400 Boys and 50 More (26 page)

She followed him along the row of ropes that dangled up into darkness.

“Don’t you run,” she said, “I want to talk to you. Sometimes you make me so mad—”

He saw a door and rushed through it, and turned with a cry as he realized his mistake. He had fled into the light cage. He turned to see her, triumphant and angry as she grabbed the wirework door and slammed it shut upon him.

The last of his strength left him. He slumped backward, catching his elbows on light levers, and so drew the theater into darkness with him as he fell.

When they found the source of trouble, they sent him out to sit in the auditorium until he felt better.

Cory came onstage. For a moment the lights were all wrong, pale white instead of red. She looked like a porcelain doll, eyes wide but blank. When she saw Ricardo, she looked over his head. Though he was the only one in the empty auditorium, she looked everywhere but at him.

“We’ll try Lady Macbeth’s song now,” said Morris.

“It’s Neal I want,” Ricardo whispered. “Stay out of my way.”

He felt murderous and guilty, but the alternative was worse. If he didn’t hate, then there would be nothing left for him at all. He did not want to be numb. If no one loved him, then he would see that they hated him; for though love was but a dream one forgot upon waking, hate worked in full daylight. Hate brought bright red visions of double lunacy, of a crimson planet spinning through a velvet-black void.

The piano played a few notes and Cory sang:

“Should l? Could I?

Would I do this deed?

How will—I kill

Duncan and mislead

The Martian warriors who’ll

Find him in his bed

The noble fighters

Who’ll see he’s really dead?

With Duncan’s last breath,

He’ll see a Macbeth,

But will it be my Lord or me?

Should it be my Lord or me?”

Ricardo groaned at Sheri’s song. It was so bad it might ruin the rest of the show.

Neal entered and they began a duet.

“Will we? Shall we?

How can we protect our fate?

Still we
. . .
will be
. . .

Taking risks so very great.”

The monster of hell-gate loomed suddenly flimsy and ridiculous above the awkward singers.

“Dare we? Care we?”

Ricardo answered, “No!”

He rushed down the row of folding chairs, kicking a few out of his way. The piano stopped and the singers fell quiet. The actors and crew came out on the stage to see him.

“That stuff stinks!” he said.

“Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean, aiming a quivering finger at the door, “you are out of bounds. Now leave and don’t bother returning.”

“I won’t have to come back,” he said. “I’ll hear everybody booing on opening night, even way out where I live.”

Cory’s eyes flashed red and he stayed a moment to look at her. Hate mauled his heart. He slammed his way outside to face a cloudy sky of blue with no trace of red in it.

* * *

Even then, he did not abandon the play. Whenever possible, he entered the auditorium before crew and cast arrived, and stayed hidden up in the dark catwalks until all had gone. Cory never saw him, for her eyes were always on Neal. Ricardo’s eyes, in the meantime, opened to the full scheme of performance, the total effect of actors and words, lighting and music—such as it was—working in dramatic fusion.

With silver pins he pricked his thumbs and dribbled his blood over everything, investing the play with his own power. He bled on the net full of foam boulders intended for the avalanche scene. He daubed the witches’ robes down in the costume rooms; these were worn by three members of Neal and Cory’s cabinet. Let them wear his blood, and though they were enemies their gestures might carry some of his power.

There were rumors, whispers, stories that he overheard from his high place. A girl in the costume room had seen the witches’ robes moving all by themselves. A boy working late on the set had seen a woman in red-black tatters standing in the light cage. Shreds of music drifted over the stage when the tape player was disconnected. Others saw severed heads that vanished. Then the hell-beast rolled swiftly across the stage with no hands pushing it.

Only Ricardo saw Newt at his tricks.

He thought of nothing but
Macbeth's Martian Revue
. He never again wondered, “Why him instead of me?” His power carried him beyond all that. In daydreams he communed with Shakespeare and saw at first hand the awful history that had provoked the play: Macbeth’s veiled mother (where could she have come from, except his dreams?) pointing the finger of guilt at Duncan. He dipped a hand into eternity and sipped from the splashing spring of the witches’ queen Hecate: a fount of blood in a dark forest. Not even the Ethics Advisory Committee could spoil that sanguine vision or censor its red power, no more than they could stop his Mars from coming into being as he imagined it.

