Scarlet Thunder (2 page)

Even if they didn't understand how this would all come together, I did. To television viewers, it would look like Hunter Gunn had leaped on the elephant's shoulders as it ran through a crowd of people who were getting stomped. Then it would look like Hunter Gunn was holding the strap around the elephant's head and battling it to a standstill.

In real life, though, it would work a lot differently. Uncle Mike would take a bunch of shots of the actor on the elephant. Hunter Gunn's face would show the emotions of a man riding a wild elephant to a standstill. After that, away from all the people, a stunt man dressed like Hunter Gunn would get on the elephant and try to hang on as it galloped a short distance. These shots would get cut into the commercial, among other shots of people screaming and running away. Edited and mixed together, it would look very real.

Here, in the parking lot, it would look very boring.

And it should have been boring.

Of course, as the elephant's trainer said later, who could have guessed what was in the cooler?

From the beginning of this three-day shoot, Hunter Gunn had insisted on having a cooler nearby, filled with freshly blended vegetable juices. He was terribly worried about the sun damaging his skin. Whenever he had to stand around outside, he dabbed some juice on his face, then covered it with a steamed towel.

I thought it was dumb. But I was just a gopher. And if he thought mashing vegetables on his skin would keep him from looking older, I was in no position to disagree.

Every twenty minutes or so, as we waited, it was my job to bring him fresh steamed towels. The towels were simple to get ready. I just soaked them in water and stuck them in a microwave. Then I brought them out on a platter, which made me feel like a silly waiter.

Hunter Gunn had barked out the now-familiar order for steamed towels as he stood beside Junior Louis. Both Gunn and the elephant were waiting for some final camera and lighting adjustments.

I ran for the towels, heated them and ran back.

Hunter Gunn was still standing beside Junior Louis. Every few minutes, the elephant tried to rest his trunk on the actor's shoulder. Hunter Gunn shooed the trunk away.

“Find me two stools,” Gunn said to me.

Then he glared at the trainer and demanded, “Get this stupid beast to leave me alone.”

I didn't hear the trainer's answer because I was already jumping at Hunter's command.

I looked around at the clutter. Cables lay on the ground in all directions. People stood and sat anywhere they could perch. Parked vehicles lined the edges of our shoot.

I spotted two stools, grabbed them and ran back to Hunter Gunn.

“Finally,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. “Now put my cooler on one and my platter of towels on the other. If you barbarians are going to insist I wait out here instead of in the quiet of my trailer, the least you can do is make me comfortable. I will not squat on the ground to apply my natural sunscreen.”

I wanted to tell him that sunscreen in a bottle was way cheaper and way more convenient. But I wasn't some wacky health guru charging him thousands of dollars.

I put the cooler on one stool and the platter on the other.

I stepped back.

Hunter Gunn opened the cooler's lid.

And mice swarmed out of the cooler and up his arms.

Mice. Lots of tiny mice, frantic to find someplace safe to hide.

Mice scampered up Hunter's arms before he even knew what was happening.

Junior Louis, though, with his trunk resting close to Hunter's shoulder, knew exactly what was happening.

Junior Louis bellowed a high-pitched scream of terror that sent people running in all directions.

A mouse jumped onto Hunter Gunn's head.

Junior Louis swatted at the mouse with his trunk.

The actor screamed and fell to his knees.

The elephant rose onto his back feet.

The trainer ran to grab the chain around Junior Louis's neck.

People screamed.

Mice ran every which way.

Junior Louis bellowed. He landed on his front feet and flailed his trunk at the darting mice.

With the trainer hanging on to his chain, Junior Louis took off. He half ran, plowing into a camera, dragging his trainer.

Hunter lay on the ground, crying.

Junior Louis stopped when he reached the fence at the edge of the parking lot.

And just like that, it was over.

There was no sign of any mice.

The shoot had been ruined.

Hunter Gunn lay curled up in a ball, whimpering.

