew member let go. It moved with a painful slowness. Two beefy blond young men came running after us, too late. We lifted just out of reach. Something pinged off the round side of one of the propane tanks and went screeching off in ricochet.