Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

During the first week of our partnership, Gadget and I reached what I considered a fair and equitable division of labor on oven construction: Gadget ran wires, installed electrical switches and lightbulb sockets. I bought the red lightbulb at Safeway, screwed it in, and-tah-dah-flipped on the switch.

We’d been waiting around all week for the smoke machine to be delivered, and by the time it appeared on the loading dock, we’d become a well-oiled team. I held the tool bag, passing tools to him like an operating room nurse while Gadget unpacked the equipment, secured the smoke machine to the floor just behind the oven, and got the whole thing going.

“You are wasted on the Naval Academy,” I told Gadget as we stood in Row C, arms folded across our chests, admiring our handiwork. The oven crouched on four stubby legs, stage left, belching smoke and glowing crimson, like a malevolent Easy-Bake oven. “You should be working for NASA.”

Gadget blinked pale blue eyes at me from behind his rimless eyeglasses. “I’m going nuke,” he said.

“Submarines?” The news didn’t surprise me. Only midshipmen at the very top of their graduating class were selected for the nuclear Navy. Gadget was so smart he’d probably be the first midshipman in history to graduate with more than a 4.0.

“Yoo-hoo!” It was Dorothy, standing “upstairs” in Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor, shading her eyes against the glare of the stage lights. “I could use a little technical expertise up here!”

Actually, Dorothy had seemed hyperenergized that week, banging away with little help or complaint on the scaffolding above my head-the second floor of Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. “Get me while you can,” she had chirped down to me on one occasion. “I go back to the oncologist on Tuesday, so by Wednesday, I’ll be back to barfing.”

I could relate to that. I’d once been so ill from my chemotherapy that I’d watched all of Killer Klowns from Outer Space because I was too exhausted to reach across the bed for the remote. So, I took Dorothy at her word. Earlier in the week, we raided the antique shops in West Annapolis, furnishing Sweeney’s chamber with a coat tree, a low bookshelf, a sofa-sized painting in a rococo frame entitled The Barque Geelong Off Hong Kong, and a large wooden chest with brass studs and leather straps, just the thing to hold the body of Perelli, rival barber to Sweeney Todd and Sweeney’s first victim.

For a mere $120 plus tax we’d scored an actual red and white barber pole at Absolutely Fabulous Consignments, then celebrated our coup over luscious, grilled Reuben sandwiches-three napkins required-at Regina’s German deli just next door. We figured we’d earned it.

All the props were in place now at Sweeney’s except the most important-his chair. Rented from a theater company in Virginia, the Victorian-style barber chair had made its appearance on the loading dock about the same time as our smoke machine, and Dorothy, Sweeney, and the two midshipmen in charge of trapdoor and body chute construction were wasting no time getting it installed. Made of solid wood with a seat and back of woven cane, the chair was a veteran, having dispatched hundreds of Sweeney’s victims in theaters all the way from Maine to Florida.

“Guinea pigs!” Dorothy shouted. “I need guinea pigs!” Behind her, Sweeney and one of the tech crew were carefully aligning a short pipe that extended from the bottom of the chair with a metal plate on the floor. “Come on! ” she urged when nobody made any effort to step forward. “I need volunteers to go down the chute, otherwise we won’t know where to position the chair.”

Professor Black materialized at my elbow. “Don’t need any cracked heads on my watch,” he muttered.

“Hellooooooo?” Dorothy warbled.

Still nobody stepped up to the plate.

I gently elbowed Professor Black. “What’s the problem?”

“Beats the heck out of me.”

And me, too. Midshipmen maintain themselves in peak physical condition. They are required to run a mile in under six minutes, jump from a forty-foot tower into a tiny pool of water, and leap tall buildings in a single bound, or they don’t graduate. You’d think a trip down a chute the length of your average playground slide would be, well, child’s play.

Professor Black apparently agreed. He began pin-wheeling his arms. “Murphy! Crenshaw! Tyler! Get out here, the lot of you! It’s show time!” Surprisingly spry for a man of his girth, the professor hopped onto the stage, and as each actor straggled in from the wings, began herding them like some tweedy sheepdog into a line that snaked, single file, up the stairway leading to Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor.

Gadget and I watched as the first victim settled himself into Sweeney’s chair, a mix of anticipation and apprehension alternating across his face. The actor playing Sweeney, standing just behind, pantomimed the throat slitting bit and yanked on the back of the chair, causing the seat to shoot forward, depositing his victim feet first through the trapdoor. “Next!” sang Sweeney in a lyrical baritone.

Two more victims were successfully launched through the trapdoor and down the chute. After each, Dorothy and the technician would confer, slightly reposition the chair and adjust the mounting plate accordingly.

By the time everything was screwed down tight, the trials had attracted a handful of daredevils, midshipmen who probably spent their leave time driving their SUVs from theme park to theme park, riding roller coasters with names like Anaconda, Shockwave, and Screamin’ Demon. Queued up rather haphazardly on stage, they jostled for position, waiting for the opportunity to sit down in the chair, have their throats slit, and play dead as the floor gave out beneath them. For these guys, everything, even mealtimes, could turn into a competition, and pretty soon Saturday morning rehearsal had become an Olympic event.

“Eight point seven!” somebody shouted as another victim shot out the end of the chute.

“Nine point three!” said another.

And we all fell about the auditorium laughing.

“Hey, Hannah. How about you?”

I gaped at Dorothy. “Me?” I tapped my chest with my thumb. “You talking to me? ”

Dorothy waved me onstage. “You said you wanted to give it a try.”

“I don’t remember saying that.” I smiled uncertainly, watching as Sweeney skillfully dispatched another victim. He was practicing with his razors now, big scary metal objects with seven-inch blades that had been modeled on a traditional straight razor and fabricated out of a single piece of steel by a local company that usually manufactured hard-to-find parts for boats. There was no edge, of course, and therefore absolutely no danger of Sweeney cutting anyone’s throat for real, but from the audience, the razors looked menacing. Between victims, Sweeney twirled the razors, and the metal flashed between his fingers, filling the darkened theater with twinkling shafts of light.

I swallowed hard, considered the chair and the razors, thinking how embarrassed my family would be if my obituary read, “Killed in a bizarre accident involving a barber chair.”

“Hannah?”

Some cheeky mid behind me began making discreet clucking noises.

“Oh, all right!” Holding onto the rickety wooden railing for dear life, I climbed the steps to Sweeney’s shop, where the pseudobarber welcomed me into his chair with a polite bow. The Pair-o-Docs, Professors Black and Tracey, clapped encouragingly from the wings. Dorothy bounced up and down on her toes. I imagined everyone else was holding their breaths.

Keeping one cautious eye on Sweeney, I backed into the chair, squirmed a bit and took a deep breath myself.

Slice’a da throat, light-a da light, shriek-a da whistle. My head shot back, the ground opened up beneath me, and I was completely at the mercy of gravity. Yee-haw! One second later I lay in an untidy heap on a wrestling mat inside Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, laughing my head off.