I took a double take, amazed. He was bald. Completely bald.

I saw something near him on the pavement that looked like a dead cat. A blond dead cat. I went over and picked it up. A wig.

I was, after all, the set gopher.

I walked over to the cowering, sniffling actor.

“Here you are, sir,” I said matter-of-factly, handing him his wig. This moment was worth whatever delay it would cost Uncle Mike. I tried to hide my smile as I politely asked, “Should I bring you a box of tissue?”

“Not Long Pond!” Uncle Mike screamed into his cell phone. “Loudon! Loudon, in New Hampshire. Not Long Pond, in Pennsylvania!”

He wasn't screaming in anger. Instead, he was yelling to be heard above the roar of engines. Uncle Mike and I stood in the parking lot outside the racetrack in New Hampshire. Two weeks had passed since Junior Louis exposed Hunter Gunn's bald head to the world. Now it was the day before
the qualifying runs here, and racers on the track were in the middle of trials.

A hot wind swept over us, bringing grit off the parking lot like ashes from a fire. The sky was totally blue, with no hint of clouds to bring relief from the heat. The pavement seemed to burn through the soles of my shoes. It was not a great place to stand and listen while Uncle Mike tried to work through the confusion with his secretary on the phone.

“No, definitely not,” Uncle Mike yelled. “Why would I have asked you to ship the stuff to Long Pond when I knew I was coming to Loudon? Long Pond is later in the schedule.”

He listened quietly, frowning with frustration.

“Look,” Uncle Mike said. “I know they sound similar. Maybe you misheard me when I asked you to fill out the shipping forms. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I need that equipment yesterday. Find the truck, stop it and get the stuff on an airplane.”

A long pause. I guessed his secretary was calling the shipping company on another line.

“Tomorrow?” he yelled. “Tomorrow? You've got to get the stuff here today! I don't care what it costs us. If it's not here today, we're in trouble.”

He snapped the cell phone shut.

“Not good, Trent,” he said to me. He pointed at the racetrack behind us. “Somehow our gear is headed toward the wrong city. I mean, if it was already there, it wouldn't be so bad. We could have it reshipped. The stuff could be here by this afternoon, and we'd only lose half a day.”

At ten thousand dollars a day for crew and expenses, half a day was bad enough.

“Where is it?”I asked.

“Somewhere between California and Pennsylvania,” he said. “On a truck. Somehow it got shipped by ground instead of overnight by air. And to the wrong place. I don't get it. My secretary doesn't usually make mistakes like this.”

He shook his head. “As if I need this to worry about. On top of everything else.”

Everything else included the mice in the cooler. No one could figure out how they'd gotten there. That little episode had delayed the commercial three days. And Hunter Gunn had demanded extra salary to continue. That, with the cost of delays, had come out of Uncle Mike's budget. He'd told me that his production company had actually lost money on the deal. The commercial was supposed to have made him fifty thousand dollars.

“If we only miss a day,” I said, “it can't be that bad. At least not compared to—”

“Don't remind me about Junior Louis,” he said. “And yes, it is bad. The mess with Junior Louis made us miss last week's race. So every day we miss now is crucial. Extremely crucial. I absolutely have to deliver this documentary on time.

“I haven't told any of the crew about the urgency to make this deadline. I didn't think it was something to worry about,” he continued. “I mean, when I signed the deal, I figured there was no way to miss.”

“Miss?”

“You know my company is simply a production company. I'm doing this under contract to Lone Coyote Studios, who in turn will make money by selling the documentary to the sports network.”

I knew all that. My big ambition was to be a director. I wanted that more than anything else in the world. I wanted it so bad that I thought about nothing else. So whatever I read or listened to or watched was all related to the film industry.

Uncle Mike continued. “My contract with Lone Coyote Studios promises delivery of the finished one-hour documentary by August fifteenth. Because the airtime is worth a lot of advertising dollars to the racing team's sponsor, if we deliver on time my company will get a huge bonus: one million dollars.”

