Bone Dance

I knew all that. It was why the wind turbine on my roof was disguised as a vent, after all. But the Underbridge had seemed — still seemed — too big, too important, too visible to be at the mercy of the City. “There’d be a stink if we closed.”

“There’s people lined up to run places like this. If the City closes us, they just hand our permit to the next guy, who’ll keep his nose cleaner than we did. And the nightbabies all just move on down the block. Be damned hard on Robby, man.”

I knew all that, too, I suppose. “It’s okay,” I said. Outside the windows, the moon had drowned in the cloud bank. I felt — it took me a moment to figure it out. Lonely. “If anything happens, I’ll keep it away from here.”

“Sorry, Sparrito,” said Theo.

I shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Let’s do some good.”

I had color bars on monitors one and two, and zip-all on number three, which meant that either the third monitor was evil-eyed or the camera in the rigging was. I hoped it was the monitor. The camera was one of maybe five I’d seen in my life, and that only because I’d been looking. It had full remote capabilities and a twenty-X zoom, and I suspected it of having been made to military specs and used to spy on SouthAm dictators. But who am I to judge?

I jiggled co

“Watch the fuckin’ lights,” Spangler shouted from somewhere below me. Serve him right if I fell on his head. I wiggled my way backward off the rigging, and checked the monitor. Live, tah dah.

“I hate it when you do that,” Theo observed.

“D’you ever wonder what it was like when this stuff was new?” I asked him, waving at the mixer, the tape decks, the video gear.

Light turned the lenses of his glasses opaque pink. “Crowded,” he said, but his voice made it mean more than that.

The house lights were down, the room was dark, and thunder muttered from miles away. I slapped a tape in one of the decks and faded the image up on the projectors, on both screens at the other end of the room. At the edge of my vision I could see Theo’s hand on the mixing board, bringing up sound as I brought up my video.

“So, don’t let ’em catch you, okay?” Theo said mildly in that last moment as it got too busy to answer him. I don’t know what I would have said anyway.

Strange scratchy sounds moved through the room, hung on moaning bass notes like the lowing of cows lost underwater. The image I’d grabbed to start with was the old black-and-white test pattern and countdown spi

Suddenly Theo segued to his other deck, pulled in something that went thump-thump-thump against a harmonica that went chigga-chigga-chigga. So I switched sources, too; because I knew how Theo’s mind worked, I had a bit ready from a fifty-year-old war movie that put the viewer nose to nose with an assault rifle on full auto. Pull back on bronzed beefcake sneering under his visor, spewing hot lead at whoever it had been that week, budda-budda-budda-thwakow! I gri

On most nights our partnership would snag on some piece of equipment; something would fail. Everything we had was old, and hardly any of it was built for the kind of industrial-weight use we gave it. The regular after-closing ritual turned the sound balcony into a repair shop where we fixed anything that had broken during the show. But that night, we had the hoodoo working.

Christopher Lee sank his fangs into someone just as Theo cranked to a horrible reverbed wail from Morticia just as lightning shattered the air between two clouds outside the window. Uma Thurman, with a look that would melt glass, stretched out a glimmering hand to the Beast in the Forman remake of Beauty and, while Theo raised a Zimbabwean singer’s plaintive high note into the rafters, while blown rain broke the view outside into a moiré pattern. Lightning lashed at the City like artillery; Ego’s top was lost in cloud, but the hits on the obelisk shape of the Foshay looked like pointing fingers. Theo put both decks to work at once, overlapping and cutting between something that was entirely percussion and something else that was all singing. I took a feed off the camera, pa

I had a lot of people to choose from. The place seemed to have filled up suddenly; but that only meant I’d been absorbed in what I was doing. Then, on one of my video strafing runs, I noticed a hand waving, an oval of face looking straight at the camera. I zoomed in, startled. “My God,” I said aloud, “it’s Sher.” Sherrea’s pointed chin and big, shadowy eyes, under a mass of black-and-purple headwrap, filled my monitor. Just then she turned to glance at the screens and saw her own profile ten feet high. She turned back to the camera and gave me the finger. “What?” Theo asked.

“It’s someone I know,” I said, loud enough to be heard this time. “I didn’t know she ever came here.”

Theo looked over at the monitor, where Sher was now making some shrugging, inquiring motion. “Oh, Sherrea,” he said, nodding. “Groovy. Take the mix, and I’ll send her up. I need a break.”

And he left, while I was still trying to ask how he knew her, and trying to figure out why I was surprised that he did.

One person can handle all the hardware on the balcony; you just can’t do as much, and it’s not as much fun. I cued up the next song: “They Want My Four-Wheel Drive,” by Los Blues Guys, copy of tape courtesy of my archives. I’d gotten the original from someone who’d brought it from northern Texas, who knew the recording engineer and half the band members. A fine example of the new record distribution system.

Much of the material at the Underbridge was of my providing. It was another thing I weighed on the scales of the Deal: Robert provided the opportunity and a cut of the door, and I repaid him with fresh antique marvels for the customers. Besides, like most collectors, I couldn’t quite keep it all to myself. I needed some appreciative audience to ooh and ahh over the gems.

I was showing the car chase from The French Co