Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“Not sixty feet,” David said. “There’s no need to exaggerate. The tree itself is only forty feet. It’s the star on top that adds another twenty. Those reporters never get anything right.”
“I’m sorry. Did he just say, ‘There’s no need to exaggerate’?” Fabien checked his English.
David and “his guys,” as he called his employees, had welded metal square tubing together, strung it with some fifty strands of heavy-duty outdoor Christmas lights, and run a two-hundred-foot power cord up the crane to light its twelve thousand watts nightly. David set all that on the ground calmly enough, as if it was fairly typical Christmas decorating, and replaced it with a bulky rigging sling. Only he described it as a swing.
“Of course, sometimes we have to take the people out of the swing and drive it over to pick up a railroad car or something. I don’t know if we can actually accuse the boys at this plant nearby of smoking dope, but it’s amazing how often they get a train started down one track, then flip the switch too soon and send the back wheels of the last car down a different track. Of course, sometimes they’ve got good reflexes. They stop it before it actually derails, and they get the little wheels turning in their heads. ‘Wait a minute,’ they say, ‘we can back this car off the track and get everything fixed right without them calling David in to make fun of us. But before we hit reverse we have to flip the switch back to the track it was supposed to go down. Okay, go ahead and flip it, guys. . . . Whoa. Whoa. Damn. We’ve played hell now.’ And so about once every year I have to get the people out of the swing and drive down there to lift the railroad car out of the gravel and back on the track. Then I can come back and let the kids play in their swing again.”
“Is it safe?” someone asked.
David looked thoughtfully at the load line, probably wishing we’d get the little wheels turning in our heads, too. “Well, now, those railroad cars weigh about 250,000 pounds, but we only pick up the back end; so it’s true it hasn’t been tested to above, say, 125,000 pounds. I didn’t like to suggest to my wife and daughters that wouldn’t be enough for them because Annette gets touchy about that kind of thing, so I go ahead and let them play in it. But it’s up to you. Who’s first?”