Vampire dreams. Huddled like a bat in the loft, he watched the actors. He hid by the speaker where the night-bird cried, and sometimes joined its voice with his own. Even Newt looked worried then, and he had wished aloud for ghostly visitations.

Cory also came into her own, and nothing strange or out of place could touch her. She led Neal around by the hand; leaned against him during critique sessions; and one afternoon, while Ricardo watched, she kissed him backstage. The kiss lasted too long and Ricardo gasped for air. Neal’s hands on her hips, clutching and tense, pulled her forward; while her hands rested smooth and relaxed upon his shoulders, and drew gentle curves, and never needed to tug because he fell toward her of his own will. Ricardo, too, almost fell. Later he lay on his back, panting, dreaming of the plunge he had nearly taken.

Opening night came as if without warning, but Ricardo had been ready for a long time.

“Banquo!” he called through the stage door. “Banquo, psst!”

Newt spied him and came over, looking wary at first, then startled. He wore pointed ears, Mr. Spock style.

“You!” he said. “You’re not supposed to—”

“Come outside a minute,” Ricardo said.

They stood in the lunch quadrangle. It was dark except for a moth-battered floodlight above the stage door.

“Are you going to see the show?” Newt asked. “It shaped up pretty well, except for those dumb songs.”

“I want a favor,” Ricardo said. “No one but you will know, all right?”

“What kind of favor?”

Ricardo held up a paper sack. “I’ve got a space suit in here, kilt and visor with Banquo’s emblem on ’em. I want to play your ghost tonight.”

“What? You can’t—”

Ricardo lunged and caught Newt by the throat. He held him against the wall.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Deacon, but I will. Just let me play Banquo’s ghost. We’ll switch places, it’s a short scene. No one’ll know it’s me except for you.”

“Why?” Newt asked. “It’s crazy.”

“That’s right. And if Neal asks, it was you playing the ghost, not me.”

Newt took a deep breath. “Let go.”

“Not till you agree.”

Newt shrugged. “I don’t care if you’re the ghost. Be my guest. It’s still pretty weird.”

“Yeah. Go on, get ready. I’ll be hiding backstage.” Newt went back inside. Ricardo went to a restroom and changed into the space suit. He fit a cap over his curls and pulled down the visor, thus resembling a dozen others in the cast. A tube of Vampire Blood, left over from Halloween, went into a tunic pocket.

When he returned to the auditorium, the play began with an orchestral flourish that seemed to catch up and echo the coughs of the audience. The Blackstone Intermediate School Band forged on to the end of the overture, then continued a few bars past that and sputtered into silence.

He peered through the backstage curtains and saw the set of Macbeth’s spaceship, the
Silex
, much resembling the deck of the
Enterprise
from
Star Trek
. On the viewscreen—a framework with blue gauze stretched across it—three hags from Cory’s campaign appeared cackling prophecies.

Neal Macbeth set his jaw and told the hags to get out of the way, he needed to see to make a landing. He was taking his shipful of space pirates to fight for the planet Mars.

“Aye, the red planet,” said one witch. “That swollen, infected orb of death and decay. Beware you do not stab the crawling sands, for your own ichor may flow below the surface.”

“Ichor in crawling sands?” said Macbeth. “What is this?”

Newt Banquo, Macbeth’s second in command, leapt at the screen brandishing his ray-gun. The witches vanished amid shrieks and groans from the sound system.

The irrepressible space pirates broke into song:

“Oh we’re on our way to Mars,

We’ve come from far-off stars,

Though the place we’re really

Fondest of is Earth.

Oh it’s been an endless trip

But the captain of our ship

Knows pretty much just what

A light-year’s worth.

So Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!

Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!”

The audience started laughing, tentatively at first. Ricardo shivered, feeling their hilarity grow.

As if on cue, the spaceship’s flimsy viewscreen trembled and would have toppled except for Newt, who caught and held it till the stagehands had anchored it from behind.

Coolly, Newt turned to his pale captain and said, “They don’t make these screens like they used to.”

The audience never had a chance to breathe.

