Free Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard

question."
    Dennis stopped and looked back. "Yeah?"
    "If you were to think of Floyd Showers as an animal, what kind would he be?"
    Was he serious? Dennis said, "I don't know," and took off across the lawn, a picture popping into his mind now, too late to tell the CIB man: some kind of roadkill out on a highway, brown fur that looked like Floyd's suitcoat.
    He kept his gaze on Billy Darwin up there in shorts and a T-shirt, holding on to the ladder with one hand now, looking down, waving. Dennis reached the hotel electrician hunched over a spotlight mounted on the ground, aiming it toward Billy Darwin .
    "The hell you doing?"
    The electrician, bib overalls and a hunk of snuff behind his lower lip, said, "You tell me and I'll know."
    "I told you I set the spots."
    "You the boss or him?"
    "You think he's gonna place the ones up on the ladder, forty feet and at the top?"
    "What do you want 'em up there for?"
    "To light the pool. So I can see the goddamn water. I told him, I light the show. And I do it when it's dark, not in bright sunlight."
    Dennis stood looking up at the top perch again. "You think he can get down?" "He went up there like a monkey."
    "Coming down," Dennis said, "isn't the same as going up."
    Not more than a few minutes later Dennis was watching Billy Darwin start down: careful at first, both feet on the same rung before taking the next step, descending a whole section of the ladder this way. But then he seemed to have the feel of it and the goddamn wavy-haired show-off was coming down one rung after another, his hands sliding down the outer sides of the ladder. Dennis waited for him to come over.
    "You made it."
    "I had to see what it was like," Billy Darwin said. "A great view of the river, all the bends in it. But you know, I think the tank looks bigger than a half dollar. More like a teacup."
    "You have to see it at night," Dennis said, "after somebody climbs up there one-handed carrying spotlights."
    The son of a bitch said, "Oh? I thought you'd use a hoist. What do you call it? That thing you hauled up the ladder sections with-a gin pole?"
    By two o'clockDennis had counted thirty-eight people gathered on the lawn, some with plastic chairs they'd brought from home. These would be local residents, Dennis believed, though they didn't look much different from the hotel guests who wandered out. He spotted RobertTaylor and Billy Darwin standing together, a couple of dudes in sporty summer apparel.
    Vernice was supposed to be here-see for the first time what high diving was all about-but she was home studying the script for tonight. CharlieHoke would call the dives. He'd stand on the plywood deck below the three-meter board, no mike, he'd announce through a bullhorn he used to attract contestants to his pitching cage. Dennis said that each time he came out of the water he'd tell him what the next dive would be and Charlie would announce it. "Be sure to tell them," Dennis said, "this will be my first performance in over a month and it's only a warm-up for the show at nine-fifteen tonight. You'll have to ad-lib, too, use some of the information that's on the poster. `From the Cliffs of Acapulco,' ABC Wide World of Sports world champion, I'm good to my mother ... Tell them not to applaud until I'm out of the water or I won't hear it. Also, not to get within ten feet of the tank. That's the splash zone."
    Charlie introduced Dennis and he opened with a flying one and a half somersault from the forty-foot perch to get the crowd's attention.
    "Remember," Charlie told all the faces looking up at him, "Dennis is only warming up, keeping his best stuff for the big show tonight."
    Dennis did a triple somersault from the threemeter board, and Charlie said, "I can tell you personally, having pitched eighteen years in organized baseball, that you better take enough time to warm up before you go in there to face some of the sluggers I've pitched to. Wasn't that a beauty? A triple somersault. Come on, let Dennis hear it."
    Dennis