Free Fall in Crimson (19 page)

"Jesus Christ! It's clearing and I want to do number eighty-one. Jesus Christ, is he in that one?"

"No. I checked it out with Kitty. No scene, no lines, nothing. That's why I didn't call in."

"How did the special project go after I left last night?"

"Mercer thinks it's pretty much okay. He just doesn't like the Mickey Mouse equipment and no chance to make cuts."

"Where's the girl?"

"Linda's looking after her."

"Good thinking. McGee, if you're through, I'll go introduce you to Josie. Dez, what you do is
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get people going on makeup and have Kitty get the pages distributed for number eighty-one, and get those balloon crews ready to go out there to the takeoff area soon as the sun comes out."

I followed Kesner through the mud to Josie's big dressing-room trailer, stepping with care. She let us in, and he kissed her on the cheek and said, "We'll be able to roll this afternoon. Here's what we'll be doing, if we stay lucky."

When he introduced me, she gave a vacant nod and began skimming through the script pages. I found it hard to believe she was as old as she had to be. A small woman, dainty, dark, fragile, with a lot of energy and vitality in her expression, in the way she moved.

She moved her lips as she turned the pages. Suddenly she threw her head back, dashing the dark hair away from her forehead. She threw the pages at Kesner's face.

"I told you! I will not do that. I will not!"

"Not do what?"

"I will not go up in that goddam wicker basket!"

"And I told you fifty times, damn it, that you will go up to eight feet off the ground. The damn balloon will be anchored! I want you up there with Tyler for your scene, the big one. The lines that are going to break hearts." He picked up the pages. "Look. Right here. Where it's marked.

That's where we take you out of the basket and put Linda in. We back off for a low angle and get Linda when she jumps out of the basket into the net. Then it goes on-up and we pick up the fall after they throw out the dummy, and all the rest is process. Eight feet in the air, for God's sake."

"I don't like the height. It could get away somehow. It would kill me. It would stop my heart.

No."

"I'm telling you, there will be three ropes this big around tied to that basket and tied to three trucks on the ground."

"The propane will blow up."

"It is safe! Absolutely safe! I know what I am doing."

She switched emotions instantaneously, from indignation and fury to cool sardonic query.

Posture, expression, voice quality-all changed.

"Do you now, darling? Do you really know what you are doing? Do you really understand the extra risks you're running?"

"What would you rather have me do, mouse? Wind it all down or try to keep it going?" It seemed to me that he gave her some look of warning, some sign to be careful.

After a moment of hesitation, she said, "it makes me nervous."

"You don't have to know anything about it. Or even think about it. Okay? Maybe you don't even have to think about being in the basket way up there in the air, eight feet. Maybe Linda would be better all the way through. Go back and do your scenes over with her. Her skin tones are better by daylight."

"You son of a bitch! She's a stuntwoman. She's no actress."

"Listen! You were run out of the industry because nobody could trust you not to fuck up and spoil scenes and cost big money. For God's sake, it's your money you're wasting!"

"So I'll waste it if I want to!"

"I'll use Linda for the whole thing. I need a picture in the can more than I need your famous face, lady."

She hesitated. "Three real strong ropes?"

"Big ropes. This big around."

"I better start to get ready."

I followed him back out into the mud and along the row of vehicles to a yellow four-wheel-drive Subaru parked next to a big cargo trailer and a small house trailer. A woman sat in the doorway of the house trailer, mending the toe of a red wool, sock. She wore bib overalls over a beige turtleneck. She looked lean and husky, with big shoulders and a plain, intelligent face, red-brown hair combed back and tied.

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"Hey Joya," Kesner said. "This here is Travis McGee, who is a consultant, and he'll get us some prime-time exposure for free, if we're lucky. Joya is the boss lady of the balloons we got left."

She had a muscular handshake, a direct, crinkled smile, a pleasantly rusty voice.

Kesner said, "I'd like to get them off the ground in maybe two hours. The weather looks okay."

