Dragons - Chapter 44 (DRAFT)

By the time I got back to the convention hotel, the registration desk we had set-up in the foyer of their biggest ballroom was open for business and lines of early-morning conference-goers were already lined up under the signs reflecting the starting initials of their last names. A dozen or more redcoats were expertly rifling through the line of battered boxes that contained their registration packets, handing the right one over to each visitor with a smile and sometimes a friendly pat on the hand. We called them redcoats because of the polyester blazers they all wore, undoubtedly issued to them by the local Convention & Visitors Bureau who provided them to traveling conventions like ours for something between the minimum wage and the union contracted labor wages of the teamsters, electricians, and riggers who set up our exhibit hall and hoisted our lighting trusses into the air. The redcoats were invariably retirees, mostly blue-haired ladies, who liked both the people contact and the supplemental income the task provided. Working amongst them were three of our own staff members -- Jeff Hatchler, Jurgis Pavlov, and Bethany Bishop.

I went behind the registration tables like I belonged there and made my way over to Bethany. “How are things here?” I asked her.

“No,” she was saying to one of the redcoats, atypically a man, with the word STANLEY punched onto the little plastic nametag pinned to the lapel of his red blazer. “Only the people with the red stars on their envelopes get the red tickets. They’ll need them to claim one of the box lunches on Monday.”

STANLEY nodded and returned to his station under the letters E-H.

Bethany turned towards me, obviously expecting another redcoat with another question.

“How are things here?” I asked again.

She nodded several times, placing her hands on her lips on surveying the mostly organized chaos around her. “Good,” she said with some satisfaction. “Couple of hiccups getting started, but things are working now.”

“Hiccups?”

She hooked a thumb towards Jurgis, hunched over with his tie hanging in the guts of one of the laser printers.

“None of the printers would take our badge stock, but Jurgis is getting them to respond.”

I looked toward Jurgis. “Good,” I said.

“What happened with Mary?”

It was barely a whisper, shushing out of Bethany’s lips as if it was afraid to be seen in the light.

“What?” I asked, turning back toward her.

“Mary,” she whispered again. “Didn’t you talk to her? About Caroline?”

“No,” I said easily, unthinkingly, more out of a desire to shut down the conversation than to lie. “She was too busy with the VIP breakfast to get into it with me.”

I stopped. STANLEY was back at Bethany’s elbow.

“Excuse me,” he said boldly, holding up a roll of blue tickets. “Is everyone supposed to get one of these?”

“What?” Bethany said, torn between what more I might say and the demands of the busy registration desk.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “Mary and I are meeting at nine-thirty to discuss the situation. You go help Stanley. I’ve got an exhibit hall to open before then.”

“What?” Bethany said again. “Oh, okay.”

And with that I left her there, moving out from behind the registration desk and into the open foyer of the ballroom. As I passed through to the escalator that would take me to the lower level exhibit hall, I accidently caught Jeff Hatchler’s eye at the other end of the desk. Like Bethany, he was there to guide the redcoats and pitch in when necessary, but he seemed to have found a brief lull in the blizzard. With some heavy flurries continuing to fall all around him, he was just standing there with his arms crossed on his chest, a sea captain smugly satisfied with the exertions of his sailors.

Seeing me, he nodded and winked.

I kept moving.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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