“I am not a fucking babysitter, Rock.” Elfie shook a socket wrench at him that was massive enough to crush his thick skull. The steel rod weighed heavily in her hand, but she set it down to finish tightening the last couple of bolts on the gerb, a metal tube filled with explosives, with her strong fingers. Her legs swung over the edge of the stage, and Rock fidgeted down below where the security guys stood to keep the rioting crowd from rushing the stage. She said, “Babysitting is for girls.”
Rock stroked his long, gray beard and pondered. He had grown the beard when he had been on the road with The Grateful Dead, smoking hash with Jerry Garcia until they were both baked, and then Jerry went back to his hotel room to sleep while Rock slung his potbelly into gear and tore down the set. “He was coherent for the radio interview this afternoon.”
Another man stepped up. Jonas, the suit-and-spit-polish manager for Killer Valentine, had been hanging back, waiting to see how things went before adding his opinion, just like always. “Tryp didn’t sound like a raving lunatic. We need him at least lucid. Sober would be great, if you could swing that.”
Elfie tightened down the pack in the gerb. “Fuck, no. I did my turn, just like everybody else. I am not a fucking babysitter, and you guys cannot hang this on me because I’m the only girl. I like doing the pyrotechnic effects, and I’m good at it.”
She was a little bit of a pyromaniac, truth be told, but Rock already knew that and Jonas didn’t need to.
Rock told Jonas, “She’s right. If you want your band to stay alive, you’ll leave her on the pyro effects.”
Both men nodded. Elfie’s pyros shot off perfectly, sprays of sparks and fireworks that got the crowd rocking, and no one ever got hurt. Her aim was dead on, in that no one was ever dead afterward. Other techs just weren’t as good, and people could get hurt.
Jonas loosened his tie. “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“It’s not the money.” Well, it was, but there were other considerations. “When would I sleep? The band sleeps on the tour bus after the show while we’re tearing down, and then they party until someone pours their sorry asses into bed, and then they sleep until interviews and sound check. That’s when we set up the stage. That’s when I do my job. If I babysat Tryppy, literally, absolutely literally, I would never have time to sleep.”
The men looked at each other. Rock said, “She doesn’t want to, and I don’t want to lose my pyro engineer. You’ll have to find someone else.”
Jonas mashed his lips into a flat line. “You don’t need her for tear-down, right?”
“They’re her pyros,” Rock said.
“They’re my pyros,” Elfie echoed. “No one else touches my bombs.”
They weren’t really bombs, though it sounded appropriately badass to call them that. Civilians didn’t know that those sparks that fountained out of the gerbs weren’t really dangerous. Elfie had demonstrated gerbs for fire marshals all over the country, holding her hand a few feet above the base, parting the fiery fountain with her palm, which lightly warmed on her fingers.
Jonas said, “If someone else tore down the pyros and cleaned it all, she could ride the tour bus or take the runner or whatever. She could stay with him the whole time. How long does it take you to set these things up?”
“All damn day,” she said. Like hell she was going to minimize her job.
Rock said, “You’d trust me to tear down your pots, wouldn’t you, Elfie?”
“Yeah, but you’re the pit boss.” Elfie scooted over to the next pot and gingerly removed a fresh flash pack from the cardboard box beside her. They were set off by an electronic pulse, but abusing things that can explode is never a good idea.
Rock told Jonas, “It would be cutting it close, but she could set up the pyros during the sound check. You’ll have to make sure that the band is cool with that, though. I won’t have Valentine going all snotty on her while she’s setting up explosives.”
“I’ll handle Xan Valentine. We’ll just tell him that it’s more efficient or the more modern way to do things, to set the pyros last. If she can get Tryp a little more lucid, maybe the rest of us can concentrate on keeping Rade and Grayson from O.D.ing and dying.”
“I don’t want to babysit Tryppy,” she said, putting some muscle into tightening the gerb’s support tube to the stage. She crouched and angled the tube upright so the gerbs would form a ten-foot wall of sparks when they detonated. “I’m not a fucking babysitter.”
Rock waved Jonas off and walked around to the steps to climb up on the stage. He sat down beside her and dangled his swollen legs off the edge, too, even though she knew that it would hurt his knees to stand up again.
“Don’t start,” she said.
“You’ve gotta treat these musos like babies,” Rock said, using the slang mew-zos for musicians, “because they are babies. No one has said no to them for years. They’re all emotional cripples. Jonas is carrying a bag of zombie dust for Rade and Grayson in his briefcase so they won’t have to skulk around bad neighborhoods to get it and rationing it out so they won’t kill themselves. It’s up to us, the adults, to make sure that the show goes on.”
“I’m a good pyro tech, Rock.” She secured the edges of the gerb support to the stage with strong, thick gaff tape on its flanges.
“That you are, but the show needs you to look after Tryp. Jonas was freaking out at how sane he sounded on the radio today. What did you do?”
“Woke him up half an hour early and made him eat oatmeal.”
“Rade and Grayson are influencing him way too much. He’s so young.”
Elfie did some mental math, calculating how old she should be. “He’s a year older than I am.”
“Girls mature faster. Some of the twenty-year-old techs are the worst ones with the groupies.”
Elfie rolled her eyes. “It’s their own faults.”
“Again, very young women, very young men, bad decisions. I would take it as a personal favor if you would try babysitting Tryppy for two weeks, and then we’ll see how it goes. If there isn’t an enormous improvement, if it was just a one-time thing, I’ll tell Jonas that we can’t manage without you. And I’m sure that Jonas will pay you more. That’ll get you closer to college, faster.”
She had already been working for over two years, and she only had about half the money that she needed. “I hate the idea.”
“Have you applied for next fall?”
“No. There’s no way I could save enough for next fall.”
“If you did this, I could make sure that Jonas pays you enough that you could leave the show in August. This is no life, Elfie. It’s like being a whaler back in the eighteen hundreds, out to sea for nine months, back home and raising hell for three, then leaving again just so your wife won’t divorce you. I didn’t see my kids grow up.”
“I’m doing fine. It’ll just take a little longer.”
“And then it’ll take a little longer than that, and then just one more year, and then you’re in your fifties and don’t know how to do anything else. What kind of engineering degree did you want?”
“Chemical,” she said, staring down at the explosives in her hands. She had gotten A’s in every chemistry class she had ever taken, even the ones at the community college her senior year of high school, right up until she had dropped out and run. “I like things that blow up.”
“Apply now. Tonight. If you do this, I’ll make sure you can go.”
“He’s going to want to go to nightclubs and stuff, Rock.” She gestured to her legs, clad in worn jeans that frayed long strings at the hems.
“We’ll get you an allowance for that. Here.” He pulled out his wallet and held out a wad of bills. “Buy some clothes. Make sure you have a hundred left over in case you need a cab somewhere, with or without Tryppy. Don’t put yourself in any situations you don’t like. If anything is weird, walk away and leave his muso butt. I’ll square it with Jonas.”
“I don’t know, Rock. It’s babysitting.”
“Personal favor. Please.”
Rock had stuck up for her when some of the asshole techs had tried to get her fired, telling people that they had to correct her pyros, mainly because she was a girl and they didn’t want women around to see their depravities with the groupies who would do anything, anything, to get back stage to meet the band. Rock had hired her, too, even though she suspected that he had known her I.D. was fake and she was desperately trying to hop the first train out of Texas.
She sighed. “Fine. Two weeks, and then we’ll evaluate whether it’s worth it.”
He smiled through his gray beard and patted her knee.