Inside Straight

Now, actually sitting on the benches the Hollywood people had put out for them and watching the lights and cameras and the milling, he was starting to feel a little less intimidated. He and the other contestants were in four rows of benches just inside the first-base foul line. The three judges—Topper, Digger Downs, and the Harlem Hammer—sat at a raised table more or less on the pitcher’s mound. The invisible mechanisms of television production—sound crew, cameras, make-up chairs, lousy buffet—were kept mostly between home plate and third base. The great expanse of the outfield was set aside for the aces to prove just how telegenic they were.

Which, you could say, varied.

Take, for instance, the poor bastard whose turn it was at present. He had his arms stretched dramatically toward the small, puffy clouds, and had for several seconds, as his determined look edged a little toward desperate.

“What are we waiting for?” Jonathan whispered.

“Big storm,” the guy beside him—a deeply annoying speedster by the name of Joe Twitch—muttered back. “Maybe a tornado.”

“Ah.”

They waited. The alleged ace shouted and curled his fingers into claws, projecting his will out to the wide bowl of sky. The other aces who had made it through the interview were sitting on folding chairs far enough away to be safe if anything did happen. The morning air smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Joe Twitch stood up and sat back down about thirty times in a minute and a half.

“Hey,” Jonathan said. “That cloud up there. The long one with the thin bit in the middle?”

“Yeah?” Joe Twitch replied.

“Looks kind of like a fish, if you squint a little.”

“Huh,” Twitch said. And then, “Cool.”

The public address system whined. The Harlem Hammer was going to put the poor fucker out of his misery. Jonathan was half sorry to see the guy go. Only half.

“Mr. Stormbringer?” the Harlem Hammer said. “Really, Mr. Stormbringer, thank you very much for coming. If you could just…”

“The darkness! It comes!” Stormbringer said in sepulchral tones. “The storm shall break!”

An embarrassed silence fell.

“You know,” Jonathan said, “if we wait long enough, it’s bound to rain. You know? Eventually.”

“Mr. Stormbringer,” the Harlem Hammer tried again, while behind him Digger Downs pantomimed striking a gong. “If you could … ah… John? Could you take Mr. Stormbringer to the Green Room, please?”

The vaguely familiar blond guy detached himself from the clot of technicians and walked, clipboard in hand, to escort the man out of the stadium. Jonathan squinted, trying to place him—café-au-lait skin, a little epicanthic folding around the eyes, blond hair out of a bottle.

“Aw, man,” he said.

“What?” Twitch demanded.

Jonathan gestured toward the blond with his chin. “That’s John Fortune,” he said.

“Who?”

“John Fortune. He was on the cover of Time a while back. Pulled the black queen, but everyone thought it was an ace. There was this whole, weird religious thing about him being the antichrist or the new messiah or something.”

“The one Fortunato died trying to fix up?”

“Yeah, he’s Fortunato’s kid. And Peregrine’s.”

Joe Twitch was silent for a moment. The only thing that seemed to slow him down was trying to think. Jonathan wondered if he could buy the guy a book of sudoku puzzles.

“Peregrine’s producing the show,” Twitch said.

“Yup.”

“So that poor fucker’s working for his mom?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” Jonathan said dismissively. A new ace was taking the field—an older guy, skinny, with what appeared to be huge chrome boots, a brown leather jacket, and a ’40s-era pilot’s helmet, with straps that hung at the sides of his face like a beagle’s ears.

“Thank you,” the Harlem Hammer said. “And you are?”

“Jetman!” the new guy announced, rising up on the little cones of fire that appeared at the soles of his boots. He struck a heroic pose. “I am the man Jetboy would have been.”

“Oh good Christ,” Jonathan muttered. “That was sixty years ago. Let the poor fucker die, can’t you?”

Apparently, he couldn’t.

Of the constant stream of wannabes presenting themselves to the world, Mr. Stormbringer had been the worst so far, but the guy who called himself the Crooner hadn’t managed to do much either. And Jonathan’s personal opinion was that Hell’s Cook—a thick-necked man who could heat up skillets by looking at them—was really more deuce than ace, but at least he was a good showman.