“The bonus is great,” I said. “But the deadline...”

I'd been hanging out with Uncle Mike's small film company for five summers. Long enough to know something about the business. After we finished filming, we would
need several weeks in post-production to get the piece ready. In other words, we were cutting it close already.

“Exactly,” he said. “It's already July, and we're running out of time. And there's a reverse bonus built into the contract. My company gets fined two hundred thousand dollars for every day the project's late.”

I whistled as I did my math. “On time is worth a million. Five days late costs a million.”

“Scary,” he agreed. “I agreed to the terms, because I need the bonus to get the next project I have in mind going. It's one that could make my career as a director. I just never dreamed we would be late, so I figured it would be worth the risk. But with all the problems we've been having...”

Yeah, I thought. This was the first summer I had seen such big things go wrong. The mice in the cooler had caused delays and huge unexpected costs. And now, with the gear lost somewhere on a highway between us and California, this project wasn't looking good.

My face must have shown my worry.

“There is one piece of good news,” Uncle Mike said, trying to cheer me up. “At least for you.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Yup. You. I want you on a camera this shoot.”

“What?!?” I nearly yelled in my excitement.

“Think of it as a promotion for all the summers you've spent as my gopher—and as thanks for the hours of research you've done to help me understand racing. I want you to use a handheld, shooting whatever you think might look good. I'm not making any promises about how much of your footage we'll use, but consider yourself your own director. You get to choose what to shoot and what angles to shoot from. Play it like a music video. I'll take care of the main cameras, but I want you to look for the little touches that can add depth to the documentary.”

“Cool,” I said. “Really cool.”

At that moment, I stupidly believed this was going to be my best summer yet.

You can watch high-speed stock-car racing all you want on television, but you'll never really know what it's like unless you've been there. Don't get me wrong, I find it exciting enough to watch on television. But it doesn't come close to the electricity of being there in person.

It was early on qualifying day, so the stands were only three-quarters full. Still, that was about a hundred thousand people. Yeah. A hundred thousand. Which is just
a big number until you look up from the pits. Then you see a wall of brightly colored shirts about a half mile long and dozens and dozens of rows high. The roar of the crowd, a high-powered hum of energy, somehow rises above the pounding thunder of the full-throttled cars that sometimes reach two hundred miles an hour.

You never really understand what two hundred miles an hour is either, not from television. The camera follows the car, and you see the car get bigger and smaller as it comes and goes. But when you're standing there beside the track, you have to snap your head from side to side to follow a car as it flashes by. Two hundred miles an hour is a blur of screaming color. At that speed, the car goes a mile in under twenty seconds. Some airplanes don't go that fast.

But being at the track is about more than what you see. Or hear. There's also the vibration from those huge howling engines...the rumbling of the ground... the smell of high-octane gasoline...and the excitement of the crew in the pit area,
something edgy that spills over and gives you the same fear and thrill.

I knew, because that's where I stood. Right in the middle of the pit crew.

Their attention was on a bright red Chevy covered with logos and decals. It had come off the track after a practice run. It stopped in front of us. And the driver got out of the car.

With so many people gathered near the car, no one really seemed to notice Uncle Mike or me. So we just watched.

The pit crew wore red coveralls with a big, white, oval patch on the back. Inside the white oval I recognized the logo of a famous chewing gum. I knew from the research that I had done for Uncle Mike that the gum company was the major sponsor of the Scarlet Thunder racing team.

A tall guy with a lean face and a crew cut seemed to be in charge. I knew his name because of the photographs I'd seen of the team. He was the crew chief: George Lot.

He spoke to the driver.

“How's the car feel, Sandy?”

“It's too light through the turns,” the driver said through the open visor of the crash helmet.

If I hadn't known ahead of time why we were here to film, I would have been surprised by the driver's high soft voice. And I would have been even more surprised at the long blond hair that tumbled free when the driver removed the crash helmet.