Palisades Park (49 page)

“This could put us on the
map,
Toni.” The excitement in his face was apparent even in the dim light of the sleeping carnival. “We’ll be turning away customers. We’ll never have to worry about being forty-milers again!”

Toni had to admit, if it was a success, it could draw the kind of tip she needed to stay afloat. “Have you told Mr. Moser about this?”

“No, I wanted to run it past you first. If Moser nixes it, well, that’s it.”

Toni thought long and hard a moment. “If Moser gives it his okay,” she said, “we’ll try the stunt with the dummy. But if the dummy doesn’t clear the top of the tower, or hits a guy wire, that’s as far as it goes—okay?”

His face broke into a smile. “Baby, you’re the greatest! I love you.”

And as she was reeling from those words, he kissed her, and more.

*   *   *

The next morning, Toni listened as Cliff sold his idea to Scobey Moser, showing him the diagrams and calculations. Moser mulled it over, then allowed, “Well, it
might
work…” He echoed Toni’s concerns, but gave the okay to try the dummy test. “But if it does any damage to this lady’s equipment, Bowles,” he warned, “it’s coming out of your pocket, not hers.”

Cliff agreed, drove his truck-mounted cannon over to Toni’s setup, and positioned it a hundred feet from the diving tower. He introduced her to his dummy, Mort—after Edgar Bergen’s Mortimer Snerd—which he then stuffed into the barrel of the cannon. He set the cannon at a forty-eight-degree angle, the muzzle aimed well above the diving tower. Then he spun the controls that drew the piston down into the barrel of the cannon, releasing a blast of compressed air that sent Mort rocketing out.

The dummy flew up, up … and over the top of the diving tower, clearing it by at least ten feet. Mort then arced earthward like a pop fly, landing with a dusty thud in a sandlot behind the carnival.

Toni and Arlan had been standing beside the tower and one of the guy wires as Mort was shot out. Neither the tower nor the guy wire was jostled significantly by the wind of Mort’s passing on his way over the top. Toni and Arlan looked at each other in relief. “So far,” she said, “so good.”

The next morning the roustabouts began tearing down the show and soon the caravan of trucks was on the road, making the jump to Omaha—or more accurately, a mile or two outside Omaha.

By late afternoon Cliff and Toni had carefully supervised the placing of Cliff’s cannon and safety net, each one hundred feet on either side of Toni’s tank and tower. As soon as everything was set up, Cliff again fired Mort out of the cannon, over the tower, and into the safety net.

“My turn,” Cliff said. “Go get Scobey. It either works or it doesn’t.”

Cliff kissed her, put on his crash helmet and flight suit, and dusted himself with talcum powder to reduce friction inside the cannon.

Toni came back with Scobey just as the waning sun was causing the sky over the plains to blush. Moser looked at it and said, “God, they do have beautiful sunsets out here.” He turned to Cliff. “Okay, Jetboy, show me.”

“Jet
man,”
Cliff muttered, climbing into the cannon’s muzzle. His assistant, Phil, spun the controls and drew down the piston, along with Cliff.

From inside the cannon Cliff called, “Fire!”

Cliff went up like a shooting star in reverse. Toni held her breath as he rocketed up and then over the tower, clearing it by ten feet, then began a half-somersault that landed him on his back in the safety net.

He bounced around the net a few times, then jumped jauntily out and onto the ground. Toni ran to him and threw her arms around his neck.

“Thank God! I thought for sure you were going to smash your stupid, silly, beautiful face into my diving platform.” She kissed him, hard. “And I did
not
want to have to clean that up.” He laughed.

Arlan came over and told her, “Tower was solid. Maybe it jiggles a little up top, but hard to say from down here.”

Scobey said to Toni, “What about it, honey? You’re the one who’s gonna be standing up there. You feel safe doing it?”

“I’ll go up first thing tomorrow,” she said, “and get a feel for how much the tower sways as he goes over. Too much sway and I won’t do it.”

The next morning was cloudy and breezy—two knots, not enough to affect her dive, but Toni told Cliff, “If I look down at you and anything feels wrong—your angle, your altitude—I’ll jump first and ask questions later. Got that?”