Ricardo backed into the sets, unable to watch. The laughter went on, but he only half heard it. How could something with so much of himself in it appear so absurd? What had become of his life’s blood, his offering of labor?

“Please,” he prayed to the catwalks. “Please don’t let them laugh.”

Not all of the original spirit was lost. The laughter died out gradually, though never completely, and the lengthening silences seemed full of increasing horror. Much of the action, unseen to him, must have struck the crowd as gruesome. Murder and betrayal, the beast of hell-gate, the cry of the obscene bird: all cast a spell of red darkness that was nearly but never quite broken each time a DuBose song came up. Relief and dismay were blended in the laughter.

Ricardo smiled. There was still hope. He affixed Vulcan points to his ears and painted his nose with gooey Vampire Blood. When Newt came looking for him, he stepped out from behind a set-piece.

“You enter over there,” Newt whispered, taking his hiding place. “You look really gross.”

“Thanks.”

“Break a leg.”

Ricardo pulled down his visor and peeked through a curtain at the scene. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were entertaining officers around an octagonal table. As he waited for his cue, he looked into the audience and immediately spied Mrs. Sherman in the front row, beyond the band, her jewelry glittering in the footlights. He hoped she wouldn’t recognize him.

“Let’s drink this toast in Venusian slug-ichor!” said Macbeth.

The officers raised their goblets.

Someone strode down the front row, a huge man with silvery hair and a dark red furious face. It was Mr. Magnusson, come to summon Mrs. Sherman from her seat. All around them, parents watched, while politely pretending to see nothing.

Ricardo heard his cue. He took a deep breath and strode onstage, aware of the two adults leaving together. Mr. Dean looked after them in horror, his conductor’s wand drooping. The music swooned.

Neal spotted Ricardo in his costume, and his eyes widened with melodrama. “By the cosmos!” he cried.

“What is it, my Lord?” said Lady Macbeth, her eyes passing through Ricardo as he shambled forward. He heard the expectant breathing of the audience at his side, now invisible in the red glare of footlights. The whole set, everything around him, appeared to be drenched in blood. His insane hieroglyphs crawled over the walls, red-on-red, luminous.

“But-but-but,” said Neal. “You-you-you . . .”

Ricardo walked offstage, turned on his heel, and waited to re-enter. His visor was steamed with the sweat of stage fright. He tried to find his breath

“My lord?” said Cory Fordyce. “What is it? Have you seen some nightmare with your eyes wide open?”

“Didn’t you see him?” Neal asked.

“See who?”

“Nothing, it must be nothing. I am tired, my dear. However, I’ll let nothing stop our celebrations. I propose a toast to—”

Backstage, Ricardo heard a growing commotion. Mr. Magnusson, pulling Mrs. Sherman after him, came through a stage door.

“No, Jack,” Mrs. Sherman whispered. “You can’t just stop the show. If you were going to come late, you shouldn’t have come at all. You’re drunk, Jack.”

“Ichor,” said Mr. Magnusson, almost spitting. “Ichor! That’s practically blood! It was the first word I heard. I’ll pull down the curtain myself if I have to.”

Morris Fluornoy bumped into Ricardo. He was running from the adults.

“What’s going on?” Ricardo asked.

“We’re in trouble!” Morris said, and blinked in puzzlement. He stooped to look under the visor. “Hey . . . Ricardo?”

“My cue,” Ricardo said.

He slipped back onto the stage and stood at Neal’s side. His pointed ears and Banquo's emblems were enough to tell the audience who he was, but now it was time to show Neal alone. He stepped before his former friend and slipped the visor up an inch or so, until Neal could see his grin while the audience saw only the back of his head. Another inch of raised visor exposed the tip of his bloodied nose. Finally Ricardo stared full into Neal’s face. He rolled up his eyes until the whites were showing, and with his hand smeared Vampire Blood all over his face.

Neal turned ghastly green.

“Hello, my friend,” Ricardo whispered.

Cory looked over and yelled, “You!”

The visor dropped. Ricardo turned and ran till he was tangled in the wings. Where was the backstage door? He saw Lady Macbeth scowling after him and Neal still gaping. He ripped off the ears and wiped the red goo on his sleeve.