"The forecast looks good," she said.

He drew in the dirt with a stick. "The wind is going to keep coming out of the southwest. Did I say wind? The breeze. Five knots and fairly steady, they tell me: So right here we do a tethered scene with Josie in the number-one balloon. Then we get her out, then Linda jumps into the net, then you balloon people take it up, and I want about five hundred feet on it when the dummy gets tossed out. We'll cut from Linda jumping to the free fall at five hundred feet. Now when we take the low angle on the dummy coming out, I want to see balloons up there, not placed so they'll get in the way of the cameras. I want enough of them in the scene so in the editing, we can go back to where we had them all going nice that day, remember?"

"Sure."

"So the closer together and the closer to the number-one balloon, the better. So what you do is establish the placement and the order of takeoff, and when you get the gear spread out, I'll set up the camera stations. Okay?"

"Fine."

"I want to put Simmy with a camera in the number-three balloon, so that better be the one to come off last, so he can get wide-angle stuff of the other balloons and the fall. I want him back in the basket and low, so the other cameras don't pick him up."

"Upwind, then, about two hundred feet from number one, with a simultaneous takeoff, and Red has such a nice touch on that burner, he can hold it anywhere you say in relation to number one."

"I'd say a little higher, but not so high the envelope gets in the way of his camera angle. With the set of the wind, he should get the kind of landscape we want to show below number one. Joya, please, honey, it has to go right the first time."

"Do everything I can."

"Sorry to hear about Walter."

"He'll be okay. We thought it was some sort of flu, and then he began to have trouble breathing.

They've got him on oxygen and full of antibiotics."

"Leaves you shorthanded."

"We were already shorthanded. There's just me, Ed, and Dave."

"So here is your new man. Travis McGee. Consultants are supposed to be able to do anything.

Give him the speedy balloonist course. Okay with you, McGee?"

"Fine with me."

There was something in her quick glance which I could not identify. It seemed like some kind of recognition. It gave me the strange feeling that she knew I was an impostor, here for some private purpose. It made me wonder if I had seen the woman before, known her in some other context. But I am good about faces, and I knew she was a stranger. I knew I had not misinterpreted some kind of flirtatious awareness. It gave me a feeling of strangeness, wariness, distrust. Proceed with caution. She either knew something about me she had no right to know, or she was making some kind of very poor guess about me. In the glance, in her body language, in her voice, there was the sense of a secret shared, a private conspiracy.

Fourteen

THE MIST was gone, the sky brightening, and the encampment came alive, with people trotting back and forth from chore to chore, engines grinding as they moved vehicles into position.

Joya told me where to wait for her, and after she had organized the positions and told people
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the timing she came back to me.

"McGee, I hope you are a quick listener, because I don't have much time. Stop me any time you have a question, any time anything is unclear, okay? We like to fly in the early morning before the thermals begin to kick up, but this should be a similar situation. The air is cool enough to give a nice lift. We've got a nice launch site here. The direction of the breeze will hold, and the first thing in the way is that line of trees at least a half mile off."

A truck pulled up to us, and two men hopped out and started to wrestle the wicker basket out of the back. Joya introduced them. I helped them with the basket. They lifted a big canvas sack out of the basket, set it on the ground, and began pulling the seventy feet of canopy out of it. It was very brightly patterned in wide vertical yellow and green stripes.

"It's ripstop nylon," Joya said. "We stow it into the bag in accordion folds, inspect it when we fold it in, inspect again when we spread it out. We check the deflation port and the maneuvering vent."

"Whoa."

"The maneuvering vent is a slit on the side, up beyond the equator, ten or twelve feet long. You pull a cord and let hot air out to descend. When you are just about on the ground, you pull the red line for the deflation port, and that opens the top of the balloon and collapses it. It has a Velcro seal. They are checking the numbered gores and the vertical and horizontal load tapes.

As owners, we're authorized to fix little melt holes with patches. And the places where damn fools walk on the canopy. Bigger damage has to have FAA-authorized repair."

