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"Some of the teams I've performed with I was always the edge guy," De
Darwin was nodding. "The girls watching you…"
"That's part of it. The crowd holding its breath."
"Come out of the water with your hair slicked back…"
Where was he going with this?
"I can see why you do it. But for how long? What will you do after to show off?"
Billy Darwin the man here, confident, saying anything he wanted.
De
"You're not desperate," Darwin said, "but I'll bet you're looking around." He turned, saying, "Come on."
De
Darwin paused, turning enough to look at De
"But you like to gamble."
"Now and then."
"There's a fella works here as a host," Darwin said. "Charlie Hoke. Chickasaw Charlie, he claims to be part Indian. Spent eighteen years in organized baseball, pitched for Detroit in the '84 World Series. I told Charlie about your call and he said, `Sign him up.' He said a man that likes high risk is go
De
They came out back of the hotel to the patio bar and swimming pool landscaped to look like a pond sitting there among big leafy plants and boulders.
De
Now Darwin looked up at the hotel. "You'd want to miss the balconies."
"I'd go off there at the corner."
"What's the tank look like?"
"The Fourth of July, it's white with red and blue stars. What I could do," De
Darwin gave him a look and swung his gaze out across the sweep of lawn that reached to the Mississippi, the river out of sight beyond a low rise. He didn't say anything staring out there, so De
"That's the spot for an eighty-foot ladder. Plenty of room for the guy wires. You rig four to every ten foot section of ladder. It still sways a little when you're up there." He waited for Darwin.
"Thirty-two wires?"
"Nobody's looking at the wires. They're a twelve-gauge soft wire. You barely notice them."
"You bring everything yourself, the tank, the ladder?"
"Everything. I got a Chevy truck with a big van body and a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it."
"How long's it take you to set up?"
"Three days or so, if I can find a rigger."
De
Darwin asked him where he was from.
" New Orleans, originally. Some family and my exwife's still there. Virginia. We got married too young and I was away most of the time." It was how he always told it. "We're still friends though… sorta."
De
"What do you call what you dive off from?"
"You mean the perch."
"It's at the top of the highest ladder?"
"It hooks on the fifth rung of the ladder, so you have something to hang on to."
"Then you're actually going off from seventy-five feet," Darwin said, "not eighty."
"But when you're standing on the perch," De
A breeze came up and Darwin turned to face it, ru
"Do you hit the bottom?"
"Your entry," De
"I'11 give you two hundred a day for two weeks guaranteed and we'll see how it goes. I'll pay your rigger and the cost of setting up. How's that sound?"
De
Ke
Billy Darwin, finally raising his gaze from the half dollar shining in the sun, gave De
Nearly two months went by before De
He had to finish the gig in Florida. He had to take the ladder and tank apart, load all the equipment just right to fit in the truck. He had to stop off in Birmingham, Alabama, to pick up another eighteen hundred feet of soft wire. And when the goddamn truck broke down as he was getting on the Interstate, De
Darwin didn't ask what was wrong with it. All he said was, "So the life of a daredevil isn't all cute girls and getting laid."
Sounding like a nice guy while putting you in your place, looking down at what you did for a living.
De