He nodded. As she started climbing the tower she felt as if there were a swarm of butterflies in her stomach, all beating a mamba with their wings. At the top she looked up at the six inches of ladder above her head, which, she reminded herself, Cliff had cleared twice yesterday. She looked down and saw Moser, Cliff and Phil at the cannon, Arlan standing by just in case anything went wrong—though Toni wasn’t sure what he could do if it did.

She gave Cliff a thumbs-up.

Moments later, he came shooting up like a bullet out of a gun barrel, and in a half-breath’s time he was arcing above her head.

She felt a light breeze on her face as he passed, but the tower stood steady and the platform below her feet didn’t sway.

Cliff landed safely in the net and in moments was jumping out of it onto the ground. He called up to Toni, “How’d it feel?”

She gave him a thumbs-up and called back, “Let’s try it again!”

They repeated it half a dozen times, each time Cliff clearing the tower by between eight and ten feet. After the last one, Toni climbed down, Cliff ran up, gave her a long kiss and said, “We’re going to be famous! And famously in love!”

By afternoon, Toni was relieved that the weather had improved—bright and clear, not a cloud in the sky, with no wind. Perfect diving conditions. Meanwhile, Cliff’s talker was building a tip with his bally:

“For the first time anywhere, two daredevil acts for the price of one! Watch as Jetman, the Human Missile, is shot out of a cannon and over the head of that high-diving sensation, the Terrific Toni! Will he survive? Will she? Don’t miss this death-defying duo, today at one o’clock!”

To Toni’s delight, by one o’clock there was a capacity crowd gathering in the bleachers, bigger than either she or Cliff had ever drawn on their own. She gave him a kiss for good luck as he slipped on his crash helmet and goggles.

Toni climbed the ladder to her customary accompaniment of “Sabre Dance,” the music stopping when she reached the top. Down below, Cliff’s drum roll began its wind-up as he climbed into the muzzle of the cannon.

This time when it went off, there was also a small gunpowder explosion to give the illusion that this was a real cannon and not just a souped-up peashooter. Cliff came rocketing out and up toward Toni.

His angle seemed fine at first—it wasn’t until he was already shooting up past her that she realized he was coming in lower than he had this morning. He arced over the tower, cutting it closer than he should have.

So close that his foot clipped the top of the tower as he passed over.

It didn’t affect his trajectory, but his weight and velocity was like a fishing line that snagged and pulled the tower backward. Toni grabbed onto the ladder for support, trying not to panic.

Then she felt a
pop
beneath her feet and looked down.

To her horror, she saw that one of the axle staves securing the guy wires to the ground had come loose.

The tower shuddered and began to topple backward.

People in the audience gasped and screamed.

In the few seconds she had left, Toni considered her options: There was no possibility of diving into the tank. She could hold on and hope that the tower fell into the net and didn’t crush her in the process, or …

She turned around on the platform, keeping hold on the tower even as it lurched backward at a terrifying new angle.

Cliff had landed safely in the net. There was only one thing she could think to do, one way to keep from getting killed.

She squatted down, trying to gather as much spring in her legs as she could, then launched herself off the platform—toward the safety net.

She didn’t have anywhere near the velocity as Cliff, but the falling motion of the tower gave her some momentum and her legs added to it.

She straightened her body into a swan dive across hard, unforgiving ground. The edge of the safety net loomed ahead—the center of it exactly a hundred feet from her tower—and on a wing and a prayer she began a half-somersault, tumbling over so her back was level with the ground …

And she fell into the net. Nowhere near the center, dangerously close to the edge—but she was
in
it. She bounced three feet up on impact, and for a moment she was afraid she would fall against the steel frame and split open her skull … but she managed to twist her body and fall sideways instead.

One more light bounce, and she was safe. For the moment.

Cliff clambered across the net to her side. “Jesus! Are you
okay
?”

“Yeah,” she said, breathless, “but—the tower—it’s gonna—”

“Don’t worry about the tower,” Cliff said.

Toni looked back and saw to her astonishment that the tower was, impossibly, frozen in mid-fall—tilted at something like an eighty-five degree angle, looking like the leaning tower of Pisa. How the
hell
?