When they had the big bright envelope spread out, downwind, Joya and the two men brought the propane tanks from the truck and slipped them into the stowage cylinders in the corners of the basket. They bolted together the support frame for the burners, hooked up the fuel lines from the tengallon tanks to the burners, then tilted the basket onto its side with the frame and burners toward the spread-out envelope.

At the other locations Joya had selected, the teams were doing the same things, getting set for a coordinated launch. They seemed to be trim and attractive people in their late twenties and early thirties. There was an earnestness about them, a cooperative efficiency, that reminded me of the sailing crowd, of preparations for a regatta. About half of them were women.

As the men were hooking the load cables to the tie blocks, Joya showed me the small instrument panel and explained it to me: variometer for rate of ascent and descent, pyrometer for temperature up in the crown of the balloon, compass-which she said was not very meaningful because there was no way to steer once you were aloft. There were gauges on the top of each propane tank. She showed me the sparker used to ignite the propane and to reignite it quickly should the flame go out. There was a small hand-held CS radio strapped to the side of the basket, which she said they used for contact with the chase vehicle.

She showed me the red line for deflation and the line to the maneuvering vent. She ran through a checklist with her ground crew and then turned to me, shrugged, and said, "Now we wait until it's time to inflate. Nothing else we can do at the moment, Mr. McGee."

When I asked her how that was arranged, she said we could walk over and watch them at the number-one balloon. They brought out a poweroperated fan, and two crew members held the mouth of the balloon wide open as the fan blew air into it. One crew member held a line fastened to the crown of the balloon and kept watch to see that it didn't roll in any kind of side wind that would twist the steel cables at the mouth. When the balloon seemed about three quarters inflated, they started the burner, and it made a monstrous ripping, roaring sound as it gouted flame into the open mouth of the balloon.

She leaned close to me to holler over the burner sound, "Flying, you use over twelve gallons of propane an hour, enough to heat ten houses. George is working the blast valve. See. Now there's a lift."

The roaring stopped. The balloon lifted free of the ground and slowly swung up, righting the basket as it did so, and another man climbed into the basket. The basket was tethered to a truck
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and to a smaller vehicle. George pulled on the blast valve, giving it a three-second shot of flame up into the balloon, waited, and then did it again.

"Short blasts are the way to do it," Joya explained. "You don't get any reaction for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, and then you get the lifting effect of the new heat."

She took me closer to where we could look up into the balloon. It was blue and white and crimson, segmented like an orange, and there was enough daylight coming through the fabric to dim the long blue flame of the burners. The sun broke through. Kesner was walking around, arguing, waving his arms. Josie Laurant arrived, leading her small entourage, and Kesner picked her up and put her in the basket. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she was visibly angry.

They brought the camera boom close and wanted the area cleared. I went back to the number-two balloon with Joya.

There was no diminution in my awareness of her special attitude toward me. She carried on a second conversation at a nonverbal level. She was telling me that she and I had some sort of arrangement. And, in addition, she was curious about me.

It seemed an unemotional curiosity, speculative and slightly anxious, expressed by the quick sidelong glances, the set of the mouth.

The number-one balloon lifted to the limit of its tether. The breeze kept it canted toward the northeast. Kesner yelled through his bullhorn. They seemed to be having trouble over there, doing the scene in between the blasts of the burner needed to keep the balloon aloft at the end of the tethers.

"You want to take this flight with me, Mr. McGee?"

"I don't know anything about it. I wouldn't be in the way?"

"I like the extra weight. Dave was going to come along. Let me ask him."

She went over to the truck and in a little while she came back with leather gloves and a helmet.

"He says sure. See if these are okay. If you lose balance or something, you might touch the burner or the coils that preheat the propane. Helmet is standard for landings. They can get rough. The thing is to face the direction of flight, hang on, and don't leave the basket. That's important. Without your weight it could take right off again and get in trouble. Look, do you want to try it or not?"