When she looked past it, into the distance, she saw Arlan—holding on to the guy wire that had popped out of the ground, the former strongman literally holding up the ninety-foot aluminum tower with his bare hands.

“Holy shit!” Toni shouted. “Arlan!”

As she and Cliff jumped out of the net, a dozen more carny hands and roustabouts joined Arlan in his tug-of-war with the tower, grabbing hold of the cable and, with their combined strength, slowly pulling the tower erect.

Toni and Cliff arrived just as Arlan had grabbed a hammer and began pounding the stave back into fresh ground.

“Arlan, that was incredible!” Toni cried. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure.” He finished pounding the stave into the earth, tossed the hammer aside—and Toni could now see his abraded, bleeding hands.

“My God, you need an ambulance!”

“Aw no, just some little cuts,” Arlan said with a shrug.

“You saved us!” Toni hugged him as they were surrounded by a growing crowd of onlookers and show folk, including Cliff’s assistant, Phil.

“You save yourself,” Arlan said. “Nice dive.”

Toni turned to Cliff. “How the hell did this happen?”

“I—I don’t know,” he said.

“I told you the barometric pressure was too high,” Phil blurted.

Cliff snapped, “Shut up!”

“What do you mean, barometric pressure?” Toni asked.

“There’s a high-pressure system over the plains today,” Phil explained, uncowed by Cliff, “pushing down, creating air resistance. I
told
him.”

“You’re fired!” Cliff yelled at his assistant. Then, to Toni: “I thought it was safe! I’d done it before, under similar pressure.”

“You knew about this?” Toni said, stunned. “And you didn’t even
tell
me?”

“Toni, you saw the crowd, it was
huge,”
he said. “How could we turn them away? It’s what we both needed! And I really thought I’d clear the tower by at least five feet. Hell,
most
of me did clear it!”

He grinned at that, but he was the only one smiling, especially after Scobey Moser ran up and boomed, “Are you two all right? And what in fucking
hell
went wrong?”

Cliff’s ex-assistant was happy to tell him.

Toni’s eyes filled with tears as she faced Cliff. “You son of a bitch,” she said softly.

“Toni, I
love
you—I swear, I’d
never
intentionally put you in any danger—”

“What the hell do you call
this?
” she shouted.

“You wanted this too!”

“Yeah, but I want to stay alive more!”

She had trusted him with her life, all because she thought she loved him. What kind of reckless fool had
she
been?

“Get that goddamn cannon away from my tower,” she snapped. “Arlan, c’mon, I’ll drive you to the nearest hospital.”

“I’ll go that one better,” Moser said. He told Cliff, “Get that goddamn cannon off my
lot
. Your contract’s been terminated.”

Cliff’s eyes pleaded with her. “Toni, honey,” he said desperately, “tell him, tell him how
careful
I was—don’t go, please—”

But Toni just kept on walking. “You sure of this, missy?” Arlan asked.

“Damn sure,” she told him.

But there were tears streaming down her face as she said it.

*   *   *

Scobey canceled that evening’s dive so Toni had time to pull herself together, but after she had rented another motel room she came back to the lot and to her tank and tower, encircled by darkness amid the flash and neon of the midway—the red spinning lights of the Chair-o-Plane as it tipped and whirled, the blazing gold spokes of the Ferris wheel turning like a wheel of chance. That was what she’d done today: she’d spun the wheel, desperate for a jackpot, and only by chance had it not cost her her life.

There were no floodlights on the tower, but there was enough light spill from the rest of the carnival for Toni to see the rungs of the ladder as she slowly climbed up to the top. Moser had had roustabouts working all afternoon on securing the axle staves that anchored the guy wires, and when Toni stepped onto the platform she felt a comforting and familiar solidity.

She looked down at the darkened tank, a few wriggling neon reflections rippling across the water’s surface. She thought about something Peejay Ringens once told her at Palisades, about how he overcame his fear of doing the bicycle jump by standing each day on his tower and “taking an imaginary ride down” until he had conquered his fear and did it for real.

Toni looked down, imagined herself springing off the platform, tucking her body and somersaulting—but instead of coming out of the tuck, she pictured herself doing another revolution, just as calmly as she had the first one—no disorientation or panic—and after the second spin she straightened her imaginary legs and plunged safely into the water.